I never would’ve thought I’d prove this…

On a web board I subscribe to, someone put forth a challenge to us, that we should use logic to prove the existence of some god. The rules were as follows:

Rules:

1. Make sure the argument is coherent (using No logical fallacies)
2. Make sure the argument isn’t question begging/circular reasoning.
3. Make sure it doesn’t use equivocation, category, ad hoc pro hoc, strawman, red herring, compositional, or ad populus fallacies.
4. Define your terms, or when you use a word how you are using it.
5. If you can or know how.. form the argument in a syllogism if you don’t thats okay as well.
6. Don’t use “personal/emotional” “proofs” for the existence of god.. personal experience doesn’t work ..why? I have personal knowledge pink unicorns exist (if you don’t believe this statement then you will understand why it wont work.)

This is an impossible task for anyone who actually believes in a supernatural deity. Apologetics for millennia have not been able to construct a god that meets all of the criteria above; item 3 above is next to impossible, but part of the problem with the gods of all mythologies lies with item 4 above. If you are a believer — irrespective of the god or gods in which you believe — then item 4 will trip you up quite well. Take the Judeo-Christian god that is often defined (if at all) as being simultaneously all-merciful and all-just. These two traits are diametrically opposed to each other and can not possibly exist in the same entity.

So I thought about it and proved god’s existence as follows:

1. I am a human being.
2. A human being is made up of cells with the human genome, blood, bones, muscles, and organs which serve various functions.
3. A human being has a consciousness which is capable of making decisions and choices related to matters of all degrees of complexity.
4. Any choices made by a human being are driven by a combination of neurochemistry and available information.
5. Because points 2 and 4 speak to physical properties, they may be said to be measurable with the proper tools and equipment.
6. Something measurable with the proper tools and equipment can be declared to exist.
7. Because a human being is made up of things that are measurable, a human being can be declared to exist.
8. I am a human being (point 1), therefore I exist.
9. As a human being, I am capable of making choices (point 3).
10. I choose to define myself as “god”.
11. Therefore, god exists.

You could argue that point 10 is a form of question begging, and therefore a violation of rule number 2 above. If that is the case (which it very well might be) then rule number 2 is in direct contradiction of rule number 4 because the need to define terms could be in and of itself a form of question begging.

Therein lies the real problem with this mental exercise: define god in a manner that undoubtedly exists, and you’ve got the proof that’s being requested, whether you define god as yourself, or Charlton Heston, or as the series of natural processes that resulted in the formation of the universe, and then it’s just a question of logically demonstrating the existence of that god. It does nothing whatsoever to resolve the chasm that exists between the faithless and the faithful.

I Knew I’d Seen Him Somewhere Before

There may be another blog entry of a more serious nature about this, but I can’t help but think that Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the sole surviving alleged Boston Marathon bomber…

… bears an uncanny resemblance to Bob Dylan, circa 1964…

What a waste…

A lot has already been said and written about the Steubenville, Ohio, rape case. I’d like to throw my own voice into the mix. I’ve written before about my position on rape.

While the concept of rape itself is abhorrent by every stretch of the imagination, every trial for rape brings two very real — and at least in principle diametrically opposed — thought processes into the mix and in stark contrast with each other. In any crime, the accused is innocent until proven guilty. And I’d hate to imagine someone truly falsely accused of raping someone; that would be pure hell for the accused. Thus, the accused has the right to a fair and reasonable defense. Again, that’s true in any crime; I’m not singling out rape here.

The big problem with rape trials, then, is that — at least if you factor out the situations where someone threatens greater violence if the victim doesn’t accede to the wishes of the attacker — the only real way to put on a defense, is to deny that the crime has been committed.

There has to be a better way, pure and simple. I don’t know what it is.

