Skepticism and Freethought as a Lifestyle

Here's the thing I always have to remind myself of: this freethinking thing, this rationalism and skepticism, it isn't a hat to put on and take off as I like. It doesn't work like that.

We see it all the time. Think of your Francis Collins types, who play the skeptical thought game as a matter of course in their jobs as scientists, but find ways to shove it aside in other matters. Atoms shall be questioned, the resurrection of Jesus shall not. I mention Collins because he has been a topic of conversation i

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n the atheist, skeptical and scientific blogospheres since his nomination for the NIH post. While his professional credentials are impeccable, his naive pronouncements on his religion are baffling when seen through the light of his day job and the mindset it demands. It's all a bit Jekyll and Hyde, really, only without the bloody murders. One moment he is Mr. Science, and the next he is Mr. Evangelical.
What's important though, I think, is that we are all Francis Collins to one extent or another. No matter how hard we try to be rational, to "freethink," to engage our skepticism in all things, we fail. And that's okay, really. We're human, it's going to happen. It's the larger process that's important. It's part of the permanent learning curve. If you ever think you have it figured it out, that you've "arrived," you really, really haven't.


I can't rag on Collins too hard, because really, I'm not much better. In my case it isn't a matter of setting aside skepticism to protect my religion -- it's setting aside skepticism to protect my bloody little illusions about myself. I've struggled, for years, with depression, anxiety. General screwed-upness. I've made bad choices, set up bad patterns of behavior. I hurt myself really, really badly in the process.

The last few years, I've been piecing it all back together, finding a way past the stupid thinking. That, let me tell you, is some hard work. Those stupid thoughts are habits, burned into your brain, and getting rid of them is a long, torturous process. It takes constant skepticism -- asking yourself questions all the time: is this right, is this true, is this real? Is this what I really want?  And sometimes, frankly, I slack off and go into a minor nosedive. I turn off the skepticism, don't question the assumptions I make about myself and my life, and usually end up the worse for wear.

I've been in one of those recently -- nothing major, nothing that will involve needless melodrama. But enough that over the weekend -- confronted with one small but frustrating problem created by it all -- I hit a minor funk, followed quickly by a flurry of thinking and planning and changing things to get back on track.

It's hard to make the skepticism a habit. Our brains just aren't designed that way, at least not completely. But it's nice to know that I've succeeded, in a small way. That I can apply it to all the areas of my life, not just to academic questions of science and social policy. Not all the time. Not completely. Not always with great success. But I'm working on it.

Thomas Paine pwns organized religion, part 1: Miracles

I've finished Part I of The Age of Reason. It's full of excellent, but it's the last chapter, Chapter XVII, that really shines. You know it's going to be good with a title like this: Of the Means Employed in All Times, And Almost Universally, To Deceive the Peoples.

Paine identifies three things that are used as means of deception: Mystery,

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Miracle, and Prophecy. Mystery he dispenses with in a prefunctory manner. Anyone who has heard George Carlin's old routines about growing up Catholic will be familiar with it -- it's a dodge, nothing else, something with which to shove uncomfortable questions away.


Miracles, though, that he spends some time on. I loved his discussion of miracles, not only because of the devastating fusillade that he levels against the notion, but because it exposes an aspect of belief in miracles I had never really considered before: the incredible arrogance it betrays.

His main attack on the idea of miracles is that the whole idea is presaged on knowing what is possible and what is not:

Mankind have conceived to themselves certain laws, by which what they call nature is supposed to act; and that a miracle is something contrary to the operation and effect of those laws. But unless we know the whole extent of those laws, and of what are commonly called the powers of nature, we are not able to judge whether any thing that may appear to us wonderful or miraculous, be within, or be beyond, or be contrary to, her natural power of acting.

Essentially, we don't know all the laws of nature, and unless we do, it is premature to declare an event as being beyond their power, not to mention a bit presumptuous. Paine goes on illustrate with example (how a man floating high in the air would've seemed "miraculous" to people, but then balloons were invented) and then moves on to the second objection, namely Art: it is possible to create the appearance of a thing. He notes a performance in Paris wherein "ghosts" were shown, not to bamboozle, but for entertainment. The effect, he says, was quite astonishing. So, you have to not only know the full extent of natural law, but you have to know how far Art can go in creating illusion, before you can make a claim that something is a miracle.

