mister gone dot com slash blog

No, it doesn’t. End of post!

…okay, not really. So, to keep up with this blog, I obviously need some subjects. “Hey, Chuck,” I say to myself. “Why don’t you write lengthy responses based on actual responses to things you have to comment on all the time?” Good idea, right?

Context is unnecessary – someone who believes in a “supernaturally ordered universe” will always throw out this gem. “Everything happens for a reason.” It is a sentence that sums up everything and means nothing all at once! By “supernaturally ordered universe,” I mean people who believe in an intervening deity, people who believe in cosmic justice and anyone else who might think there are no such thing as random occurrences. “Everything happens for a reason” is a general rebuttal to any claim that the universe is unfair or that God’s hand is easily blamed for tragedies as it is given credit for “miracles.”

But the sentence says nothing. Firstly, of course everything happens for a reason. That is how physics works. We don’t understand it all, but electrons orbit, atoms fly around, molecules are formed, forces act on matter and things happen. At this level, the sentence is meaningless – the physical reasons things happen don’t help us determine if there was intent behind them.

In the second sense – that everything happens as a means to an ends, and that those ends are determined by an external force or entity – “Everything happens for a reason” implies there is a greater purpose to seemingly random events. It also implies that bad things are intended, even if they happen to innocent beings for no apparent reason.

Let’s assume this is true and evaluate a tragedy for potential long-term value. For instance, a baby is born anencephalic – the forebrain doesn’t develop, the remaining brain is exposed and even if the baby survives birth, they will die within hours. The overseer of the universe, be it God or Cosmic Justice, has decided this will happen, and we are to believe there’s a good reason for that decision. The apologist might say, “This was a lesson to teach us that life is precious.”

Certainly, the spin might be a relief – learning should be a positive experience, and life is precious. However, the only reason life is precious is because it’s limited and fragile. If there’s a cosmic plan, that fragility is part of the plan! Imagine yourself at a birthday party where the host says, “You better appreciate this cake, because if you don’t, I will take the cake away from someone else before I even give it to them.” Would you find this host to be moral and just?

Of course not! And you would be justified – your host’s sense of morality makes no sense. If he tells you the cake rule is all a part of a greater plan to make people appreciate cake, you would say, “It doesn’t matter. The means don’t justify the ends. You can’t make people appreciate cake by randomly taking away other people’s cake. It’s wrong.”

And neither can any God make anyone appreciate life by having babies die randomly. The ends do not justify the means.

If everything happens for a reason, but the event that happens is morally incongruent with moral law, then the being who caused the event is immoral. If “Killing is wrong” is our maxim, and God kills, then God is wrong.

But what if God’s morality is beyond ours? I’ve mentioned this before, and it deserves its own post, but if God’s morality is distinct from ours, then there is no true morality. From a practical perspective, this is not only hypocritical, but it’s also shortsighted to preach one morality and practice another and expect that no one will notice or care. From a metaphysical perspective, there is no clear reason why God’s morality wouldn’t be superior to ours, and if it is superior, then it is logical that we should be following the superior morality. Thus, a person could commit atrocities and say, “Well, this is all part of a bigger plan, and the ends justify any means.”

And the God of the Bible, at least, does atrocities better than anyone.

Sure, a believer can say there’s a complex set of rules that differ depending on whether you’re God or not, but then they are left saying God created a world wherein the morality would not be his own, but rather an arbitrary morality – a special set of exhibition rules that humans need to follow for no particular reason other than “I said so.” If God can murder and be moral, he could have very easily created MurderEarth, where it was moral to murder people. This idea exposes the obvious – murder is not a moral act, not even if God says so.

“Everything happens for a reason” – it might make a believer feel better. However, it is either meaningless in so far as it is always true, or it exposes the immorality of God as a Cosmic Tragedy Processor.

And I didn’t even get into the possible systems by which God decides who needs the lessons that tragedy teaches – that’s a whole new moral quandary for believers… so maybe I’ll cover it later.

Mr. Daily Show,

In general, I love you guys and think you are insightful regarding many of today’s issues.

However, the Marilynne Robinson interview revealed both her ignorance and, sadly, yours. (I don’t want to blame Jon Stewart only, as I suspect there are other culprits!)

Ms. Robinson imagines a conflict between science and religion and then imagines that imaginary conflict shouldn’t exist.

I could write seven essays on the problems with the ideas expressed in this interview, but uh… I’ve got stuff to do. And so do you. So here’s seven sentences:

1.) Science never relies on faith (where “faith” is the belief in a fact despite the absence of evidence that can be generated in repeatable controlled experiments).

2.) When science proposes something like, “Dark Matter (not anti-matter, buddy) makes up most of the universe, but we don’t know what it is and we can’t detect it,” it’s not stating that as a fact or a belief.

