Depression and Atheism

Look through a faithless eye
Are you afraid to die?—"Thoughts of a Dying Atheist", Muse

I've heard a lot of speculation here and there about a link between depression and atheism. It certainly makes sense to Christians that without God and a life purpose, there's just no reason to get out of bed in the morning. And there's enough circumstantial evidence that you don't have to be living under a rock to believe it. But I suspect the majority of Christians only (knowingly) know at most one atheist personally, so I would take any generalizations about atheists from the mouth of a Christian with a grain of salt. Heck, I don't think most atheists are qualified to talk about atheists in general.

But it might surprise you to hear that I do suspect there's a link between depression and atheism, just not the way you might think: I'm not convinced that atheism causes much if any depression, but I do suspect that depression causes a lot of atheism, in a manner of speaking. Specifically, I propose that atheism is more natural and easier to accept from a depressive mindset than from a typical "well-balanced" mindset.

Cause and Effect

Emotions have a bigger effect on reasoning than it's comfortable to accept. Marvin Minsky proposes in The Emotion Machine that the division between emotions and reason may even be an artificial notion. I find from my own experience that my mind just works differently when I'm upset, and sometimes the differences are bigger than the similarities.

Someone who sees the world from under a shadow isn't going to see a divine underlying plan in everything that happens, or see little victories as a clear answer to prayer. They don't expect everything to magically work itself out in life or after death, and more often than not prayer won't give much comfort when they're having problems.

But even that's not all there is to it.

The Skeptical Mindset

When I get a heartwarming email forward, or hear a factoid from a motivational speaker, my first instinct is to check it on Snopes, every time. It doesn't matter if it's a good story, or if it makes a really good point, or if I think the teller is trying to trick me. The bottom line is, if it purports to be a true story, and it isn't, I don't want to be retelling it. And I've been shocked before by what convincing yarns turned out to be false, but I'm getting pretty good at sniffing out fabrications.

I bring it up because most people, under some conditions, just won't bother checking all the facts. It's tedious, and by the time you've confirmed all the facts, all the emotional punch is gone. A lot of those people, for whatever reason, gravitate towards religion, and the fact checkers gravitate away. There are just too many uncheckable facts.

Why it Matters

A lot of people would probably read my claim and say, "Oh, another reason to write atheists off. They don't believe in God because they're depressed all the time, but we emotionally balanced people can think clearly." I think that's a bit unfair. I'm not so sure there is an "unclouded reason" in any emotional state, or any "unbiased" default mode of thinking. My skeptical mind helps me investigate bugs in the software I deal with at work, and I think engineers, doctors, stage magicians, and judges need a similar skeptical mind to do their jobs properly. There are problems amenable to a sober mind and problems amenable to a cheerful mind.

If depression is part of the reason behind atheism, though, it does imply that God may not be the one and only cure for said depression. Usually God comes first, then depression, then atheism.

Depression medication won't necessarily "cure" atheism, either. People don't always take psychoactive meds consistently, and seeing their entire mindset change when going on and off the medication can make them question everything they used to believe. A lot of medication won't even dampen the skeptical nature, since that's not the problem it's designed to fix.

But Then Again...

I only come into contact with a specific population of atheists, so I'm never convinced that I've seen the whole picture, but I do know a lot of atheists who are on or have been on depression medication, and those are just the ones who talk about it. Still, it's possible it's all in my head, and atheists aren't any more depressed than the rest of the population.

Fine-Tuned Constants

There seems to be a lot of buzz in the theological community lately about the "Argument from Fine-Tuned Constants", which is an argument for Intelligent Design that claims that a universe like ours can only exist when certain universal physical constants lie within a very narrow range. I have a lot of problems with this argument, and I argue that not only is it not very compelling, but it's an unsound argument on several fronts.

The Constants

The standard conception is that these physical constants are a fundamental feature of reality. But if you take a look at how physicists works, you get a very different picture.

The truth is that physicists really don't like constants. If a theory ends up having too many constants (or "fudge factors" as some scientists call them), then it begins to look suspicious. The main reason is that each constant is an unanswered question. There's generally a deeper reason for the value of a constant. For instance, the speed of sound in air seems constant, but it turns out to be related to the inertia of the air, so we can calculate it from other values. Scientific progress is gradually supplying answers to these unanswered questions, so positing God as the answer is a cut-and-dry God of the gaps argument.

But there's more to it than just the unsatisfied question of "why?". A physical theory with a lot of constants is like a house for sale that's filled with overpowering air fresheners: there's a lot of room for error..."overfitting" and sometimes "data dredging", in this case. With enough constants, any model can be made to fit the existing data, but theories with more constants have much less chance of predicting new data, and therefore are likely to be wrong as an abstract model. It's not always a case of foul play, but the values of any constants will be fit to existing data, which means that more constants couple a model to specific measurements and steer away from a general solution. The building blocks of our physical theories seem "undeniably real", but that's more because we've been taught about them for so much of our lives than because it's so obvious.

All this muddles the question of what the constants actually represent, and what it means to "tune" them.

How Things Might Have Been

Even if these values can be freely changed and the universe could be drastically altered, what then? The fine-tuned constants argument, like all design arguments, paints our environment as somehow "special". In this case, it's usually claimed that life could not exist in a universe where such-and-such value were different by one part in some-odd million billion billion billion.

