What Does Knowledge Really Mean?

When talking about atheism/theism and arguing with theists, there is a lot of talk about knowledge and belief. Many atheists tend to adopt the agnostic atheist label, saying they don't believe that gods exist but also saying that they don't know for sure. This leads me to the obvious question, what do we mean when we say we know something? What is knowledge?

In a certain sense we don't know anything. I could be a brain in a vat connected to the matrix, you might not exist at all, but are merely a figment of my imagination, we could both just be a part of someone's dream. We can never be sure that some craziness like this isn't happening, in that sense we don't know anything. But this definition of knowledge isn't useful, and it's not really the way we use the word except when we talk about god or perhaps during drunk philosophical conversations (seriously, I throw great parties).

If I hold a pencil out at eye level and let go, it is possible that a glitch in the matrix will make it hover, it is possible that an alien has a tractor beam on it that will pull it to the ceiling when I let go, it is possible that god will perform a miracle and make it fly against the wall instead of toward the floor. In this sense, there are incredibly low probability things that could happen and we can't say with 100% certainty what will happen next, and yet we are all comfortable saying that we know the pencil will simply fall to the ground. Why is it that in this example everyone is perfectly happy to say they know for sure what will happen to the pencil, but when we talk about god people are so quick to fall into this "we can't know anything for sure" nonsense?

Pic Source

We all know Santa doesn't exist, we know the easter bunny doesn't exist, we know that Zeus isn't real, in all of these other examples we don't bend over backwards to quality everything. Nobody says "We can't be 100% sure where the presents under this tree came from", we all know that the parents bought them and put them there while their kids slept. I know that my parents did this when I was a kid. Nobody will take me to task for making that statement. Why is it so taboo, even among other atheists, to say that I know that God doesn't exist?

The only other wrinkle here is what is meant by a God. In these discussions people will often back up to a deist God who created the universe and then was hands off. They have a point there, in relation to that God it makes sense to be an agnostic atheist. But let's be honest, that is not the God we are usually talking about. We are talking about Yahweh, a God who knows everything, has absolute power, cares about us, and interferes in our lives. This God doesn't exist, it just doesn't make any sense.

I think for any reasonable definition of knowledge, I can safely say that I know Yahweh doesn't exist. Am I going to start calling myself a gnostic atheist? I don't know, I imagine it would cause more problems than it would solve even though I think it is accurate. I can hear it now, people would say that I now have accepted the burden of proof and have to prove that God doesn't exist. But let's think back to our examples of Santa and the easter bunny. We are all perfectly comfortable saying we know they don't exist. We are gnostic a-santa-ists, we are gnostic a-bunists, where is our burden of proof there? I imagine we are all happy with the lack of evidence where we would expect evidence to be. Why isn't that enough for yahweh?

Abortion Isn't Eugenics

I recently had a pretty annoying conversation on twitter (surprise surprise). It started with @bidenshairplugs who wrote to #atheism saying that if you are really an atheist it isn't rational to waste time arguing about it. I said that even though God isn't real belief in him causes real harm. Then @Jennyruskie decided to jump into the conversation to say that not believing in God causes worse harms and cites eugenics as evidence. I pretty much face palmed at this point, my guess actually is that she heard someone associating the Nazis with both atheism and eugenics and made the connection, of course we all know that this is ridiculous as hitler was most certainly not atheist. Anyway, I decided to simply point out that basically no one is in favor of eugenics. So she hits me with this gem.

@hausdorff80 @bidenshairplugs 50 million aborted babies beg to differ.
— Jennifur Kat (@Jennyruskie) April 2, 2013

I must say I was pretty shocked at how terrible this reply was. First of all, lets start with the fact that atheists are not getting all of the abortions. I don't have any statistics at my fingertips, but I'd be willing to bet that abortion rates are fairly constant across religious lines. But more importantly, abortion and eugenics are not the same thing. Granted, a eugenics program could include forced abortions, but those are clearly not the abortions that we are talking about here.

