The Flying Saucers
There's very little that I can say with certainty.
This came about very recently in my life, and at first, I thought it was a problem. You lose self-assuredness, and you begin to believe that your brain is somehow in decline. You used to know everything, and then, all of a sudden, it feels like you know nothing. You second guess every thought that crosses your mind.
This is what comes with being wrong just one time too many. Especially when it counts.
In this post, I am going to discuss a topic that I so often choose to write about: religion. I'd like to say that this is an impartial take on the subject matter, but that's never the way things are. What I can offer is that I won't make the mistake that many people seem to. Thus far, I've found the arguments for Christianity put forth by Christians to be extremely unconvincing. They appear to base their belief in the ideology on a logical flaw, the oldest error of syllogism. It goes something like this:
It's possible that X is true.
I want X to be true.
Therefore, X is true.
In this case, "X" can be swapped out with "the Christian religion"
Unfortunately, I find that atheists or those otherwise opposed to Christianity tend to make the exact same logical error, but their own desire is in the other direction. It's how humans operate: we start with what we want to believe, and then let confirmation bias filter out the evidence that would help make a case against what we want to believe.
I have been on both sides of this: I have wanted it to be true, and I have wanted it to not be true. I wish I could promise you that I was devoid of a desire in either direction, but I know better than to be certain of this either way. No, I cannot promise to you that I will be impartial. No one is. I can only aim to be honest.
Richard Feynman was a physicist in the 20th century, who won a Nobel Prize for his contributions to subatomic physics. He was also one of the most brilliant educators of those that would succeed him in the field. Like most popular scientists in the public eye, he had a lot to say about epistemology. In a scientific age, how is it that so many people believe in things for which there's no evidence, or are demonstrably false?
By his own account, one thing he was asked about quite frequently when he was interacting with people out in public was UFOs. People see lights in the sky, they can't make sense of what they are, and so stories about visitors in spaceships from other worlds proliferate among the public consciousness, until a whole subculture of people believe in these stories, invent their own, and the whole thing becomes bigger than any one individual who believes them.
On flying saucers, Feynman had this to say in one of his lectures, aptly titled "The Unscientific Age":
"It is very unlikely that flying saucers would arrive here, in this particular era...Just when we're getting scientific enough to appreciate the possibility of traveling from one place to another, here come the flying saucers."
Human beings are a species that descended from a common ancestor that we share with chimpanzees and bonobos. This happened around 6 and a half million years ago, give or take a few hundred thousand years. I'd like to ignore almost all of that and skip ahead quite a ways. Based on genetic evidence, it would seem that all human beings alive on the planet today descended from a small band of hunter-gatherers that lived in Africa around 50,000 years ago, and who subsequently spread out to cover the rest of the globe.
In this time period, as bands of humans separated from one another, kept apart by great distances, cultures started to diverge. Different languages evolved. The physical characteristics of these different bands of humans changed so drastically that we can plainly see the differences in race around the world today.
From the perspective of civilization, human beings don't change a whole lot during this time period, until relatively recently. The modern world is born in Mesopotamia, an ancient city which was located in present-day Iraq. We don't know much about the city prior to 5,000 years ago, around the time that writing was invented, and ideas could be passed through time down to us. This is the dawn of the Bronze Age.
It is around this time that Abraham, the Jewish patriarch, is supposed to have left this area of the country to go and settle in Canaan, a land that God has promised to him. This God is named "El Shaddai", or "god of the mountain". (Depending on how you translate the Hebrew, it could also mean "god of the breasts", which leads some anachronistic modern thinkers to insist that this God of the Hebrew bible was actually a woman. I offer no comment on this point.) This name doesn't sound terribly omnipotent. Indeed, Abraham is visited by this God in the form of a human being, accompanied by two other men, who are supposedly angels. They eat a meal together that Abraham's wife makes for them. This is a far cry from the God thundering sentences from the clouds at Jesus' baptism.
