I'll Pray For You

I've noticed many times when talking with theists online that eventually I'll see the line "I'll pray for you" and they'll be gone, well most of the time anyway. Some seem to come back for another round, possibly checking to see if their prayers actually worked. Of course, if they are praying to an omnipotent deity in order to change my behaviour, they don't need to tell me they are praying for me. In fact it would probably be better for them if they didn't tell me they were praying for me and instead just used it as a marker of falsification. So why mention it at all? Because it's not for me to acknowledge your grand gesture, it's to condemn me by using a passive-aggressive invocation to a moral authority.

Yes, it's all a big farce; implicit condemnation masquerading as a positive gesture. It's a means of ascertaining the moral high ground, to allow one to act with moral superiority. Judgementalists For Jesus™ we can call them, ones who will leave God as the eternal judge but secretly wish they had the gig. Maybe they are putting together a resume now for the afterlife, trying to show God just how Judgemental and cruel they can be while trying to appear loving and concerned. It seems to be the Christian way. Of course it could be worse, at least we aren't expecting some kind of Spanish Inquisition. Now it seems guilt is the chief weapon. Guilt, persecution complex... No wait, that's two weapons. The two chief weapons are guilt, persecution complex, a delusion that religious moral code is still relevant. Three, three chief weapons. Fuck it, let's start over.

I can see why the religious cling to it as their weapon of choice, but it makes no difference to an atheist. It's basically an appeal to the authority of God, that scary dude in the sky who will torture you for all eternity if you piss him off. Having that up your sleeve as a weapon of condemnation can only be effective against those who believe in such rot. Instead to those immune from God's judgement, this exposes a defensive frailty in the caster of the incantation. It exposes their fear of judgement; that their behavioural code is not based on the kindness of their nature, instead it's the fear of punishment that is the force behind their sense of right and wrong. These aren't good people, they are petty, weak people who need God to fight their battles for them. Instead of being able to make any decisions of their own, they leave it up to an invisible force (or more accurately a holy book, or even more accurately what other people tell them the holy book means) in order to guide their sense of right and wrong.

So what does it matter to me? On a personal level, it doesn't. If people want to pray for me, to light candles, use a voodoo doll, or even sacrifice a goat (though I'd prefer no animal cruelty), that's their choice. None of it is going to affect me one bit. If they want to use it as a passive-aggressive means of ascertaining the moral high ground in a discussion, then I have a problem with the expression. Those four words coming from a close relative who only wants your safety is sweet, from a complete stranger on a semi-anonymous medium is underhanded. If any of you genuinely believe that casting an incantation will rouse an omnipotent sky-daddy to come and change my ways, you are more than welcome to try. Just don't tell me about it please, I don't want you to rub your insecurities onto me.

Elitist Memes

I want to delve into the speculative for a moment, and highlight my inner struggle over the role of society & culture. The struggle exists in how ideas are to be preserved throughout time. Memes have a propagating tool of their own, but I sometimes wonder if commercialism is pushing society towards an idiocracy where memes previously of cultural significance will be starved by their aggressively pushed counterparts; where feeding the selfish gene on a most basic level will do away with the complex yet subtle landmarks of our time. My personal struggle is reconciling the notion that the population decides it's culture with the value of elitism.

The culture explosion
A look back at culture over the last 500 or so years is a monument to the creativity of the human race. The Da Vincis, the Shakespeares, the Bachs & Beethovens, the legacy of those few who shaped our cultural landscape will be immortal as long as western society survives. We've even gone beyond that and preserved their legacy in digital code, thanks to possibly the most important cultural legacy of all: science. Now while science has done it's best to preserve the past, the mechanisms which it has used are now the fundamental way that society as a whole communicates. The method of preservation that once only catered for the most elite ideas is now recording every piece of cultural significance. In effect, while the preservation culture for centuries has been at the discretion of the societal elites, now it's in the hands of the masses.

From this point of view I can see the merits to post-modern thought on culture. The worth is in the eye of the beholder, and art becomes equally valid. If someone asked me to name what I felt the most significant music of the current decade, my answer would be different to most other peoples. Of course I could feel what I chose is better, and I could give reasons that justify that position. Ultimately my choice is subjective, just as all the choices of others are. In that sense it's all equally valid, but ultimately there are winners and losers on the culture front. Some memes survive long after others, they can transcend cultural boundaries and time-frames. Where in a consumer model everything has a shelf-life, the memes survive well beyond their allotted lifespan.

