Better systems

See, the thing is, religion isn’t all bad.

*FIRST PARAGRAPH CONTROVERSY KLAXON*

It’s not, though. But it’s still a long, long way from the best we can do.

The Skeptics with a K framed some ideas interestingly in a recent episode of the podcast. They were talking about the classically bullshit-ridden debate over whether religion or atheism has directly caused more historical death and suffering, and which is therefore “worse”.

The first thing to remember is that this is entirely disconnected from the question of whether God exists, or whether any religious ideas are reasonable to believe based on the available evidence.

But, even while there have certainly been religiously motivated murders numbering well into the millions, and also genocidal regimes led by atheists, I’m increasingly of the view that there’s nothing useful to be gained by trying to determine any sort of comparative body count.

As I think Mike pointed out on the show, the idea of atheism being responsible for murder seems ridiculous on its face; there’s no way to logically get from “there is no god” to “I should kill a bunch of people”, without adding a load of unrelated shit in the middle.

But then, theism doesn’t directly result in or endorse killing anyone either. There’s no more a logical way to get from “there is a god” to “I should kill a bunch of people”, without also adding a load of unrelated shit in the middle.

Unfortunately, adding a load of unrelated shit in the middle is precisely what religion tends to do. Hence “I believe in God” leads, blunderingly and meanderingly and by way of numerous distortions and corruptions, to the Crusades, the lynching of homosexuals, and all the rest.

And on the flipside, you have religious charities, and the unavoidable fact that belief in God, however mistaken, often engenders a kindness and desire to do good works in people of faith.

Atheists are always quick to point out various things when this is brought up – that historic religious institutions are in a much stronger position to provide infrastructure and funding for charitable organisation, that organised atheism hasn’t had centuries to establish a similar community that can embark on charitable projects, the name of the biggest lending community on Kiva, and so forth – all of which is quite correct. The idea we’re rushing to counter, in these cases, is the common claim that believing in God makes you a more compassionate, more generous, better person, than being an atheist. We’ve been told often enough that we all have no reason to be moral, and so that’s the bullshit we most easily react against.

But there are other things to be taken from the observed association between religion and charity. It’s not a condemnation of atheism to note that some forms of religion, as a system, are pretty good at arranging, organising, and motivating people to do good things, behave kindly and compassionately, and strive to alleviate suffering.

It’s also pretty good at helping people justify and rationalise the most grossly inhumane atrocities of which humanity is capable.

So it’s a mixed bag. Racist genocide and feeding the hungry are two things people are entirely capable of, with or without religion – but which religion often exacerbates and supports.

So, can’t we have one without the other?

It’s not that hard to conceive of a better system, which does more of the good things, and less of the bad. We could identify the parts of religion (or any other system) that are beneficial, separate out the ones that are harmful, and organise ourselves in a way that promotes and encourages charity without also helping people rationalise and justify tyranny and cruelty.

It should be possible. It doesn’t seem likely that, if you want everyone to be better at sheltering the homeless and not passing by on the other side when someone’s in need, you have no choice but to accept the corresponding tendency to lead armies against anyone else who’s basically trying to do the same thing as you but gives it a different name. We can surely have compassion without religiously inspired evil.

Atheism isn’t this system. (Though I suspect, and urge, that many people acting this way would be atheists.) Humanism might be it, or at least might be a few steps down the right path. It doesn’t need to be any more formal than that, nothing with an official hierarchy and rules and whatnot. Just a set of ideas, picked and chosen to help us do the best we can.

Skepticism and critical thinking are also positive things, and any belief systems we have in place should encourage and nurture these things. Religion often tends to be hostile to genuinely honest and open questioning of ideas – not always, but it throws up some serious roadblocks. So let’s see if we can’t do better.

The claim that religion is never any good for anything doesn’t hold up, but atheists shouldn’t feel they’re conceding anything important by abandoning it. Many people cling to their faith as a source of comfort and reassurance, in times of difficulty and pain. It does them some good, in a situation where simply removing it and replacing it with non-belief would not be better for them.

What’s important, though, is that religion is not the best we can do. Not by a long way. The comfort it provides comes only at the expense of a rational approach to the real world. It lets you feel better, but only by believing false things.

