Stardate 20030507.1858

(Captain's log): In broad terms, some atheists claim that atheism is actually a scientific fact and can be proved, thus demonstrating that atheism is different from any other religious belief. They contend that atheism is true where all religious beliefs are false delusions. Other atheists, myself among them, know that it isn't possible to prove that there are no deities. It might be possible to prove that some particular deity with certain characteristics doesn't exist but it isn't possible to produce a blanket proof that there are no deities whatever. To demonstrate that, I proposed the Theory of Fred the apathetic god, and showed that there's no way for us to tell whether we live in a mechanistic universe or one produced by Fred.

In yesterday's post I referred to "proof atheists" who contend that atheism can be proved to be true, and "belief atheists" who think that atheism is a belief. I am a "belief atheist". I make the following statements:

I believe that there are no supernatural beings and no supernatural influences on the universe. Everything we experience is a manifestation of the physical properties of the universe and the interactions of the mass and energy and various forces which are part of the universe. Sometimes those interactions are fantastically complex, but I nonetheless believe that this does not prove any kind of supernatural intervention.

Since atheism is a belief for me, I can not prove that I'm right. Indeed, I have little interest in trying, since I'm not evangelistic. I became an atheist for good and sufficient reason, but I am content to let others make their own decisions.

Activist atheists, including those who make the strong claim that atheism is actually scientific and can be proved, are eager to claim a form of exceptionalism for atheism relative to any other form of religious belief; they want atheism to be seen as somehow better, more plausible than any other. In a sense atheism is exceptional since it's the only religious belief that eschews supernatural influence, but I do not make any claim that it is superior to any religion and I do not think of myself as being morally or intellectual superior to those making other choices, solely because I became an atheist.

I mentioned yesterday that non-atheists were more likely to encounter activist atheists, and that they commonly form their opinion about atheists from them. There are zealots among theists as well, and those are the ones most likely to seek out and try to save any atheist they learn about. (Thus it is that the zealots from both sides often find each other, and they deserve one another.)

I've gotten my share of responses from various kinds of theists over the years, including in my mail for this site. The arguments range from dreadfully misinformed, to obnoxious, to outright deceptive, to the thoughtful and well informed. But it tends to the lower end of the scale because thoughtful and well informed theists are more likely to respect my decision and not try to convert me.

There are common objections from some that science "proves" that the mechanistic view of the universe is impossible because what we see around us would not be possible. There's a pretty standard set of arguments which are less than impressive, mostly focusing on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, and the Heisenberg Principle. Given the fact that I've heard essentially the same arguments many times from many people, I can only conclude that there's some central source of such comments where these people hear them, and then parrot them to me, and usually what they prove is not that science is wrong but that they don't actually understand it. Often that's because they use some sort of English-language summary of the principle and try to apply it rigorously, in ways which are invalid. I do not propose to deal with such objections in depth here; I'll just review them.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is a favorite of anti-evolutionists. Since the Second Law says that disorder will increase, how could evolution create every more complex organisms? It's because that isn't what the Second Law says. It refers to the overall degree of disorder in closed systems, but an open system can increase in order without violating the Second Law, and life is an open system, not a close one.

Sometimes you hear comments to the effect that certain events in Quantum Theory are altered as a result of "observation", and there will be a claim that this implies that intelligence is actually a basic force in the universe. This will be cited against my own belief that thought is a property of brain matter and that the "mind" has no independent existence. It is indeed true that in Quantum Mechanics that the act of observing a particle in certain ways causes wave functions to collapse, but the mistake here is to assume that "observe" implies intelligence. In actual fact, machines can do it and so can certain natural conditions. There's no requirement for a mind to be involved.

A broader category of objections are part of the overall concept of "intelligent design" and start with an observation that in some way or other the situation we see seems just too good to be true. Thus it must have been the creation of a God, and thus it implicitly proves that God exists. I received an example of that in the mail today, from Steven:

I am a Deist. I know Fred exists. The difference is that my Fred designed everything. He does not need to watch because he already knows what's going to happen because he designed it that way. Since I believe that Fred exists outside of our universe, he can look at it as a whole from beginning to end as one big beautiful creation.

Which brings me to my main argument for my version of Fred. Beauty. Not only did Fred create this big, beautiful universe, he endowed us with the ability to appreciate that beauty. Explain to me how your mechanistic universe produce a humanity that can say, "Wow, what a beautiful sunset!" Show me how natural selection would produce a species that likes to smell and look at flowers when we don't eat the darned things (for the most part). Why would we even find those pictures you have at the top of your site even mildly attractive?

The only reason I can give is because Fred designed us that way.

