Author Archives: xamishatheist

Belief Systems: Coherency, Completeness, and Reality

18 Wednesday Apr 2012

Posted by in Epistemology, My Philosophy

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Something that you believe is obviously a belief. To be more precise, a belief is a statement about the universe that the holder believes to hold true. The sum of all the things that you believe is your “belief system”. And, once again, to be more precise, a belief system is the sum of all statements that the holder believes to be individually true.

Everybody has a belief system. Without it, we wouldn’t have any way to make sense of anything from the smallest question such as ‘why does water flow downhill’, to the biggest of questions such as ‘what is the meaning of life’.

So what defines a good belief system and how could one belief system possibly be objectively better than another? There are three qualities of a belief system that are very important; coherency, completeness, and reality. I will explain these ideas in some detail below although not in the order just given.

Reality

The individual beliefs in a belief system must comport with reality. It is possible to have a completely fantastical belief system, only if you’re unlike most people (i.e. you’re completely insane).

What I mean is that your beliefs must agree with what you see in reality. If you stub your toe really hard and you firmly believe that you did not stub your toe, then your belief does not comport with reality (and you are most likely insane).

Such a belief system is useless because it does not help you make accurate predictions about the future. Life is all about making accurate predictions. For our entire lives, the sun has risen every morning. Based on this evidence, we form the belief that the sun will always come up in the morning. Based on this belief, whether or not we think about it, we make the prediction that the sun will come up tomorrow morning.

If for some reason, the sun stops rising in the morning, then our belief that the sun will always rise in the morning, does no longer comport with reality. When that happens we are forced to discard the belief and search for a new one. Perhaps we’ll revise our belief to ‘the sun sometimes rises in the morning’. If after a long period of not even that happening, we would be forced to revise it even further, to something like, ‘the sun used to rise in the morning’.

Coherency

Coherency is about how well one’s beliefs make sense when more than one at a time are considered. A coherent belief system is a belief system in which all the individual beliefs fit together in such a way as to create a solid whole. A belief system that contains contradictory beliefs is not coherent.

For example, suppose you held the bizarre belief that all Mennonites are weird. You also hold the belief that a certain friend named Sam is a cool dude and is not at all weird. Then you find out that Sam is a Mennonite. Suddenly you realize a contradiction in your belief system. On the one hand you believe all Mennonites are weird and on the other hand you believe that one Mennonite is not weird. These two beliefs do not fit together. Taken one at a time, they might make sense, but taking both at the same time results in a logical contradiction.

An incoherent belief system is bad. If you hold contradictory beliefs in your belief system it must logically be the case that at least one of your beliefs does not comport with reality. It is false. This tends to cause confusion and cognitive dissonance – neither of which are good attributes to possess in this complex life.

Finding contradictions in one’s belief system is actually quite common for the serious thinker. That’s because we are all operating on incomplete information. None of us knows everything and no matter how strongly we believe in something, new information could pop up which totally disproves our belief. Finding a contradiction can actually be a refreshing experience because it gives you the opportunity to explore intellectually and perhaps to happen upon bigger truths.

It is a common tactic for debaters (think atheist versus Christian) to attack the coherency of the other person’s belief system in an attempt to find and display a contradiction in the opponent’s belief system.

The important thing is that you remove the contradiction. Think about the conflicting beliefs because one of them must logically be false. Are all Mennonites really weird? Is Sam really a cool and completely non-weird guy? In your investigation into the basis of your opposing beliefs you may just stumble onto something new. Perhaps not all Mennonites are weird after all!

Completeness

The last quality of a belief system is “completeness”. This idea is related to how big your belief system is. Are there still questions that you don’t know the answer to? Of course there are! Our belief systems will probably always be incomplete but yours can be more complete than your neighbor’s.

The completeness of one’s belief system can be deceptive. This is particularly true when it comes to religion. Believing that God does literally everything is a pretty damn complete belief system isn’t it?

Well, no because as it turns out, this belief system actually just skips over everything. Take earthquakes for example. Years ago, many people thought God caused earthquakes and that was that. This idea was an explanation for earthquakes but it was useless. It was of no help in predicting earthquakes nor in gaining a better understanding of the overall workings of our planet. Nowadays we know about plate tectonics – how the plates move about on the Earth’s surface, grinding against each other, pressing against each other, and suddenly releasing tension. This explanation of earthquakes is more complete – it is more useful. It helps us predict earthquakes, it helps us gain a better understanding of how the Earth works as a whole, and it even helped explain several things in evolutionary theory that had previously been mysteries.