This is not the start of religion in the world; at this time, there are religious beliefs all over the ancient world. As one example, the Egyptians worship Ra, Amun, and Isis, among many other gods. Whenever we dig up an archeological site of prehistoric humans, we find evidence that suggests they practiced some kind of religion. But back to the inception of our Jewish lore: in that part of the world, where Hashem reveals himself to the earliest of the patriarchs, there are almost certainly other Gods around, worshipped by neighboring communities. Polytheism is the norm. To this charge, a simple case can be made by examining the First Commandment, the first law later given by Hashem to the Jewish people via Moses:
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me."
What's interesting about this statement is that it's not exactly monothestic. In our day and age, people interpret this to mean that we should not make gods out of earthly things, but that's not at all what it states. Read it again. What, exactly, does this wording presuppose? It does not say, "I am the only God and so you can only worship me."
And so it begins. The God of the Judeo-Christian tradition enters human history by banding together with a small tribe of humans in an area of the present-day Middle East. Sometimes he kills a bunch of their enemies for them. Sometimes he kills a bunch of them. Why? We can never say. His ways are not our ways.
The question I inevitably come to is, what about the other 45,000 years leading up to this time period? (To say nothing of the 6+ million years prior.)
Human beings come to a point where their communities become large cities, where massive populations of people live. With this comes the need to establish moral codes, rules that tell people how they should treat each other, so that people can deal with the multitude of strangers among whom they are living without there being complete chaos.
Here the zeitgeist explanation lends itself to our chronology. Right around time human beings invent writing, this is precisely the point in history at which the Judeo-Christian God, a God who is known to us primarily through the writings that have been passed down to the present via the Good Book, decides to enter into human affairs to give us some rules about how to behave. It's the flying saucers again.
There is a movie from the late '90's that I'm quite fond of call The Truman Show. This is about a man (named Truman) whose entire life has been lived in one large television studio, and his every action has been televised to viewers around the world. This is unknown to him for the first 30 years of his life. The film begins with him starting to sense something amiss in his world, something off about the way his reality seems. He mentions this to a friend of his (a hired actor, like all of the other people in his life), who plays off the idea as being ridiculous. "It's an awful lot of world for one man, Truman," he muses, intent on distracting our hero from further questions.
Of course, in the film, Truman happens to be right about the nature of his reality. And this resonates with people watching the movie because this is precisely how we regard the lives we are living in our own grand realities. Despite being full of other people, everything that happens in this world seems completely and totally centered around us. To our own skewed perception, we have been the focal point of every event that has ever happened to us.
It seems unlikely that our entire world, let alone our entire universe, is a construction that was designed in order to test the morality or ethical behavior of one tiny subset of primates living within it. Or that if something created us, that it should look like us. Or that, if human beings are being tested, that we are being tested based on a characteristic that we alone in the animal kingdom seem to possess. It's an awful lot of universe for one species.
It is immensely strange to me that some Christians believe they need to spread their religion throughout the entire world. The Bible tells the story of the Tower of Babel very early on: human beings are collaborating with each other to build a structure that reaches up to heaven. God himself is so threatened by this that he scatters the one human language into several languages and redistributes these new factions of people around the world, so they cannot communicate with one another and conspire together. Not too many chapters later, this same God approaches one of these peoples, with one language, and decides he's on their side, and against all of the other human beings he created. Later he decides that all nations should be converted to worship him. If he wanted all human beings to know of him and worship him, why scatter the languages? We know that all human beings on earth came from that tribe in Africa some 50,000 years ago. Why didn't he insert himself at this bottleneck?
We live in a very peaceful and prosperous time; it's considerably better than the several centuries and millenia that preceded it. Christians love to point to this wonderful age we live in as having stemmed from the Christian religion in some way. But Christianity existed in the world for some 1700 years after Jesus died before the tide started to turn and we ended up in this wonderful era. So it makes little sense to assign a cause-effect relationship between the religion and our present prosperity.
Those opposed to Christianity are quite fond of pointing out things like the Crusades, the Inquisition, the wars following the Protestant Reformation, and so on. There is no shortage of atrocities that have been committed in the name of religion. But these kind of atrocities were present in the world long before Jesus came. The only thing Jesus did was cause people to cluster in groups around him, instead of something else. It makes equally little sense to assign a cause-effect relationship between the religion and the horrors that human beings are capable of.