But the same "scientists" have until now been telling us that evolution is impossible, and therefore that life should not exist in our universe. Sure, an altered universe would be different, but the salient question is "could (intelligent) life exist?". No scientist today is qualified to start with a handful of values, extrapolate out to an entire universe, and then determine that intelligent, self-replicating life won't ever exist anywhere within that universe. And certainly no scientist is qualified to do that same thing for every possible universe to determine that all or even most would be uninhabitable.

Answering the Questions

Theistic arguments take an attitude of demanding an answer for a given question. They often take the form "how else can you explain it?". That's not always a terrible approach, but it's certainly something to take in moderation, since easy answers are often wrong. It also entails the assumption that we already have all the requisite knowledge, which is especially unlikely when we're talking about metaphysics.

The common response is to take these arguments at face value and try to give an alternative explanation. To that end, many people suggest anthropic reasoning to explain why we observe such "special" conditions in our universe. I believe the anthropic principle is an excellent answer to the question, but based on the above arguments I don't believe the question itself is valid. The anthropic principle is such a neat, unconventional idea that it's easy to forget to ask if it's really necessary in this case.

Finally, it's unrealistic to expect scientific inquiry to ever finish its job and answer every significant question. The answers to questions about the "fundamental constants" will probably be incredible, but the questions themselves aren't all that special or compelling. There are volumes of unanswered questions; what makes this question of fundamental constants stand out is mostly that it's easy for laymen to speculate about.

The bottom line is that the argument from fine-tuned constants is a lot of things, but it isn't science.

Unconditional Love

I know
You love the song but not the singer.—"I Know", Placebo

I recently read Atlas Shrugged, and since then I've been doing a lot of thinking about Ayn Rand's philosophy. One of the weirdest turns she takes in her philosophy is how she applies her "no sacrifice" tenet to love and relationships, but as it turns out, I'm starting to see more and more how it all makes sense. In a nutshell, she outright rejects the idea of unconditional love and in its place believes in loving a person for their virtues.

Since her theory of love is a close parallel to her economic theory, let me say a thing or two first about her economic theory. She believes that socialism and our modern society try to completely separate productivity from incentive, and that the direct result is that people basically can't help but stop working hard, start cheating, and as a group destroy our economy. But one of her central ideas that I missed at first is that in her ideal society, more will be produced, and that in a society of free trade, both parties benefit with every transaction. That means that Medicaid and unemployment will go down, but that wages and standard of living in general will go up.

So how does that relate to love? Well, if all love were suddenly based on virtue rather than "choice", my knee-jerk fear would be that nobody would be "good" enough to deserve love. I recognized right away that it's the same knee-jerk response I had to her economic ideas (that nobody could be productive enough to survive), so I think the analogy runs pretty deep. I realized that if we punish "conditional" love so much and make it a black mark to love someone because you want to, if we make it a virtue to love someone in spite of their faults and horribly "selfish" to love someone because of their virtues, then what we're left with is empty, devoid of emotion, and based on guilt. If we love based on virtue, then I predict that our quality of love will increase, and there will be more love to go around!

As someone who always strives for sincerity and makes it a priority to live and love richly, I find a lot of energy and comfort in that thought. It's very hard for me to answer questions like "why do you love me?" when my love is based on sacrifice and guilt, but when I base my idea of love on virtue and mutual benefit, I'm coming up with new answers to that question all the time. I think how easily such a question comes to our minds in moments of insecurity should itself be a hint that love should not be based on nothing and that love naturally goes hand-in-hand with appreciation.

Objectivity in Art

"If I could do it, it ain't art." —Red Green

There's a discussion on Kevin's and Ben's blogs about whether there's any objective standard for art. I like to watch movies, and I've spent a lot of time thinking about what makes a movie good. Some movies that I feel like I should like but don't; others I like for exactly the reasons I hate another. And while there are some movies that almost nobody appreciates, there aren't really any movies that almost everyone appreciates. Can art itself really be "good" or "bad", or is it all in our heads?

To say that art is "good" or "bad" implies a purpose to the art that it either meets or falls short of. The high-level purpose for anything we would call art is to be appreciated by somebody. To know what people will appreciate, you have to understand people, so I don't think any criteria can be universal (i.e. we have no idea what kind of movies aliens would appreciate). But if any qualities are shared by all of humanity, they have potential to become a foundation for objective artistic principles, not objective in the sense that outside observers could agree about what is artistically valuable, but that they could agree about what humans would find artistically valuable.

You might be tempted to point to brain structures we have in common as examples of "shared qualities", but the human brain is designed to be extremely adaptable. Similarities in "artistic taste" are rare, and subtle differences in taste can have a big effect on how we evaluate a particular song or painting.

If you could agree on criteria, evaluating a specimen would become a much more objective process. The subjective part is deciding on the criteria. But some things intrinsically imply a particular purpose. A metal plate on a door in place of a handle suggests a purpose to be pushed, not pulled. If something suggests a purpose and then fulfills its suggested purpose, then it is "good" in a more "objective" way than something that doesn't suggest a purpose. By the same token, something that fulfills some purpose extremely well is more "objectively good" than something that doesn't really fulfill any purpose. The very fact that it works for some purpose suggests using it for that purpose (once that purpose is discovered). That said, we can find a purpose for almost anything, but some things have so much order to them that they're nearly perfect for one clear purpose and nearly useless for anything else (e.g. computer software).