Updating Your Belief System

We are often given new information. Our job is to analyze that information and ask ourselves if it makes sense with what we can see of reality. If it does, we need to ask ourselves if it is coherent with our existing beliefs? If so, the information is quickly incorporated into one’s belief system but if not, the information must either be discarded as false or one’s belief system must be revised.

When it comes to larger chunks of information (such as the theory of evolution), it is wise to take a little more time to ensure that everything in the set of statements actually coincides with reality. If it does, then we need to check the internal coherency. Do all the statements within the set, make sense when taken as a whole (remember to disregard your own beliefs through this process)? If it comports with reality and has good internal coherency it is time to see how well it would fit with the rest of your belief system. If there are conflicts then things start getting interesting. On the one hand you have a scientific theory that explains reality quite well but on the other hand it doesn’t fit with your beliefs about the nature of reality.

Now you need to start thinking hard. Could you modify your existing beliefs enough so that evolution could fit inside without causing coherency problems? If so, would the resulting belief system be better than your current one? Would it be more coherent? More complete? If so, there’s only one viable option. Revise your current belief system enough so that you can import the new segment.

When I first studied the evidence for evolution I marveled at the how well it explained some of questions that I had often wondered about. It appealed to me because it mirrored reality so well and it was so much more complete than my existing beliefs on the subject – that God created man and all the animals. However, I couldn’t be expected to just drop the idea of God entirely. My beliefs about him were entwined with all the other beliefs in my belief system. So I started wondering if I could believe in both. As it turns out, I could – as soon as I re-interpreted the Bible as more of a metaphorical work than a literal work.

Rarely does a person’s entire belief system change overnight regardless of how much evidence is thrown at the person. It is often easier to live with contradictory beliefs than it is to completely switch a belief system. This is particularly true for belief systems that are well established in a person’s mind. I’m referring to religion and how it is often indoctrinated starting at a very young age.

Judging from my own experiences, I believe it is essentially impossible for a firm Christian to become an atheist in any short period of time (despite having been born atheist, mind you). For me the whole process took about 10 to 12 years.

So if you are intent on changing someone’s belief system – don’t try to do it overnight. Work on one or several beliefs at a time rather than the whole system at once. You increase your odds of eventually succeeding.

Note: In this last section, I have approached the issue of updating one’s belief system from the perspective of someone watching your mind (metacognition). When it happens to yourself, it will not seem quite this analytical. In fact, many of these steps will be taken by your mind without you even realizing it.

Thoughts on God by an ex-Amish Heathen

17 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by in The Conversion

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The following are some thoughts that I noted in my handheld over the past year or so. It is interesting to wonder what I was going through at the time… The most recent notes are at the top.

March 12, 2012, 7:45 PM

I wish God would stay the f*** out of my life.

November 17, 2011, 1:47 AM

Shouldn’t the Army also have chaplains for all the other religions?

September 10, 2011, 6:46 PM

Amish boy to atheist man: On the one hand, life becomes less meaningful and less serious. On the other hand, there can be no more afterlife goals.

August 3, 2011, 3:34 AM

Which is more important, truth or belief?

July 13, 2011, 12:13 AM

Very few statements make less sense than, “I wasn’t hallucinating!”

(I bet I was thinking about the religious visions that some people claim to experience.)

June 12, 2011, 10:25 PM

Conventional behavior bears no resemblance to rational behavior.

April 19, 2011, 2:53 AM

The difference between the theist and the agnostic: The agnostic accepts the unknown simply as the unknown while the theist anthropomorphizes the unknown for a variety of reasons ranging from 1) a lack of independent thought, 2) a need for companionship, and 3) a fear of the unknown… Even false hope is comforting.

Date and Time Unknown

I do not believe a supreme being would design a universe that operates according to rules of logic… and then hide from logic.

I also do not believe a good supreme being would punish someone for reaching a logically valid conclusion given the available information.

A God that punishes its subjects for a logically valid conclusion… is an evil God that I want no part of!