Can we improve on that? Can we come up with an approach which helps and supports and comforts people, and allows us to help and support and comfort each other, while remaining grounded in the real world, letting both compassion and rationality drive what we believe?

Christ, I hope so.

It’s unhelpful to focus too fixedly on whether “religion” or “atheism” is responsible for any of history’s great mass slaughters, because nothing’s that simple. But there are things to be learned about different approaches one can take to the world, and what kind of institutionalised behaviour these approaches tend to engender. Authoritarianism and inflexible thinking are strongly connected with cruelty and tyranny, and religion is by no means the best way we have of avoiding authoritarianism and inflexible thinking.

The demonstrable falseness of religious claims is ample reason to reject them; the regularity with which bigotry, hatred, and aggression are backed up by religious motivation should be ample to strongly compel us toward a more optimal system of organising ourselves to do good things.

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The virtuous circle of rational non-dickitude

There’s two things we need more of:

1. Rationality
2. Compassion

Those are the big two, anyway. Not a revelation in itself, but my ideas crystallise interestingly now and then. In particular, my mind keeps wandering back to a point JT Eberhard made a while ago.

The sum of the battle between reason and faith can be reduced to this: both compassion and reason can be terrible without the other.

Reason without compassion gives us nuclear bombs instead of nuclear energy.

Compassion without reason produces loving parents who watch their children die of easily curable diseases, because the parents think prayer is a better tonic than medicine.

I think maybe the reason my brain keeps prodding me to explore this some more, is that it’s been working through its own related thoughts, and has finally got somewhere with it.

The idea that compassion and rationality are, in essence, the two most vital aspects of life, and the two areas in which the most valuable world-saving work can be done, isn’t that new to me.

And I think what I want to talk about is how they aren’t just non-overlapping magisteria, but can both feed into each other. There’s a virtuous circle to fall into there, between a scientifically skeptical approach to the world, and a love for humanity, if you try.

I’m currently in the midst of reading Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. This is a well overdue development, because I’ve been reading other books and blogs about cognitive biases, which cite Kahneman’s work constantly, for years. But if his name isn’t abundantly familiar to you, this book will properly blow your mind.

Even if you’re well up on much of the skeptical literature about logical fallacies, and can spot people using straw-men or ad hominems a mile away, there’s a whole other realm of how your own thinking will mislead you. You can read about so many brilliant experiments into the way people’s intuitions and assumptions lead them awry, and ought to feel a little creeped out knowing that you are in no way immune from any of this mental blundering which you can see leading other people into palpably misguided decisions.

There’s also research showing how hard it is to admit that this stuff really does apply to you as much as anyone, and not keep seeing yourself as a special case, whose thinking really is as clear and unbiased as it feels like. But I’m starting to get sidetracked.

The point is, the more you know about the unreliable processes of human thinking, the easier it is to not hate people when their thought processes fail them in very human ways. To study and embrace rationality, you have to learn to identify and work around your own flaws; once you know a bit about what they are and how difficult they are to avoid, you’ll be more inclined to understand them in others, and realise that it’s these artefacts of human cognition which make people they way they are, not just an inherently evil countenance. You’ll also learn to examine your own anger toward others more critically, and trust it less.

And the reinforcement can work the other way, too. The more compassionately you feel toward other people, the better chance you have of taking on board new arguments, hearing and listening to alternative viewpoints, and absorbing information that might change your mind. If you stick with your natural instincts, and let your brain define anyone not already firmly in your camp as an “other” whose heretical ideas need to be defended against, then you’ll find it incredibly hard to admit, to yourself or anyone else, that you might not have been lucky enough to be perfectly correct about something the first time.

Compassion helps you avoid the cognitive fallacies and biases that come from tribalism and defensiveness. Rationality helps you see the humanity in everyone else, by recognising their proneness to cognitive error as a part of yourself.

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Blood and trolls

An observation in the wake of happenings in Boston:

I mentioned in passing yesterday that some people immediately started completely making shit up about atheists being responsible for the explosions in Boston. Literally within minutes of the news, a cabal of tragic individuals started ranting and screeching about how all unbelievers are murderers and it’s all Richard Dawkins’ fault and on and on.

It all deserves nothing more than to be ignored. There is no sensible path available to us which disregards that advice. But in the times when I’ve failed to follow it, I’ve invariably found the delusions of these people more offensive, more personally galling, more viscerally disgusting, than the notional terrorist bombings themselves.

