timeimmortal

Joel responded fairly quickly to my last post about him. He feels that I’ve missed the point. Interestingly, he doesn’t exactly do a great job of citing an example, preferring instead to approach it thusly:

He’s decided that I think all religions are the same.

Which is not what I said.

My point was that they are all equally crazy. Medicated or not, violent or not, oppressive or not. They are all people who hear voices from dogs. The difference in how far you must stretch believability between Scientology and Christianity is negligible.

(Actually, I think scientology is much more believable)*

I’m not sure how you can deny that.

Equally, O Reader, it could be argued that the statment above isn’t defensible either. It has not been conclusively established that belonging any Religion is a form of being “crazy.” That remains a matter of opinion (obviously not one which I, nor around 5 billion people world-wide — if not more — share).

As to the matter of stretching believeability, there’s still a gulf of difference between believing in Xenu and levels of mental proficiency, and believing in God and Jesus. With all due respect to L. Ron Hubbard, at least a few historical records (from different authors, even!) concerning Jesus’ life. Scientologist fiction might be interesting, to some, but it’s far harder to swallow and accept as factual than are the Gospels.

And the Gospels are better corroborated by external historical sources.

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves, let’s refresh our memories with what Joel said about schizophrenia:

For example, lets suppose I’m schitzophrenic. And I believe that the dog is talking to me telepathically. Would you see any real difference between me and the other schitzophrenic that believes the dog is talking to him vocally?

Now, Joel is kind of trying to have his cake and eat it too; he asserts that I am incorrect in saying that he thinks all religions are the same. And yet, what is he saying above? From here, at least, his statement would seem to be saying that in his view, there isn’t any tangible difference between the two schizophrenics; they are “the same” for all intents and purposes. Except that they aren’t, as he later assures us.

Which is it?

And as much as Joel chides me for missing his point, he has missed mine:

He thinks that, since I don’t believe in god, then thats a religion as well since, of course, it has the word ‘god’ in it.

That is similar to saying I have a significant belief that there is not a gorilla in my closet.

Now, I am not currently looking in my closet, so I suppose there MIGHT be a gorilla in there.

But I have zero reason to believe there is.

Thats one of the tragic mistakes most theists make. They believe that there’s a decision to be made. Do you believe in god or not, in short.

In my experience, it tends to be atheists who adopt the “either/or” stance; most theists I know tend to first approach things from a “both/and” perspective (for example: the dialogue between science and Religion). Now, I admit that I’m the victim of a somewhat biased sample; most of my religious friends are Catholics. And I further admit that where belief in God is concerned, it’s hard to take a “both/and” stance — if one doesn’t believe in God, one can hardly be said to believe in God, can one?

Still, in my experience, it is atheists who tend to prefer dichotomy.

To be fair, I have talked about atheism — being just one more entrant on the spectrum of beliefs — from an angle that suggests decision-making. And I do think that there is a decision to be made. But it is not whether to believe, because belief is an unavoidable part of the human condition. We are all believers, even if we aren’t all members of religions according to the dictionary definition of the word.

The question is what we believe. We may not believe in God, and we may not believe in many gods. We may not believe that the Bible, the Koran, or the Torah contain the answers we are seeking after. But we may believe that science holds those answers. We may believe in reason. We may believe in rationalism. The point is: we all worship something, whether a transcendent divinity or our own wallet and/or genitals.

That is why truly, genuinely non-believing atheism (if it exists) can only, at most, be a temporary fad in the transition between Christianity and whatever belief system follows it down the way, whether that’s the same or another form of Christianity or some sort of paganism. Humanity can’t not believe; it’s in the very fabric of our being to worship. As I’ve noted, the only question is what we will worship. Will we worship what is true, or merely a simulacrum of the truth?

And here’s the rub: we all believe in things that “the evidence” cannot explain. Joel’s atheism is no grounded in empirical realities than is my Catholicism, and I do hope that Joel can appreciate that just because something is not “seen” does not mean that it is not real; it may mean that we lack the means to see it. The point, then, is that atheism is as much a “faith” — in the sense of being a philosophical conjecture and a belief in a metaphysical reality (or, perhaps more correctly, the lack thereof) that cannot be defended from evidence. It’s not necessarily accurate to call it a religion, but neither is it wholly inaccurate to do so.