Another form of the same argument points out that the relative strength of the four basic forces are tuned in such a way as to make the universe hospitable to life. If, for instance, gravity were weaker relative to the electric force, you might not be able to form stars at all, or they might be short lived. Why, it is asked, are the values of the forces so marvelously tuned so as to make life possible? Does that not demonstrate that when God designed the universe that he deliberately chose those values so as to make it possible for life to appear?

Arguments about "intelligent design" based on equivalent observations can be made at all kinds of scales, from the very largest (the relative strengths of the four forces) to much more local ones such as Steven's comment about our esthetic sense of beauty.

There's actually an answer to all these objections, but it isn't one that theists making these arguments generally find very satisfying. It's known as the "anthropic principle".

In any situation in which you make observations, you always have to take into account that the questions that you ask, and the means by which you try to collect data to answer the question, have the potential to distort the data you collect. Sometimes that distortion is systematic. Jane Galt comments that opinion surveys conducted on the telephone may well be becoming less and less reliable because a lot of people, fed up by constant pestering from telemarketers, tell pollsters to buzz off when they call. Some people are willing to spend 15 minutes answering silly questions while others are not. The poll necessarily only takes data from those willing to talk, but are they actually representative? Is the mere fact that they're willing to answer enough to make them a statistically invalid sample of the population as a whole? It's a valid fear.

Inherent sample bias is a major issue in paleontology, because in the past the conditions needed in order for fossils to form were quite unusual. Of course, the earth is a big place and there's been a lot of time, so it's hardly surprising that a lot of them were created. On the other hand, the processes by which they're exposed again so we can locate them may well also not be random. So when we find fossils from a certain era in the past, what we see may not be a true sample of what was alive then. In general terms, the fossilization process is predisposed to preserve hard parts (bones, shells, teeth) from creatures living around or in bodies of water. Other critters living in other kinds of ecosystems (e.g. desert specialists) are far less likely to have been preserved and we don't really know much about them.

In the last decade or so, there has been a major effort by astronomers to try to determine whether there are planets orbiting nearby stars. There are two main ways of doing this, and both of them involve making repeated observations of the same stars on a regular basis over a long time period (a few years). Neither approach has the ability to directly observe the planets; both of them are based on looking for the gravitational influence of the orbiting planet on the star.

One way is to take a long sequence of pictures of a section of the sky, and to look to see if the star is wiggling back and forth relative to the stellar background. That's pretty crude and doesn't work very well. A much better approach is to take a sequence of spectral measurements of a given star, and to look to see if there are changes in the radial velocity of it relative to us. If the star is moving back and forth and we're near the plane of orbit of the planet, then this will induce a doppler shift. If enough data is captured, over the course of several orbits of the planet, it's possible to make a curve fit on the data and from that to deduce the mass of the planet and the orbit it's in.

And they've confirmed that many stars actually do have planets, but most of the planets they've found have been massive (much larger than Jupiter) and have tended to be in quite tight orbits (sometimes in orbits smaller than Mercury). A lot of them have been in extremely eccentric orbits. What they haven't been finding is systems which are like ours.

Does that mean that our planetary system is a freak? No, what it means is that the kinds of measurements they're making, with the kind of sensitivity they have, and the time baseline over which the observations have taken place are not actually capable of finding systems like ours unless they're really close by, and none seem to be. The kinds of planets they've been locating so far are the ones most easy to detect, because big planets in fast orbits produce large and rapid changes in the movement of the stars they orbit. This work is very important in many ways, but it can't be used to make any kind of evaluation of how common systems like ours may be. For that we'll need far better equipment and a lot more time (decades).

When it comes to major metaphysical questions, the anthropic principle states that when humans look at themselves and the life around them and the world on which they live and the universe in which that planet can be found, and ask deep questions based on what they see, that the questions themselves and the observations are inherently biased, in ways which may not all be evident.

For instance, Steven asks how it is that we have an esthetic sense of the beauty of the universe? Isn't that proof of God's love that he gave us that sense as a gift? Actually, it doesn't prove anything, because if we did not have such an esthetic sense we'd never miss it. For all we know there may well be many kinds of esthetic pleasures which we do not experience because we're not designed to do so.

Why are the relative strengths of the natural laws tuned to make star formation, and planetary formation, and life formation possible? Is it the result of intelligent design? It doesn't have to be. The thing to point out is that if they were not properly tuned, there'd be no intelligent life in the universe to even ask the question.

Is intelligence itself so improbable that the only explanation for its formation is supernatural intervention? It's not clear that it is all that improbable; we're not in a position to know that yet. But even assuming that it is improbable, even long shot bets can pay off. But if the odds against natural development of intelligence, without supernatural intervention, were fantastically long, then if it hadn't actually happened in this universe there would be no intelligent beings worrying about the problem.

