A beginning

So it begins.

(I’ve used that exact phrase as a pseudo-dramatic intro too many times before. But it’s true, it really does begin.)

This is my new blog. I’m branching out from my LiveJournal, and will mostly be saving that for personal updates and keeping in touch with other people, while this here wordpressamajig will be used for SRS INTARWEB JOURNALISM. Or something like that. I may also do something with the layout, in time, but right now I’m quite liking Cubik’s Rube in the Kubrick style. We’ll see how it goes.

Anyway. One of the regular themes I’m planning to maintain for this blog is that of science and skepticism. These have been interests of mine for some time, and this seems like as good a day as any to start contributing to the long-standing and wide-ranging debate, about the purported existence of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (or any other, lesser deities for that matter) and the disappointing absence from actual reality of any divine appendages, noodly or otherwise.

The following is something I wrote a while ago, for my short-lived website The Hungry Atheist, now enhanced and digitally remastered for 2008, which sums up some very general thoughts on science and faith. I hope you’re sitting comfortably. Feel free to get up, walk around, stretch your legs, or make some tea at any point – I do go on a bit sometimes.

It is commonly claimed that God is “unknowable” to science, or that he is outside of science’s realm of knowledge. Religion and science are said simply to be different approaches to understanding the world in which we live, both equally valid and useful in their own right, but which should each refrain from intruding into the other’s field. The phrase used to describe this by Stephen Jay Gould, a prominent biologist and populariser of science, was “Non-overlapping magisteria”. It sounds like a nice, reasonable sharing-out of responsibilities, and might appeal to our sense of fairness, but I think it’s based on a misunderstanding of just what science is. This is the subject of today’s sermon rant.

Everything that we humans can be said to “experience” is processed by our brains, which provide us with a sensation of that experience. A lot of the sensations we feel are sparked off by input from our five senses – we see things, hear things, and so on, acquiring information about the world, and then our brains put together a mental structure that models what the world seems to be like.

Sensory input is not vital for us to experience sensations, however. Our brains are perfectly capable of providing many sensations unprompted by any sights or sounds around us. We dream, for instance, and experience many things entirely of the brain’s own concoction, because it gives us the same (or very similar) sensations to those that it would be prompted to give us, if we were actually seeing and hearing the things we dream about.

So everything we experience is down to the firing of particular neurons in the brain, and the true nature of the real world is not the only thing capable of providing the sensations of these experiences. Whether I’m really eating a delicious cake, or I merely believe in the delicious cake because of information being fed to my brain by the robots keeping me jacked into the Matrix, is something I have no hope of deciding by the experience alone. What’s going on inside my head is identical in either case, and what’s going on inside my head is, fundamentally, all I’ve got.

However, you don’t need to turn to cinematically kick-ass but scientifically illiterate film-making to find examples of how our squishy organic matter can be flummoxed. Our eyes by no means provide a complete or flawless visual representation of the world. If you stare at a bright light for a while, and then look away, you’ll notice a slight imprint left on your retina flashing in front of your eyes for a while afterward. There’s nothing actually there in front of you being seen, but your eyes are doing the best job they can to provide the brain with a picture of the world, and its best guess is sometimes a little misleading.

Similarly, those magic eye pictures make it look like some parts of it are sticking out at you. Drugs or sensory deprivation can conjure up all sorts of images that look utterly real, because your brain is producing much the same sensations, regardless of the unreal nature of the external stimuli. (Such hallucinations might be surreal, and not convince us of their reality, but visually they do – it’s only our familiarly with the real world and a brief logical look at the situation which tells us that the pink elephants tap-dancing on the coffee table are unlikely to exist and should not be offered biscuits.)

Even if we are receiving accurate information, something often goes wrong on the way to the conscious mind. How often have you misread a word on a page the first time around, and thought it said something else? And even if the information is read and understood correctly, we don’t always know what to do with it, how to interpret it, or what conclusions to draw.

We are also capable of finding interpretations and meanings where there are none, like when clouds resemble everyday objects. In short, direct input from our senses is very unreliable for actually finding things out, and everything we can claim to “know” is necessarily subject to our human failings. Some uncertainty in this cannot be avoided, simply because our aforementioned squishy organic matter is all we have to do our thinking with, and it’s not perfect.