3.) Rather, science relies on proposing possible explanations for phenomena, then proposing tests to prove or disprove those phenomena, while never claiming proof of things that can not be proven (like the existence or non-existence of God).

4.) Religion relies on mythological and untestable explanations for phenomena, and is increasingly met with scientific facts that eliminate what is mythological and shrink what is untestable.

5.) Science is ambivalent to religion because science is ambivalent to anything that isn’t an observable, measurable, repeatable natural fact.

6.) Religion must struggle with science because it constantly expands our knowledge into crevices of thought that displace long-held and comforting beliefs – like the observation of evolution displaces creationism, and continued study of abnormal psychology ousts evil spirits, or an understanding of cognitive processes casts doubts on the soul.

7.) Ultimately, religion must learn to evolve if it’s going to survive; it must adapt itself into a cultural spine for helping guide those who are lost and advise those who are facing ethical dilemmas (which it always claims are its goals), but it must abandon the threats, the myths and the nonsense.

Yeah, the semi-colon was a bit of cheating.

Love,

Chuck

The tale of Adam and Eve is interesting for a lot of reasons. If you’re the kind of person who thinks that mythology has an insight into psychology (and I am!) then the depth of the story easily doubles or triples.

The story also forms the foundation of a certain justification of human suffering. After all, Eve and Adam eat the apple, in that order, and then God is all, like, “Hey! Now you have to toil in the fields and suffer through childbirth and crap. And ye shall surely die.”

Of course, conceptually, it’s all ridiculous. An all-powerful being creates three beings – a man, a woman and a serpent – knowing each of them as intimately as he knows himself, knowing their natures and knowing their wants and desires. Then he sets up a paradise, but with a caveat. If he were to call this a “test” then that would be a ridiculous notion. He’s all-powerful, and he created the beings. He should know the outcome.

Now, to draw a fun analogy, let’s say I make a ball of wax. I know the nature of the ball, I know how it will behave because I understand physics, and I try to make the best ball of wax I can. Then I decide to create the perfect conditions to test the ball of wax – I make a ramp and try to roll the ball down the ramp. Now, what I want is for the ball to roll straight down to the end of the ramp. Let’s say the ball isn’t perfect – it’s a bit off, and it rolls off the side of the ramp.

As the ball’s creator, I am responsible for it rolling off the side of the ramp. Now, in anger, I might throw the ball of wax against the wall, but punishing the ball of wax is ultimately futile. What I ought to do is remold the wax to make it more spherical, make sure the ramp is straight and test it again once I’ve made it better. Apparently, making a better ball of wax is not in God’s plan.

But what’s worse, to me, the analogy is better stated as God making a ball of wax, putting it in a gutter and being angry when it rolls down the gutter. The story supposes the all-powerful being created curious beings, put them in a garden with a blabbermouth snake, and then got angry when nature took its course.

What’s more interesting to me is that we’d consider that sort of thing completely unethical in our society. A police officer cannot entice you to commit a crime. It’s called entrapment, and it’s cause for a dismissal of charges against the entrapped offender. In the garden, God is responsible not only for putting curious humans in abutment to a talking snake (with legs, at the time), he doesn’t get involved when the snake talks to them. As Ricky Gervais points out in one of his stand-up routines, he could have just told the snake to shut up, or told Adam and Eve that the snake was a liar. But he didn’t.

The story is obviously not sensible at all, which is why it’s mythology and not a true story of how humans came to exist. Moreover, it’s mythology that speaks to a certain psychological belief – that humans are to blame for their own suffering. It is just one more story in a long line of psychological delusions that allow us to continue to believe we live in a fair and just world. We cannot stand the idea that life just isn’t fair, so we invent tales that show us that we are to blame for its unfairness, not to mention that we embrace political ideals that insinuate that the poor are lazy and the disabled are faking it. They must be, because the universe is totally fair to everyone.

The unfairness of any existent god to the people he is supposed to have created is an enormous flaw in any theist claim. But what’s worse, any belief in a Hell or any form of eternal punishment is a belief that the all-knowing creator of the universe created a perfect ball of wax and was pissed off when it rolled away from him.

Oh Em Gee, where have I been? Just busy with other things.

I just wanted to mention that today is Boobquake. What started as a joke has turned into a national phenomenon, which is great when it’s funny. Basically, an imam somewhere says that immodest dress causes earthquakes, so a young woman has proposed this be tested by a day of immodest dress. It is a great idea.

The psychology of belief is pretty astounding, and the depths to which a believer will go to connect their personal wishes to their metaphysical beliefs always surprises me. But I have lived a life of scientific thinking, so I have a lot of problems relating to magical thinking (outside of sports superstitions).

My big question is… if Adam and Eve were naked in the Garden, and that was the way God made them… why is he pro-modesty these days? I am pretty familiar with the Bible, but I’m way too lazy to go look up where the worm turned on the fashion issue.