Many years ago, I saw Bill Maher's movie about Christianity, Religulous. There's a scene in the film where he draws parallels between the stories of the Egyptian god Horus and Jesus. Both were born to virgins, both had 12 followers, both walked on water, and so on. The insinuation, which is made by many modern-day mystics, is that Jesus was made up in order give creedence to some new religion. The problem is that most of the claims Maher makes about Horus aren't seem present in the sources about ancient Egyptian religion. This seems so often the case with atheist arguments: they'll exaggerate claims or enhance ideas with falsehoods in order to make their point. This doesn't prove that religion is false so much as it demonstrates that human beings have a tremendous propensity for stretching the truth when it comes to making a case for their religious claims. And if the atheists exhibit this behavior, then so too must have the early founders of any religion, including the earliest Christians. This kind of atheist rhetoric is making a case against the veracity of Christianity, but in an indirect way, and not in the way that they mean to.
Granted, none of what a religion like Christianity claims is impossible. Religious believers seem keen to point out that non-believers simply cannot prove that God does not exist. (They fail to acknowledge, or perhaps even recognize, that this logic cuts both ways.) Since it's not impossible, they reason, then they opportunistically jam a crowbar into the infinitesimally slim gap of possibility, and pry it open from possible to probable to almost certain. Feynman said that this came up in conversations about the UFOs; when he dampened their enthusiasm by saying that UFOs almost certainly weren't signs of exterrestrial life paying us a visit, people would retort by asking, "Well, isn't it possible?"
Of course it's possible, Feynman would concede. The question is never whether or not something is possible, but what is really going on. When you can't know for sure, the most probable explanation, based on reason, is the explanation you should be satisfied with. Is it more likely that many miracles have occurred throughout human history due to divine intervention from a metaphysical higher being, or that humans have simply made up these stories? I have never witnessed a miracle, but almost everyone I know has lied about something at multiple times throughout their lives. And between UFOs, cryptozoology, and 9/11 conspiracy theories, there are millions of people who collectively believe odd theories for which there is no direct evidence.
So I'm remiss to accept Christianity, or any major religion, as literal, inerrant truth. Can I express all of these doubts with any certainty?
I'm not sure.
This came about very recently in my life, and at first, I thought it was a problem. You lose self-assuredness, and you begin to believe that your brain is somehow in decline. You used to know everything, and then, all of a sudden, it feels like you know nothing. You second guess every thought that crosses your mind.
This is what comes with being wrong just one time too many. Especially when it counts.
In this post, I am going to discuss a topic that I so often choose to write about: religion. I'd like to say that this is an impartial take on the subject matter, but that's never the way things are. What I can offer is that I won't make the mistake that many people seem to. Thus far, I've found the arguments for Christianity put forth by Christians to be extremely unconvincing. They appear to base their belief in the ideology on a logical flaw, the oldest error of syllogism. It goes something like this:
It's possible that X is true.
I want X to be true.
Therefore, X is true.
In this case, "X" can be swapped out with "the Christian religion"
Unfortunately, I find that atheists or those otherwise opposed to Christianity tend to make the exact same logical error, but their own desire is in the other direction. It's how humans operate: we start with what we want to believe, and then let confirmation bias filter out the evidence that would help make a case against what we want to believe.
I have been on both sides of this: I have wanted it to be true, and I have wanted it to not be true. I wish I could promise you that I was devoid of a desire in either direction, but I know better than to be certain of this either way. No, I cannot promise to you that I will be impartial. No one is. I can only aim to be honest.
Richard Feynman was a physicist in the 20th century, who won a Nobel Prize for his contributions to subatomic physics. He was also one of the most brilliant educators of those that would succeed him in the field. Like most popular scientists in the public eye, he had a lot to say about epistemology. In a scientific age, how is it that so many people believe in things for which there's no evidence, or are demonstrably false?
By his own account, one thing he was asked about quite frequently when he was interacting with people out in public was UFOs. People see lights in the sky, they can't make sense of what they are, and so stories about visitors in spaceships from other worlds proliferate among the public consciousness, until a whole subculture of people believe in these stories, invent their own, and the whole thing becomes bigger than any one individual who believes them.
