Spent some time in a waiting room this morning (it is a beautiful day here, btw), and while there I read the Jan/Feb edition of the AARP magazine, which had an interesting piece on miracles. There was a religious bit to it, which I won’t discuss, because my thoughts on that sort of thing are pretty well known and just piss people off, but one portion of the piece was the best description of statistics using common language that I have seen in a long while:
Consider the survey results: of those who believe in miracles, 84 percent say they happen because of God. About three quarters further identify Jesus and the Holy Spirit as sources of miracles, while lesser numbers attribute them to angels (47 percent), saints (32 percent), deceased relatives or others who have passed on (19 percent), and other spirits (18 percent).
So what’s going on? Wouldn’t the Creator of the universe have better things to tend to than pulling off the occasional miracle? It depends, of course, on whom you ask.
To a scientist, events that many would consider miracles are not only explainable, they’re inevitable—because in a universe of nearly infinite possibilities, outrageously unexpected things have to happen at least occasionally.
“The Law of Large Numbers shows that an event with a low probability of occurrence in a small number of trials has a high probability of occurrence in a large number of trials,” says Scientific American columnist Michael Shermer, author of Why People Believe Weird Things (W.H. Freeman, revised, 2002). “Events with a million-to-one odds happen 295 times a day in America.”
Enough with the miracles, and on to the sacrilege. Was it really necessary for someone to remake Drive by the Cars
BTW- get used to conspicuous product placement such as the link above. At least I am not asking you to send silly putty to Nancy Pelosi.
Media Browski
The number of Christians who believe in heresies to their own religion (ones that bloody wars were fought over) never ceases to amaze me.
And now I refer you to the guy who’s been hit by lightning 3 times in Florida, and multiple lottery winners as examples of "Outliers happen, especially when they’re not really outliers."
Zifnab
Why are miracles always good things? What about the guy that gets hit by a bus after picking up a big job? Or the man who trips and falls on top of his hunting knife in the wilderness? Or the perfectly healthy young girl that suddenly and inexplicably develops malignant brain cancer?
Does God even get credit for these or what?
Punchy
edited for my own stupidity
Dave
@Zifnab:
Maybe God is running a revenue-neutral Earth. Gotta keep the balance and all.
The Grand Panjandrum
The explanation of the Law of Large Numbers is easiest understood when explained in plain language. (As above) On more than one occasion I have explained it this way:
Take the lottery. Most of them have extremely low probabilities that any one ticket will win. Your odds are somewhere in the 1:175 million area. So purchasing 100 tries each drawing does not in any significant way increase your chance of winning. As a matter of fact they are still very close to zero. However, when 10’s of millions of tickets are sold for a particular drawing it is much more likely that someone will have a winning ticket.
Doing simple counting problems and calculating probabilities can be counter intuitive to those who don’t understand the underlying mathematics.
Punchy
I have this book, and HIGHLY recommend it. The author is a world-class athlete turned hard, hard, hard-core science guy.
NonyNony
Why? Most Christians don’t understand their own religion, let alone know the history of it. They generally just listen to what their preachers tell them and move on.
And in a lot of non-denominational evangelical churches, even the goddamn preacher doesn’t understand the historical basis of the religion he’s preaching. The "nice" thing about American-style evangelism is that any fool who can quote from the Bible can start his own church if he can convince a bunch of people that his interpretation is the right one. That means that you often end up with incoherent and inconsistent drivel as far as theology goes because they’re basically making it up as they go along. (Which is also why those churches tend to fall apart once the charismatic preacher dies or retires and tries to pass his legacy on to his children.)
former capitalist
Why am I three threads behind in commenting this morning?
I must admit to being old enough to receive the AARP magazine. I try to throw it away the moment it shows up in the mailbox, but my SO likes the articles. In fact she dug it out of the trash this morning and then chewed me out for it. I, on the hand, find the articles to be amatuerish and boring, with topics usually directed toward meaningless shit that’s not going to piss anybody off. Like, for example, miracles. Which makes sense when you consider the advertisers.
"Dustin Hoffman tells all about what he wants to discuss with God". Holy shit batman, who effing cares.
Comrade Kevin
@Punchy:
Yes, I agree, it is a very good book. Some of the stuff he has written about his days as a super-long-distance cyclist are pretty scary, too.
How We Believe is another good one by him.
