An Inexhaustive, Scatterbrained Post on Atheism and Science Fiction

Necessary inventions.
January 24, 2012

Only non-believers believe in atoms.

I’ve thought before that, sociologically speaking, people look to attribute God’s qualities to other phenomena, like the universe, politics, aesthetics/art, or science. People much smarter than me have undoubtedly come across this before, like Voltaire when he said that if God didn’t exist it would be necessary to invent him.

I like that quote because it can stoke paranoid atheist fervor and gets religious people who are too stupid to entertain hypotheticals in a huffy, but the ingenious thing is that it’s an assertion, not an opinion. If someone doesn’t believe in God, then either because of our sensus divinitatis or because of humanity has been culturally entrenched with religious belief, the non-believer has to find the qualities of the divine we “sense” epistemically and apply them to something else. It’s not just a new morality from the demise of Christianity that Nietzsche described that we can reconstruct. It can be everything else.

The archetypal elements of all religions—flawed human existence, salvation, eternal life, a transcendant being—leak out and find their way into the cracks of some other construct. The more religion-minded of us might apply it to the atheism of Buddhism while the more secularized of us have an array of choices, one them being scientism.

Idolizing unscientific phenomena—even the morality found in natural law, if it impedes advancement—is mortal sin, religion is the devil, the apotheosis of the human soul (the Judeo-Christian soul or the classical Greek version, it’s sometimes hard to tell) is reached through arcane hypercomputerization, academics are the priests and the classroom is the temple. The paradox of induction, the dilemma of direct and indirect realism, for starters, which are written into the scientific method are articles of faith for scientists.

Just read Clarke’s Odyessey series, or Ghost in the Shell, Asimov, Disch, Ellison, Heinlein, Wells. I haven’t touched all of those but what I have so far is very telling.

For further, more organized, reading:
Atheism and Science Fiction at the Science Fiction Observer
Science fiction author asks, why are atheists who write space operas supposed to know best whether God exists? at Uncommon Descent
Does reading science fiction predispose people to atheism? at Wintery Knight
Why Reading Fiction Should Matter to Atheists at Friendly Atheist
Richard Dawkins Is Killing SF! at Jack of Ravens

Atom doodle by tonybaize.

A Very Clear Post About the Definition of Religious Faith

Undefinitive.
January 16, 2012

"Knowledge? Alls I know is that I'm skeptical of it."

Whenever you want to get a lot of response from religious people, ask something basic yet broadly-defined and colored by perspective. At the Christian Libertarians group on facebook, someone asked what faith was. The responses were varied as you’d expect with such a word with varied usage. I was surprised there wasn’t the guy that said, “Anything other than what the Bible says is wrong!”, but if you read carefully someone came close.

Here was my response to the question:

‎”Faith” is any a priori proposition, something we use as a premise for inferences. Other people have mentioned something similar. “Religious faith” is an assumption about truth concerning the supernatural, i.e., “God exists”, “God is a blue octopus”, or “God doesn’t exist”.

Usually these assumptions cannot be proofed true or false (else they would be conclusions and not assumptions); they are subject to a rational actor’s internal epistemological workings and not demonstrable.

Of course, now I that I read it, I’m second guessing it. Religious faith can be demonstrably true or false but that is dependent on another actor’s “internal epistemological workings”. Person A can demonstrate—through, say, the presentation of evidence via reliable authority—that a defeating belief for Person’s B belief in God is wrong. To wit, if Person B disbelieves in God primarily because they believe Christians killed millions of witches in the Medieval period, though it is a non-sequitur, Person B might come to a belief if Person A presents them with evidence by authority that the “9 million women” belief is out-of-this-world untrue.

In this scenario, Person A isn’t dissolving a belief about God and replacing it with another belief about God, Person A is removing a barrier to further epistemic action such that Person B, believing God doesn’t exist because of an historical mass murder, is now able to exercise better epistemic due diligence concerning God’s existence.

I still somewhat maintain, as Plantinga does, that beliefs about God—any belief save for maybe strong agnosticism— is a priori, like sense perception or the rules of logic, unable to be arrived to rationally (or scientifically, if you really want to shoehorn the religion vs. science dichotomy). In this way, most beliefs about God are unscientific* yet not in the way skeptics like to frame the debate.

*An interesting note about unscientific belief. 99% of what we believe about what science has taught humanity is taken a priori (faithfully), via the reliable authority of scientists and journalists. Unless we do the (instrument aided) sense perception and inductive logic** that entails experiments ourselves, reliable authority is as close as we’ll ever be.

**Don’t forget Hume’s infamous problem of induction, a further element of faith involved with knowledge brought about by the scientific method.

More on Alien Invasions, Moron Alien Invasions

Estupido.
January 10, 2012

Almost a year ago I posted about the typical alien invasion scenario one sees in sci-fi books and films, and how those scenarios were unlikely versus possible non-coercive interactions. In a Stefan Molyneux speech I was listening to the other day I was surprised to hear him mention it, though it was only as an aside. Below, he starts in on it at the 0:28:02 mark.

