AronRa, a 46-year-old geoscience student and prolific video ranter, has created an excellent series about the “Foundational Falsehoods of Creationism”. He’s been working on these for about a year, and though he has to hang it up for now for an extremely busy semester, the first 13 (yes 13!) installments are fantastic. We look forward to his return and wish him well on exams. Let the debunking begin.
1st Foundational Falsehood of Creationism
My personal rant against one of foremost falsehoods of the creationism movement; the idea that accepting evolution is tantamount to declaring atheism, or that one need be creationist to be Christian.
2nd Foundational Falsehood of Creationism
Exploring the erroneous notion that the holy scriptures were written by God, rather than be subject to the errs of humanity.
If you come from an evolutionary psychology kind of world view, as I do, you suppose that the mental and psychological traits humans express are adaptations driven by natural or sexual selection. The way we behave, the things we believe, and the way we frame or understand things comes from a long history of being the best possible scenario, survivalwise.
Adherents.com says about 16% of the earth identifies themselves (or is allowed to identify themselves) as atheist/agnostic. So it’s safe to say most of the world is religious. It must serve a pretty important role in terms of our survival and reproduction as a species.
Huffington Post has a nice article today on the God Gene - the drive to believe in something - which reminded me of this fascinating piece from Wired on Dr. Michael Persinger, the cognitive neuroscientist mentioned in the Huff Po piece. He’s been toiling away at Sudbury’s Laurentian University (lol at Wired’s description of Sudbury as the hellacious ends of the earth), uncovering the connections between the right hemisphere of the brain, visions and voices, and the feeling that you’re in the presence of God.
Some people are genetically predisposed to look for God, and Persinger’s work describes what happens when they think they’ve found him. “When the right hemisphere of the brain, the seat of emotion, is stimulated in the cerebral region presumed to control notions of self, and then the left hemisphere, the seat of language, is called upon to make sense of this nonexistent entity, the mind generates a ’sensed presence.’ ”
You know how the Mormons think that “you can know if the things you are learning are true if you ask your Heavenly Father in prayer. He desires for you to know the truth, and you can receive an answer from Him through the Holy Ghost” and how the “feelings” you get are your “personal revelation”? That’s the mind generating a sensed presence. Because you really, really want something to be true, your resolve your cognitive dissonance about the evidence that it’s not by generating your own evidence.
Like these crazy bastards. They’re definitely having an intense experience, but it’s all user-generated. Kinda like Joan of Arc, Moses, and Joseph Smith.
Being agnostic/athiest often goes hand in hand with a certain level of skepticism. Part of being a rational skeptic is having an understanding of critical thinking.
Here Be Dragons is a new 40 minute web movie produced by Brian Dunning of Skeptoid and is an introduction to critical thinking suitable for a general audience.
“For it is the natural tendency of the ignorant to believe what is not true. In order to overcome that tendency it is not sufficient to exhibit the true; it is also necessary to expose and denounce the false.”
There were some recent discussions here on Topic Agnostic about “proving a negative”. This concept is quite central in my position of being Agnostic and I will briefly explain why that is so, and why it is an important concept to understand correctly.
Firstly is the idea of logical fallacies. A logical fallacy is a component of an argument which, being demonstrably flawed in its logic or form renders the argument invalid in whole.
A common logical fallacy that many fall trap to using is the “ad hominem”; which is an argument that attempts to counter another’s claims by attacking the person rather than addressing the argument itself. True believers will often commit this fallacy by countering the arguments of skeptics by stating that skeptics are closed minded, which does not address the issues that they bring up.
Another common logical fallacy is the “straw man”. This is when you argue against a position you create specifically to be easy to argue against, rather than the position actually held by those who oppose your point of view.
Which brings us to “proving a negative”. It is the fallacy of appealing to lack of proof of the negative. For example…
“X is true because there is no proof that X is false.”
It is asserted that a proposition is true, only because it has not been proven false. The negative proof fallacy often occurs in the debate of the existence of supernatural phenomena, in the following form:
“A supernatural force must exist, because there is no proof that it does not exist”.
However, the fallacy can also occur when the predicate of a subject is denied:
“A supernatural force does not exist, because there is no proof that it does exist.”.
Pay attention to that last statement; that is where agnostics come from. To say that God doesn’t exist because there is no proof that God does exist is a logical fallacy, as is the opposite.
That is the core of it, how do you prove that something un-testable (such as the existence of God) doesn’t exist?
I require evidence for my positions, which is why I am not atheist, because they have already come to a conclusion. Now, the difference between some atheists and some agnostics may not be very much. For example, I am not 50/50 with my assertion that there isn’t a God, I’m pretty sure there isn’t, but to come to a definitive conclusion I would require some sort of evidence.
Now to address what “proving a negative” is not.
A poster on a recent thread here on Topic Agnostic had this to say…
“Five is not equal to four
The ancient Egyptians did not watch Seinfeld
The tsetse fly is not native to North America
These are negatives proven to be true. ”
Let me be clear, “Proving a Negative” is NOT the same thing as proving what something is not.
For example, if I were to state “I am not a female” (which I am not) that is not “proving” a negative, that is a statement about the condition of a known entity. Stating that a cat is not a dog is again NOT proving a negative.
Looking at the Seinfeld example, using the formula as stated above.
“X is true because there is no proof that X is false.”
“Seinfeld watching Egyptians is true because there is no proof that Seinfeld watching Egyptians is false.”
Well, there is plenty of proof that this is false; Jerry Seinfeld isn’t thousands of years old is one of them. Why go on from there? The concept doesn’t fit the premise.
So these sorts of examples given by the poster don’t fit the case of successfully proving a negative.
Another good example of how you can’t prove a negative, or that something doesn’t exist, are these…
Santa Clause
The Easter Bunny
The Tooth Fairy
Prove to me that these entities DON’T exist! You can’t. However, it is VERY unlikely, even though there have been books written about them, stories passed down through generations about them and millions of people that have had personal experience with these figures in their lives which turn out to be hoaxes; that is not proof that they aren’t there. So, I am agnostic about Santa Clause, and God.
A classic case of how negative proof is a logical fallacy is “Russell’s Teapot”
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