It’s Just a Theory

17 Tuesday Apr 2012

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Many of the less educated Christians when faced with the onslaught of a scientific theory that contradicts their beliefs, whether it’s the Big Bang theory or evolutionary theory, shout back with, “It’s just a theory!” This, of course, is an egregious abomination onto language and epistemology.

First of all, the term “theory” when used as scientists use it, is quite different from the definition ascribed to it by the layman. The layman would define “theory” as ‘a possible explanation for something’. Scientists have a word that fits that definition too. It is “hypothesis”. When a scientist talks about an idea that is a possible explanation for something, he or she uses the term “hypothesis” because “theory” has quite a different definition in the fields of science.

A scientific theory is a bunch of confirmed hypotheses all tied together in a manner that can be used to explain and make predictions relevant to the phenomenon under question. A theory is the closest thing to “proof” that seekers of knowledge about nature can hope to reach.

The Christian may go on to argue, how can scientists be so sure that evolution or the big bang are true? Nobody was there to see it. The Christian will argue adamantly that you can’t prove that something is true without somebody having been there to see it and verify it.

It is at this point that I ask the Christian what 1000 plus 1000 is. Well, duh – it’s 2000.Then I ask if they have ever actually counted 1000 of something, another thousand of something, put it all together and counted everything again to verify that it really is 2000. Well of course not but that’s just ridiculous.

No, I point out. Arithmetic is just a theory – a logical framework resting ultimately on pure assumptions. Arithmetic has never proven itself wrong so we continue believing it to be a valid theory. Natural selection has never been proven wrong (and all it takes is one thing out of place), so we continue believing it to be a valid theory.

The Fear of Death

17 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by in Other

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The other night some friends and I went out and watched Titanic 3D. My girlfriend loves the movie. I thought the movie was well-written, well-directed, well-acted, and totally depressing.

It was depressing to watch all those people dying toward the end of the movie and it really made me wonder what I would be feeling if I was in their situation. I mean think about it. What would be going through your mind if you knew death was imminent? Would you pray to whatever God you believe in? Would that provide peace for you? Would you be able to die without that mental anguish that I envision?

In one scene, there is a minister praying and the people around him are reaching out to him, touching him, and holding onto him as the Titanic sinks. In that moment I felt the comfort those people were getting from that. If I was in that situation I might even be reaching out to the minister, despite my lack of belief in God.

Death is feared. I think that when a person contemplates imminent death, the emotional response is so powerful that it can completely overwhelm any rational output of the mind. A powerfully emotional movie like the Titanic allows some of us to experience in a small way what imminent death might feel like. After watching the movie I realized that even a rational mind like my own could be overwhelmed by the emotions and trigger a deathbed conversion.

I remember hearing, as an argument against atheism, the stories of atheists that suddenly convert to Christianity on their death beds. As the stories go, the atheists mock God until almost the very end when they suddenly start praying to him and begging for forgiveness.

Those stories are at most anecdotes, and many are no more than myths (particularly the one about Darwin). It wouldn’t surprise me, however, if that kind of thing actually happened on a regular basis. I imagine myself on my deathbed and I think there’s a chance that even I might do something like that. I think it will take a lot of courage to face death without falling into the wishful thinking of Christianity.

However, I disagree that this is evidence for the existence of God, as many Christians would like to claim, or proof that all atheists know deep down that there really is a God. Quite the contrary. The only thing that deathbed conversions are evidence for, is fear of death.

Religion provides an answer for one very powerful metaphysical question – what happens when we die? Christianity, for one, gives you the belief that you’re immortal in a sense. Being an atheist, I believe technology is our only hope for immortality.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the the deathbed conversion was found to be more likely among atheists that left religion than among atheists that have never been religious. The claim that deathbed conversions are caused by ‘all atheists know deep down that there really is a God’ could be tested statistically. If those atheists that left religion had deathbed conversions at a rate significantly higher than those atheists that were never religious, it could be evidence that deathbed conversions are caused in part by a person’s previous religious experiences rather than something that all atheists know deep down.

To end this post on a lighter note I will close with a deathbed story about Voltaire – the famous philosopher. When asked by a priest to renounce Satan and turn to God, Voltaire allegedly said, “Now is no time to be making new enemies.“

The Creature on my Lawn

16 Monday Apr 2012

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There is a creature sitting on my lawn.