Movies and television depend very heavily on understanding the purpose. That's why TV sitcoms use a laugh track to cue the viewer in to look for a joke. A bad movie can become a hilarious joke, and then from that vantage point become a great movie (okay, maybe not for everyone).

My conclusion is that when we say some art is good, we usually mean that there's some purpose it's good for. When people disagree, they usually disagree on the grounds that they don't value that purpose, and therefore that it's no purpose at all. The criteria are subjective on some levels and objective on others. Consequently, I don't think it's accurate to call art either purely subjective or purely objective.

The Airplane/Treadmill Problem: Corrections

Since my last post on the airplane/treadmill problem, I've had some extremely interesting conversations about it with a few friends. I'd like to make some clarifications and qualify a few of my earlier statements. I apologize, this looks like it will be another long post, but it also looks like now we're getting to the real meat of the problem.

"Eustace Bright" asked me if this has ever been tested. I'm sorry to say I never gave a very good picture of what would happen if you tried to test it and why. I tend to favor theory over practice, but theory divorced from practice quickly becomes aimless rambling. So, with that in mind, let me try to start from a real-world perspective this time.

The short answer is that some aspects of the problem would be extremely hard to test. Now for the full answer...

The Wings and Engines

I said before that with "powerful enough" engines, the plane would take off regardless of how the engines themselves work. I understated the point a little bit that for some types of engine "powerful enough" might mean "like the warp drive from the Enterprise". With big propellers and a very light plane, there might be a chance it could take off from a stationary position. I really have no idea how powerful of a rocket or jet engine it would take to create enough airflow, if it's even possible. Also keep in mind that more powerful engines tend to be bigger and heavier. If the engines are attached to the plane, they're going to have to meet a certain power-to-weight ratio.

In other words, it may be possible to build a plane that could lift off in place (with only horizontal thrust), but if you pick a plane at random, you could be reasonably certain that it wouldn't pass the test.

The Wheels

Remember that a quirk in the problem description requires the plane to be stationary without necessarily providing the forces to hold the plane stationary. This creates a weird kind of reverse causality where you can try to find the answer and find that you've lost the question. The upshot is that if you can show that no such force can hold the plane stationary, you thereby prove that the problem has no exact solution.

I had listed two candidate forces to hold the plane stationary, friction and rotational inertia (the resistance to spinning faster or slower) in the wheels. The friction I'm referring to is in the wheel bearings. As far as rotational inertia, I think I need to clarify what I meant just a bit with another quick example:

This time, imagine a ball on a treadmill. When you turn the treadmill on, the ball moves back a bit before it gets rolling. Once the ball's spin gets up to speed, its momentum alone keeps it spinning, like a ball spinning in mid-air except supported by the treadmill. When you stop the treadmill, the ball will "coast" forwards quite a ways before friction finally brings it to a stop.

I had suggested that those two forces would be enough to keep the plane stationary, but then I discovered a flaw in my reasoning: neither of those forces is proportional to the speed of the treadmill.

The sliding friction in the wheels is a constant force, regardless of speed. Unless the wheels have some serious wobble or mechanical problem that makes them start to lock up at higher speeds, we'll only ever get a fixed-strength force from the friction. If the engines exceed that force (which is extremely likely), there's nothing we can do with the conveyor belt to compensate.

The rotational inertia is a little more promising, but not much: its associated force won't be proportional to the speed of the belt, but it will be proportional to the acceleration of the belt. Momentum and inertia are related to velocity whereas force is related to acceleration. Remember that once my hypothetical ball was up to speed, it stopped moving backwards without any additional forces having to act on it (not even friction). That means with the conveyor belt spinning at a constant speed, the wheels will offer no real resistance to a constant force from the engines.

My conclusion on the "exact match" constraint between the belt and wheels is that it very well may be impossible to balance the forces and create a stationary plane to meet the requirements in any practical scenario.

Postscript: An Apology

Last time I mentioned Mythbusters and some YouTube videos that claimed to solve the airplane/treadmill problem, but didn't seem to have anything to do with the real issues. They demonstrated exactly that the plane wasn't stationary, so they couldn't have been answering the question exactly, which had specified that the plane must be stationary. Well, that was true, but they were trying to answer the follow-up question of whether any such real-world forces could hold the plane back against the force of the engines, which turns out to be a tough part of the problem. Since the friction is a constant force, they've definitively ruled out friction as a candidate in any realistic scenario.

That said, I still have some ideas to kick around before I'll concede that the problem can't be saved. It'll be a longshot, though.

Edit: I did some more thinking and ruled some ideas out. I think I'll leave the whole airplane/treadmill thing alone for a while. It's more fun to discuss it in person, anyway.

The Airplane/Treadmill Problem: My "Solution"

A few days ago I posted a description of the Airplane/Treadmill Problem, which is basically a trick question of physics and logic:

Imagine a 747 is sitting on a conveyor belt, as wide and long as a runway. The conveyor belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction. Can the plane take off?