It really strikes me, mulling over his argument, the arrogance that belief in miracles entails. To claim such knowledge! To claim to know what exactly is possible and impossible, not only in nature, but in art! What amazes me, over two centuries later, is that people still make that kind of claim. Science has been sitting us on our asses again and again. At each stage we find new marvels, new things we didn't even know could exist, and we also learn about whole new realms of knowledge in which we are ignorant. And Art? Could the performers of Paine's day even dream of the kinds of illusion that are created in today's movies, or that magicians like Penn and Teller perform in Vegas?

And they call rationalists arrogant. Hah!

Coming up soon: Prophecy, and the other line of attack that Paine uses on Miracles. Or, why Paine, as a believer in God, is really a bit perturbed the very notion.

Reality's simple joys

Sometimes, working weekends really, really sucks. Friday and Saturday nights gone, or at least mostly so. Missed opportunities for socializing, having fun. Last night, for instance, I could've been at my sister's, hanging out with cool people. Instead, work, noon to 9:30pm. Gah.

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I can perhaps be forgiven if, while I was biking home, I was feeling a bit cranky and dissolute. The weather didn't help -- the whole day had been a big build up to a storm that didn't happen, the air always tingling with suppressed energy waiting to be released, and...nothing.

So, I'm biking home, and on the western horizon is a sight you can't claim to see too often -- a huge, and I mean huge, crescent Moon, burning through a wisp of cloud above the Tucson Mountains. I've always had this weird thing with the Moon -- seeing it relaxes me, awakens that sense of awe that can sometimes get pummelled down by the relentless march of the mundane in our everyday lives. The Moon is so amazing. Earth's companion, one that has shaped this world and the life on it. A big dose of beauty in our night sky. Something that 12 of us have voyaged to and stood upon.

The Moon is a constant presence in our lives, and so we are always imbuing it with meaning. From ancient mythologies to modern Moon races, it's a focus of a lot of human thought. Maybe that's why it's so comforting to me -- it's not only an amazing natural phenomena, but it makes me think of some of the important things in human life.

So I stopped, and gazed at the Moon for a while, and some of that ick feeling faded away, and I remembered my day and all the little interactions with people that were fun and sweet and nice, and it all didn't seem so bad.

Of course, I got home and into my apartment, and some of the icky angsty feeling came back. The moments of quiet sanity can be so short. But it's nice to have them. No supernatural, no Big Man in the Sky saying he loves me -- just a quiet moment with a bit of reality. It's a healing thing.

Misogyny and unreason

Girl shunned by family after alleged rape.

What's the harm, we're often asked, in this irrational belief or that irrational belief? Does a belief in God really hurt anyone? Is a person who believes in magic really dangerous? Who are they hurting?

Maybe, just maybe, the harm is illustrated by an eight year old being abandoned by her family because she was raped. Let's be clear about something here: wherever you find misogyny, you will find it based in irrational beliefs. They could be religious, or "cultural," or whatever. But they will be irrational. Certainly, any system that blames the victim of a crime for the crime will be nothing like rational.

Whatever the brand of hate -- racism, sexism, homophobia, classism -- it never has a rational basis. It is always founded in irrational beliefs that are never held up to

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the light of reason, never questioned, never tested. Every advance in human ethics has come about because of Reason -- people asking real, honest, difficult questions. Arguments that seemed sound and reasonable were, when subjected to that scrutiny, shown to be nothing more than flimsy rationalizations. Cultural beliefs about women, about gays, about different races, you name it, all shown to be absurd when simply subjected to the simple test of asking "Yeah, but is that true?"

The price for not asking questions, for not subjecting every belief we have to scrutiny, is situations like this. It doesn't even matter what the source of irrationality is in this case -- it could be religion, culture, the conditions created in that culture by decades of war. Maybe all of that. What matters is that the irrationality be fought, that it be called out for what it is. To do that, we have to question every belief, no matter how dear it is to us or someone else. Anything else is, frankly, unethical.

Music! Wild is the Wind: David Bowie

Just chillin' with ice coffee on a hot summer day before I head off to work.