Slightly more offensive again, is the way my iPhone’s Twitter app kept crashing while I was trying to keep up with all the news.

Obviously this is insane. I mention it only as an example of the way my hind-brain’s priorities – the ones that arise automatically and emotionally, and which I feel before I’ve had a chance to determine what I think – are unbelievably screwed up. It’s concerning to think where they might take me if I lacked the wherewithal to realise how misleading they are.

It’s all about good ol’ metacognition again, y’see. Important stuff.

Oh, and a secondary observation: give blood. Not just now, in the immediate aftermath of a highly noticeable catastrophe. Whenever you can. There is always someone very close by who needs some of your blood and will die if they don’t get it. Current medical science is such that this is, sadly, literally true – but it is also such that you can save a life just by giving up a half-hour or so of your time and claiming some free biscuits. I started doing it, in part, because they set up a donation centre every few weeks in a hall I walk past every day on my way home from work. I saw one of the ambulances parked outside one day, found out what was going on, and booked myself in for a future visit (with some prompting from a friendly local nurse). Please, find out if there’s anything like that near where you live.

So there’s your pep talk for the day, folks. Save someone’s life, and continue to not feed the trolls.

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About thinking, about thinking

If you asked me to sum up one of the most important and influential developments in my outlook on life and way of thinking in recent years, the thing which has most changed my view on the world and on myself, and which I’d most love to see more broadly spread among everyone and its importance appreciated, in a single word…

…I’d probably ask who you are and why I should bother paying attention to your long, wordy, and arbitrarily restrained questions, before making some more tea and procrastinating some more of my novel.

But if you caught me in a sharing and succinct mood, my answer would be:

Metacognition.

Which refers, in very brief terms as I best understand it, to “thinking about thinking”; being aware of what goes on inside your own head, of the physical and emotional processes that lead you to certain beliefs and states of mind.

The ability to see one’s thoughts as the product of a cluster of organic matter, moulded into shape by billions of years of competitive evolution, working through its own programming in an often chaotic and messy way – and not as simply the way things are because that’s how you see and feel them and so that’s the way the world is – is massively underrated.

Eventually I’ll explain more what I mean, why I think this, and what it’s meant to me (though in the meantime, as is often the case, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s got it pretty well covered if you want to read some more). But one thing in particular set me on this train of thought recently.

Journalist and nice man Jon Ronson tweeted recently about a new edition of his radio show that’s going to air soon. In his words:

The first episode is about how whenever I look at my clock the time is 11.11.

Obviously it’s an exaggeration, but the ensuing surge of retweets and other Twitter discussion showed that it’s not just some personal oddity, noticing a certain time of day coming up disproportionately often in the course of your clock-watching; many other people reported a similar phenomenon, often with exactly the same time. (I’d actually heard of this before, but with 9:11.)

Why does it happen? Well, various things spring to mind. Once you start noticing when it happens to be 11:11, for instance, it’s probably hard to stop, particularly once it’s in your mind as a cultural event which dozens of people have been tweeting about. I’ve completely lost track of how many times I’ve glanced at some sort of clock today, because none of them has been memorable for more than a few moments; if one particular time had special reason to stick in my mind, then I might start to remember it as if those were the “only” times I looked at a clock.

The lines of 11:11 have an obviously pleasing flat, straight, simple symmetry to them, which make them more interesting to notice than, say, all those occasions when I’ve checked the time and it was 14:53. (That could quite plausibly have happened to me hundreds of times in my life, for all I know, and I don’t remember a single one of them.) And maybe, on a subconscious level, it’s not always accidental; if you notice the time when it’s 11:07, perhaps you’ll be flicking back there every so often over the next few minutes, to see if you can catch 11:11 in the act.

And people regularly exaggerate, misremember, and misinterpret, of course, especially when they’re trying to make sure they have a story to tell that’s at least as good as everyone else’s.

I’d gone some way down this line of reasoning, after reading Jon’s first tweet, when I thought: Wait, why am I starting to get defensive about this? I’m doing some motivated thinking here, as if I needed to defend the idea that coincidences happen without there being some sort of supernatural, paranormal force behind it all.

…When did anyone bring supernatural paranormal forces into this?