So what does eugenics mean? It's basically the manipulation of the gene pool in an attempt to make a better human. Usually it involves not allowing a perceived lesser group of people to breed, this could mean sterilization, forced birth control, or forced abortion. These are the kinds of actions taken by a madman trying to create a master race, not a scared teenager who doesn't want to screw up her life by having a kid that she isn't prepared to take care of. Forced is the operative word here.

pic from wikipedia

Equating eugenics and abortion is ridiculous, and connecting them to atheism shows just how dishonest these people are. But what really bothers me here is that I'm sure @Jennyruskie didn't just come up with this argument on her own, someone out there must be promoting this faulty logic. I guess when you have no logically sound argument you have to just make crap up about the other side.

Hebrews 11

Listen to the podcast below (or right click this link for the mp3 file) 

Podcast Powered By Podbean

By Faith (v. 1-40)

v1 "faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."

This is interesting, we start this chapter off with a definition of faith. I will often see Christian argue that when they talk about faith, they are not talking about blind faith, but having faith in things with good reason. This seems to disagree with that assertion, apparently faith is just being confident of things just because you hope for them. It's funny to me that Christian will often decry the idea of blind faith, when their book actually uses the phrase "things not seen". 

Not surprisingly, Guzik has issues with my interpretation. He says "faith is the 'sense' that gives us evidence of the invisible, spiritual world." I don't know what he means when he says the word 'sense', but this sounds like nonsense to me. He also quotes Bruce who says "faith is the organ which enables people to see the invisible order". Again, what the hell is he talking about when he says faith is an organ? He also says "Faith is needed for what we can’t see and can’t touch", I would argue that this is because they are imaginary. He also says "Faith does not contradict reason, though it may go beyond reason." I don't know what this means, he is just spewing a bunch of nonsense, all of these things are meaningless, he is trying to disguise the fact that faith is believing things with no good reason.

This chapter largely contains a bunch of examples of people who have faith, I want to focus on a few details contained within.

v6 "without faith it is impossible to please [God]..."

That is interesting, it is only possible to please God through faith. We can't please God because of properly knowing about him, we must have faith in him, he must be unseen to us. Does this mean that Paul did not please God? He had actual evidence (according to the story) that God existed, does that mean he didn't have faith in the way it is being discussed here?

In v13, speaking of the descendants of Abraham it says "These all died in faith, not having recieved the things promised" it goes on to say about them "they were strangers and exiles on the earth"

I have no idea what this is saying.

According to Guzik, the promise is the coming of the messiah, which they believed in and yet God hadn't fulfilled yet. That seems a reasonable enough interpretation to me.

v35-37 "...Some were tortured, refusing to accept release, so that they might rise again to a better life. Others suffered mocking and flogging, and even chains and imprisonment. They were stoned, they were sawn in two,they were killed with the sword. They went about in skins of sheep and goats, destitute, afflicted, mistreated"

but they justify this by saying that they will get what they deserve in heaven

v39-40 "And all these, though commended through their faith, did not receive what was promised, since God had provided something better for us, that apart from us they should not be made perfect."

So basically it instructs you to have faith because God will take care of you, but even if he doesn't God still wins. Why would God have to hide behind a no lose scenario?

Again, Guzik claims that this promise was the messiah coming. This does seem to make sense, as it explains the "something better for us" bit there.

For the overview post (If you think I should add or remove stuff from this list please let me know, I think it would make good conversation)

Bad:

11:1 When the bible says faith, it means blind faith

"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen."

What do you mean by 'create'?

Yesterday I was poking around youtube and stumbled across this video which prompted a blog post. There are some apologetics which refer to things being created and it addresses mundane things being created as well as the universe being created. As pointed out by the video, the creation of something like a table, and the creation of the universe are very different things, and not just because of the scale.

Let's look at what happens when you create a table? At first, there is no table, but you have a pile of materials, you have wood, glue, screws, or whatever. When you put the materials together you have 'created' the table. There was no table and now there is. What you have really done is reorganize some matter that was already there and we have a particular name for the configuration that you ended with. This is true for everything that we can create, be it a car, a house, or a person. With a person you don't have a 'pile of materials', but you are reorganizing materials just the same.

Now, consider the creation of the universe. The claim is that there was nothing, then God created the universe. God created all of the matter that there is out of nothing. He did not take some stuff and turn it into the universe, he started with no stuff, and then blinked the universe into existence.