OniHanzo
@Zifnab:
Ah the Super Bowl God. If he’s leading someone to victory, he’s fucking laying boils and plagues on somebody else. He picks one political party, one ideology, one country over another and blows hot winds and flat tires at his enemies.
Probably has a brand of peanut butter he prefers above all others.
slag
It hurts my brain to know that this fact even requires explanation. My psychic once told me that we have another 8 generations to go before 75% of people understand the difference between mysticism and science.
Conservatively Liberal
I believe in miracles, but only because of the stupid people who believe in them. For example, the fact that Bush won a second term showed me that stupid people that believe in miracles can make miracles happen.
My motto in life? Good or bad, shit happens.
Zifnab
@NonyNony:
Some folks would call such an organization a "cult". But that would be silly. They’re Christians! Hurray!
TheHatOnMyCat
Exactly, and you would be amazed at how many people just don’t have a clue what the signifigance of that number is.
But that aside, the thing about "miracles" that gets me is, the narrowness of them. So a miracle saves a family. Another miracle could save a million families. Why not have the bigger one? A few of those could save the world.
Also, I have a hard time with the miracle of smallpox, and cleft palate, and AIDS. These little miracles prop up a worldwide theater of human suffering and death that boggles the mind. Maybe these "miracles" could be reexamined by that supposedly loving god?
Just a fucking suggestion.
Laura W
I prefer synchronicity. (Not by The Police, in lieu of miracles.)
Drive? Favorite Cars Song Ever.
Predictably.
(I’m gonna play that CD right now. Crappy day, rainy, no energy.)
Keith
Shorter John Cole: "Terri Schiavo had a chance to get up and walk, so George W. Bush was proved f’n right" ;)
The Other Steve
When I start reading AARP magazine, I will know that my life is over.
former capitalist
@NonyNony: Oh boy, no kidding. There’s a nutball independent Baptist Church here in town. Not too long ago, as I’m told, the preacher jumped up on the back of a couple of pews and yelled, "we’ve to stop these queers".
The shit that they put on their digital sign is friggin’ ridiculous; it’s almost funny. Sometimes, though, it gets the temperature correct.
And I just love all the blue denim, ankle length skirts the women are required to wear.
The Other Steve
A MIRACLE!
Brett Favre has announced his retirement again.
ricky
Most of the miracles I have witnessed have involved "other spirits." After consuming said spirits, many of my acquaintances miraculously surivived.
Napoleon
@Punchy:
I have it too, but have never read it.
TheHatOnMyCat
Oh no. It’s over when you start reading True Story En Espanol.
The Other Steve
BTW… the talk from Israel today is that a Parliamentary system of government is unsustainable and they want something more like the US system where there is a clear winner.
Just think it’s ironic to all those who call for proportional representation here in the US. This must be another Miracle. :-)
Michael D.
Speaking of what would have been a miracle. This, from The Onion
Xenos
The question is whether people generally can function without the hope of miracles. I doubt they can. So it can be a useful fiction to keep many of us sane, as long as it does not get out of hand.
Tsulagi
@Zifnab:
Damn lefty atheist, everyone one knows God does the good stuff and the Devil does the bad.
Generous churchgoer guy finds he has the winning Powerball ticket then hyperventilates suffering a fatal heart attack, the Devil did it.
A brilliant RSSFer misreads Commander E.E.’s tactical plan then cuts off and sends his own balls, the Devil…Okay, God did that one.
demimondian
The real question is this: "Gravity: miracle, or the biggest miracle."
gnomedad
I would vote to bring back the Fairness Doctrine if it required TV news to interview proportionate numbers of lottery losers as well as winners.
Dave
Maybe the Law of Averages is the vehicle God uses to perform miracles…
Just throwing it out there. Who is to say that God couldn’t be a hard-core math lover? Fibonacci sequences in nature, anyone?
Indylib
@NonyNony:
That’s how I ended up agnostic. I grew up in a non-churchgoing vaguely Christian household and when I started to get interested in figuring out what religion was all about I read books (other than the bible) and took classes in college. My personal experience of trying to answer my questions through intellectual means instead of spiritual ones resulted in seeing Christianity and other modern religions as on par with Greek mythology.
Mark
I hate to pick nits, but I’m a little disappointed that a columnist for Scientific American could make some pretty sloppy mistakes in his writing.
The probability of an occurrence does not change depending on the size of the trial. It’s the number of occurrences that changes.