Now I'm going to share my thoughts on what's wrong with the question and how I would go about "answering" the question at face value.

Since there's a lot of ground to cover, I'll give you a quick outline of my plan of attack:

• The problem description implies that the plane can't move, but doesn't say why.
• With powerful enough engines, the plane will lift off.
• Any reading of the problem description that makes sense of the premises leaves the plane stationary and the air flowing past the wings fast enough for an in-place liftoff.
  

There are several angles to look at the problem from, but there's one observation that's relevant to all of them: the problem defines the plane as stationary but doesn't necessarily provide a mechanism for holding the plane in place. We're told that no matter what else happens, the wheels don't slip and the conveyor belt speed exactly cancels out the wheel speed. By the principles of geometry, not physics, this boils down to an obscure way of saying that the plane doesn't move. That means that any statement of the problem that requires the plane to move forward or backward entails a contradiction, and can be read as "imagine a plane is moving and also not moving".

(Note: I read the problem to say the treadmill moves backwards at the "speedometer speed" of the wheels. A lot of people seem to read the problem as matching the air speed of the plane. I believe that's why on Mythbusters and several YouTube videos, the plane is clearly not stationary when it lifts off. If you solve the problem using air speed instead of wheel speed, the answer is trivial and turns out to just require the wheels to spin twice as fast as they would on solid ground.)

One other thing is certain. With powerful enough engines, the plane can always achieve liftoff, whether it's being held stationary, pushed forward, pulled backward, or completely uninhibited by the conveyor belt. I can prove it using only Newton's third law (actions and reactions) and some back-of-the-envelope aerodynamics:

1. The wing's shape is designed so that if enough air flows past it, it will pull upwards enough to lift the plane. It doesn't matter whether the plane moves through the air or the air moves past the plane (like in a wind tunnel).
   
2. Any engine (turbine, rocket, etc.) achieves acceleration by forcing something in the other direction (air flow, rocket exhaust, etc.). If enough of anything is forced in one direction, the balancing effect of air pressure will cause some breeze to follow it.
3. With enough energy ("enough" being the operative word), that air is going to move, and with enough airflow, that plane will go up.
   

That said, I doubt such engines can be made at any time in the near future, given that more powerful engines will tend to make the plane weigh more.

So, the plane must be stationary for the question not to be bogus, and the plane will lift off in any non-bogus but idealized) statement of the problem. But there's still one question left to answer: what's stopping the plane from moving forward? To answer that question, let's forget about the plane engines and consider a slightly different problem:

Imagine a wagon is sitting on a conveyor belt as wide as a wagon trail. The conveyor belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction. You stand in front of the conveyor belt holding a rope that's attached to the wagon. If you give the rope a tug, what stops the wagon from moving?

In other words, since the wagon can't move a fraction of an inch without making either the universe or our heads explode, who or what are you playing tug-o-war with?

Here's where we bring back all of the little pieces of physics we ignored. If we neglect all of the technicalities of real-world physics and declare that the wheels have absolutely zero resistance to motion, then the motion of the conveyor belt is completely unrelated to the wagon and your rope. It could be tracking 10,000 mph in either direction, and you simply wouldn't feel it from the rope. That means that the wagon would necessarily move, and the problem description breaks down. Since that won't work, I'll relax the constraints a bit and see how I can link the motion of the conveyor belt to an equal and opposite tug on the wagon. The question is whether there is some way to interpret the problem so that there is still a single correct answer, or whether every reading turns out to be bogus.

The simplest way to make the problem work would be to say the wheels don't roll perfectly, that there's some friction in them. That way, if you get the conveyor belt moving fast enough, it will match your tug with its own.

Another option is to give the wheels some mass, which eats up some of the energy in getting the wheels to spin. As an example of this effect, think of how you can lift a yo-yo by the string alone before it gets spinning very fast. The same idea would allow the conveyor belt to pull on the wagon.

The theory of relativity might give a third option for balancing the system, but I'll spare you the details.

The Airplane/Treadmill Problem

It's time for a physics/logic problem. This problem has been circulating for a while, and there have been a couple of interesting arguments and an ocean of stupid ones.

Imagine a 747 is sitting on a conveyor belt, as wide and long as a runway. The conveyor belt is designed to exactly match the speed of the wheels, moving in the opposite direction. Can the plane take off?

The problem is actually sort of bogus. Figuring out exactly what's bogus about it and how to explain it is the real challenge. There are several ways to solve the problem just by saying "physics doesn't work that way", but since they're technical explanations and they're not satisfying answers, I'll go ahead and rule real-world physics out: the wheels are massless and frictionless, and all physics discovered after the year 1900 is off-limits.

I have my own thoughts on how to "solve" the riddle, but I'll give you a chance to look it over and ponder it for a while before I post my "solution".

Illustrated Philosophy: A Different Angle on Subjectivism

There seems to be a lot of confusion about subjectivism and its implications, so rather than expound arguments against objective values, I thought this time I'd take a step back and get a birds-eye view of objective vs. subjective worldviews.