Steubenville raised a glaringly bright light to one other aspect of rape trials that is equally troubling. I would consider this kind of trial second only to murder trials in that the pursuit of justice will not undo the crime that was committed. In a theft trial, the stolen goods can be returned or the victim can be compensated for their loss. The best the victims in a rape or murder trial can hope for is that the guilty parties will have learned their lesson and won’t commit their crimes again. Maybe with a bit of deterrence for others who might think they can do the same thing and get away with it.

Small comfort for the victim. Add in a community that rallied not around her, but her attackers, and I wonder how much the trial added to the trauma she had already endured. After all, her attackers were stars of the high school football team, popular, boys will be boys, and all of that bullshit…

A feminist appearing on Fox News recently suggested that the solution to the problem of rape is to teach men not to rape anyone. Although somewhat simplistic, she’s right. It’s not as easy as she made it out to sound, but it’s the right thing to do. In Steubenville, surely the culture of entitlement that the boys felt (thanks to their prowess on the gridiron) was a huge contributing factor. And we saw that in the way the community rallied around them, even in the face of overwhelming evidence of their guilt.

The way the boys reacted to their sentence, I think they thought that entitlement would acquit them of their crimes. That’s at least the impression I got; the fact that they broke down when their conviction was handed down, proves that they’re human. When they get out of prison, I sincerely hope that they’ll allow themselves to be a cautionary tale. I hope that they’ll be willing to talk about the horrible crime they committed, how they sincerely regret having done it, and being a message of reason: telling other people not to rape. Just like that woman on Fox News suggested.

Without regard to what the boys do, though, I wish the victim can find some degree of consolation in the outcome of the trial. It’s not going to be easy for her to move beyond the trauma of both the crime and the trial itself. But she must. For her own sanity and self-worth. She was exceptionally brave just getting this far. Whatever can be done to help her move forward can and should be done. Let her become a survivor and let her example be an empowering example to women everywhere.

It’s the least that can be done, for a crime that can’t be un-committed.

International Women’s Day

Today, March 8, is International Women’s Day. Say what you will about the former Soviet Union and what they stood for, and their overall policies, if there’s one thing they got right — or at least tried to get right — was treating women as equals to men. Today is a holiday they came up with to underscore that attitude.

Insert joke hear about how International Men’s Year can resume tomorrow.

But seriously, modern society is, well, patriarchal. This is hardly news. And it has been for quite a while. An educated guess as to when men claimed clout and power over women, would be around about the advent of agriculture, six to ten thousand years ago. Harvesting crops required physical strength and, whatever else is true, men are, on average, physically larger and stronger than women.

Bring in politics and religion and you’ve got yourself a self-perpetuating patriarchy.

There’s a mental exercise anyone can do, about determining whether or not you, as a member of a given group, enjoy a privilege that people not in that group don’t enjoy. Is there something that you take for granted, that other people might not even be available to other people? If someone asks for something you take for granted, why should you keep that something away from them? It’s like that one verse from the Phil Ochs song, “Outside of a Small Circle of Friends”:

Sweating in the ghetto with the colored and the poor
The rats have joined the babies who are sleeping on the floor
Wouldn’t it be a riot if they really blew their tops?
But they’ve got too much already, and besides we’ve got the cops!
And I’m sure it wouldn’t interest
Anybody
Outside of a small circle of friends….

But that song isn’t really about feminism as much as it is other forms of privilege.

There are issues that women have to deal with. That’s not to say that they’re not men’s issues, too, but they disproportionately impact on women, so we need to be made aware of the fact that it happens. Privilege is when you take something for granted so if you don’t know about a given problem, you can’t really be prepared to solve it.

One thing I do think, though, is that there’s no such thing as a purely “women’s” issue. If it affects women, it affects me. Take, for example, my position on rape, which I have expressed on more than one occasion. That said, I don’t think I can understand the trauma that comes from it anywhere near as well as a woman who has gone through the trauma, can. This is why, when it comes to raising consciousness about matters, we need to hear people most directly affected. And just like the Phil Ochs song above, there are songs to help us raise awareness of the issues. So how about this one?