There is? But I don’t see a thing.

Of course not. The creature is invisible. You can’t see it with your naked eyes nor can it be detected with any sort of optical equipment.

But I don’t hear anything of it either.

Of course not, the creature never makes a sound.

Well, then, what kind of creature is it?

It’s a rather large creature, about six feet tall and two feet wide.

Well then, if it’s that large I should be able to go outside and feel around for it until I find it.

No, that’s quite impossible. The creature lacks all mass whatsoever. You wouldn’t be able to feel it nor would you be able to detect it with any sort of seismic sensor or even a statistical analysis of the movements of air particles in the area.

Ah, it must be one of those new-fangled energy creatures. Let me get out my magnetometer.

Don’t bother.

How in the world am I supposed to detect this creature?

Oh that’s quite impossible. The creature is completely undetectable by any scientific instrument or method now or that will ever be made.

How can you possibly know about it then?

It talks to me.

Atheists are Ignorant

15 Sunday Apr 2012

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Atheists are an ignorant bunch.

Atheists don’t know for sure how life began on Earth. They hypothesize a number of ideas such as abiogenesis – the idea that life sprang from an inorganic primordial soup and panspermia – the idea that life was brought here from another place in the universe. Christians know exactly where life comes from – God created it.

Atheists don’t know for sure how long the universe will last. Some think it will end in a Big Crunch at some unknown point in the distant future. Others think it will end in a Big Bounce, again at some point in the distant future. Christians know that the end is near and that it will be caused by God’s hands.

Atheists aren’t sure where the universe came from although many suggest that it came from nothing. Christians know exactly where the universe came from – God created it.

Atheists aren’t sure why there is something rather than nothing. Christians know that it’s God’s plan for there to be something rather than nothing.

Atheists don’t know the answer to, “Why are we here?” and some of them will go as far as claiming the question is meaningless because it anthropomorphizes a natural process. Christians know exactly why we are here – we are here to prepare ourselves for the afterlife.

Atheists know very few of the answers to the big questions in life. Christians know almost all of them.

Atheists may be ignorant but at least they’re not delusional.

A Discussion About me on Facebook

15 Sunday Apr 2012

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Today I discovered that a Facebook Group called Mission to Amish People has been discussing me. Here is the discussion;

I would like to comment on several of these posts so here goes;

One man says, “So, I see atheists can get lonely…. Lonely for what? This man just exposed an emptiness in his heart. Because he acknowledges it, and asks for something to fill it…”

It is true that I get lonely but it’s not a secret longing for faith. I feel lonely because I don’t have friends that share my beliefs. How would you feel if you were the only Christian surrounded by atheists?

Now there is another issue I have that you’ll be happy to learn about – I suffer from existential depression at times. Religion pretends to answer a lot of metaphysical questions such as ‘why are we here’ and ‘what happens after we die’. As an atheist, some of these questions are left unanswered and others are answered in ways that I don’t like. However, the truth means so much to me that I can live with the depression that comes with it.

Another person says, “I wondered too why you are exposing others to this site , I got shivers reading just a few of the blogs , decided not to comment on the blog , just pray for him …I also think we need to pray for the unstable ones who read this blog that they wouldn’t be swayed by reading it …..”

See what I mean about Christians thinking atheists are pure evil? I guess I can’t really blame them since from their point of view, we atheists are trying to get people that are on the path to being eternally happy and shoving them down the path of eternal suffering. I guess we pretty much fit the definition of “Satan” for them.

Another person says, “It takes a lot of faith to be an atheist. (yes, that is meant to be ironic). I’m sure they don’t see it as faith…but it really is. A false faith.”

This is the premise for a fairly common argument against atheism but it’s completely invalid. It is invalid because atheism is a belief based on reasoned arguments. Faith is not.

The last poster says, “…I suspect that he has received enough condemnation already…”

I could give that guy a hug. Finally, someone with the ability to look beyond their own feelings on the subject and see that I am a real person.

The Reading Habits of one Little Amish Boy

14 Saturday Apr 2012

Posted by in Early Life

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When I was a child, I did a lot of research. From the time I could read until I moved away from home and got my first laptop, I spent a lot of time buried in my family’s encyclopedia set.