First let's see how things look to a subjectivist:

Subjective Outlook

In this model, there's an objective truth that underlies all shared experience (meaning things that almost all humans have in common, such as biological humanity, our location in the universe, and especially the things considered painful or pleasurable). The body of human knowledge floats on top of this layer of experience, so it's also indirectly supported by truth. If the details of human experience were significantly modified, any bit of knowledge might be invalidated or become nonsensical. Different people can agree on qualities of human experience, such as moral values, because of a shared vocabulary and shared experience, but calling these shared values objective, universal truth is only accurate in a weak sense, as a form of conversational shorthand.

Now let's look at a world of objective values:

Objective Outlook

In this case, some knowledge is supported directly by truth, without being filtered through human experience. Everyone can agree on objective values, because they aren't supported only by the details of human experience, and they have universal significance outside of human experience. This implies that humans have a special kind of direct access to truth, such as divine revelation or an internal moral compass.

Understatements of the Century

Language is incredibly ambiguous and emotion-laden, so much so that it's impossible to use neutral language. Instead of putting no spin on our words, the best we can do is put "the right" spin on them. It's all you can do to not mislead people, and if you succeed, then they'll be misled by somebody even dumber.

So, by way of illustration, I've decided to compile a short list of statements that are so understated as to be absurd. Notice the use of diminutive phrases like "just", "nothing but", and "only" to enhance the effect.

• Human beings are just a bunch of atoms.
• A computer program is one enormous number.
• A human being is just a machine.
• Intelligent life coming from non-life is improbable.
• What a person believes comes down to personal preference.
• People only do what feels good.
• Space is big. (You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is.)
• You'll win the lottery eventually if you keep playing it.
• The laws of nature can give us equations to determine the state of all matter at any given time if we know the state of all matter at any particular time.
  

The Effects of Morality

Today's question: What does morality do?

If I tell someone that I don't believe in any sort of morality, I tend to get a response of shock and "moral panic". After the shock wears off, the arguments range from "how do you get out of bed in the morning?" to "that's what destroyed the Roman Empire". The consensus seems to be that if everyone were like me, the results would be terrible. So, I ask you, what are you afraid of?

Is it something physical? You might be afraid that without morality, our societies would destroy themselves in a civil war of greed. If that's what morality gives us, what separates it from mere practicality, or "advanced common sense"? What you're really afraid of is not that I'm discarding spiritual truth, but that I'm not smart enough to predict the consequences of my actions. It's a valid concern, but a physical concern.

Is it something emotional? Are you afraid that without a sense of universal good and evil, everyone would become depressed, apathetic drones? Then what separates morality from psychoactive drugs? It may be a natural remedy, and it may help me not depend on others for emotional support, but it doesn't have eternal, universal significance.

Is it something spiritual? Are you concerned for my soul? As I read it, Christian salvation doesn't come from morality, but from belief. Righteous behavior flows out from belief in God, but where does a belief in morality itself fit into the equation? If I don't believe in God, what spiritual difference would it make if I valued morality?

Maybe morality has some of those effects, but also has deep significance for other reasons. But then the shock and fear have nothing to do with its significance. If that's your stance, I can't argue, but don't pretend the fear is righteous. It's just pragmatic.

Please say what you mean, and stop hiding behind vague terminology and intellectual laziness. What you're hiding from is personal responsibility.

The Next Step

I want you to imagine something...

One day someone hands you a book, and tells you, "You need to read it. It's the next step." You ask, "...what for?", and are met with a blank stare. "It just is! It's the next step."

Later that day, a lady tells you, "I believe it's the next step to sing 'I Am the Walrus'." "Oh..." is all you can manage. She looks at you in disbelief. "Well, why aren't you doing it?"

At lunch, you realize your wallet's at home and ask your friend to spot you 10 bucks. Feeling adventurous, you try, "I think it's the next step...". His face is screaming in shock. "How can you say that?! It's failure! Total failure!"

What's missing?

Spreading Atheism

I keep hearing people say that atheists have no valid motive or right to spread atheism. I think this perspective is ridiculous all over. The reasons to promote atheism may not be as obvious, but they can be just as significant to an atheist as a Christian's reasons are to the Christian.

The most common objection is "you only have this life to worry about, but for me it's an issue of eternity". If this life is all I have, wouldn't it be worth more to me? And if my earthly surroundings are all I'll ever have, am I not justified in being particular about them? I like the story about the boy throwing beached starfish back into the water, where a man comes along and asks, "What difference does it make? You'll never save them all." The boy says, "To the ones I do save, it makes all the difference in the world." All these "insignificant" moments on earth add up, and even Christians believe one's actions in this life make all the difference.

I also believe atheism is the truth, and I think the truth stands for something in its own right. I may not believe in absolute morality, but I do believe in absolute truth, and even though I can't force anyone to accept what I believe to be the truth, I refuse to subvert it to tolerance and "personal preference".

So, what's an appropriate response to the belief that there is no God? For me, the process of rejecting faith was excruciating, even if parts of it were thrilling and rewarding. I do believe that hard-earned knowledge is more valuable and profound, but I don't believe in burning books to make all learning a struggle. If you want to climb upwards, neither flat ground nor a sheer cliff is as useful as a flight of stairs.