Because literally nobody had. The only thing that had happened was someone mentioning a pattern they seemed to have observed. There wasn’t even a hint of an implication that pixies or goblins must be responsible for it (and Jon has a track record for being more grounded than that). But I started reacting as if there were, in the conversation my brain started carrying on with itself.

It’s not hard to understand why I’d do that; those sorts of stories, where an ostensibly improbable occurrence is used to justify belief in something wacky, do go on all the time, and do regularly annoy me. This wasn’t one of those times, but the cached thoughts welled up in my mind anyway, and if I hadn’t been attentive to it, I could’ve started arguing vehemently and digging my heels in to defend a position that wasn’t remotely under attack.

I suppose it’s worth briefly exploring what the trivially obvious arguments against such supernatural bollocks would be – primarily, that any spiritual or divine agent devoting its efforts to influencing when Jon Ronson happens to check the time, but which is continuing to let tens of thousands of children across the world die from starvation, AIDS, and malaria, is irrelevant at best and downright malevolent at worst.

But that’s not my main point here. More interesting right now, is how quickly I began building up mental defences in response to a completely imagined attack on a belief system which I shouldn’t even really be that defensive over anyway.

This has gone on long enough for now. I’ll try to hone in on some interesting parts to this in more detail soon.

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We’re all trying to Be Reasonable

Be Reasonable continues to establish itself as one of my most looked-forward-to podcasts. It still only airs monthly, but I hope it sets the standard for some more similar content in the future.

This latest show was the first one where I was entirely unfamiliar with the fringe claim being examined. It’s about a particularly niche bit of folklore from 12th century England, and one man who’s almost entirely alone in thinking it a true tale of two extra-terrestrial human children visiting our planet. You should hear the full story.

One thing that’s fascinating to analyse, and hear the hosts attempt to unravel, is the way in which minor oddities and gaps in our knowledge are inflated and exaggerated, to make room for massive assumptions and leaps of imagination – while those same gaps and leaps are minimised, and outlandish fantasies are treated as if plausible, even necessary, conclusions from a paucity of evidence.

Here’s the kind of thing I mean: part of the mystery of the origins of these two children who turned up in Suffolk surrounds the language they spoke. It wasn’t recognised by the people in the town where they were brought, and the interviewee, Duncan Lunan, is convinced it was the language of an alien world. One mainstream hypothesis is that the children were speaking Flemish, which is possible given the circumstances, but Lunan dismisses the notion that Flemish wouldn’t have been recognisable to the people in the area at the time.

You can follow his logic, as far as it goes. He’s done his historical research, and it may well be that Flemish should have been familiar to at least some of the people who interacted with the children; it’s a curiosity, an anomaly, something odd, if it apparently wasn’t.

But to resolve this by postulating a far more improbable anomaly, such as human children living on another planet and beaming to Earth through a matter transporter which malfunctioned because of sunspots (as he later discusses), is no solution at all. It’s a perfect example of “Conclusion: Dinosaurs“, and if that’s not the formal name for the logical fallacy at play here then it should be.

I had planned to go into the faulty reasoning exhibited by the subjects of this podcast in more depth, but it’s not really necessary; the claims are so baseless that my rehashing the numerous and obvious refutations wouldn’t particularly add anything. But what’s worth noting is how easy it is to start to forget that fact, when listening to these people talk about things that interest them.

The show’s second guest was Michael Wilmore of the Flat Earth Society, a group dedicated to being about as fantastically and comprehensively wrong in a single field of study as it’s possible to be. The conversation was, on both sides, friendly, charming, informative, lucid, well informed, engaging, and educational.

Michael Wilmore and the others have conclusively demonstrated that, when it comes to examining how people arrive at beliefs so out of kilter with reality, and continue to maintain them in the face of all evidence for quite so long, “they’re crazy” is a wholly inadequate explanation.

The belief systems in question are utterly vacuous. They are based on hot air and undiluted piffle. But these are functioning human beings who’ve got there via an entirely human series of experiences and thought processes. Every bizarre rationalisation or illogical justification they need to use to prop up their tower of bullshit is something we’re all potentially capable of, and all call upon more often than we’d like to admit in the course of making it through another day.

It’s hard to always feel this way. Anyone who follows me on Twitter will know how agitated I get at people daring to have a differing opinion during a certain BBC1 Sunday morning programme. Those people are terrible at believing kooky things.