Of course, that might be one of the best-known consciousness-raisers out there. There’s another song that is just as effective. It’s a scary theme, to be sure, but it’s the kind of thing we need to hear if we want to improve ourselves. I just love this song…

(Note that, if you recognize that voice but not the name, she’s the original Maureen from Rent.)

Of course, rape and child abuse aren’t the only issues that affect women. There’s a third topic — domestic violence — that needs to be addressed. I vacillate back and forth as to which is more pernicious: rape or domestic violence. The former is often a one-time trauma that devastates the person emotionally (and likely physically). The latter is a continual trauma that can be just as devastating, but recurs far too often for anyone to be comfortable with. And this may be the best consciousness raiser for that topic:

Maybe, just maybe, in honor of International Women’s Day, we could all just raise our awareness of these three problems. They’re certainly not going to go away if we ignore them.

GMO’s Again

There was an article on alternet last summer, which stated that the five most awful atheists are Sam Harris, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Penn Jillette, S.E. Cupp, and Bill Maher.

I think the biggest mistake the article makes ipls that it conflates atheism with scientific skepticism. It’s certainly true that there’s certainly no shortage of overlap between the two worldviews; something like 95% of all scientists are atheists. Of course, not all atheists are scientists (that includes me; I had a very bad experience with my physics teacher in high school that kind of soured me on science as a discipline…)

Bill Maher is fairly unrepentant in his animus towards organized religion and has only recently referred to himself formally as an atheist. (He had previously called himself agnostic). And he’s a great example of the lack of overlap between the two worldviews. I have written before about how I perceive Bill Maher’s take on medicine. He hasn’t said much about medicine in recent years and has taken on a new cause: the opposition to Genetically Modified Organisms or GMO’s, specifically as pertains to our food supply.

And I couldn’t disagree with him more about this. Through some form of selection or another — be in natural selection, selective breeding, artificial selection, or agriculture, by definition everything we eat, has been genetically modified. Whether it’s in a lab or in the ground, genetic modification happens all the time.

As I said above, I’m not a scientist and don’t pretend to be one, but I understand it well enough to know that genetic modification is the key to feeding a world where populations of plants and animals are dying out, the planet is getting warmer, and human population is increasing.

Simply put: we should not be opposed to GMO’s, no matter what we choose to call them. (I kind of like the term “frankenfood” even though it’s intended to be a fearmongering term…)

Some might argue that growing organic crops is preferable to GMO’s. On a small scale, sure. But you’re never going to be able to grow enough crops organically and feed seven billion people.

I’ve written before about GMO’s and how denial of science is neither a conservative nor a liberal phenomenon, as the following clip from last weekend’s Real Time with Bill Maher will attest. I have to forewarn you if you watch it: it’s painful to watch or even listen to. It’s kind of aggravating how close he comes to getting “it” but then swerves away on an anti-GMO kick.

Of all of Bill Maher’s “New Rules” I think this is the most painful one to listen to.

Now, I can acknowledge that Monsanto has done some shady things in the realm of patenting its processes, and for that they do deserve criticism. But that is an argument for patent reform. To use its patent-trolling penchant as an argument against GMO’s is essentially an ad hominem attack. Except, of course, Monsanto isn’t a human being. (But they are a person in the eyes of the law…)

Bill Maher has the right to his views and opinions. And it’s stuff like this that put him on the list of the five most awful atheists. But his position on this has nothing to do with whether or not god exists. It just shows that he’s not a scientist.

Then again, neither am I. Is the only thing keeping me off of that list, the fact that I’m not famous?

The Onion Fucks Up

The night before last, at the Academy Awards, the movie Argo took home the award for best picture. While director and producer Ben Affleck was speaking on the stage, thanking the academy and everyone involved in the production of the movie, the satirical newspaper The Onion crossed a line, with regard to the 9-year-old star (and Best Actress nominee) of the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, with the following tweet:

(I’m using an image of the tweet because it has since been deleted, but this is the internet and nothing is ever truly invisible…)

The Onion is known for its satire, often hard-edged and at times offensive to the people or groups whom they lampoon. That much is a given.