My frustrations have come not so much from the disagreement and "intolerance" as from the misunderstanding, disrespect, and outright shock that I received from theists around me. I've also struggled with all kinds of fear, having secrets that may or may not destroy relationships, but could never be taken back. My approach to making things a little better for each generation is more of exposure than education. I try to be "the atheist" in someone's life and show them how little difference it makes, and what form the differences take. I also try to disarm loaded words like "atheist" by using them in natural conversation, when possible.

I like to develop and refine my beliefs by discussion with people who disagree. I don't measure success in "converts to atheism", because I find that it's rare for people to be "led" to atheism. Instead I try to break the certainty people have that they already know everything that I'm going to say, and to give them a flavor of what atheism is really like.

One of my less noble goals is to make the world a little less passively theistic. The way things stand, it's a theist's world and we're just living in it. They have all the traditions, political power, and the "right of way" in most parts of the world. A lot of theist comforts come at atheists' expense, and if they're bailing water from their boat into our ocean, I wouldn't mind bailing some of it back into their boat.

It may sound bitter to frustrate theists just for its own sake, but especially with regard to religious traditions I think the small effects add up. Many Christians refuse to participate in the "harmless traditions" of Santa Claus and Halloween, or the questionable tradition of Mardis Gras (not that any of those are "atheist traditions"), and I call that justification enough for my actions.

Fatalism and Futility

"I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow.
I feel my fate in what I cannot fear.
I learn by going where I have to go." —The Waking, Theodore Roethke

Fatalism is the belief that there is only one possible future. The name comes from "fate" rather than "fatal", but emotional nuances still haunt the term from the first time you hear it, making it more natural to dismiss and criticize. The idea is at odds with the idea of free will because the normal conception of free will requires that no natural laws completely determine human behavior, whereas obviously human behavior can affect the physical world. This would imply that non-physical causes have physical effects, and therefore the sum of physical laws isn't enough to completely predict the future.

Fatalism suggests that the conditions of the future have a constant, non-variable value. However, everyday language, even among fatalists, treats the future as a variable to be affected by each decision and action. I've heard several people ask, "If the future is predetermined whether or not I make a given choice, why bother doing anything?". There are two ways to read this question: present actions don't actually affect the events of the future, or actions don't affect the fixedness of the future. Both are troubling thoughts.

The first case is obviously absurd. We make choices every day that ripple outwards and have incredibly unexpected consequences. It's even more absurd than it might seem, because if memories are physical states in the brain, then future memories couldn't be affected by present actions, so you could have absolutely no recollection of many choices and actions. The absurdity leads many people to reject fatalism and determinism outright.

But fatalism doesn't require this absurdity, because fatalism holds not just the future as constant, but also the present and all choices and mental states. Any choice that will be made is fated to be made one way or another. It's still a perfectly valid and useful mental model to treat the future as a variable, because it's a mathematical unknown in any equation and still must be solved for. Even the past can be treated as an unknown, as historians are well aware, because we've lost information and can't be certain of exactly what happened. There are many "variables", but no free variables.

The reasoning of the original question is a form of proof by contradiction, assuming fatalism and then deriving absurd results from the assumption. Proof by contradiction is worthless if it makes extra assumptions, because then the error can't be traced back to the original tentative assumption. In this case, the contradiction came from the extra, false assumption that there are free variables.

I can't refute the other way of reading the question, though, because I completely agree with it. Your actions and decisions (constants) can't affect the fixedness of the future by any means. It's like pulling yourself up by your bootstraps: you have no variability to imbue the future with, so you can't actually change its course. The feeling of helplessness is understandable in a psychological way, but not actually supported by any logical argument.

As an example, imagine I can read your mind, and you're standing at a fork in the road. You decide to go left and I tell you "Go left". So then you decide to go right just to spite me, and I say "Go right" right away. You give up and decide to stay put, so I say "Don't go anywhere". Then you decide to run in circles quoting Shakespeare, but before you can move I say "Run in circles quoting Shakespeare". You will probably feel an overwhelming sense of futility before long, but eventually you decide to ignore me and just go about your business. After a while, you start to realize I'm the one who should feel overwhelmed with futility, not you. If I keep doing this forever, I'm nothing but a nuisance. If I ever stop, you've won the game. Finally, I'll say "Tape my mouth shut" and you will.

The same reasoning applies to fatalism. Everything you do is predetermined even if you try to cheat the system by changing your mind, but it doesn't matter. You'll never know what's around the corner until you turn the corner, and it shouldn't bother you that something is already around the corner whether you look or not. It can't help being there, but you can (deterministically) decide whether to look.

Moral Relativism - Part 3

If someone's beliefs point to some type of morality, then I have no business judging or interfering. But many people seem to actually put the need for some kind of morality ahead of the existence of a particular system, and furthermore require that the criteria of right and wrong are universal and unambiguous. They claim that without a system of guidelines, everyone will sink to the worst depths of depravity, and every society will tear itself apart. They teach everyone to fear and distrust anyone who doesn't avow at least some morality, and that anything is better than nothing in this respect. This attitude goes far beyond a loyalty to their own doctrine of morality, and firmly asserts that even if all other particular beliefs turn out to be false, some other morality must save us from the war of all against all; the very idea of moral relativism must be a logical contradiction and so-called relativists must be fools.