Or, it’s a format specifically tailored to encourage conflict and argument. And it’s nice to just hear people who believe completely different things, having a chat and trying to understand each other once in a while.

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Anguished howls and solid reasoning

A recent article by Mehdi Hasan about being pro-life has been widely, and rightly, criticised. Here’s one good example of that.

Rather than go over again the various problems with Hasan’s attempts to reconcile an anti-abortion stance with his “lefty” politics, I was given pause by one particular observation, about his style of engaging with opponents:

Hasan employs an undermining tactic that he uses to subtle, although powerful effect, throughout his piece. His opponents are emotional rather than logical: they are “provoked” to “howls of anguish” by Hitchens’s “solid” “reasoning”; they “fetishize” their position in opposition to pro-lifers who “talk”. He accuses pro-choicers of “smearing” him; he asks them not to “throw [his] faith in [his] face”. And yet in the same article he repeatedly “smears” them with oppositional language that positions him on the side of logic and social progressiveness, relegating pro-choicers to the illogical side of the raging ego of neoliberalism.

Part of the reason this struck me as much as it did is because I’m certain I must have done this quite a bit myself.

It’s an easy trap to fall into. It takes some deliberate thought to remember why it’s a bad idea, when you’re trying to write something evocative and convincing. It’s easy to slide into some forms of intellectual laziness when you’re focusing on trying to craft some clever sentences.

And it’s not like the terms in the scare quotes have no value whatever in discourse. Reasoning can be more or less solid; the tone of an argument can make it seem emotionally fuelled, or unreasonably angry.

But not everyone who disagrees with you is a shrill, screeching harpy. Even if they disagree with you about something really important. They might well be trying to make their point, trying to make themselves understood, standing up against what they see as their opponents’ frustrating failure to get the point, and sometimes lapsing into unfair characterisations or snark. Much like yourself.

I’m going to try to bear this in mind more in future.

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Still a humanist

Richard Dawkins has a new series going on at the moment, about Sex, Death, and the Meaning of Life. The sex and death episodes have been interesting so far. You can watch them online at that link if you’re in the UK.

It has a godless leaning to it, but it’s not all about arguing with religious claims. Instead, it’s covered some useful thinking on how to live well once you’ve done the relatively easy bit, and progressed far enough intellectually to give up on the failed God hypothesis.

One idea in particular was crystallised for me when he met with a couple whose child had died in infancy. During pregnancy, the scans had shown that the developing fetus had no kidneys. It was an uncommon, horrible medical condition. There was nothing that could be done for it, and it had absolutely no chance of survival. The standard medical advice in these situations, I gather, when it’s detected early enough, is to terminate the pregnancy.

This couple didn’t do that. They allowed the child to come to term, prayed for a miracle, and decided to make the most of what time they had with it. They got to spend about half an hour with their baby before it died, as had always been inevitable. They felt sure that this was the right thing to do, and those few minutes they had as a family were incredibly precious to them.

What this crystallised for me is that there are two things in this world which are absolutely vital.

The first thing is reality. If this couple’s decision was based on a hope that things might somehow turn out okay for this child, then it was misguided. Miracles do not happen. Infants developing with such severe problems cannot, with our current level of medical science, survive in the world. A developing embryo is different in a number of crucial ways from a fully developed human. The world is a certain way, and the extent to which our beliefs match up with the way the world is matters.

There’s no god to help make things better when babies die unfairly. None of us will ever meet our departed loved ones again in some other world.

The second thing is each other. These two people were facing a terrible situation, and they deserve powerful, continuous compassion from anyone analysing and discussing that situation and their decisions. I don’t know what it’s like to love a child the way they loved theirs. The closest I can come to that feeling is for the cat, who’s only been around a month or so. If the love people have for actual human children scales up from cats as much as some people say it does, then, well, I don’t think I understand how other people aren’t all crying all the time.

Everyone deserves all the compassion you can possibly spare for them.

The important thing – or perhaps I mean, the thing it took me longer to realise, and which I need to keep reminding myself of – is that it’s an and, not a but. Kindness and skepticism.