Science is a tool which we can use to help us establish what we can “know”, in this uncertain way, about the workings of the world we live in, while hopefully eliminating (or minimising the effects of) as many of these inevitable human inaccuracies as possible. Logic is another tool, this time a method of thinking, which we can use to determine probably true facts from probably false ones, under a given set of circumstances, as accurately as possible. That’s all. It doesn’t intrinsically preclude your “gut feeling”, or “common sense”, or whatever reason you might have for thinking you know something. But being illogical is a good way to end up believing something wrong. Using logic makes that less likely.

Logic and scientific reasoning, then, do not a priori deny the existence of God, or of any other supernatural phenomena. Nor are they inequipped to study them; if we are capable of believing incorrect things on these topics, then any tools we have to eliminate the errors of perception and thought that might have led us there could surely still be useful, in our struggle to believe as many true things and as few false ones as possible.

Science is our human attempt to know about the world, and anything asserted to be a part of this world necessarily falls within its reach. If it has any measurable effect on reality, it can be studied scientifically.

What science does in these cases is to lay down guidelines for sensible and rational thought. Words like “sensible” and “rational”, remember, mean only that we are determining probably true facts from probably false ones as effectively as we can. Anything that helps increase our chances of being right, and decreases the number of false things we inadvertently believe, is always desirable. My claim here is that rational thinking and an effort to minimise the number of untrue facts in our belief system should be applied to everything they possibly can be, because they’re the best we have, and we are never infallible.

The reason that nothing falling under the category of “psi” (broadly referring to any paranormal phenomena) is currently accepted by the scientific consensus is that scientific investigation is yet to provide a reason to view ideas like extra-sensory perception, dowsing, homeopathy, and so on, as being probably true. Individuals may have experienced what they consider to be conclusive proof, but no replicable and decisive experiment has managed to widely convince anyone else. But it could, if these theories are actually correct. If there’s anything worth believing, it should still look worth believing after efforts have been made to eliminate errors from our process of examining the world.

So far, no psi phenomena have been shown to resemble a likely truth after rigorous, error-minimising testing has been done. But because of science’s ability (and in fact its necessity) to adapt and change in the face of new evidence, the scientific consensus will reflect what the evidence actually implies, and will gravitate towards the truth over time, as more data is accrued. There will always be a propensity to seek a “natural” solution (that is, one which invokes no new entities), and a common criticism of the scientific approach is that it is biased against any presently unknown phenomena. But many new and strange things have come to be widely accepted over centuries of scientific study, and psi has simply failed to stand up to the kind of testing to which theories like Newtonian mechanics, general relativty, and evolution by Darwinian natural selection have all been put. There comes a hypothetical point where phenomena with which we are already familiar are not enough to explain what we see, and something new has to be introduced.

And this must apply to any controversial paranormal topic as well. Nothing has been convincingly demonstrated yet, but we understand how it could be, if the claims being made are true. There must be a point in a scientific, logical investigation where, should it be reached, some kind of “supernatural” explanation would become the most likely one. What science does is to stop us jumping to that conclusion before it is wise to do so. If you have a dream about God telling you that the secret of life can be found in a squirrel’s nest in a tree in Kidderminster, you’ve probably just been eating too much cheese before bedtime. But if you see an Angel of the Lord descending through your ceiling, giving you a message apparently from God, and in the morning you’ve still got a bloody great hole in your roof, then it might start to look like you really have just been Anunciated to.

(Or, y’know, a more scientific and less flippant example. The James Randi Educational Foundation regularly collaborates in designing protocols for experiments into the paranormal, as part of their One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge. In each of these, if the pre-arranged criteria are met, it would be taken as persuasive evidence that the new paranormal phenomenon in question is genuine. Say, if a psychic can consistently predict which of a selection of cards has been drawn, with accuracy beyond what could reasonably be attributed to chance, and when all “natural” explanations have been ruled out also.)

Science and logic do not deny such a possibility out of hand; they merely set the standard for required evidence, and tell us what we should demand in the way of proof if there is to be any point in believing in any such thing. And there must always be such a standard, if we wish to take any interest at all in reality.