Consider:

I don’t actively think there isn’t a gorilla in my closet. It would be INSANE to think that I had to make a choice about whether or not there’s a big old beastie in my closet. The default position is for me to not believe in such a thing in such a place. Assuming that my bedroom isn’t part of the gorilla migratory pattern.

No one would say that one of my characteristics is that I believe my closet to be gorilla-free.

This is technically true. Equally, though, the fact that there is no gorilla in Joel’s closet does not mean that there are no gorillas. And the presence or absence, in Joel’s closet, of something we have the capability to detect with one or more of our five senses says nothing at all about the presence or absence of something we lack the capability to detect in the same area.

Nor, would anyone say, as a another example, that a significant trait I hold is that I don’t believe squirrels talk, or that my mother walks through walls, or that men rise from the dead.

These are, I think we can agree, aberrations from the norm. Without evidence to say that these aberrations are occuring, the default position is that they aren’t happening. But given that this is the default, the significant aspect is choosing to believe in them.

The norm is to not.

Of course, you can’t have these conversations with many theists because they believe there is evidence of god. No one has shown me any.

There is one word, I think, that applies to Joel’s beliefs here: Positivism. I’ve written about that many, many times, and see no need to re-hash prior content here. Suffice to say that if Joel’s atheism is based primarily on a lack of empirical evidence for faith, his atheism is weak indeed, and possessed of a fundamental illogic.

And as I have noted above, the fact that we don’t have evidence for a thing does not necessarily mean that the thing in question does not exist; equally, we may lack the ability to perceive or otherwise detect the thing. Certainly that was true of atoms until recently, and most stellar phenomena as well. Over time, we have developed methods of seeing those things, but other things yet remain unobserved: gravitational waves, for example, or the Higgs boson. Or, for that matter, extraterrestrial life. Perhaps, in time, we will observe these things as well. Then again, perhaps we won’t ever observe them directly.

The existence of a thing is independent of whether we have seen it. If there are aliens on some planet way out there in the depths of space, we don’t know it. But if we (and they) die out before either of us ever has the chance to meet the other, that does not mean that we both did not exist, does it?

Yes, there isn’t any hard evidence for the existence of God or Jesus — not anymore, at least, since Jesus hasn’t taken an Earthly stroll in nearly two thousand years. But then, if there were evidence, it wouldn’t be “faith,” would it?

They only thing they ever do is show examples of things we can’t explain…yet.

But they don’t like that last word.

These closing sentences of his illustrate, yet again, why Joel’s refusal to distinguish between different religions and/or denominations thereof hampers his ability to argue effectively. Methinks that he is too used to debating Evangelicals — personally, I take no issue with the word “yet” (as in, say, “Christ has not returned…yet,” perhaps?). It is, after all, just a word to describe a possible future.

Joel also seems to assume, erroneously, that a dichotomy exists between the sciences and religion, and seems to assume that given sufficient time, science will enable us to completely do away with religion. Obviously, I don’t share that viewpoint; there is no inherent contradition between religion and science, and in fact both are pathways of revelation. And as science continues to discover new and exciting things, I do not find my faith weakend — if anything, it is strenghtened as I become better able to comprehend the magnificence of the works that God has wrought.

We cannot know everything about how God works in the Universe, but it does serve to note that there is nothing to say that God, having built the Universe in a certain way, cannot effect his plans for the Universe and those living in it via the natural processes that are at work within creation. There is nothing to say that God didn’t forge humanity out of successive generations of progressively more complex lifeforms. Nor is there anything that says that God, having devised gravity, could not have used gravity to fabricate the stars and planets that now pepper the cosmos.

Atheists seem to expect that everything about God necessarily has to involve whiz-bangs and lightshows. It isn’t necessarily always so.

* perhaps this statement tells us all we need to know?

That is, perhaps humanity is a rarity in the galaxy (and perhaps even the Universe), and perhaps extraterrestrial life is something we will never find — especially not intelligent extraterrestrial life.

Professor Andrew Watson has published his findings ["that humans evolved via a series of four "critical steps" and that the likelihood of all these occurring elsewhere is less than 0.01%."] in the academic journal Astrobiology.

“Complex life may be a rare phenomenon, observers rarer still,” he wrote.