Also, in the last sentence, I assume he uses the number 295 million because that’s roughly the population of the U.S. But if you consider the enormous number of events that occur in each of our lives every day, far more than 295 million events with a million-to-one probability occur every day in this country.
The Moar You Know
@The Other Steve: I will fall down on my knees and thank the God I don’t believe in that this self-absorbed pill-popping drunk has finally decided to call it quits, at least until he realizes that he’s out of OxyContin and can’t afford the refill.
djork
Isn’t this an Alanis Morrisette song?
NonWonderDog
@Mark:
No, I think the number sounds about right. Million-to-one shots succeed nine times out of ten, remember; you’ve just got to get the probabilities right. 1,000,010-to-one won’t cut it.
Dork
/reads this
//grins
///searches intertubes for "Frieda Pinto’s phone number"
Steeplejack
John Cole @ top:
I loves me some "Heartbeat City." Best Cars song evah.
Had to play the Amazon snippet over and over because I can’t find the damn CD.
MBunge
"But that aside, the thing about "miracles" that gets me is, the narrowness of them. So a miracle saves a family. Another miracle could save a million families. Why not have the bigger one? A few of those could save the world."
Wow! That’s so insightful! It’s not like theologians have spent centuries thinking, speaking and writing about that subject. And it’s not at all like you could explain it with a simple statement like "If God does stuff like that, free will ceases to exist". Man, we really need to get you on Oprah to enlighten the masses!
Mike
Svensker
And to think you could have stimulated the economy. Dang.
Brett Favre is retiring from the Jets. A miracle, indeed! And w00t!
slag
@Mark:
Good point. But then, we’re getting into defining what we think of when we use the word "event", which isn’t easy to do.
headpan
Hey, remember back in the day, when we were all gonna send her a table?
Oh, oops, that was a different website, I think.
SGEW
I always wondered about this . . .
Is any regular B-J reader/commenter actually religious?
I never seem to find anyone who owns up to being a sincere faithful believer, except on blogs that are explicitly religious. We can’t all be ardent atheists/apatheists/deists/agnostics, right?
I mean, the odds are against it ;)
The Moar You Know
@Steeplejack: The Cars – Greatest Hits (the 1985 version, not the 2002 version) has it.
headpan
Can we just re-name the republican party the "No One Could Have Anticipated [insert fuck-up here] Party"?
NonyNony
@Zifnab:
Yeah, basically. The line between "cult" and "religion" is a subtle one to begin with – especially since a number of mainstream religions started out as what we’d call "cults" today. A lot of the non-denominational, evangelical churches tend to cross that line and then jump up and down all over it. And then ask for money.
But hey, we have freedom of religion in this country. So as long as there isn’t criminal activity going on, I’m not going to try to tell them to stop. I may laugh at them, but I won’t tell them to stop. And that goes for any cult – even the Christian ones.
MBunge
I suppose somebody should point out that the Law of Large Numbers doesn’t actually explain why incredibly rare and seemingly impossible events happen. It doesn’t explain how they happen. It simple explains that they do, in fact, happen. So, it’s value as an "Ah ha! Religion IS stupid!" arugment is somewhat limited.
Mike
The Moar You Know
@SGEW: A poll might be entertaining. I’m some weird breed of agnostic, in that I’ve never witnessed, seen or heard any evidence that God exists, but am willing to be proven wrong.
Tonal Crow
(cancelled).
Dave
@SGEW:
I am.
Steeplejack
@The Moar You Know:
Thanks, I know. I just can’t find my copy of the CD because of the chaos that is my work area right now.
Did find the Buddy Miles classic Them Changes (1970). Might have to roll with that. Killer versions of the Allman Brothers’ "Dreams" and Neil Young’s "Down by the River."
The Moar You Know
@MBunge: No one is making the argument that religion is stupid; it simply doesn’t provide anyone with tools to solve real-world problems.
Fencedude
@The Moar You Know:
I’m perfectly willing to entertain the possibility myself, but if there is a god (or gods) I hope they’re the fun pagan kind.
Monotheistic gods are just so stuffy.
gil mann
And they’ve still got nothing to show for all that work? Jeez. They’re practiically economists.
headpan
I am what you might call a non-traditional Christian and I have studied the religion in historical context. Depends on what your definition of "religious" is, I guess. Just being a Christian on here, I am sure I am quite the minority, but that’s fine – I live in an area teaming with hypocritical fundies who refuse to educate themselves on any issues beyond what their "preachah" tells them, so it’s a comfort to know there are others out there who can think for themselves, be they religious or not.