Now a meme's ability to survive is itself a gauge of it's worth. While some memes can propagate very successfully and rapidly, the longevity is the key. Ideas with worth will survive longer, the cultural imprints that have either a representative quality of their era or a timeless characteristic will be ultimately successful and therefore of cultural worth. This is not the only gauge of it's worth, and there is room for that one nefarious character in our society: the expert.


The importance of being elitist
Sam Harris recently wrote an excellent article on the role of elitism and politics, it seems that being elitist is something as a society we explicitly reject on a personal level yet strive towards on a daily basis. By and large people do realise the important role that the experts play, just look at the creationists who will appeal to any scientist who will validate their position. Where the role of the expert comes in is where there is a realisation that some people know more than others about a subject. While most people could tell the difference between a $100 bottle of wine and a $5 cask, there are only a few with trained palettes that can describe in great depth of the balance between flavours and assess the comparative quality of similar wines. Same goes for critics of all cultural phenomena, their time and dedication into learning the intricacies of their particular field puts their views as being worth more.

This does not mean that the elitists are authoritative or dictating culture, their views come from an educated background but are still subjective. One doesn't have to agree with an expert, it's opinion (educated opinion) and not science. What it does is set up a separate rung for memes to sit on, and gives an option for culture that the elites consider worthwhile a chance to survive in a marketplace where it would go over the heads of most people. Now this is the difference that the last 100 years has to the 450 before it; before it was purely those in the know; the elites of society, who would decide culture. The memes existed purely in upper class circles, where education and resources meant only a select few were the culture of propagation. Now the mass-market decides the worth.

So often art these days has to go after the lowest common denominator. It's a product, and it's one that must sell in order to sustain itself. So much of commercial television these days is mediocre at best, I struggle to see how people can watch these shows of no style or substance. Even the shows with something often descend into predictability and resorting to gimmicks. I wonder how much it's on the back of every artist's mind that when creating a work of art it has to be sellable. Does this have an effect on the final product even before the producers get their hands on it? Gaming since it's a new artform can give insight into this. As the market has exploded and the audience is now mainstream, companies that want to stay afloat have to target the main market. While Bioshock was a great game in it's own right, many of the elements from it's spiritual predecessor, System Shock 2, were either simplified or cut out to make the game more accessible to the general audience. It made for a more streamlined game, though less of an immersive world.

It's now hard to think of art as anything other than entertainment, it's ability to sell is the propagation tool. The role of the expert is to take that entertainment and determine what is worthy of preservation given it's content, context and competition. Is the content of the art groundbreaking or profound? Is it contextual and symbolic of the time it was made? Does it stand above the competition and what makes it so? There is still art, while being entertainment, that has the memetic traits to compete in the environment of the experts. While this market is maintained, culture should preserve memes both popular and the profound. The danger is that in a society where everyone rates themselves an expert that the voices of those who are truly in the know will be drowned out.

Were You There?

Recently I sat down and watched the excellent PBS series Evolution. It was a very well-made series, it explained a lot of the basic concepts and gave a fairly comprehensive overview of the theory itself. The final episode was devoted to the question "what about God?". The episode was not to give an answer on the question, rather to show the struggle in the community and especially with fundamentalist Christians of the reconciliation of their belief in a divine being and the science behind the process. The man who epitomises the outright ignorance of the general population is Ken Ham, and his way of hardening believers against any 'evolutionist' was to ask them the question "where you there?". Now aside from treating his congregation like 4 month old babies with downs syndrome, the question is outright fallacious and misleading. Only a fool would expect this to actually be an answer; it's the logical equivalent to Goddidit. But there he is, getting the sheeple to mimic his poor reasoning.


Absurdity manifested
The question itself is absurd, it puts an incredible amount of focus on direct observation as the only form of tangible evidence. This is akin to saying that a murder with no witnesses is unsolvable, after all no-one saw the crime take place. In courts, it turns out that anecdotal evidence is unreliable; an eyewitness tale must be consistent with the evidence gathered at the crime scene. That forensic evidence, gathered after the event, is the cornerstone of any murder trial. This is precisely what happens in science.

In a murder trial, all pieces evidence are facts. Facts on their own are meaningless, it's the narrative that strings them together. The narrative is the theory of events, it must be consistent with all the facts. An inconsistent narrative that is contradicted by facts will lead to an acquittal. Likewise in science, observable facts are all around us; they are the end product of cause and effect. It's a theory that seeks to explain the facts and any inconsistent theory is thrown out. If the man accused of murder has proof he was in another state at the time the murder took place, then the theory that he committed the murder is wrong.