Notice that we are really using the word 'create' in 2 very different ways. In one way, we are taking matter and rearranging it, in the other way, God is starting with nothing and making matter appear. These are very different things and we probably shouldn't even be using the same word for it. At the very least, I would argue that any intuition we have about things that we can create should have no bearing on the creation of the universe from nothing.

Definition: Supernatural

In a recent post in the comments of another blog, I was accused of being biased against the supernatural. My first thought was to question whether or not this was supposed to be an insult. Why yes, I am biased against the supernatural, I don't believe that the supernatural exists.

But then I was wondering if we were really communicating properly, I wonder if we all think of the same thing when we hear the word "supernatural". I think we can all come up examples, things that we would consider supernatural "God, ghosts, magic", but what exactly does it take for something to be considered supernatural? I think it basically means something that we perceive to be unexplainable.

Let's take magic, which we currently would consider to be supernatural, and suppose it were real. There would presumably be some rules by which that magic operates. There is potentially some energy that most of us cannot detect, but magic users could sense and somehow gather. They can then channel this energy and use it to create fireballs or whatever. Perhaps there is a certain amount of time it takes to rebuild this energy, perhaps they can only build up so much at a time, perhaps they have to go to certain places where the energy is plentiful.  The specifics don't matter, the point is, there are some rules which govern the way this magic works. If we could create the correct diagnostic tools we should be able to figure out how it works. Suppose we were able to peel back this curtain, would we still call it supernatural?

But this example is silly, as far as we can tell, magic as I have described doesn't exist. But let's think about how this has played out in the past. What happens when we get sick? Clearly there is some supernatural entity that has caused the sickness. We are possessed by demons, or evil spirits, or God is upset with us. We can see that people are getting sick, but we don't know why. I wonder if people in those times would have thought that sickness itself was supernatural. Obviously we know that there is really some microscopic thing that was causing the sickness, but the people of the time had no way of detecting them.

So am I biased against the supernatural? absolutely! Do I think ghosts are real? Nope. What if ghosts did turn out to be real? Would we say they are supernatural? Probably. But what does that really mean? I think it mostly means that they are just very mysterious and poorly understood. If we learned a lot about them I bet they would stop being called supernatural after a while.

Definitions: Miracle

A few recent discussions have gotten me thinking about the meaning of the word 'miracle'. Like many words, we all have some intuitive sense of what we mean when we say it, but actually nailing down a definition can be hard. Does miracle mean something that happened that is great and unexpected? Does it mean something that is incredibly unlikely? Does it just mean that God did it?

Let's think about miracles using the definition of divine intervention. To me, this is a strange definition as it requires the belief in God as an assumption. I have not seen any good reason to think God exists, and therefore by necessity, I don't think miracles are real either. You can't use miracles to prove that God exists, because if I accept that it is a miracle I have already accepted that God exists. But I think that misses the point of what is being said a bit, it is also something amazing that we can't explain without God. Let me try to explain my point with an example.

Suppose I have been in some accident and my right arm has been amputated. Then one day I wake up and overnight my arm has grown back. We would all probably call it a miracle, some colloquially, some would use it as evidence that their God exists. What is really being said is that we don't understand how this thing happened, I guess God is real. What if it turned out that some aliens had come to earth and they did it using unimaginably advanced technology. Maybe they abducted me overnight to study us and fixed my arm as an afterthought. Is it still a miracle? I would say no if the definition of miracle hinges on the fact that God did it. Now, what if those aliens never made themselves known. What if they were passing by, abducted me overnight, healed my arm, then decided humans suck and kept going without ever telling us they were here. In this situation, we can see that a miracle never occurred while the people of that reality would say one did. They will never have enough information to conclude that a miracle didn't occur, they will always think that God did it, but they will be wrong.

The idea of a miracle is poorly defined and impossible to prove. The parameters of a miracle require that we have a lack of knowledge, which means as we learn, things that were once miracles will be reclassified. As long as 'miracle' is poorly defined it is useless, people who already believe in them will call some things miracles while people who don't believe in God can easily say there are no miracles.