Not: “Yes, it’s important to feel for these people and their difficult situation, and not judge them for the decisions they’ve made, but…”

Not: “Yes, it’s important to believe things based on evidence, and not be swayed into irrationality by emotions or other cognitive biases, but…”

Humanism isn’t about but. At least, mine isn’t. Care about reality, and care about people. Both these things are vital, and there’s no reason they can’t complement each other.

Picture related:

(via Indexed)

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The Atheist Prayer Experiment – Day 25

Christians don’t want us to be rational.

That’s a slightly unfair summary of a lot of the conversation around this experiment. I’ve been told a few times that I should “remain open” to “ways in which my prayer could be answered”, for instance. Is it a rational approach that’s being encouraged here? Nothing sounds unreasonable about keeping “open” to possibilities.

And yet, “open-mindedness” is a virtue often espoused by people who really just want you to accept their claims at face value without “closed-mindedly” asking any critical questions. Sometimes they’re so wrapped up in their own world that any reaction other than immediate acceptance is seen as debate-stifling ideological closed-mindedness; sometimes, they’re just on the defensive somewhat because they’re so used to having their extraordinary claims questioned and picked apart.

QualiaSoup has a great video about the real meaning of open-mindedness. Less helpful is the perspective of someone on the Facebook group earlier today:

It’s not that I’m closed minded to the idea, it’s just that I already know what’s true.

Sigh. It’s this kind of thing that prompts me into championing belief in Thor and leprechauns, so that the people on the other side can see what it’s like.

Any good rationalist should be “open-minded”, in that we should be willing to honestly consider the worth of new ideas when they’re put to us. But you can’t dismiss us as being closed-minded when we’re unimpressed with your anecdote of someone who had cancer and then prayed and then didn’t have cancer any more (yes, these have been put forward as arguments for something-or-other in the group) – especially when we explain why it is that common coincidences are not convincing.

What some people seem to mean when they say “just be open-minded” is something akin to “go anomaly hunting and cherry-pick your evidence to support our conclusions”. If anything good happens to you over the 40-day course of this praying thing, maybe that’s God making himself known in your life!

Sure. Maybe. Maybe every time the cat over-excitedly claws my legs, that’s God punishing me for supporting gay rights and not sacrificing any goats in his honour lately. Maybe.

There’s also a lot of suggestion that something we need to ask God for – rather than simply that he provide any evidence at all that he’s actually there – is some sort of a “change in myself”. What sort of change isn’t very precisely specified, but I’ve never heard any suggested prayers that sound even remotely like “Lord, please help improve my powers of critical thinking, so that I may more rationally analyse the evidence for your glorious existence.”

If their claims about God are true, then a greater capacity to accurately assess truth claims is the only kind of change that makes sense. But I don’t think that’s the idea. I think the implicit message behind this “change in myself” idea is that the change should be “stop resisting and just go along with it already”. God, please make me more gullible so that I might believe in you.

I’m ready to assess any evidence as best I can. But I’m waiting on something pretty special before I start believing in any god. It’s ludicrous to believe something without a reason, so give me a reason.

If you disagree with that claim, you should give me all your money. Why? No reason. Just believe.

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Negative evidence

Are you a weak atheist or a strong atheist?

Most people who read this blog will have some idea what I’m talking about. And most of them, I suspect, will be one or the other. (Theists and agnostics, you can join in soon.)

To recap briefly, “weak atheism” commonly describes a position which doesn’t accept the existence of God, but doesn’t actively deny it either. A weak atheist won’t say “God does not exist”, but simply doesn’t positively believe in any such being.

“Strong atheism” you can probably surmise for yourself. There is no God, it affirms. It makes a positive statement, an active truth-claim.

I’ve written before about whether any form of atheism can really be wholly without affirmation, as weak atheism is often described. But regardless, it’s accepted by a lot of non-believers that strong atheism is somehow a step too far. We’re not obliged to be convinced by the evidence offered for God’s existence, but we don’t have ground to make truth claims ourselves. We shouldn’t say that he definitely doesn’t exist.

After all, you can’t prove a negative. If you were to claim that there’s a unicorn in your kitchen, I could safely withhold my belief until you offer some evidence. But can I ever really make the claim there is no unicorn? Especially if it turns out to be even more magical than regular unicorns, and can render itself invisible and intangible and otherwise impervious to detection?