Svensker
@SGEW:
I am, too, in a squirrely liberal Quaker doubting Thomas kind of way. But mostly yes.
headpan
Fundies have an obsession with having a "personal relationship with God." It’s basically all about them. No emphasis on helping one’s fellow man, those less fortunate than you, UNLESS, you get a conversion out of them.
Michael D.
@SGEW:
I once made a mocking comment about the god here one day and really got an earful. So yes, there are definitely religious people here.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
@SGEW:
I’m religious. But I’ve learned to stay out of these threads, because otherwise 25 people who agree with me on every other subject call me an idiot for disagreeing with them on this one.
It’s not a very insightful discussion anyway- it’s not like someone is really going to make some mind-blowing point that I haven’t thought of and rejected myself, or that I’m going to do that for them. Most of us have probably figured out what we believe in at this point in our lives, and if someone hasn’t you still have to give them the benefit of the doubt that they’re content with what they believe at the moment.
Beliefs are beliefs, and don’t have to be based on reason; while it’s no doubt very entertaining to ridicule others for believing in metaphysical possibilities that can neither be proven nor disproven by physical methods, I personally don’t find it either polite or interesting to do so, and I’m pretty sick of the discussion. I would go so far as to call it "intolerant" around here, on occasion (not this thread, not yet anyway), but I’m sure the people calling me an idiot for believing in God will also call me an idiot for calling them intolerant for telling me I’m an idiot for believing in God.
And that’s all I’d care to say about the topic. There are plenty of religious commenters around here, but we’ve mostly learned to shut up about it. Speaking of which, I’ll shut up now. Flame away.
Tonal Crow
@Mark
That depends entirely upon how you define "occurrence", which is, in any case, a confusing term. I much prefer the term "event". Thus, P of the event "any single coin toss is heads" does not change depending upon the number of trials, but P of the event "any coin toss so far is heads" certainly depends upon the number of trials.
Agreed. That was very sloppy.
Feebog
My Grandson completed his math homework two days in a row. Now thats a miracle.
Dave
@SGEW:
To expand on my original answer:
I am, but in a syncretic manner. I believe in God, but I also believe that God can be worshiped in infinite fashions. Christianity works for some (like myself), Islam for others and so forth. I have always found it strange when people who believe in God, who marvel at the infinite variety of the Universe and see it as His work, think that He can be worshiped in only one way.
And I use "He" just for convenience, btw
r€nato
well see, that’s where you went astray. You’re supposed to just check your brain at the door on your way into the church, listen to what the man with the collar tells you and if you have any doubts, shut the fuck up.
r€nato
Well, Dave, I’d say Richard Dawkins thinks you’re a pussy ;-)
Your conception of God is so vague as to be all but meaningless.
Svensker
@r€nato:
Making Snuffy’s point for him beautifully.
:)
Bootlegger
@The Moar You Know: Then you must be a scientist. I "came out" as an atheist a few years ago, but if this computer monitor suddenly burst into flame, without burning, and a voice started talking to me about leading the Balloon Juice posters out of the wilderness, after checking that a) my grad students weren’t playing some cool joke on me, and b) Balloon Juice posters weren’t playing some cruel joke on me and c) I was having a flashback to my acid days, then I might actually believe in a god. Of course if god appeared as Morgan Freeman or George Burns it would be more believable.
Indylib
@r€nato: lol
Not likely, I fucking intellectualize everything. Drives my husband nuts.
Calouste
@The Other Steve:
Proportional representation is not a requirement for a Parliamentary system. There are many countries that have a Parliamentary system but no or limited proportional representation, Great Britain being the obvious example.
But what kind of "clear winner in the US" system are they looking for? The Florida 2000 or the Minnesota 2008 version?
r€nato
not really. If a religion has enough adherents and money and power, it’s a religion.
If it has few adherents, it’s a cult.
Bootlegger
@Feebog: My sons picked up their toys after being told only once and I about dropped dead from that miracle.
amorphous
@demimondian: You know what, that’s deeper than maybe you were aiming for. Maybe this is an aside, but if all of these people who believe in miracles or creationism or whatever took a fucking moment to look at the science and see how unbelievably complex and perfect (for life) the universe is, I would have a hard time believing they wouldn’t see God in science, too. I doubt any of them have ever heard of the fine structure constant, much less have any understanding about the ramifications of changes to it or other things we know about the universe, but if they did, and if they wanted to tell me that God essentially "programmed" the universe, then I think I could get along with them much better… so long as they don’t think it was "programmed" 6,000 years ago.