The thinking is sound but I actually think he is a little bit off. If the aliens do have interstellar travel their government could still have some presence on arrival because their state could just appropriate (steal) the privately-developed technology. I don’t think that a state-controlled ship would necessarily instigate war but the likelihood is far greater than if it was commerce-controlled.

It’s pretty simple. Assuming the aliens have a similar psychology and preferences as we do, violence isn’t just going happen because Civilization A meets Civilization B. Think of it this way: if you’re anything like me—and let’s hope you’re not—you simply don’t go about destroying weaker things you come across, just because you come across them, and we don’t go stealing property that isn’t ours. It just doesn’t happen, or happens very rarely, and even without the state there will be repercussions. If I come across Widget A and I believe it will sate a preference of mine, coercive methods of acquiring Widget A are going to be at the bottom of the list for many reasons.

Of course, the paradox here is powerful: fiction is inherently about the unusual, with science fiction more so, and if we are expecting a sci-fi scenario to play out in real life all we have to rely on are our expectations, which have been conditioned by sci-fi itself. If we’re relying on that we’re going to expect what’s not likely to happen at all.

A Dead Italian Philosopher Says You Can’t Finish a Novel

Halfway.
January 5, 2012

If Zeno's not in hell because of this, I will put him there.

One way struggling artists assuage a stunted career is to summon da Vinci Leonardo’s “art isn’t completed but abandoned” quote. Its dogged overuse has erased its profundity and replaced it with irritation as it’s thrown in with other quotes on facebook profiles to justify unwanted, and sometimes unacceptable, behavior.

But I’d like to take it a step back and refer critics of a writer’s perpetual works in progress to Zeno and his dichotomy paradox. In this application, novels aren’t abandoned because of some self-destructive unworkability with the plot or because the writer over-affects the tortured artist sensibility; it’s because novels cannot be finished, even published ones. Before all its intended words are written, half of the words must be written. And before that half, half of that, ad infinitum. Not to mention that when it needs to be edited it also needs to be edited halfway…

Therefore, no novels really exist; they’re just partial transcripts of narratives left on the side of the road that just happened to catch the eye of an agent in need of a paycheck. This situation is actually better for aspiring writers…you’re undoubtedly lazy, incompetent, and uninspired, but those aren’t the reasons you work in progress suffers from crippling incompletion. You’re just up against an insurmountable roadblock of ontology. And you don’t need to be an artist to experience the infuriating sadism of self-appointed tasks in artistry.

So, next time a family member ask how far along your novel is, the correct answer, categorically, is “nearly halfway”. Any other response is really giving Zeno the middle finger.

Annual “Click All My Amazon Affiliate Links” Post, 2011 Version

Click and win.
December 30, 2011

2011 was a mostly-arbitrary division of time just like any other, but things happened within that duration in my life that are worth noting. My son got borned in August and I got canned from Noisecreep in the Great AOL/HuffPurge. On the literary side I released Bored in the Breakroom as a free e-book (rave reviews on amazon!) and the short story A Native’s Story real-book.

And in the interest of being an amazon.com affiliate, here are some links to favorite books I read during the year and albums that were released. I won’t deceive you like other bloggers and their multi-post hoo-haa year end link projectile vomiting: this is purely for amazon click-throughs, and because I need a quick break from Retardo Montalbán.

Behold…then pour cheap midnight wine into your bloodstream in celebration of a mechanical ball succumbing to gravity.

Books:
The Complete Collection – H.P. Lovecraft
Halo: First Strike – Eric Nylund
All Quiet on the Western Front – Erich Maria Remarque
Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales – Ray Bradbury
Batman: The Dark Knight Returns – Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, Lynn Varley
Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451: The Authorized Adaptation – Ray Bradbury, Tim Hamilton
2001: A Space Odyssey – Arthur C. Clarke
2010: Odyssey Two – Arthur C. Clarke
The Man Who Was Thursday – G.K. Chesterton
Franz Kafka: The Complete Stories – Franz Kafka

Music:
10. Animals as Leaders – Weightless
09. Death – The Sound of Perseverance reissue
08. Deadlock – Bizarro World
07. Demon Hunter – Death: A Destination
06. Death – Individual Thought Patterns reissue
05. iwrestledabearonce – Ruining It For Everybody
04. Death – Human reissue
03. Born of Osiris – The Discovery
02. Life On Repeat – Struggle & Sleep
01. Life In Your Way – Kingdoms (download for free)

I Used To Write Her

But I Had To Delete Her.
December 23, 2011

Merry Christmas, work in progress. You've been bad.

Like someone else in a similar position recently posted, I’ve decided to suspend A Season Underneath indefinitely. The reasons are legion, but the biggest is that I am on my fourth rewrite and it doesn’t seem to be getting a whole lot better. The chapters are just sort of there, with no real story to bite down on. I can’t imagine anyone really liking it, but that might be because I’ve been looking at it for a while now.

I actually don’t mind doing this. The first draft was an elephant gun misfiring at a mosquito. Awful-awful. After a few rewrites most people would have moved on to something else but I kept at it, so I am where I am now because of undue persistence.