How can life be so complex? Because intelligence can't develop, so far as we know, except in large and complex creatures and such creatures must come from a complex life system. The universe is a really big place, and the number of stars in it is truly vast. A lot of time has passed. Even when the odds of winning a bet are absurdly long, if you make enough bets it's not too surprising when it eventually does pay off. With quadrillions of chances to make this particular bet, and billions of years, it isn't all that difficult to believe that it finally hit.

For all we know, this is the only planet in the entire universe where it actually did happen. But the fact that we are large creatures who are intelligent means that we have to be part of a very rich life system, which will include many other complex forms of life. Thus the fact that we see such things around us doesn't prove anything.

Many find the anthropic principle unsatisfying because it seems like rationalization. It's true that it can be abused, but it's not actually smoke and mirrors.

In fact, we see manifestations of this kind of thing in our everyday life all the time, only most of us don't find them very puzzling because we understand them. In the world today, the majority of humans alive live on less than $1000 per year. My own lifestyle is much more comfortable than that, and by world standards I'm part of a very small minority. Why is it that such a high proportion of my fellow citizens have very comfortable lifestyles comparable to my own, and virtually none of them have incomes that low? Doesn't probability say that most citizens of the US should be living on less than $1000 per year, since it's such a large population that it should be statistically representative of the rest of the world? If I'm so unusual in the world, why am I not unusual within the US? The reason is that the kind of processes which make my wealth possible can only happen on a large scale and as a result will benefit many or most of the other people in the same nation. The fact that I live a given comfortable lifestyle and can even ask the question I just asked implies that conditions exist which would affect the answer. If those conditions didn't exist, I also would not be wealthy and wouldn't even be thinking about the problem.

That's an example of way in which the anthropic principle operates. That particular question doesn't actually get asked because we already know the reason and the condition we see doesn't puzzle us.

But we don't understand all the factors which might be involved in the creation of life by natural processes, or the development of sophisticated life, or the development of intelligence. And it may be that some of the things we see which look as if they are unreasonably fortuitous are actually inevitable in the sense that they may derive from the same long sequence of improbable events which made it possible for us to even exist and think about such things. In other words, if they hadn't happened, we wouldn't even be here to talk about such things.

Which means that issues about how improbable they actually are don't matter. It's like the person who hits the $10 million slot machine jackpot asking why it was them that won. In some cases such people have been known to think that it was a blessing from God, and indeed it may have been. But it's also possible to explain it without such reference by noting that it had to be someone, and if it hadn't been them they wouldn't be asking whether God had decided to bless them. But it's really just that they were extremely lucky.

Theists also tend to point out that atheists can't explain everything. There's so much out there which we don't understand; how can you atheists be sure that we won't find things later which can only be explained as the result of divine intervention.

The answer is that we can't be sure, but so far it hasn't happened, and my own personal belief is that it won't happen. The fact that we don't have a mechanistic explanation for something right now does not prove we never will have. It may well be that eventually evidence appears which proves that there's a deity. If so, I'll have to reexamine my beliefs in light of it. But until that happens, I can only make my decisions based on what I know and on what seems to me to be the most likely explanation. It's not certain; I could be wrong. But that doesn't matter.

I believe that I am not wrong. I have faith that the choice I've made is the right one. I can't convince you that I'm right, but I don't need to. I make no claim that the process by which I came to that conclusion is universal or overwhelmingly convincing to anyone except myself, but I'm the only one I need to convince. I have thought deeply about the issues and I believe I have the right answer. That's all that really matters.

Remember that I make no grand claims about atheism; that's the other guys.

Theists sometimes object to atheism on the basis of the fact that it's cold and uncomforting. Why would you atheists not want to go to heaven when you die?

That's an example of what's known as an appeal to consequences, which more or less says that a given statement must be false, because if it were true the side effects would be unacceptable. The only answer I can give is that I don't think that the universe promised to please us. I prefer to deal with what I think is true even if it's not very nice, rather than to deceive myself with a more pleasant falsehood. I can see the attraction of eternal bliss in an afterlife; but I don't think any such thing will happen, and if I were to embrace such a thing it would prevent me from actually doing what I really can now, while I'm still alive.

I've also seen theists assume that atheists are also amoral, that atheism makes people embrace shallow hedonism, and thus that atheism is to be despised. It isn't true, but even if it were this is another example of an appeal to consequences.

Of course, at about this point the militant atheist, sitting listening to all this, explodes. "How do you expect to prove to the Christians that we atheists are better than they are, more rational, with this kind of crap?"

I don't think we should be trying to prove that, because I don't think it's true, at least universally. There are foolish Christians and there are foolish Atheists. But there are thoughtful people of both kinds, too. I don't see atheism as a belief to be inherently superior to any other. All I know is that it's the only belief I can accept.

My new blog: Chizumatic