Doubt and Certainty: On the Incoherency of Belief

Philosopher William Irwin wrote an interesting piece for “The Stone,” an ongoing series of essays on “timely and timeless” philosophical issues that appears in the New York Times. In it Irwin argued that both religious faith and secular non-faith should, properly, be encased in doubt.

Blind religious conviction, like unthinking atheism, he argued, just isn’t very interesting. Total acceptance makes him suspicious. If one believes without question (from either side of the theological divide) it suggests, to Irwin, that they haven’t listened to the other side’s perspective.

Needless to say, the article attracted quite a few readers’ comments — 2,237 of them, to be precise. The Times selected seven of them and published them the following week. They’re thoughtful and focus on issues of faith, belief, doubt and certainty. They come from both believers and atheists and several intriguing points are made. But no one touched on what, for me, is the key issue: the incoherence of a deity.

I used to teach a course titled “Parapsychology: A Critical Examination.” One topic we looked at was the nature of belief. Invariably, a student would realize that God was a paranormal entity and we’d end up in usually fascinating discussions about religion and belief. The students always wanted to know what I believed. I’d duck and weave and refuse to answer till the semester of 9/11. The classroom windows gave a clear view of the towers. We saw them come down and I really couldn’t stay silent.

My belief is simple, I told them. Religion is just not relevant. It plays no role in my life. They said that made me an atheist. I demurred. Atheism means taking a stance on God, specifically, his (or her — some didn’t like that) existence. I’m not doing that. They didn’t like that either.

I told them I didn’t believe in 20-foot tall, four-headed purple unicorns. Confused looks ensured. It’s like that. I don’t deny their existence. I just don’t think about them. They’re irrelevant. It’s unlikely they exist but so what.

A young woman countered by noting that surely I’d thought about God.

Of course, I told them, but only when someone else brings the topic up.

That pretty much covered matters. I didn’t want to get into the incoherency argument because that was not my job. We were in that room to examine the cognitive processes involved in human belief, not what we believed.

But the issue of the coherency or lack thereof of deities is important and it was missing in the exchange in the Times though several comments raised the classic, “The existence of God can’t be proven or, for that matter disproven. It’s a matter of faith.”

This is, more-or-less, true. Efforts at proof usually turn on variations of the ontological argument, and have pretty much failed to satisfy theologians let alone logicians. In that sense, belief in the existence of God (or any other deity) is, indeed, dependent on faith.

The other side, the secularist, non-believer side, actually can make a better case based on the argument-from-incoherency principle.

Take my mythical unicorn. Everything we know about evolutionary biology, biochemistry and biophysics points to the impossibility of such a creature. So it just doesn’t make sense to offer ontological claims. Similarly, with deities. Everything we know about cosmology, astronomy and physics, about the age, size and nature of the universe, the age of our planet and the point in time when life emerged renders the very notion of a transcendent supreme being incoherent. It simply makes no sense.

Until recently we thought we were pretty much alone, our planet was all there was and it really felt like it was prepared, readied for us. We now know this terra-centric view is very wrong.

There are several hundred billion galaxies in the known universe. Each contains several hundred billion stars. Virtually every star we get a good look at turns out to have planets. It takes a stupendous dose of hubris to think that a supreme being oversees all this but selected our little dust mote of a planet for his/her largesse.

But even if you do think this way, the manner in which this supposed deity went about things is just nutty. Why wait some seven hundred million years for the first life forms? Why hang around for 4.5 billion years before getting to humans? Why would this entity cool his/her heels for another 300,000 years before giving us his blessings? And what was the sense in creating at least three different kinds of species of Homo before letting our kind knock off the others?

It just doesn’t make any sense. Not to me anyway and I’m just not comfortable with the line that “God works in mysterious ways.” I like a good mystery, especially a scientific mystery but those have, in principle, empirical and theoretical answers.

Is this a proof that God doesn’t exist? No. Proving non-existence isn’t easy to do when dealing with well-defined entities that lend themselves to empirical exploration and the ontological status of mysterian concepts like supreme beings isn’t one of those.

