There Are Four Lights

Surly Amy, a Skepchick and the artist behind Surly-Ramics, took some lovely photos of me wearing her beautiful handmade jewelery. You can find them over on her flickr page. Surly-Ramics is the place to go if you’re looking for jewelery to show off your love of science and skepticism! They can be found on Etsy too!

Does God have a Future?
A Great Debate Filmed by ABC’s Nightline

Today, we attended a debate between Michael Shermer and Sam Harris vs. Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston. The debate was “Does God have a Future?” and will air on ABC Nightline on March 23rd. It was splendid  to see Shermer and Harris speak again, after each giving their own great talk, last month, at TED. Chopra was predictably absurd, dishing out his brand of woo juice cocktail—-new age pseudoscience post-modernism blended with faux quantum physics. Jean Houston, whom I’ve never heard of, was a complete embarrassment. I don’t recall anything relevant in her boring anecdotes.

I had a chance to ask a question, so I came up with one for Deepak. He had mentioned “deeper ways of knowing” and gave the impression that this was through intuition and repeatedly referred to “the subjective”. So I asked, “Without the objective scientifiic method, how can we distinguish what is true from what we simply want to be true?” Deepak answered this by saying he would answer my question, but that he didn’t want to answer any more questions after that. He then proceeded to not answer my question by doing his little Chopra word dance of nothingness.

Now, I know correlation doesn’t always mean causation, but if you want to interpret Chopra’s actions as being totally scared off by my question of skeptical awesomeness, I have no problem with that whatsoever!

If you’ve read any of this blog, you’ve probably guessed I’m an atheist–that gross word people use to describe us non-believers. But I think I’ve said before that atheism isn’t what’s important to me; I’m more concerned about skepticism in general (rather than just being skeptical about gods)…because atheism alone can lead to those annoying people who say “I’m not religious, but I’m spiritual”. I know because I used to be one of those annoying people…

And spirituality still involves faith: believing something to be true without evidence, despite evidence to the contrary, or even believing something for which there can be no evidence. There seems to be only one reason why we would give in to this type of thinking; because it feels good. People only have faith in things they want to be true. And so, when you use faith you fall into a dangerous mode of thought where you let your emotions get in the way of seeing objective truth.

This is where I found what’s important to me (and why I love Carl Sagan so much)…I realized that I’m far more concerned about what’s true than what feels good. This takes much more discipline than faith, though the spiritual gurus would have you think different. Spirituality is constantly trying to convince people that faith is a virtue and that it takes a disciplined mind to make faith work.

I have never known anyone, not one person, either religious or spiritual who is happy…truly content, and content because of their faith. What I see is people constantly needing to remind themselves of their faith; day in and day out they need to repeat to themselves what they believe…as if they are deeply unsure if it really is true. They need to gather in large groups with others of similar faith to reassure one another that this is what they all believe. Not only do I find this deeply unsatisfying, but doesn’t that also seem like a ritual of self-denial?

This is why I want truth. Truth isn’t something you need to recite. The truth simply is…whether you want it to be or not…good or bad. The truth about the world around you is there whether you choose to accept it or not, whether it hurts you or not, whether you want it or you don’t. Truth doesn’t promise to always makes you happy–but isn’t there something so very selfish about wanting only what makes you happy to be real? What the truth will always offer you is understanding and that is something that stays with you.

I don’t have a manga doodle to go along with this entry (I’m working on Legend of the Ztarr). I just wanted to post about the Beyond Belief conferences, after recently finding out that the 3rd conference, BB3: Candles in the Dark, took place earlier this month. The videos were available online through The Science Network’s website, but apparently had to be taken down do to overwhelming demand and will be available through Google video sometime soon. Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark, has a wonderful Carl Sagan quote on the about page:

In The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan wrote:

Science is more than a body of knowledge; it is a way of thinking. I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the key manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness.

(My bold)

One of my favourite talks is from the 2006 conference, in the second session, which is by Neil deGrasse Tyson. I couldn’t get enough of the first conferences so finding out about the third is really making me geekout. These kinds of lectures make me giddy as a schoolgirl.

Tyson’s talk is basically about the “god of the gaps” argument. I’ve come to realize that even atheists aren’t immune to this type of thinking, despite their lack of belief in a deity. Atheists can still believe in astrology, homeopathy, psychics, dowsing, acupuncture, or any other paranormal/pseudo-science faith based systems, without ever invoking a god to fill in the gaps. Instead, they can throw around words like “energies”, “vibrations”, or fill in what they don’t know with quantum magic words “entanglement”, “fields”, or my favourite gap-filler, “uncertainty principle”. You can be an atheist and still not be a critical thinker, still not be a skeptic. The atheist equivalent to the ‘god of the gaps’ that I’ve come across most often is to say that there are just some things that are out of the realm of science. I think Tyson’s talk illustrates very well that it’s this kind of thinking that hinders discovery.