It’s a common thing to not have one’s first manuscript published because your first (and sometimes subsequent) book are too horrendous for exhibition. Even established short story writers can’t/won’t bother with their first novel because it’s a beast many tentacles to hack off and a greenhorn novelist doesn’t have an intellectual axe big enough to handle it. They finish it but it sits somewhere on a shelf or hard drive somewhere while the second novel, if the writer hasn’t offed themselves yet to get it done, gets more traction with agents.

So with that I’m starting a new manuscript with the nickname Retardo Montalbán (please, PC language police, find a more worthy cause). It will be soft/social sci-fi, alternate history, not really dystopian, with a sort of Luddite-libertarian feel…no damnable vampire love triangles, wizards, fairy tale characters in real life, hyperdrive shunts, or anything occurring in the year 1,000,000,000 AD. It’s a story with people who do and think things and set things into motion, not a bestiary of gimmicks.

So, birth/death, a new year, and all that jazz. Krampus will be pleased with me.

Photo by riptheskull.

A Post Where I Feature a Comment I Made About Car Accidents

Self-absorbed.
December 19, 2011

The beginning of something great.

Writers love to hi-five each other with permalinks instead of dollar bills in our hands, then we return to our dens and badmouth others’ sentence structures and word choice into half-empty coffee mugs. This post is different because I’m referencing a comment that I made and liked, posted on someone else’s site. Mike Duran’s blog will remain nameless but I will still speak ill of my own talent because it’s not hard to do.

Good writing is like car accidents. The writer constructs a scene of metal and glass and bodies gone wrong. There are certain brute facts about it, and as the god of the book’s universe the writer knows them all, but everyone who sees the accident, the readers, witnesses those brute facts different. Writers do a disservice to their readers when they hammer every detail out in plain language, leaving no room for engagement.

Readers should be confused enough about the violence of your story to need to think about how not to be confused, but not so much that they believe the effort is not worth the return. For people that see books as a drug fix while in between reality show seasons will not understand this—having to do thinky things while reading? That’s for like, school—but that might be preferable to being told the backstory of the auto industry or worse yet, how we should think of and feel about the accident.

Photo by the Seattle Municipal Archives.

It Was a Pleasure to Read

First line.
December 16, 2011

Further Thoughts on God and Trans-World Moral Agency

Just skip this and tweet about Tim Tebow.
December 14, 2011

Images from a "trans-world moral agency" search. I take it to mean processed carbs are an element of a depraved universe.

I posted about the problem of evil about a month ago, and I had some further ideas related to it.

  1. God created at least one physical universe with moral agency (axiomatic).
  2. God created the angels with moral agency (2 Peter 2:4, Jude 6).
  3. God would be omniscient enough to know when his preference for moral agency-creation would be sated, or he is never sated with the creation of moral agencies in universes.
  4. God has no reason to not fulfill his preferences maximally.
  5. Only God is the only perfect moral agent (or, all moral agents are imperfect creations absolutely).
  6. Imperfect moral agents will eventually choose depravity at least once.
  7. Therefore, he seems to prefer moral agency more than moral automata (1 and 2).
  8. Therefore, every universe created would contain at least one type of moral agent, or, no universe would be created with only moral automata (3,4,7).
  9. Therefore, every universe created would experience depravity (5,6,8).

In a nutshell, if God prefers moral agency in one instance, and assuming he has enough power and knowledge (I don’t think he has to be omni-propertied) to know his own preferences and is able to fill them, he would prefer moral agency creation with every creation “session”.

I was hesitant about proposition 2 because the creation of angels isn’t really a universe creation, although the creation of hell may be seen as that. I included it to bolster the idea of God preferring moral agency. Hell’s depravity is pretty much axiomatic, but maybe not in the same sense that our universe, or any universe with moral-agency-depravity, would be. Christ saw it fit to redeem our universe and though Revelation has Satan unrepentant for eternity it doesn’t say there wasn’t some sort of plan in place to redeem him that he ultimately rejected, and I don’t think there’s anything mentioning the other fallen angels.

Homework: barring verses to the contrary, other universes are at least not likely and I might say they are more than likely given statement 4. If so, what would trans-world redemption look like?

Something To Get Mad About For A Few Minutes

There's probably a football game on or something.
December 11, 2011

An interesting image of dubious accuracy that has popped up many times in my facebook feed the last week. The origin might be here, but a website with a domain name like that might not be the best source for statistics.

Some may cluck their tongues at America’s unfettered capitalism but it’s really a result of corporatism that the ratio is so drastic. Instead of the mass of consumers deciding who wins and loses, CEOs that win the auction for regulatory power would naturally reap the monetary benefits that they would have to actually work for otherwise.

In a truly free market, America’s ratio listed here would actually indicate a healthy division of labor. It would mean the poorest of the poor are entering the market and driving that ratio further apart. With something as simple as minimum wage laws in place this would never happen, and so the poorest (usually teenagers) find it harder to secure employment.

Don’t expect this to be remedied soon, or rather, don’t expect the reasons for the ratio to change anytime soon. Increased regulation is a sexy prospect for some voters and politicians love the job security.