We may have to discover tens of thousands of Earth-like planets before we find one which harbours sophisticated organisms, according to Professor Andrew Watson, from the University of East Anglia.

The reason is that the “habitable lifespan” of an Earth-like planet — estimated at five billion years — will rarely be long enough for complex life to evolve.

“We now believe that we evolved late in the Earth’s habitable period, and this suggests that our evolution is rather unlikely. In fact, the timing of events is consistent with it being very rare indeed,” he says.

“This has implications for our understanding of the likelihood of complex life and intelligence arising on any given planet.”

I never really understood the incredible tendency of some people to automatically assume that extraterrestrial life must exist; frankly, there is nothing to suggest that it does. Life is an amazingly complex thing, and I for one cannot believe that it arose wholly by chance — and if there was any intent behind its arising, then it is perfectly reasonable to believe that life on Earth may be unique in all of creation.

Equally, it might not be — after all, an artist may desire to compose many paintings. But if it’s out there, I very much doubt we’ll ever encounter it, especially when the odds of it being there are so astronomically low.

TheSpaceAdmiral writes in with a question about this article.

What exactly did you find misleading in the CanWest article about HD 189733b? Do you really think they jumped to any conclusions about life on other worlds?

The article implied that life on HD 189733b is unlikely (”a world too hot for conditions favourable for life as we understand it”) and was very clear that it’s the process, not the discovery of methane itself, that is the major milestone (”But the ability of scientists to analyze its atmosphere and detect carbon-based molecules is a crucial feat in efforts to find planets that may harbour extraterrestrial life”). In no way does the article imply that it’s at all likely HD 189733b harbours life. The lead-in (”Astronomers have found organic chemicals on a planet outside our Solar System, a milestone in the hunt for extraterrestrial life”) is vague, but not incorrect or misleading, since it’s quickly clarified.

I think what I found to be potentially misleading was the title of the article relative to its content. “Clues found to alien life” really isn’t an accurate headline for an article that talks about the discovery of methane in the atmosphere of a faraway planet, especially since methane can be created by non-organic processes. I’d be skeptical of taking the presence of methane, especially in an environment such as the atmosphere of HD 189733 b, as any sort of indicator on the road to discovering extraterrestrial life.

It just seems that every time there’s any kind of discovery made about another planet, the writer reporting on the discovery jumps very quickly into the discussion of the possibility of alien life, even when it doesn’t seem particularly justified, by the actual nature of the discovery, to be doing so.

I realize that article writers and stringers don’t necessarily have control over the headline of the article they submit. But that’s also why I kind of find the article misleading — whoever wrote that headline gives the impression, I think, that something actually living might almost have been discovered, or that a necessary precursor for life (some kind of amino) might have been stumbled over. Finding out that it was just methane was, I daresay, something of a let down.

This Edmonton Journal piece is a bit misleading.

Astronomers have found organic chemicals on a planet outside our Solar System, a milestone in the hunt for extraterrestrial life. Researchers also identified water in the atmosphere of the so-called alien planet, a world too hot for conditions favourable for life as we understand it.

But the ability of scientists to analyze its atmosphere and detect carbon-based molecules is a crucial feat in efforts to find planets that may harbour extraterrestrial life. Reported today in the journal Nature, the feat makes the alien planet possibly the best understood of the 270 detected so far. It is named HD 189733b and was discovered in 2005 in the constellation Vulpecula, a realm 63 light years from Earth.

The organic chemical in question is methane. The presence of an organic hydrocarbon in a planet’s atmosphere, while interesting, is hardly an indicator of the probability of finding alien life, either on HD 189733 b or on any other planet yet discovered — especially since methane can be created by non-organic sources (and the planet’s atmosphere does have a lot of water vapour in it; if it also had a high carbon concentration, this would probably provide sufficient pre-conditions for methane formation). And at any rate, the planet itself is not exactly hospitable — its atmospheric temperature is on the order of 700 degrees C.

Maybe there is alien life out there somewhere, or maybe there isn’t. All we know right now is that we don’t know of any other life besides that which has emerged on Earth; for all intents and purposes, we are alone. I can understand the excitement that accompanies every discovery made about other planets in the galaxy…I just wish people would exercise a little restraint, and take a little time to think, before jumping to a not particularly likely conclusion about life on other worlds.