Our encyclopedia set was outdated. It was more than 20 years since it had been printed but this 24-book set, measuring about three and a half to four feet wide when all the books were set upright beside each other, seemed to hold an almost infinite amount of knowledge for me.

I would spend hours on the floor with open encyclopedias scattered around me – taking notes in one of my many notebooks. I enjoyed how, at the end of each entry, there was always a list of related entries. Some question, such as, ‘how do radios work’ would pop into my head and I would go to our bookshelves and pull out ‘R’ from the stack of encyclopedias. After studying the lengthy entry, I would go through the list of related articles and realize excitedly that there was still more to learn about the topic. Back to the bookshelves I went to select still more encyclopedias. Due to the way these entries cross-referenced each other, I would often spend hours and hours researching a single topic. My exasperated sisters would tell Mom, “**** is up there with his encyclopedias all over the floor again!”

In this manner I learned about everything from cuttlefish to deoxyribonucleic acid. My favorite subject by far was cosmology and I spent a large chunk of my childhood research time studying this subject. The distance between the stars and the galaxies fascinated me to no end. I learned why the stars shined and I learned about the moons of Jupiter (I got mocked in school for suggesting that there is more than one moon).

I did more than studying when I was a child. Oh, yes. My first love was The Hardy Boys. Because Dad’s work would often take him through town, he would often stop at the town library, just for me, and pick up another stack of Hardy Boys. I also read classics such as Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. When my Dad deemed me mature enough, I launched into Louis L’amour’s and Zane Grey’s western thrillers. To this day, a good fiction thriller (preferably science fiction) can still be the highlight of my day.

Most Amish parents don’t read more than the Budget (Amish newspaper), Family Life (inspirational magazine for plain people), and several other such materials. They think that learning beyond that which is necessary to please God is not only a complete waste of time – but that knowledge can actually be treacherous (Well, Duh!).

Luckily for me, my parents are not your typical Amish parents. They are voracious readers and have never discouraged the gathering of knowledge through reading. On top of reading The Budget, my parents would read USA Today from cover to cover every day and weekly they would read U.S. News & World Report. After that, Mom would curl up on the couch with the latest Reader’s Digest or something similar and Dad would lay on the floor with the latest western thriller, political thriller, or even technological thriller.

Becoming an Atheist

14 Saturday Apr 2012

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At first it starts with a nagging question – an inconsistency or a contradiction that you notice in your belief system.

Then you rationalize. It’s usually not that difficult to rationalize – to invent something that makes sense with the rest of your belief system. Your religious beliefs will survive this rationalization – they’ll just have to endure a minor tweak.

Then you have more nagging questions. You realize that even your tweaked belief system is not sufficient to withstand the inquiry of an intelligent mind. Frantically you make more rationalizations and for a time, everything makes sense again.

And then of course you hit upon a new idea and a new question pops up. Once again you rationalize. This process keeps going on for several years. Your belief system gains some patches and a whole lot of little tweaks. Your rationalizations have become quite complex.

At some point you suddenly realize that your beliefs about God are way different from that of everyone else around you. But this is fine, you’re comfortable with this because it makes you feel good to have calmed the cognitive dissonance with your rationalizations.

The questions don’t stop there. In fact, the more you learn about science and philosophy, the more questions you get and the harder they become. You start redefining your beliefs even more. Your God starts becoming smaller and smaller. What you’re doing is learning more and more about the universe and relegating God to the gaps in your knowledge. If you’re lucky, you will have started learning about logic and you will suddenly realize that your beliefs about God are based not on evidence but on arguments from ignorance.

Eventually, you realize that your belief system is the definition of “agnostic”. You don’t tell your friends about your new label but you don’t feel awfully guilty about your beliefs either. After all, what could be the harm in admitting that you don’t know?

Then you start playing devil’s advocate. You debate against your religious acquaintances hoping that they can prove to you that God really exists. They fail miserably.

Mentally you start scoffing at your friends’ beliefs whenever the subject of religion comes up. It is around this time that you realize what you’ve become. An atheist! Surprisingly, it doesn’t feel all that evil. You don’t suddenly have the urge to rape and to kill. Actually, you start feeling better about yourself once you realize that your morality is real and not just a fear of eternal torture.

Becoming an atheist is not a single decision that a person makes nor is it a single point in time. Becoming an atheist is a long journey that often happens over the course of many years. For me it was about 10-12 years from the first serious question I had to when I was first comfortable considering myself an atheist.