Goddammit, they make me so mad. Hellooooo religious nutcases, your God would become even more amazing to you if you actually understood the way things work.
I’m not even sure if this comment makes sense, I’m raging so hard.
Laura W
@Steeplejack:
Speaking of…I got Under the Covers (Matthew Sweet and Susanna Hoffs – rec. by TBogg, I think?)…really good versions of Cinnamon Girl and Everybody Knows this is Nowhere.
Screamin' Demon
I think the larger question here is, who the hell cares? Everything after Candy-O carries the stench of sell-out.
r€nato
I went through several permutations of belief over the course of my life, until I finally figured out that praying is just talking to yourself and it solves nothing. If you want something to change in your life, take action; don’t talk to yourself and hope for the best.
Kurt Warner didn’t take the Cards to the Super Bowl because God willed it; he (and Fitzgerald, and Whisenhunt, and…) led them there because he is a skilled and talented athlete.
If Kurt’s faith in God did him any good, it provided the inspiration and confidence he needed to succeed. But that did not come from God; it came from manipulating the psychology of his own mind using the tool of religious belief.
r€nato
(deleted ‘cuz I clicked "submit" twice)
Dave
@amorphous:
No, it makes a lot of sense. There is nothing to say that God couldn’t use science and math as the mechanism for creation. And I am not even inferring that he manipulated it (like those whackjobs at the Discovery Institute) but rather the parameters were set and He let it unfold as it would.
I don’t see why that idea is so objectionable to some (on both sides).
amorphous
@r€nato: Amen.
/irony
Bootlegger
@amorphous: I think you make a valid point. I watched NOVA last night about the Dover case, Intelligent Design on Trial, and the people who pushed ID didn’t even want to consider the science because it either made their book of fables invalid or, as one preacher said, diminished what it meant to be human and created in god’s own image. So they really don’t care what science has to say because it disagrees with what they want to believe.
Interestingly, a couple of the science teachers and one of the scientists they interviewed were devout Christians but basically argued exactly what you say, that science reveals to them the wonders of their god’s universe.
The idiot on the Board who was insulted by the mention of Darwin 15 times in the science book? Not so much. He claimed he couldn’t comprehend how any Christian could believe Darwin.
Zifnab
@Tonal Crow:
It was an oversimplification. If he’d wanted to be anal about it, he could refer to the "event" as a daily occurrence – making breakfast – and the "miracle" as a one-in-a-million happening during the event. So if we were to determine that having breakfast waiting on the table when you came down stairs was a one-in-a-million "miracle" occurrence, we could guestimate that it occurred 295 times today. Of course, you also have to take into account variance within the events. You’re not going to have it happen exactly 295 times every single day. Perhaps it happens 300 times today and 290 tomorrow. Or maybe it happens 590 today and not at all tomorrow.
But at this point, we’re engaging in high school / college level statistics.
It would be nice if people DID understand a bit more late high school / early college level science and math. If we did, I suspect we’d see far fewer "miracles" because we actually knew what we were looking at. An ellipse or a seizer or ball lightning or a flu outbreak wouldn’t come across as mystical and supernatural if people knew general laws of nature a little better.
Frankly, I’m tired of someone finding Mary in a piece of burnt toast or a bent car fender and announcing it as proof of a higher power. Did your toaster have shmutz in it? Did the car that hit you have a large Christian idol strapped to its bumper? These might be the actual reasons.
Ash Can
@SGEW: I’m religious, in a Dorothy Day kind of way.
@The Moar You Know: "it simply doesn’t provide anyone with tools to solve real-world problems."
Not true. It can (dependent upon both the religion and the individual believer) impart very effective tools for dealing with life’s more ambiguous, complicated, and philosophical problems. I don’t mean to say that I think such tools are limited to believers; obviously non-believers can develop/possess them as well. But a claim that any religion is useless/inapplicable in the face of any real-life difficulty is incorrect.
r€nato
@amorphous:
if you haven’t yet read Richard Dawkins, you should. He makes a marvelous and devastating case against the "God of the gaps" argument which many casual believers in creationism make. (of course he’s not the first to do so.)
basically, people have been making the "God of the gaps" argument for centuries. If you can’t explain something rationally or scientifically, just say, "God did it!"