And there’s no question about it: this was offensive. And wrong. And, to be frank, not funny. (Full disclosure: I haven’t seen the movie Beasts of the Southern Wild, nor do I know anything about Quvenzhané Wallis, other than the fact that she’s the youngest nominee for best actress in the history of the Academy Awards. So maybe there could be something here that I missed, but I sincerely doubt it…)

So the fundamental question is whether or not, even in a tongue-in-cheek sense, there are times when calling 9-year old girl a “cunt” is right. And I admit it: I can’t think of one.

This coming from a guy who believes that there is no such thing as a topic that’s so taboo, so off-limits, that we can’t make fun of it. Yes, attempts at humor with some topics can make you more enemies than friends, but I strongly support the right to make these kinds of jokes.

So the Onion did the right thing, the noble thing, the admirable thing, and apologized. As far as I can tell, the apology is sincere, although the line about “taking immediate steps to discipline those individuals responsible” raises more questions than it answers.

The one big question that bears asking, is whether or not this was merely a lapse in judgment on the part of an indeterminate number of staffers at the Onion, or if something far more systemic was at play here. Hell, I don’t even know how much time elapsed between when the concept was first considered, and when it got posted. Or was this a natural consequence of a work culture that tries to be biting, hard-hitting, in-your-face, and, well, crude? That question will likely never be answered.

And, I’d like to reiterate that the Onion did the right thing by apologizing. One other question that does come up — and we won’t know this for quite some time — is whether this is going to have a lasting impact on the quality of the satire we see coming out of that website. The last thing we want is for a bigger named celebrity (in the realms of either entertainment or politics) demanding an apology because of the way The Onion lambasted them.

If it means anything, I’m hopeful at least about the quality of the satire, as evidenced by today’s satirical take on a big news item from yesterday: U.K. Cardinal Resigns in Wake of — Get This — Sex Abuse Allegations .

Yay me!

I could probably write an entire blog entry about the blogs and podcasts I read and listen to regularly. But I’d like to talk about one in specific.

I have been listening to The Skeptics Guide to the Universe for about two years now. It’s a weekly conversational style between five well-known people in the science/skepticism community. (Steven Novella, Jay Novella, Bob Novella, Evan Bernstein, and Rebecca Watson)

One of the regular features of this show, is a listener-response segment called “Who’s That Noisy”. It used to be that they’d play a sound clip of something and challenge their listeners to guess what it is. Late last year, they switched the format from universally sound clips, to also putting math and logic puzzles into the mix as well.

I have never been able to figure out what the sound clips are, so I appreciated the expansion into logic puzzles.

This year, they added a new bit to this segment: if you’re among the correct guesses to the puzzle/sound, they will put your name into a drawing and pick one of those correct guesses at random. At the end of the year, all of the randomly chosen names will be thrown into one final drawing, the winner of whom will get to have a spot on the show itself.

And I got last week’s puzzle correct, so my name was in the drawing. And my name was chosen from among the correct guesses! More news on this to come.

What was the puzzle, you might ask? It’s pretty straightforward:

If I have two children, one of whom is a boy born on a Tuesday, what are the odds that I have two boys?

Scroll down for the answer…

13/27. We’ve got the following permutations for two children:
The first child is the boy born on a Tuesday and the second child is a boy born on any day of the week. (7 possibilities)
The first child is the boy born on a Tuesday and the second child is a girl born on any day of the week. (7 more possibilities)
The first child is a girl born on any day of the week and the second child is the boy born on a Tuesday. (7 more possibilities)
The first child is a boy born on any day of the week other than Tuesday (The Tuesday would have been captured in the first grouping) and the second child is the boy born on a Tuesday. (6 possibilities).
Going through all of those possibilities, there are 27 possible permutations of children where one was a boy born on a Tuesday, of which 13 have two boys…..

Now we just need to see if I win the drawing at the end of the year. We shall see….