Evolution is the narrative of life that best matches all the facts that are observed now. Why should the small variation that's seen now be any different on a long term scale? This is why creationists fail when they try to distinguish between micro and macroevolution - it's the same process over a longer time frame. Macroevolution has been observed both in the lab and in nature, where genetic variation has become so large that two different populations can no longer reproduce. Over a longer time frame, the variation will only increase even further as both populations will sit forever genetically isolated but continue to mutate.

When looking at the fossil record, it tells it's own narrative of the types of species that lived at that part of history and the progress of evolution. When we look back at early Cambrian rocks, there are no humans let alone vertebrates; there are only invertebrates. Looking a bit closer to the present, there are fish and arthropods, but no land animals of any kind. Around 380 million years ago, the first amphibians emerge. This tale goes on and on. The narrative of the fossil record only makes sense when it's put in the context of evolution. The mechanisms under which evolution works are the only tangible explanation for the fossil record the way it is.


Who wrote the bible?
Maybe the argument needs to be thrown back on those making the argument. Since they use the bible as the infallible word of God, maybe the question needs to be asked "where you there?". Of course you just can't ask God whether he wrote the bible or not, ever since he came down as Jesus he's not taking calls any more. So how was the bible written? Unless God came to earth and wrote endless pages of text, did all subsequent copies, revisions and translations, then the bible is the work of man and thus subjected to the same fallibility as creationists like Ken Ham talk about with science.

Of course man wrote down the stories, even if they were divinely inspired, it was still a book written by men, revised by men, and translated by men. All holy texts can at best be divinely inspired; manifestations of messages handed through mental manipulations by a divine being. To have a deity write their own holy book would be impossible, everything cultural we know is a man-made device. For the Torah it wasn't even one man who wrote it, there were four different sources it was all compiled from. Just read Genesis chapters 1 and 2 to see the different authorship, there are two different versions of the creation story in the first two chapters of the book. Now did man come before animals or did animals come before man?

The problem with the man-made stories of Genesis is that no-one was there to view them. It was not a first-hand eyewitness account, no-one was there to see God making the world and everything in it. Likewise it suffers from the same falsehood as creationists are trying to say about science: no-one was there to see it. The belief that the holy books are indeed inerrant relies deeply on faith and it propagates on naïvety, there's nothing in the the bible to suggest it's the inerrant work of an infallible deity. Rather the glaring contradictions, the inconsistencies, the poor language and having nothing in the bible that couldn't have been written by 1st century authors, would all tend to point at the fact that the book is a man-made socially-constructed volume.

There's one place to turn to which can shed light on the historicity of a document: archaeological evidence. It turns out that Israel weren't the only tribe keeping notes about events in the middle east 3,000 years ago, so some of the stories can be checked against the records of others. People and places can be independently confirmed through impartial evidence; this evidence can be dated by a variety of methods such as carbon dating or the types of technology. Looking at the Jesus story, those who wrote the gospels had never seen Jesus in the flesh, they were most likely not even born when Jesus lived. They certainly weren't there to witness the birth of Jesus, which is why one story has an age no later than 4BCE and the other would put the birth at 6CE. These stories would have been derived from the Gospel of Mark which was written at least after 70CE.
So were the authors of the gospels there for Jesus? No, that would explain why the books don't align with history. Just as the authors of the Torah weren't there on the history of the planet, which would explain why the science and the text doesn't add up. When the facts don't fit the narrative, the narrative must be wrong. The bible is the inerrant word of God in the same way as a holy being that commits infanticide can be considered all-loving.

If the Bible is telling the truth, then God is either untruthful or incompetent. If God is truthful, then the Bible is either untruthful or erroneous. - Rev. Donald Morgan

Miracles and Statistics

"There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics." - Benjamin Disraeli

Highly improbable events can often seem miraculous, our minds are not equipped for intense statistical analysis and certainly not for dealing with large numbers. Couple this with the very limited scope in which to view the world and suddenly blind chance can seem fate, divine intervention looks to be the only explanation. Certainly some events are too statistically improbable to happen by chance, and in those intelligence must be sought as an explanation. But given enough time and enough of a sample base, miraculous events can and do happen in every walk of life.