I might say I don’t believe in such a beast. But can I ever claim to have proved that it’s not there?

Of course, this may seem a petty distinction. It doesn’t matter to most atheists if they can’t technically prove there’s no God (or unicorn). But a common stance they take is to explain why this lack of disproof doesn’t matter for their position. And I’m not sure they’re going about it quite right.

Let’s take two less contentious claims, and examine whether we need to be “weak” or “strong” in our disbelief of each one:

1. I have never worn a hat.
2. The entire Universe was created forty-five minutes ago.

You probably don’t believe either of these statements is true. But, if you had to pick, which would you say is more likely?

I’m guessing you’d go with the first. I mean, it sounds very unlikely, but it’s possible. Maybe it’s just never really come up in my life: nobody ever gave me a hat and suggested I try it on, my ears have always been good at keeping themselves warm, my family never bothered with Christmas crackers and any paper garments that might be kept inside them, that kind of thing. Or maybe I developed an aversion to hats at an early age and made a conscious decision never to let one touch my head.

It’s a bit of a stretch. And easily enough disproved by a picture of me wearing an awesome hat. But it’s less outright ridiculous than the second assertion. What possible reason could there be to suppose that the entirety of creation – all the galaxies already in motion away from each other, the light from the stars already on its way to our eyes, everybody’s memories of years past – were all summoned into existence, created wholly intact, in the last hour?

It’s obviously silly. But how do you disprove it?

There’s not much you can say to that. It’s completely implausible and not supported by a shred of evidence… but there’s nothing you can point to which actively refutes it. The best you can do is note that there’s no reason to suppose it’s true, it goes against every aspect of our understanding of how the world works, and it clearly seems to be something that’s just been made up to make some sort of point.

For the hat thing, though? There are pictures of me wearing a hat. It’s been disproved. Myth: BUSTED.

So, having seen the proof, are you now comfortable declaring it an outright falsehood that I’ve never worn a hat? You don’t have to just be agnostic any more; there’s evidence. Can that claim be rebutted, in a way which the forty-five-minute-old-Universe claim can’t?

I think you’re quite entitled to tell me: “Don’t be silly. You have worn a hat.” You’d be quite rational to base that on that picture of me wearing a hat. But can’t you be just as definite about my other claim, even without an equivalent picture which disproves it?

If you think that making an active negative claim is only acceptable where a palpable disproof exists, then this implies that “I’ve never worn a hat” is a less likely proposition than really really really really young Earth creationism. And that just seems wrong.

For one thing, the evidence you’re basing your truth-claim on might not be that conclusive. Maybe all the pictures that exist of me in hats are photoshopped. Maybe it’s not actually me in that one I linked to above, but just a top-of-the-head lookalike. Maybe there’s a grand conspiracy around it, covering up the truth of my hatless past. Can you prove there isn’t?

Of course you can’t. But despite this lack of disproof, you’re still entitled to actively deny such a situation, not just withhold acceptance. It doesn’t make you dogmatic to believe something sensible, even if you can’t produce knock-out evidence, if it’s a situation where you don’t need knock-out evidence for your claim to be almost certainly true.

It doesn’t mean you won’t be convinced by evidence. Everyone makes many statements of fact every day of their lives, without adding the words “provisionally, according to the best available evidence, but I’m prepared to change my mind if new data arises” to the end of every clause. It isn’t closed-minded to think that some things are true and others aren’t.

So go on, make a few bold claims, with certainty. Actively deny the truth of a claim you can’t disprove, but which has no supporting evidence of any note and which is vanishingly unlikely on its face.

Is there a conspiracy to make you believe I’ve ever worn a hat? No there is not.

Was the Universe only created 45 minutes ago, or less than 10,000 years ago, with every impression of being much older? No it was not.

Can Sylvia Browne communicated with deceased spirits? No she cannot.

Does homeopathy work? No it does not.

Is there a God? No there is not.

Reason is on your side.

This ended up being way longer than it needed to be. I guess that’s what re-writes are for, in principle. Oh well.

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Superskepticalihumanisticatheistplus

Even though the sound of it is… well, opinions vary.

The latest big atheisty skeptosphere type thing seems to have started with Jen McCreight (or one of her commenters). Atheism Plus. It’s for atheists who care about more than just the no-god thing. It is the internet’s new jam.