Perhaps thoughts like these are more common than we realize. Gretta Vosper, a minister of a church in Toronto has acknowledged that she is an atheist saying she just got to the point where she couldn’t believe in a supernatural being and claiming that she is far from alone. Many liberal congregations, she said, are headed by atheists, ones who value the good works that churches do and the role they play for families and communities.

I guess you don’t have to believe in God to do “God’s work.”

Con Artist Gets Comeuppance -- Via Nolan Dalla

My friend and fellow blogger Nolan Dalla has a nice little essay on a sleazy character named Mark Thomas Georgantas, a.k.a. Mark Gigantis, Mr. Smooth and Pure Cash. Georgantas is a con artist and one so blatant that you’d think he’d couldn’t possibly get away with it.

He sells a “system” that is guaranteed to beat the casino, its craps tables, baccarat games and roulette wheels. The system is so good, so his pitch advertises, that no one using it can possible lose. The claims about how much a gambler can make are outlandish and more than a little confusing.

In some of his materials he explains how to turn a mere pittance like $10,000 into a quarter of a million, or more. In other places he writes that as soon as you’ve paid the ten thousand coconut fee for the system, he will, using your money, begin depositing up to a thousand rutabagas a day into your bank account — presumably because he’s winning that (and more) with your money. He called this one the “absentee bankroll” gambit. In other materials he requests large deposits from clients with whom he will continue to collaborate to generate huge profits — and all investments are guaranteed and all monies refunded if requested.

Not surprisingly, Georgantas turns out to have a long rap sheet for embezzlement, fraud, grand theft and violating probation. He’d also been indicted in absentia in Nevada for swindling two gullible investors out of some 350k bananas.

Last week his run ended. He was spotted at a casino in Vegas and arrested. The tale will likely have its sad, storybook ending: jail time and the poor bastards who got stuck for the three point five hundred thou’ are outta luck. The judge might order it repaid but that won’t happen.

Two thoughts on this escapade:

Greed fosters gullibility.

Knowledge trumps (sheesh, I now hate using that verb) ignorance.

Greed and gullibility: It’s oft been said that when something looks too good to be true, it is. But, as neuroscientists have discovered, when what’s called “trait-greed” is activated, the ability to make rational decisions is severely compromised. As Mussel and colleagues recently reported in the journal Social Neuroscience, individuals who are high in greed not only were attracted to risky situations with high potential outcomes, they showed distinct neurological markers in their brains when making decisions. When Georgantas dangled his promised goodies in front of his clients/victims (one advertised a potential profit of $400 million on a mere $50k investment), they bit.

Knowledge: If you know anything about casino gambling, about roulette, craps, the slots you know that none of these standard table games can be beat — other than by cheating and that has its own downside. As outlined in books like The New Gambler’s Bible and Gambling for Dummies, the only games that a punter can beat are those where the odds are not fixed by the house but change depending on the situation.

These games all have a key feature: the payout and the true odds shift constantly and by making decisions which are stochastically favorable you can win in the long run. Among these games are blackjack under the right conditions, fantasy sports, race handicapping, sports betting and poker. In each, winning requires a great deal of practice, skill, patience and understanding. Gambling for Dummies has a chapter on each of these with the basic strategies for playing them outlined in detail.

There are no guaranteed systems. Anyone who ever tries to sell you one (and there are hundreds of scammers out there) is a fraud.

Ask yourself, if you really had a system to beat roulette why would you let anyone know? The more people who beat the casinos the more likely it becomes that they will realize what’s happened and change the game to neutralize your edge. This is precisely what happened with blackjack. As more and more players learned card-counting techniques the house began tinkering with the game making profitable play harder and harder.

Anyone who wants to sell you a way to predict where a roulette ball will land or how to control the outcome of a dice toss is a con artist and once you know this you will be less likely to have any residual trait-greed mechanism kick in.

Trump and the Truth about Being "Pro-life"

The “interrupter in chief,” as Rachel Maddow has dubbed Chris Mathews, pulled from Donald Trump a compelling admission: From the far-right wing of the nation’s political stage where he has set up camp, a woman who has an abortion is a criminal and deserving of some, yet unspecified, punishment. Later in the evening his people tried to walk this one back but it was far, far too late. The cat, so they say, is out of the bag.