Well, as scientific knowledge has advanced, the "God of the gaps" becomes less and less powerful. We no longer need a god to explain how human beings came to dominate the planet, or why fish have gills, or what stars are. So the "God of the gaps" argument is both intellectually lazy and it also is a dangerous argument for religionists to make since the relentless advance of scientific knowledge continually diminishes their ‘proof’ of a god until it hardly exists anymore; the existence of god in such an argument is asymptotic, never reaching zero but diminishing constantly until it is for all practical purposes zero.
Bootlegger
@Zifnab: There was a great piece at Salon.com about the Hudson plane landing NOT being a miracle because basically the pilot, crew, and the plane did exactly what they were trained/designed to do and thus the outcome was expected and not a miracle.
Steeplejack
@Laura W:
I’ve gotta leave in a couple of minutes and won’t be back until late tonight, but I wanted to get this in: yeah, they had some good covers on that album.
Also, Neil’s album Live at Massey Hall, 1971 is surprisingly excellent. They either caught him on the best singing night of his career or spent the last 35 years fixing his voice, but it’s great. Thought of that because he does an excellent solo-guitar-and-voice rendition of "Cowgirl in the Sand." Which I associate with "Down by the River" because they both came off the same album originally. (End thread-jack.)
amorphous
@Bootlegger: I believe I saw (I’ve seen? Is my colloquial grammar incorrect here? I think so) that NOVA before. I mostly raged. If it’s what I’m thinking of, I found the deconstruction of flagella irreducibility to be the awesomeness. As a materials scientist, biology is like black magic to me, I just look at it and I’m like whoa.
And now I live in Texas, so we just went through this whole thing again with the ID’ers. This place is such a shithole. I hope to never leave my university cocoon.
Man, I’ve got a good rage on. This would be beneficial if I actually ever exercised.
Indylib
@r€nato:
That’s pretty much the conclusion I came to for myself after spending 3 years in AA. The group support and my own mind believing something outside myself was helping allowed me to stay away from the booze. That was 14 years ago. In the last 11 years I don’t go to meetings, I don’t ask any God for help, and I’m still sober, still pretty content and calm in my personal life. I still utilize a lot of the steps from the program because they are good common sense, I just don’t need the "Power greater than myself" step in a personal way anymore.
RSA
It’s not just a Christian or even a traditional religious thing, of course. For those who don’t like traditional superstition, there’s always The Secret, which will explain how the Law of Attraction can help you to occasionally "manifest" events that would only happen with moderate to high probability without your mental effort.
Vincent
[email protected]:
Agreed. If people want to believe in a God then they should believe in one of the universe as it actually exists and not how they would like it to be. The universe is actually pretty damn amazing and it’s hard not to get a sense of wonder about it regardless of one’s belief or disbelief.
libarbarian
This relates to my main complaint about Idiocracy, which I just saw recently.
It’s portrayal of "stupid people" was weak. It is precisely traits like being unable to understand this concept, and not misspelling or enjoying watching people be kicked in the balls, that defines REAL stupid people.
Pedantic asswipes like to lament the superficial aspects – like poor spelling or watching NASCAR – of public ignorance, but, really, Its is THIS kind of ignorance that has people following pseudo-prophets, taking "The Secret" &"The Celestine Prophecy" seriously, refusing to vaccinate their children against MMR, and blaming the economic crises on minority homeowners.
Anyways, thats my fucking manifesto for the day. You got a problem wit dat, asshole?
Phillip J. Birmingham
I’m with Screamin’ Demon — it wasn’t necessary to make Drive the first time.
DaddyJ
"Million-to-one chances crop up nine times out of ten."
— Granny Weatherwax, Equal Rites, by Terry Pratchett
See also, Guards, Guards by the same author.
Chris Johnson
Hey, me too- my God is the numbers that aren’t in Cantor’s infinite list of infinite numbers. My God is the Godel’s incompleteness theorem God- the counter to my personal need to basically understand and be in control of everything. And I do ‘pray’ to it (I dislike the he/she thing, too limiting) but along the lines of ‘let me do your will and know it’ or variations thereof.
I seriously feel there’s a larger pattern, don’t know how it’s worked, but I’m of the opinion I’m not supposed to know how it’s worked. I just want to harmonize with it and do my thing to the fullest of my ability.