On flying saucers, Feynman had this to say in one of his lectures, aptly titled "The Unscientific Age":
"It is very unlikely that flying saucers would arrive here, in this particular era...Just when we're getting scientific enough to appreciate the possibility of traveling from one place to another, here come the flying saucers."
Human beings are a species that descended from a common ancestor that we share with chimpanzees and bonobos. This happened around 6 and a half million years ago, give or take a few hundred thousand years. I'd like to ignore almost all of that and skip ahead quite a ways. Based on genetic evidence, it would seem that all human beings alive on the planet today descended from a small band of hunter-gatherers that lived in Africa around 50,000 years ago, and who subsequently spread out to cover the rest of the globe.
In this time period, as bands of humans separated from one another, kept apart by great distances, cultures started to diverge. Different languages evolved. The physical characteristics of these different bands of humans changed so drastically that we can plainly see the differences in race around the world today.
From the perspective of civilization, human beings don't change a whole lot during this time period, until relatively recently. The modern world is born in Mesopotamia, an ancient city which was located in present-day Iraq. We don't know much about the city prior to 5,000 years ago, around the time that writing was invented, and ideas could be passed through time down to us. This is the dawn of the Bronze Age.
It is around this time that Abraham, the Jewish patriarch, is supposed to have left this area of the country to go and settle in Canaan, a land that God has promised to him. This God is named "El Shaddai", or "god of the mountain". (Depending on how you translate the Hebrew, it could also mean "god of the breasts", which leads some anachronistic modern thinkers to insist that this God of the Hebrew bible was actually a woman. I offer no comment on this point.) This name doesn't sound terribly omnipotent. Indeed, Abraham is visited by this God in the form of a human being, accompanied by two other men, who are supposedly angels. They eat a meal together that Abraham's wife makes for them. This is a far cry from the God thundering sentences from the clouds at Jesus' baptism.
This is not the start of religion in the world; at this time, there are religious beliefs all over the ancient world. As one example, the Egyptians worship Ra, Amun, and Isis, among many other gods. Whenever we dig up an archeological site of prehistoric humans, we find evidence that suggests they practiced some kind of religion. But back to the inception of our Jewish lore: in that part of the world, where Hashem reveals himself to the earliest of the patriarchs, there are almost certainly other Gods around, worshipped by neighboring communities. Polytheism is the norm. To this charge, a simple case can be made by examining the First Commandment, the first law later given by Hashem to the Jewish people via Moses:
"Thou shalt have no other gods before me."
What's interesting about this statement is that it's not exactly monothestic. In our day and age, people interpret this to mean that we should not make gods out of earthly things, but that's not at all what it states. Read it again. What, exactly, does this wording presuppose? It does not say, "I am the only God and so you can only worship me."
And so it begins. The God of the Judeo-Christian tradition enters human history by banding together with a small tribe of humans in an area of the present-day Middle East. Sometimes he kills a bunch of their enemies for them. Sometimes he kills a bunch of them. Why? We can never say. His ways are not our ways.
The question I inevitably come to is, what about the other 45,000 years leading up to this time period? (To say nothing of the 6+ million years prior.)
Human beings come to a point where their communities become large cities, where massive populations of people live. With this comes the need to establish moral codes, rules that tell people how they should treat each other, so that people can deal with the multitude of strangers among whom they are living without there being complete chaos.
Here the zeitgeist explanation lends itself to our chronology. Right around time human beings invent writing, this is precisely the point in history at which the Judeo-Christian God, a God who is known to us primarily through the writings that have been passed down to the present via the Good Book, decides to enter into human affairs to give us some rules about how to behave. It's the flying saucers again.
There is a movie from the late '90's that I'm quite fond of call The Truman Show. This is about a man (named Truman) whose entire life has been lived in one large television studio, and his every action has been televised to viewers around the world. This is unknown to him for the first 30 years of his life. The film begins with him starting to sense something amiss in his world, something off about the way his reality seems. He mentions this to a friend of his (a hired actor, like all of the other people in his life), who plays off the idea as being ridiculous. "It's an awful lot of world for one man, Truman," he muses, intent on distracting our hero from further questions.