Mathews caught Trump in an unscripted moment where he was forced to actually think rather than rattle off another of his well-rehearsed, if often incoherent, buzzlines. The result was telling.

But it’s not just the insanity of criminalizing abortion, there’s a deeper motivation behind Trump and others who hold such a position. Trump repeated several times that he’s “pro-life” and even tried to turn the tables on “Tweetie-bird” (the moniker many viewers use for Mathews), by asking him what he thinks about abortion given his avowed Catholicism. Mathews wouldn’t have any of it, noting a subtlety that eluded Trump: the Catholic church doesn’t make laws, it makes moral pronouncements.

So what’s the deeper motivation? Why are conservatives (though it’s just weird to use that label for Trump) so anti-abortion?

Because they are against women having sexual relations for pleasure and not specifically for the aim of procreating.

That’s it. Dead simple. A woman who violates this dictum and becomes pregnant shall be punished. The punishment most favor is to be compelled to carry to term an unwanted baby and, barring giving the infant up for adoption, the additional burden of having to care and nurture the child to adulthood. In passing, it’s worth nothing that this attitude towards women has echoes in the fundamentalist orthodoxies of all three of the world’s great religions but that’s an essay for another day.

Anti-abortionists like Trump like to wrap the noble-sounding mantle “pro-life” about their shoulders. That claim is quite simply, bullshit. If they really held humane, pro-life values it would be obvious in their larger socio-political philosophies and priorities. To be pro-life is to support Planned Parenthood’s reproductive health clinics, their STD screening programs, their birth-control advice. Instead they seek to close PP down. If you give these women easy and cheap access to birth control measures, if you clear up their STDs they’ll just go out and have sex without procreative intent.

To be pro-life is to be for pre- and post-partum medical care for women, to back paid parental leaves, support pre-school programs, advocate expanding Head Start, agitate for full funding for education, support grants for bio-medical research into genetics and the causes of infant mortality.

Conservative back none of these because they’re not pro-life. They never were. That label is a sham, a cover for a deep hatred, a dangerous misogyny. They’re anti-abortion, pure and simple, and it’s because, in their minds, the only women who would ever want an abortion were ones who violated their antiquated moral code and fucked for fun.

It’s telling that most “pro-lifers” would allow abortion in cases of rape or incest.[1] In these cases the woman didn’t have fun so she’s not guilty. 

The Guttmacher Institute studies the demographics of abortions. What the data show is that women do not use it as a birth control method, as some critics claim. It’s mothers of three who cannot afford raising another child, twenty-somethings beginning a career, naive sixteen year-olds who got a little loose and frisky at a party, wives whose husband’s condom failed, women who simply miscounted the days since their last period, college students planning on going for an MBA after graduation and on and on.

These women are the ones who are pro-life, their lives and the lives of the children they will willingly, lovingly have and raise later when they’re ready.

Flo Kennedy: “If men got pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.”

Barney Frank: “Republicans think life begins at conception and ends at birth.”

---

[1] Except for Cruz who holds a consistent, if cruel, position that abortion should always be illegal no matter the circumstances of conception.

Stopping Trump: They're Getting it Wrong

The Republican Establishment is beside itself, bewildered by the popularity of Donald Trump and seemingly impotent to stop or even slow his march toward the magical number, the 1,237 delegates needed to secure the nomination. The National Review set aside an entire issue for twenty-two “against Trump” articles written by respected conservatives. Conservative columnists David Brooks and Ross Douthat have issued passionate calls for moderates to find a path to normalcy. Prominent business leaders and political operatives have held secret meetings focused on stopping Trump. Foreign diplomats, used to a more evenly keeled US stance, have expressed dismay and hopes for more reasonable candidates to emerge. Comedians mock him; editors rail against him and respected Republicans from Karl Rove to Bruce Bartlett and Mitt Romney have castigated him.