Turns out that approaching life from that angle has brought way more joy than I ever got from approaching life as a hostile pile of angry statistics that had to be mastered and beaten.
I get that ‘God’s heart’ sense from things like genetic algorithms… self-organization… I think we as intelligent beings try to reduce everything to our level, and God symbolizes the impossibility of this- I don’t know what it is or how it acts or what kind of volition it has but I do know that when we either declare God dead and reduce everything to our level, or declare that God is reduced to our level and wants money and dead people, we tend to EPIC FAIL.
There’s a reason certain types of loonies come over all frothing atheist- I’m thinking of Randites and various freemarketeers here- it’s their innate need to be able to master all of the world’s possibilities and be in total control of their fate. A lot of people who declare God dead actually mean ‘fortunately, I was next in the line of succession and will tell you what reality is’.
I know a lot of things but I’ve come to appreciate how shockingly much I don’t know :)
THAT line’s gonna get used against me… ;)
ricky
Good thinkin, perfesser. Stay safe in there with the other college pupa. If you leave it will be a miracle if you are not crushed on some pick up truck windshield.
Billy K (D-TX)
So who did the Drive remake? (And yes, that’s the worst thing The Cars ever did.)
This one doesn’t.
Catsy
QFT.
It’s not an aside in my eyes; to me it’s central to squaring religious belief with science–two areas which are otherwise fundamentally incompatible, as one deals with answering the unknowable with faith, and the other deals with expanding the boundaries of the knowable with evidence.
I’m not religious as such, but I do still retain a certain sense of spirituality. I have one of those huge, coffee table-sized books of photographs of the planets and the universe, and it is impossible to look at some of those photographs, comprehend their scale and scope in even the tiniest way, and not be awed and humbled. To the extent that I believe in a sentient higher power at all–and when I allow myself to meander down this road, I do, as it strikes me that everything had to come into existence /somehow/–it is as a sort of cosmic game developer: someone who creates the universe and its most fundamental ground rules, compiles it all, and puts it out there to see what happens when you create a gravitational constant and a whole lot of rapidly expanding mass. Could there be any cooler experiment?
Krista
That’s a good quote to remember and use.
As far as religion goes, for the most part, I’m a fan of the concept of Bertrand Russell’s teapot theory. You tell me that there’s something out there that cannot be seen, but the burden is on me to disprove its existence, AND I’m supposed to live my life according to your interpretation of this invisible being? No thanks. Of course, 12 years of Roman Catholic upbringing still manifests itself in unconscious ways. Old habits are hard to break, I guess.
Tonal Crow
That last clause is where these discussions usually go off the rails. To the extent that metaphysics makes predictions about the physical world, we can test them in the same manner as any other predictions. For example, we can infer something suggestive (though, of course, not conclusive) about the existence of an all-good god by comparing the ethical performance of his adherents against that of non-adherents.
The idea that we cannot disprove the existence of some god is an oft-cited trope, but it’s just incorrect. First, it assumes a standard of "disproof" vastly higher than the hard sciences require for other hypotheses (e.g., it refuses to accept the validity of the above comparison). Second, and much worse, it implicitly postulates a trickster god, who creates the appearance of a physical world obeying certain rules, but specifically arranges it so that we cannot see beyond that illusion to discover the god himself. If the second postulate is correct, then we cannot know anything about anything, since "god did it" is a "legitimate" answer to any and all questions. This is a profoundly useless (and nihlistic) philosophy. We can know many things, and our stock of knowledge is (almost always) monotonically increasing. Meanwhile, the god of the gaps shrinks.
Cyrus
Remember Mel Gibson’s snuff film The Passion of the Christ? While filming it, the actor playing Jesus was struck by lightning. An assistant director was also struck by lightning twice. This makes me think that there is a god but he’s on the atheists’ side.
(More seriously, it makes me think you shouldn’t fucking have lots of people standing on top of a hill in stormy weather carrying lots of metal and other tall, upright equipment.)
Tonal Crow
@amorphous
If (the? this?) universe weren’t "perfect for life", we wouldn’t be here to pontificate on the question. That said, I very much look forward to some experimental data tending to prove or disprove the various multiple-universes theories.
Zifnab
@Cyrus:
See, that right there? That’s Darwinism.