Where science uses logic and reason and evidence, to try and make sure that we can tell the probably true from the probably false, the supposed “alternative magisterium” of religion uses faith, which asserts a belief in the truth of something without considering the notions of logic, reason, or evidence. Faith is not an equally valid method of learning or understanding, and religion and science are not simply alternative approaches with equivalent validity. Many people claim to have had experiences which have affirmed their faith in some way, but do not examine them scientifically.

To claim that certain things should not be considered within the realms of science, and should remain a matter of faith, is to admit to a lack of interest in whether the thing you have faith in is actually true. Without conducting at least some degree of rational scientific analysis on your experiences, you are doing nothing to uncover any mistakes which may be present in your judgment. We, as humans, are always capable of making mistakes, and we must do our best to eliminate them if we have any interest in the truth. To examine claims skeptically and scientifically is the most reliable way we have in which to do this.

This must mean, then, that people’s personal experiences must be regarded as “scientific evidence” supporting whatever beliefs they may hold. This is true, to an extent, but one thing that needs also to be borne in mind is that, if these experiences are indeed personal, then nobody else can make any measurements of them, or experience them in any way except through hearing their story being recounted second-hand.

Something might happen to you which utterly convinces you of the veracity of your beliefs, but to everybody else this is a single piece of anecdotal evidence. This, on its own, is unlikely to persuade anybody, especially if the claim you’re making is wildly more improbable than the simpler explanation that you’re just plain wrong. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is entirely rational in her conviction that vampires and demons of many kinds exist – it would stretch the bounds of plausibility much further for her to consider any other explanation for what she’s experienced – but most other people, were she to tell them of the things she’s seen, would be equally rational to start backing away slowly from the crazy lady.

We’ve all seen other people being wrong before, even when they absolutely “know” something to be true. So, if the only evidence I’m given to work with is that you claim to have been granted a divine vision of God, or felt the wonderful power of the Holy Spirit, or been blessed by the presence of the Invisible Pink Unicorn, it would be simply gullible of me to believe it likely that you in fact really experienced what you thought you did. Whatever you may be convinced happened, there’s no reason your story alone should be enough to persuade anybody else.

Also, if somebody has what they consider to be a deeply enlightening and spiritual experience, this may affect them quite strongly, and become something they feel very emotional about. This often overrides more rational processes, leading people to reject alternative, “scientific” explanations. In this case, as ever, all the word “scientific” means is that we do what we can to remove possible errors in what we believe, so the explanations we eventually hold to are more likely to be correct. Everything that happens to us must be considered in this way; nothing can be considered “outside” of the scope of rational thought, because we never stop being human.

To claim that God cannot be explained by science, then, is really to say that he cannot be explained satisfactorily at all, unless one is willing to forego the process of identifying potential mistakes in one’s beliefs. If this is the case, then all that’s happened is that the decision has been made to believe in some arbitrarily chosen idea, and no steps have been taken to find out if you might be believing in something untrue. Even truly divine experiences such as a genuine visitation by God, should they happen, must also be subject to erroneous understanding and interpretation, because we’re still human. However perfect God is said to be, our organic brains are still responding to internal and external stimuli, and providing us with the experience of sensations, in the same way as ever.

Many different people, of hugely differing faiths, have often been utterly convinced that one god or another was communicating directly with them. The most strongly-held beliefs in mankind’s history have been so varied, and have so often contradicted each other, that many of them must have been utterly wrong. But they were still believed in, passionately, beyond all reason, despite being merely the products of a wonderfully complex, intricate, and fascinating human brain, with a limitless imagination.

Whatever God may or may not do to convince you of his existence, you’re still human, it’s still your fallible brain in which these fallible thought processes occur, and you could always, always, be wrong.

Knowing that this is possible should only make people more determined to explore and uncover the truth about the things they believe, and to make damn sure that if some of those things are wrong, they get weeded out and replaced by something more likely, sooner rather than later. Because you can do that, you know. If you’re right, then a scientific, logical, and rational approach, which allows for learning, doubting, and questioning, will support your case. And if you’re wrong, then you can just change your mind and be right instead. It’s win-freakin’-win, baby.

(Postscript: When I submitted this to Digg just now, I had to confirm that this article was not, in fact, a duplicate of this YouTube video of a cat on a ceiling fan. I love the internet.)