Winning the Lottery
Now this is a statistically improbable event. In a system where 6 of 44 numbers are drawn out, the chance of winning is approximately 1 in 5 billion. Given that in the Australian lottery system each ticket has 12 different combinations printed on it, that chance drops to about 1 in 40 million. So if there were a million tickets bought each week, it would take about 40 weeks for the statistical probability to match the unlikelihood. Run the lottery enough times and there's bound to be a winner somewhere.

Now what would it look like from the winner's perspective? They have won something that is incredibly unlikely, a statistical fluke. The pay-off for that statistical fluke is a huge financial gain and the cost was very little. Buying a ticket each week certainly improves the odds, but not by enough for it to be considered anything other than a statistical fluke. If someone bought a ticket every week for two decades, the chance of winning once is approximately 1 in 40,000. So while it's a far better chance than just buying one ticket once, the difference in likelihood of outcome is practically the same. So the person who wins had an extreme bit of luck, it's nothing more than the inevitability that someone has to win some time. For the extremely fortunate individual this could be taken as a significant event, as something more than blind chance.

This is how in the ordinary course of events, people can lead extraordinary lives. The luck that a few have is inevitable in a large enough population size; the scope of statistical insignificance is wiped out. It's with the global media that improbable events are broadcast into our daily lives. We are exposed on a daily basis thanks to the news, something that almost never happens is being portrayed to us as a regular occurrence. So by extension, winning the lottery would sound a lot more a frequent purely because the sample size is extraordinary. This can be applied further.

On a simplistic level, take rolling the dice. Now guessing one roll is 1 in 6. Guessing two rolls is 1 in 36, three rolls is 1 in 216, 10 rolls is 60,466,776. Now if everyone in the world were to guess the sequence, it's inevitable that people would be able to guess the exact sequence. It would be unlikely that no-one was able to guess it; statistically it should have happened 100 times over. This is why picking a single individual event is a good indication of psychic power. Statistically the improbable does occasionally happen, it's only with consistency that meaning can be derived.


Meaning from consistency
Now given the premise that an individual can experience improbable occurrences given a large enough sample size and time, the role of causality needs to be explored. While there certainly are events that befall one for simply nothing more than being in the right place at the right time, there is also the possibility that the individual is rigging the results. This is the train of thought leading to psychic powers, that there are those who can mentally affect the selected outcomes through divine insights. It can also lead to the belief in a personal God (or guardian angel) is watching over the affected individual.

Having a one-off event of improbable chance is statistically explainable; having repeated bouts of chance would indicate there has to be some underlying cause. Say for instance if someone could correctly predict a shuffled deck of cards in order with no foresight (1 in 8.0658*10^67) there must be something to explain it. The obvious answer is that the deck was rigged, that the person knew in advance what order the cards were in. Without that, there is calls for further study to find out why.

As noted previously, appealing to the paranormal is not an explanation; it explains nothing and just raises further questions. Rather a mechanism of how someone could see into the future needs to be explored. But in order to get to that state, there needs to be some consistent statistical significance. Without the ability to reproduce improbable events, then chance is the only viable explanation. We don't ever get something like 52 cards being picked, instead events with higher probability are sought after. Instead it might be something like the value on the card (1 in 13) or pick the suit on the card (1 in 4). It makes the probability of having hits higher, but it also takes away from the significance of picking an incredibly improbable event.

Take picking the suit on the card. For a deck there the average person should pick 13 of the 52 cards by guessing before any card is dealt. If the predictions are made after each card, the odds would change (i.e. if 51 cards are picked out, the observer should be able to deduce the final card's suit). So there should be scores around 13, but not everyone will fall exactly on 13. There should be people who score 15 or 16, some who score 8 or 9, there may be one who scores a 24. If that individual consistently scores in the 20s while others average out over a long period of time to around chance, then there is something significant to derive from the event. If someone scores 22 one turn then 11 the next, then it falls within the normal course of events.

Consistency is the only way to gain meaning from statistics, it's the foundation of statistical analysis. The problem when looking at the paranormal is the tautological nature of the phenomena; it's never that the phenomena doesn't work, it's that the user wasn't in the right frame of mind. As the saying goes: If someone wants to use statistics to appeal to the credence of a phenomena, then all statistics and their context must be shown. If someone can pick the suit of a card 1 in 2 times as opposed to 1 in 4 consistently, then there is good cause to trumpet that stat. But if it happened once and the rest it averages out to 1 in 4, then there is nothing special to report. The improbable does happen, it can adequately be explained by statistics. The sooner people learn to use stats properly the better.

The Great Gig In The Sky

R.I.P. Richard Wright