Tonal Crow
@zifnab: We are very good at finding "patterns" in random data. Why? Most likely because it has strong survival value (Oh-oh, here comes Darwin again!): if we (even fairly often) conclude that a pattern in the grass is a lion, we (and therefore our progeny) are more likely to survive then if we (even rarely) conclude that a lion is merely a pattern in the grass.
gnomedad
@Chris Johnson:
Well said! I like to say that I don’t believe in "belief"; in a God who rewards you for believing in him or punishes you if you don’t. Entertaining the question "does God exist?" even for the purpose of answering "no" seems to me to reinforce the memeplex of the "believers".
I like this point. For me, one of the benefits of God-thinking is to remind myself that I’m not God.
Hob
I don’t think the Law of Large Numbers by itself is so hard for people to understand. Most folks get the part about "If a zillion people have played the lottery, someone probably won it." What takes forever to explain is that "If a zillion people have played and no one’s won so far, the next one who plays is much likelier to win" is not true.
Randall
I can’t figure out whether God is the intelligence that created the energy that is the universe or just the energy itself.
All I know is that it usually speaks to me through my wife and kids.
DougJ
Just to be clear, you’re not blaming Jesus for that, are you?
Zifnab
@Tonal Crow: And yet, if you can refine your technique – winnowing out the false positives and false negatives – you’re more likely still to survive.
A man that sees a lion in the grass every time he goes out hunting and, as a result, starves to death doesn’t help himself. A man that sees God in the gaps of science and decides his epilepsy fits are punishments for beating off to Playboy Magazine isn’t more likely to survive his condition long enough to reproduce when compared with a man that sees the need to get a good doctor.
Admittedly, lions have been around since the dawn of man and good doctors were slim or non-existent a century ago. But that’s the path humanity needs to take. Those who grow better at seeing the lion will outpace those who develop a phobia of grass.
Zifnab
@Hob:
I play dice games enough that I still fall into this trap. "Well, he rolled four six times in a row, so now would be the time to bet he’s going to roll five or less." It’s not mathematically sound at all, and yet I still find myself doing it.
RSA
The gambler’s fallacy is probably the best known cognitive bias there is. Or so a lot of people have told me.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@Zifnab:
On a different forum, several of us were trying to explain to someone that getting 10 heads in a row does not make it any more likely that the next toss is going to be tails.
There’s also the misperception that sequences like 10 heads in a row are less likely than any other sequence, which isn’t true. The odds of throwing 10 heads in a row (1 to 1024) is exactly the same as throwing 9 heads followed by a tail, or 5 tails followed by 5 heads, or alternating heads-tails, or any other specific sequence. We think of a sequence of all-heads being somehow special, but from a probability standpoint it isn’t.
duaneg
As any Kiwi will tell you…
The Strawpeople/Bic Runga cover of the Cars’ "Drive" was pure genius. Partly because everyone who listened to it for the first time was expecting a cover of her song "Drive", but mostly because it is so f**cking gorgeous.
gil mann
I’ve never understood the whole "some things, man wasn’t meant to know" deal. I know fundies view sex organs as something God gave us to test our ability to delay gratification, but an awful lot of moderate theists seem to apply that logic to their own minds.
It’s a terrible thing to waste, guys. Take it from someone who knows first-hand. Of course, I did manage to map out the aforementioned larger pattern while doing said mind-wasting, but I doubt my work holds up.
aarrgghh
Blue Raven
Polytheist over here, with animist tendencies. The thing about my belief is that people who don’t perceive the existence of deity most likely aren’t supposed to. Doesn’t mean you’re cursed. Just, maybe, serving the infinite by acting as a sanity check against the gullible or overenthusiastic. And if one human mind can’t grok tax law, why is it wrong to say it can’t grasp something else it didn’t develop and was written by multiple committees over a long period of time? Polytheism as I see it means there are overlapping groups of entities who have their own ideas and they can’t always agree. Or translate it to human terms well, since they’re a sort of alien intelligence. And the universe being a victim of shitty bureaucracy has made more sense to me than anything else, including atheism.
Ravensview
I’ve always been annoyed by this whole miracle thing. Wiki gives one definition of it as "a statistically unlikely but beneficial event". Why does it always have to be beneficial? What do we call it if the event is detrimental?
If there’s divine intervention for beneficial events, who/what is causing the other ones. Is there a good and an evil force out there, working our lives like a tag team?
If a miracle saves a falling child – what pushed him in the first place. Does the same divine being do both events, just to be able to sometimes swoop in like a hero? And sometimes to not intervene, just to keep us guessing.