Of course, in the film, Truman happens to be right about the nature of his reality. And this resonates with people watching the movie because this is precisely how we regard the lives we are living in our own grand realities. Despite being full of other people, everything that happens in this world seems completely and totally centered around us. To our own skewed perception, we have been the focal point of every event that has ever happened to us.
It seems unlikely that our entire world, let alone our entire universe, is a construction that was designed in order to test the morality or ethical behavior of one tiny subset of primates living within it. Or that if something created us, that it should look like us. Or that, if human beings are being tested, that we are being tested based on a characteristic that we alone in the animal kingdom seem to possess. It's an awful lot of universe for one species.
It is immensely strange to me that some Christians believe they need to spread their religion throughout the entire world. The Bible tells the story of the Tower of Babel very early on: human beings are collaborating with each other to build a structure that reaches up to heaven. God himself is so threatened by this that he scatters the one human language into several languages and redistributes these new factions of people around the world, so they cannot communicate with one another and conspire together. Not too many chapters later, this same God approaches one of these peoples, with one language, and decides he's on their side, and against all of the other human beings he created. Later he decides that all nations should be converted to worship him. If he wanted all human beings to know of him and worship him, why scatter the languages? We know that all human beings on earth came from that tribe in Africa some 50,000 years ago. Why didn't he insert himself at this bottleneck?
We live in a very peaceful and prosperous time; it's considerably better than the several centuries and millenia that preceded it. Christians love to point to this wonderful age we live in as having stemmed from the Christian religion in some way. But Christianity existed in the world for some 1700 years after Jesus died before the tide started to turn and we ended up in this wonderful era. So it makes little sense to assign a cause-effect relationship between the religion and our present prosperity.
Those opposed to Christianity are quite fond of pointing out things like the Crusades, the Inquisition, the wars following the Protestant Reformation, and so on. There is no shortage of atrocities that have been committed in the name of religion. But these kind of atrocities were present in the world long before Jesus came. The only thing Jesus did was cause people to cluster in groups around him, instead of something else. It makes equally little sense to assign a cause-effect relationship between the religion and the horrors that human beings are capable of.
Many years ago, I saw Bill Maher's movie about Christianity, Religulous. There's a scene in the film where he draws parallels between the stories of the Egyptian god Horus and Jesus. Both were born to virgins, both had 12 followers, both walked on water, and so on. The insinuation, which is made by many modern-day mystics, is that Jesus was made up in order give creedence to some new religion. The problem is that most of the claims Maher makes about Horus aren't seem present in the sources about ancient Egyptian religion. This seems so often the case with atheist arguments: they'll exaggerate claims or enhance ideas with falsehoods in order to make their point. This doesn't prove that religion is false so much as it demonstrates that human beings have a tremendous propensity for stretching the truth when it comes to making a case for their religious claims. And if the atheists exhibit this behavior, then so too must have the early founders of any religion, including the earliest Christians. This kind of atheist rhetoric is making a case against the veracity of Christianity, but in an indirect way, and not in the way that they mean to.
Granted, none of what a religion like Christianity claims is impossible. Religious believers seem keen to point out that non-believers simply cannot prove that God does not exist. (They fail to acknowledge, or perhaps even recognize, that this logic cuts both ways.) Since it's not impossible, they reason, then they opportunistically jam a crowbar into the infinitesimally slim gap of possibility, and pry it open from possible to probable to almost certain. Feynman said that this came up in conversations about the UFOs; when he dampened their enthusiasm by saying that UFOs almost certainly weren't signs of exterrestrial life paying us a visit, people would retort by asking, "Well, isn't it possible?"
Of course it's possible, Feynman would concede. The question is never whether or not something is possible, but what is really going on. When you can't know for sure, the most probable explanation, based on reason, is the explanation you should be satisfied with. Is it more likely that many miracles have occurred throughout human history due to divine intervention from a metaphysical higher being, or that humans have simply made up these stories? I have never witnessed a miracle, but almost everyone I know has lied about something at multiple times throughout their lives. And between UFOs, cryptozoology, and 9/11 conspiracy theories, there are millions of people who collectively believe odd theories for which there is no direct evidence.
So I'm remiss to accept Christianity, or any major religion, as literal, inerrant truth. Can I express all of these doubts with any certainty?
I'm not sure.