A Failure of Imagination

I'm reading Thomas Paine right now, The Age of Reason, and he provides the

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perfect opportunity to talk about one of the themes that will come up here:  imagination, and the failure thereof. Here's Paine, in Chapter 10 of the Part 1:

In like manner of reasoning, everything we behold carries in itself the internal evidence that it did not make itself. Every man is an evidence to himself, that he did not make himself; neither could his father make himself, nor his grandfather, nor any of his race; neither could any tree, plant, or animal make itself; and it is the conviction arising from this evidence, that carries us on, as it were, by necessity, to the belief of a first cause eternally existing, of a nature totally different to any material existence we know of, and by the power of which all things exist; and this first cause, man calls God.

The reasoning here is familiar to everyone. I have no wish to refute it. I'm after a different fish:  how it represents a failure of imagination.

What Paine does here -- and what the whole Argument from Design does -- is a basic exercise of imagination. He takes his own experience, and extrapolates from that to reason about something he doesn't have direct experience of. We can call this the first step in imagination. It's an important one, and damn handy. Heck, it's this ability that probably makes our brains such handy blobs of cells to have on hand. We use it all the time -- in trying to understand nature, and even just to understand each other.

The usefulness of it, though, has limits. Our failure of imagination comes in how often we forget that, and settle for that first step. Whether it's Paine making an analogy about makers, or a person trying to decide why their lover is pissed at them, we often stop right there with the first, simple extrapolation from our own experience. We don't go the next step, and ask the Big Question: Yeah, but is it true? That's when imagination truly soars. It's one thing to posit that Nature, like the items we create, must have a creator -- it's another to then ask, but is that true, or could something else be true? Do our experiences fail us here?

Science has shown us, after all, that our experiences and perceptions fail us all the time. Our senses only show us part of the universe. Our brains don't wrap themselves easily around Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity. And Evolution has shown us that the appearance of design is by no means a sure sign that design, in fact, exists.

My biggest gripe with religion is just that failure of imagination:  it settles for the simple analogy, with its horizons set firmly in the boundaries of the human mind. I won't beat up on religion too hard, though, because it's a common human failing -- heck, I could write several books about the ways I've fallen into that trap. But all the incredible stuff we humans have accomplished in the past few hundred years -- all the science and technology, the social advances, you name it -- has come from that second step of the imagination, the daring to envision the possibility that there could be another answer, another possibility. The daring, at the end of the day, to imagine possibilities outside of the confines of our own heads.

Welcome!

Welcome to Expanding the Proscenium! Partly, this blog is skin hunger 2.0. Partly, it is something else. When I started skin hunger, I didn't really know what I wanted it to be. But several months of writing and thinking have done a lot to clarify things for me, and thus Expanding the Proscenium is born.

I am an atheist, but this isn't, quite, an atheist blog. It is about the deeper, more interesting, and more important, issue: Reason vs. Faith.

Carl Sagan wrote, in Pale Blue Dot, that

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Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe that utterly dwarfs — in time, in space, and in potential — the tidy anthropocentric proscenium of our ancestors. We gaze across billions of light-years of space to view the Universe shortly after the Big Bang, and plumb the fine structure of matter. We peer down into the core of our planet, and the blazing interior of our star. We read the genetic language in which is written the diverse skills and propensities of every being on Earth. We uncover hidden chapters in the record of our origins, and with some anguish better understand our nature and prospects. We invent and refine agriculture, without which almost all of us would starve to death. We create medicines and vaccines that save the lives of billions. We communicate at the speed of light, and whip around the Earth in an hour and a half. We have sent dozens of ships to more than seventy worlds, and four spacecraft to the stars. We are right to rejoice in our accomplishments, to be proud that our species has been able to see so far, and to judge our merit in part by the very science that has so deflated our pretensions.

That's what this blog is about. It is about expanding that "tidy anthropocentric proscenium." It is about Reason, and the poverty of Faith. It is about growing our imaginations to match the scale of the universe. Art, science, geeky fandom, philosophy, you name it -- it'll have a place here, as long as it challenges us to expand the proscenium of the theater of our minds.

I hope you'll join me on this journey! In the meantime, please pardon the dust. Everything will soon be up and running properly!

Stay tuned!

Coming soon! In the meantime, why not read skin hunger?