Morality is supposed to be a system for guiding behavior. Without some explicit brand of morality, what would be left to guide a person's actions? We still have reason, emotion, social conventions, and some would claim free will and an internal moral compass. These may not add up to a universal system, but it is certainly some kind of means for guiding behavior. Someone who demands some further moral standard is saying not just "I have extra/alternative criteria" but "those criteria are not enough". Usually, the accusation comes in a stronger form, that "those criteria are worthless or even harmful". Another angle is "even if those criteria are enough to keep the peace, they're just a soulless copy of true morality". I could address each claim individually, but I'll just summarize that yes, it's tough being ethical and responsible, nobody does it perfectly, and I also don't think just any given moral system gives life meaning, even if some particular system might. In other words, it's not true that anything is better than "nothing", even if some particular thing might be better.

On the other side, young people seem to look to moral relativism as some sort of refuge from any responsibility that excuses them from any sort of social judgment, and others judge relativism along these lines. I consider such an attitude insane and irresponsible, and not a valid conclusion from the premise of moral relativism. However, not everybody window shops for a nice conclusion and picks a justification to match. I'd love to move the discussion away from emotional outrage, fear, and disgust and towards clarity and understanding. I'd also love for atheists to stop clinging to universal morality when they can't make a coherent argument for it.

Probability Schmobability?

Never let it be said that probabilities don't matter. Sally Clark, a British woman whose two sons suffered cot death (a.k.a. SIDS), was arrested under suspicion of murder. Her prosecution included testimony from Roy Meadow, a pediatrician who claimed that the probability that both sons died of natural causes was less than 1 in 72 million. He got that figure by squaring the 1 in 8500 likelihood of cot death in affluent families.

He irresponsibly ignored the requirement that events be independent for his calculations to yield meaningful results.

Furthermore, his results imply that there was only a 13 billionth of a percent chance that Mrs. Clark was not a murderer, apparently assuming that it was improbable even for the first son to die. With probability, it's extremely important that the "clock" be started exactly with the surprising event, never including previous "related" events. If the Pick 3 numbers for one day are 1-9-6, that's not surprising. If they're also 1-9-6 the next day, it is surprising. So if the odds are 1-in-1000 for winning, the probability telling us how surprising our "coincidence" is would be closer to 1-in-1000 (the odds of getting 1-9-6 the second day) rather than 1-in-1 million (the odds of getting 1-9-6-1-9-6) since it wasn't surprising in the least until the second 1 popped out. In the same way, nothing was surprising in Sally Clark's case until the second son died, so even without considering the other error she would only have a 1-in-8500 surprise value.

There may have been other evidence involved, but it's horrifying that someone so careless with evidence would be involved in a murder trial.

She served more than three years in prison before she was released on further evidence.

Moral Relativism - Part 2

Every idea, whether or not it's accurate, is based on other ideas, itself, some mixture of the two, or nothing. Relativism has a lot to do with ideas and implications, so I'll say a little on that subject before I get back to why it's important.

Because ideas are only anchored to each other, all ideas are ultimately "floating in space" in a sense, and the entire corpus of human knowledge is not "well supported" as a whole. Put another way, the "infallible" process of logical deduction (applying what we know) is worthless without the "fallible" process of logical induction (predicting what's "probably" true).

There are, however, ideas well worth believing. Bertrand Russell says, "the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it". This is the trick to all of our ideas: our basic, fundamental assumptions are so simple or necessary that it's not worth considering the alternatives. For instance, many of our ideas are based on reliable sensory experiences. If our sensory experiences are so misleading that there's no way to follow them to the "real truth", then the "real truth" will be irrelevant until that changes. It doesn't matter if everything is a dream unless and until we wake up or find a good reason to question it all. So there is a legitimate basis to many ideas, just not one that's supported by evidence, technically speaking.

Now back to relativism. It's my contention that you can't get from a moral statement to a non-moral statement. The implications of a moral statement ("X is good") are also moral statements ("we should do X", "there's not enough X"...). The nearest thing to non-moral conclusions would be explicit responses ("I will do X"). These responses also depend on other moral statements ("I do things that are good"), and they have a decidedly non-universal sense to them. Moral statements can also be related to God in significant ways ("God wants me to do X"), but that only extends the "moral statement bubble" as opposed to penetrating it, because they're still a type of moral statement and lead to more of the same ("God says to do good", "God is good", I will do what God says to do").

My belief is not that God-based morality is empty or flawed, or even that it's necessarily on equal footing with moral relativism, but that relativism is no more self-defeating or contradictory than moral universalism. Neither system minimizes the personal responsibility to make decisions, act on one's convictions, or seek the truth, although relativism leaves a few extra unknowns as far as how to go about it.

Moral Relativism - Part 1

Ethics and values and morals, oh my! It's time to throw caution to the wind and discuss relativism. Before I do, though, I'll need to invoke my muse and put all my energy into doing this just right. The internet is full of discussions about relativism, and as far as I can make out, it's all either horse poo or extremely boring. I'm going to try my best to keep this and any further posts manageable and well-organized. Here goes...

What difference does it make being a relativist? Does a relativist believe that whatever makes you feel good is "right"? If you see a relativist on the street, how will you know? Think hard about those questions, and don't jump to the easy answers right away, because they're the focal point of the idea of moral relativism.