None of it is working. Trump’s position in the polls remains the same. His rallies are as circus-like as ever, his supporters perhaps even louder and more passionate and, as we saw on Tuesday, the delegate count climbs.

The reason is simple but the standard bearers of “Classic Conservatism” who have run the GOP for decades don’t seem to have grasped it.

The core of Trump’s appeal is “anti-establishment.” Everything he says, does or claims he will do, flies in the face of standard political tenets and his supporters — who have been ignored by the Democrats, reneged on by the Republicans, neglected by the intelligentsia and mocked by the media — eat up every word.

It should come as no surprise that every time someone from the GOP’s establishment wing attacks Trump, insults him or criticizes his positions he gains. Every time a group of Republican VIPs gathers to plot ways to block his path to the nomination it reinforces his message. Every angry op-ed piece from the Times, the Washington Post or Huff Po merely tells them, yet again, that they are right. He is their champion.

There’s a reason why this is happening. Psychologists have long-known that persuasive communication depends, to a considerable extent, on the credibility of the messenger. With Trump’s supporters the credibility of all establishment figures, groups, organizations or publishing outlets is about as low as it can get — and so their appeals have zero impact.

There’s a video zipping around the Internet showing in rapid interspersed clips Trump dealing with protestors by having them thrown out of his rallies accompanied by threats of violence from Trump and snippets from Obama deftly handling those who disrupted his speeches with calm and open discussion of the issue. The anti-Trump folks praise this video. The pro-Trump crowd just laughs — they love their “tough guy” and think the president is a pussy.

But there’s another strategy. If the GOP wants to weaken his appeal they have to shift gears; the tried and true doesn’t work in this new world. They have to have the messages come from outside the establishment. To be effective they have to be delivered by those held in high esteem by Trump’s supporters. They cannot come from anyone who appears even remotely linked with the establishment — no party regulars, no university professors, no pundits, no members of Congress, no prominent bloggers.

They need to recruit business insiders who have firsthand knowledge of Trump’s suspect dealings write the op-eds, developers who were screwed over by Trump go on talk shows. Shareholders who got burned by his bankruptcies make the YouTube videos; construction workers who lost jobs to illegal immigrants on Trump projects need to take public stands; people who lost houses and jobs in Trump’s machinations appear in ads. Then do interviews with the students scammed by the phony Trump University, investors who lost money in Trump Steaks.

Each of these will introduce a glimmer of doubt. Doubt is a powerful force in hotly contested elections — hell, look how it’s damaging Hillary who should, simply on her record, be untouchable in this election.

If the GOP wants to stop Trump they’re going to have to go back to their 2004 playbook and SwiftBoat him. If they don’t and Trump gets the nomination, the Democrats will have to go down this road as well.

It’s ugly but this is an ugly time in American politics.

The GOP and the SCOTUS

Obama nominates Merrick Garland, a respected, moderate, little-bit-to-the-left judge for the open SCOTUS seat. The Turtle and crew, of course, repeat their line that they won’t even give him a hearing. They worry that the negative blow-back will hurt them in the election but are balancing that against the howls from their base which could hurt even more if they knuckled under.

Then he looks at last night’s results and a flash goes off in his tiny reptilian brain. With Trump as their nominee (or, worse, storming off to run as a third party candidate out of spite if denied) Hillary will win in a walk and the Dems will probably take back the Senate.

“Oops,” it dawns on him (finally). “she’ll nominate a serious liberal, likely a woman.” So, the back alley deal-making begins.

“Well,” the Turtle was heard to whisper this morning, “if she wins in November, we’ll confirm your guy during the lame duck session.”

You do have to give the guy some credit. He’s a nasty piece o’ work but he’s a shrewd politician. His entire career has been focused on one thing (no, it’s not governing, that never crosses his mind), winning. Everything he does is focused, laser-like on one goal: winning the next election.

I keep asking myself why he does this. Why would any decent person want to win every election when they have no plans for governing or actually doing anything of value when they get there.

It’s like my cat chasing a toy mouse. The goal is to catch it. After that, well, for both my cat and the turtle, there is no “after that.”

What a sad bunch.