Just remember, you were born an atheist!

Water Divination

13 Friday Apr 2012

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Water divination (or water witching or dowsing) was taught to me at a fairly young age by my Father. I turned out to be a natural at it. I’d simply take two heavy-gauge wires about two feet long and bend both into an ‘L’ shape. I would hold a wire in each hand – the short portion of the ‘L’ in my hand. I would hold my closed fists about a foot apart with the wires sticking out in front of me.

I should note here that many Amish don’t like the idea of water witching because they fear that it is a gift from the devil (just like magic supposedly is). My Father apparently didn’t share that view.

To find water I would start with the wires pointing away from me and parallel to each other. Then I would simply walk around slowly. If I crossed an underground water stream, the wires would slowly swing toward each other until they crossed.

I was quite good at divining for water. If I’d test myself by walking toward a jug of water that I had placed on the ground for exactly that purpose, the wires would cross when they went over the jug. The same held true when I divined near our well or above known underground water pipes.

I went as far as to walk around our property with pen and paper and map all the underground waterways beneath our property. I was so good at it that I even demonstrated my skill at school. Some of my fellow students were skeptical at first but they all believed me when half of them discovered that they too had the gift. Excitedly, we took turns with the wires – walking over bottles of water and proving ourselves over and over again.

Nobody knew exactly how water divination worked but it was my older brother’s notion that it had something to do with the Earth’s magnetic fields and how it flowed through water, metal, and the human body. To my mind, it seemed like a plausible explanation and so I ascribed to his “theory”.

It wasn’t until years later (I was probably around 20 years old) when I decided to look into the scientific research in the field of water divination. What I found troubled me greatly. For such a useful physical phenomenon I expected considerable and positive research being done on it. What I found instead, was that researchers consistently, statistically proved that there was no such thing (or at least they proved that “skilled” water diviners did no better than chance on average).

By this point in my life, I had grown quite fond of mathematics – even the rather indefinite field of statistics. It troubled me to think that mathematics didn’t agree with me.

So, I decided to take the matter into my own hands and test it myself. I found a jug, filled it with water, and placed it in the backyard. Then I found some wires, bent them into the appropriate shape, and started witching.

What I discovered was astounding. I had completely lost my talent. The simply wires refused to cooperate. They wouldn’t cross over the jug unless I really really willed them to.

My mind went back to rebuttals I had heard other water deviners make when questioned. “It doesn’t work unless you believe in it.” Still, why would it not work for believers who try it in front of scientists?

I was getting really suspicious now. I found a piece of wood and drilled holes so that I could place the wires into the piece of wood and in that way I could divine for water without touching the wires. What I discovered was quite interesting.

Since I had drilled the “holder” holes straight down into the wood (the holes were vertical and almost perfectly parallel), the wires could not cross. They would both swing one way or both swing the other way, but they would not cross.

I took them out of the piece of wood and held them in my hands once again. This time I was interested in the mechanics involved in getting the wires to cross. After playing around with them for a bit, I realized that when I held the wires and they crossed, it was not because they were swiveling due to some attraction between the long tips of the wires, they were crossing because the top of my fists tilted almost imperceptibly toward each other causing the tips of the wires to slowly fell toward each other by gravity’s force alone. In retrospect, this is all blindingly obvious but if you really believe in something it almost requires a punch in the face to accept the opposite.

At this point I started seriously considering the possibility that I had fooled myself all those years. Could it really be that it was only my will causing my fists to tilt imperceptibly and cause the wires to cross?

Back to the computer I went and to the Wikipedia article about water divination. After reading carefully the possible explanations, I learned about the ideomotor effect. The ideomotor effect described exactly what I had been starting to suspect – that the whole thing was my will causing my fists to tilt imperceptibly and the wires to cross.

It was at this point that I started seriously studying the ideas related to skepticism. What I learned about the placebo effect and the other myriad ways that the human mind fools itself, had even more of an effect on me than learning about the ideomotor effect. Within weeks my well rationalized belief system was crumbling and my mind kept going to the Weird Al song, Everything You Know is Wrong.

All Amish kids of my generation know Weird Al’s songs because of Amish Paradise. Check it out, I think it’s quite hilarious…