I make the claim that relativism itself makes very few direct prescriptions, and only provides a few vague implications. It's a mental model for understanding "moral propositions", or statements involving words like "good", "bad", "righteous", "evil", "right", "wrong", "should", and "ought". Yes, it's all just about words, and that can be frustrating, but words make up such a big part of our lives that sometimes they deserve a second look.

Consider the statement "exercise is good". How do you respond to such a statement? You might get up and go for a walk, eat a piece of cheesecake out of defiance, or make an excuse for not exercising. If you have no response whatsoever, and immediately forget the statement, what purpose does it serve? It might still make someone else feel good to say it, or fill a gap in conversation. If, on the other hand, nobody has any response to a statement, in what sense does it still have value? Probably not in much of a practical sense. I take the position that a statement only has practical value if it affects some feeling or behavior, either immediately or down the road.

That in no way berates moral claims themselves or makes people stupid for holding moral beliefs. There is usually a very strong response to moral statements. However, it makes our relationship with such statements a little more explicit. That's not the essence of relativism, but it's a foundation for further argument, and if we can come to agreement on this point then it'll help keep the rest of the discussion sane.

An Allegory of Colors

There's a city where everyone loves yellow. It's the color of happiness and excitement, so all the people there paint things bright yellow and wear yellow clothes all year. But Bob really likes the color blue. It's not that he dislikes yellow, but to Bob, a little splash of blue looks nice alongside the yellow.

When Bob was a little boy, his preschool class drew crayon pictures. He drew a big yellow sun. Then he used black crayon to draw his house, and filled it in bright yellow. With a green crayon he filled in his front lawn, and then he asked his teacher for a blue crayon to draw the creek that ran nearby.

"What do you want the blue crayon for?" asked his teacher.
He explained, "I need it to draw the water."
The teacher blinked and then told him, "Blue is a sad color. That's why we call it 'feeling blue' when someone's sad. Water's actually clear, so why don't you just draw the edges of the water with black?"
He said "okay" and went back to his desk, but he couldn't understand what was wrong with the blue crayon. He didn't think it was a sad color, or any particular kind of color even. It was just blue.

A few years later, for Bob's birthday, his friend gave him a blue shirt with "Bob" written on the front. He really liked it and rushed upstairs to change into it. Then he noticed that his friends seemed distracted and a little uncomfortable whenever he talked to them. He thought, maybe they don't like my shirt, but he sort of liked standing out, and he didn't mind too much if a couple of people thought he was weird. After they all went home, he went on a walk, and an old lady yelled across the street at him, "Is that some kind of protest?"
"What?" he called back.
"Your shirt is blue. Are you trying to annoy everyone?"
"It's just a color. What's it to you?"
She scowled. "Everyone else likes yellow. You're probably just trying to get attention..."
He did like some of the attention he had gotten, especially since it was his birthday, but he was pretty sure that wasn't the only reason he liked wearing the shirt.

After that day, whenever he noticed his blue shirt in the closet, he always thought of the old lady, so he didn't feel like wearing it anymore. Eventually it was just taking up space in his closet and his mind, so he threw it away.

One day, when Bob was all grown up, he needed to paint his fence. His house was already solid yellow, so he went to the store and bought the last can of pastel blue paint for the fence. After a long afternoon of painting, he finally had the last fencepost covered. He stood back to admire it, and then went inside for the night. When he woke up the next morning, he looked out of his window, and his fence was yellow again! He asked his next-door neighbor about it later, and the neighbor said, "Don't you like it? We noticed you couldn't find yellow paint for your fence, so the whole neighborhood pitched in to surprise you."
Bob felt a little silly. "Well, I kind of liked it better when it was blue..."
"Buddy, the whole town loves yellow, and you're the only one who likes blue. You'd better learn to like things yellow or you'll never be happy around here."
He relented. "Yeah, I guess you're right. It does look pretty good yellow."

And he meant it...sort of. But sometimes when he was thinking hard about something, he would suddenly remember his fence wasn't blue anymore, and then he remembered he was trying to like yellow, and soon his head was spinning with conflicting emotions and he would forget what he had been thinking about.

One rainy day, Bob was thinking about the blue shirt he had when he was younger, and he realized something. When other people made things yellow, they weren't trying to do anything in particular. They were just doing what came naturally, it was easy, and Bob wanted them to be happy, too. On the other hand, whenever Bob thought something should be blue, it was always a big event. It wasn't just that yellow was popular, it was mostly that people expected things to be yellow. When he wanted something blue, he always had to have a reason for it, and people would assume that he wanted to be irritating.

Sometimes, when he felt like things should be different, he did like to irritate people a little, because it seemed like it would help change things somehow. He discovered, though, that when he irritated people, they tried even harder to find things that could be yellow, if not to spite Bob then to lift their spirits. Like quicksand, he could do nothing and things would gradually get worse, or he could try to do something and the situation would decline even faster.

The more he realized that his perspective didn't matter, the more it frustrated him every time he noticed yellow going up somewhere. It hadn't always been a big deal. Like he had said, it's just a color. He tried to learn not to care, but he felt frustrated with himself for ever having cared, and soon it wasn't just about the colors anymore. Now he was always frustrated, and nobody could understand why Bob always got so worked up over colors.