The fact is, most of the atheist community has already been concerning itself with various things beyond the falsehood of religion for some time now – but it’s not implicit in the word “atheist” itself. For many, the factors which led them to atheism are similar to those which compel them toward various kinds of social activism – but there’s nothing to say you can’t be a misanthropic anti-science crazy bastard who also doesn’t buy any of that hooey about Jesus.

Some atheists still find non-belief central to their identity, but want to be something more than simply a non-believer. Insofar as this is prompting people to rally around noble causes, embrace positive values, and find new reasons to feel energised about the possibilities of an atheistic, skeptical, compassionate, engaged worldview, I can totally get behind this.

Personally, I’ve been using the word “humanism” for years to basically describe the same thing, but it’s not a label which suits everyone. Arguably it doesn’t necessarily even imply non-belief in God, so if you want that to remain central to your identity, then it makes sense to keep looking for another label.

Mostly, this seems to be a thing driven by good intentions, aimed at nurturing more positive interactions and encouraging better social engagement among people who have something in common and choose to band together. I think a strong majority of what I’ve seen discussed around Atheism+ is coming from a good place. But I’m still nervous.

The various splits, schisms, and dichotomies among the atheist/skeptical/rationalist/humanist/etc community that already exist are largely artificial and unhelpful. You’re either with the FTBullies or against them, and such like. And I’m worried that Atheism+ might just become one more divide, another way to see people as either part of your in-group or outside of it – and for those on both sides of that dividing line to distance themselves from the others.

Its socially conscious aims are all fantastic, and are nothing new to the atheist community at large. But there’s something about defining them as a whole new movement which I’m not sure is a great idea.

And that’s even before I read this, in which it’s clear that some people are totally on board with the idea of Atheism+ being a divisive issue. That’s just fine, they say, so long as we’re keeping out only the wrong sort of people – misogynists and racists and abusers and whatnot. Just like they‘ve tried to oppress women and minorities and others in the past.

This just seems dangerously wrong to me. There can be opinions which aren’t compatible with your worldview, but once you start deciding that people are just inherently not part of your crowd, even if it’s because they believe abhorrent things, then Atheism+ becomes a potential tool for abuse.

It might be a significant improvement to say “Those inhuman scum don’t support gay marriage”, where once people said “Those inhuman scum think a black guy’s vote should count just as much as mine”… but it’s still not great.

I’d love to see what people do with Atheism+, if they’re inspired by seeing what possibilities exist for people to band together and do good things and spur each other on. I’d hate to see it turn into some sort of litmus test, a requirement that you prove your worth by joining the club, so that the tribe all agree that you belong before you’re deemed worthy of anybody’s consideration.

My darling love has also decided this isn’t for her, and said something which at first made me a bit sad:

I think that the conclusion I’m coming to is that I should give up on the idea of finding a group of “my people” where I can snuggle in and wear the nice symbol on a necklace. It’s a bit lonely not having a tribe…

But then I realised this is actually kinda how I think anyway.

People are getting on board with Atheism+, in part, because they’re disappointed that the atheist community doesn’t wholly consist of “their people”. There are enough profoundly differing views that not everyone can be part of the same tribe, and splits and rifts will naturally form. Throwing your lot in with any one particular identity always has the potential to exacerbate conflicts, which now become about tribes rather than just individuals.

I’ve been a bit more socially withdrawn than some, and had less success in getting deeply involved in the community – but perhaps as a result, I’ve found it easier not to have to pick a side. I follow various people I’m interested in, and agree or disagree with them on an individual level as best I can. This may also relate to the fact that atheism’s never been any kind of a struggle for me, or something I’ve ever suffered for and needed reassurance over; I don’t need the comfort of a tribe the way someone bravely abandoning a lifelong Christian upbringing despite their family’s anger might do.

I’ve also gotten to know what it feels like when my brain interprets Person A’s attack on Person B as a wound against my own ego to an irrational degree. I’m fairly good now at recognising that this means I’m too mentally tied in with Person B, and need to be careful about losing my objectivity.

So, I’m a bit all over the place with Atheism+. I don’t doubt it’s going to encourage people to do plenty of good. I also worry about the potentially stifling effects of setting entry requirements to being part of a conversation.

If it’s all going to be a colossal mess, let’s try and make it a good one.

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