Imagine that you see someone wearing a tinfoil hat. What are they concerned about? Perhaps that their thoughts are being read by the NSA or CIA. Perhaps that some mysterious government agency is using radio waves to send commands into their brain. But that wasn’t the original purpose of tinfoil hats. Delusions change with the times, and there was no NSA or radio programming in the 1920s when tinfoil hats became a thing. Back then, the goal was to prevent telepathic intrusion.

Today, someone might fear alien abduction, but it might’ve been demon possession in an earlier time. Today, someone might fear government spying through computer malware, but yesterday it might’ve been fear about someone stealing their soul.

Signs of the times

It’s not just paranoid delusions that adapt to developments in science and technology. Bogus medical treatments also keep up to date. With new scientific interest in magnetism, Franz Mesmer treated patients with magnets in the late 1700s. With the discovery of radioactivity, radioactive products were popular in the early 1900s—radioactive toothpaste to brighten teeth and radium water (advertised as “Perpetual Sunshine”) to improve health.

We’ve seen this innovation in religion as well. The Fox sisters were key players in the growth of Spiritualism in the late 1800s. They were investigated by well-known scientists, and this gave them a respectable luster. During the same period, Christian Science developed as a Christian response to scientific medicine.

More recently, UFO religions grew after UFOs and aliens became part of the culture. The Seekers cult expected to be taken aboard an alien spacecraft in 1954, just before the end of the world. When the appointed hour came and went with neither destruction nor a spacecraft, they reframed reality so that their prayers had saved the world. In 1997, the Heaven’s Gate cult committed suicide together to catch a ride on a UFO flying behind a comet. Raëlians prefer to enjoy life here on earth, with aliens providing technology for eternal life. Scientology’s mythology includes Xenu, the ruler of the Galactic Confederacy. The Nation of Islam also includes UFOs in its teachings.

New religions that would’ve been inconceivable just half a century ago include Kopimism, which views communication as sacred (“kopimi” = “copy me”) and Jediism, inspired by the movie Star Wars. Barely more credible are New Age views like those of Deepak Chopra, despite his frequent use of science-y words like “quantum” and “vibrations.”

What does this tell us?

If “Yahweh is the creator of the universe, and his son died for the salvation of mankind” were an instinctive truth programmed into every human heart, we would expect to see people moving toward Christianity, and there would be only one interpretation of it. However, the hydra of religion that we actually see, with new heads appearing daily, doesn’t look like what we’d expect if there were some universal, accessible religious truth. In fact, it looks like quite the opposite. Religion is a response to vague supernatural desires, and these responses change with time and place. Far from coalescing into a single viewpoint, Christianity continues to mutate, with 45,000 denominations and counting.

Why does religion change and adapt? For the same reason that bogus medicine changes and adapts: hope.

If conventional medicine won’t promise you a cure, quack medicine will. Laetrile will cure your cancer, and stem cell treatments will cure your Parkinson’s. And if your life sucks—whether you’ve just been dealt a bad hand by life or you screwed it up yourself—religion offers hope. If you have guilt from past actions, it shows how to wipe the slate clean. If your present life is painful, it shows how to ensure a great afterlife. Religion is the cereal aisle at the grocery store—there’s something for everyone, with novel new products testing the water all the time.

Delusions, quack cures, and religion adapt to the times. None make convincing claims for truth.

There is a rumour going around that I have found God.
I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys,
and there is empirical evidence that they exist.
— Terry Pratchett

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/19/14.)

Image credit: Matthew Bellemare, flickr, CC

This post was written by Chad DeVillier. He was raised a devout Creationist and spent his mid-twenties transitioning from Biblical Studies major to skeptic to antitheist. His passion is now inspiring skepticism and critical thinking in others through rational discourse.

We are not and cannot be on the same playing field, they the religious and we the non-, because those who have come to accept deities into their lives have done so either largely or entirely for emotion-based reasons—“feeling God’s presence,” faith, subjective experiences, correlations that cannot be proven between events that cannot be verified, etc. You will never find a religious person who came to be such because they spent years researching and weighing the objective evidence for and against each major religion; that’s not how religious conversion works, no matter what C. S. Lewis and Lee Strobel tried to sell you. The religious sometimes defend their beliefs with attempts at logical arguments they’ve picked up after the fact, but I submit that the religious don’t have a seat at the logic table because logic was never the driving factor behind their conversion; one cannot throw logic to the back burner in favor of faith and then simply pick it up later to defend oneself with. Unless they cite thorough research and objective reasoning as the primary reason for their conversion, the religious are not at liberty to pretend that their intention was to side with the most well-reasoned side. (And if they do attempt to cite this, a test to verify this is below).

Once the emotion-based conversion has taken place, once a now-saved person embraces something as the cornerstone of their life, confirmation bias runs rampant and beliefs become irrevocably tied to emotion, leaving the convert unable and unwilling to be objective, impartial, or the least bit interested in deconverting. While it is true that no one can be completely free of bias because of the mind’s overwhelming tendency to employ them, I think it’s fair to say that a religious person who has based their entire life, hope, and future on an ideology is vastly less capable of being objective than someone whose entire source of purpose and hope does not depend on faith in their beliefs. You cannot talk objective reason with someone who is not willing to seeing things through a lens other than their own.

And why should they want to see things through another lens? The believer has much to gain, theoretically, from embracing an ideology that tells them that they are cherished by an all-powerful being, destined for eternal happiness, and required only to seek the will of their very own creator for all of their needs and questions; they see, on the other hand, only bleakness and death compared to the shimmering narrative they’ve come to hold fast to and will therefore find excuses to refuse anything but that. Of course, wanting something to be true does not make it true, but try telling that to the convert!

Test if beliefs are based on logic

To test whether or not this blatant disregard for logic applies to a specific religious person (we mustn’t jump to conclusions without giving them a fair chance to prove themselves, must we?), two simple questions can be asked:

One: “What was the primary factor behind your conversion?”

If the answer is anything other than rigorous, objective research into many ideologies, independent of and only later followed by subjective reasons such as “feeling God” or faith, they have failed the test of potential for objectivity. Again, one cannot simply make a life decision based on subjective reasons and then act as if objectivity is their goal. Logical reason only impacts those not already convinced of something else, and subscribers to a religion that demands faith capable of moving mountains are much too far removed from the reach of reason to plausibly claim that they are daily willing and capable of suspending that immovable faith in order to ask and answer uncomfortable questions impartially. Cognitive dissonance and unshakable belief are mutually exclusive.

Two: “Would you, hypothetically, be willing to completely abandon your faith and beliefs if you received undeniable evidence that you were wrong, and if so, what evidence would you need that to be?”

Stated again for emphasis: “Would you—again, only hypothetically—be willing to let down your family and friends, leave your church community behind, and come to terms with the fact that there is no one guiding your life or watching over you, if you turn out somehow to be wrong, and what sort of thing would you accept as undeniable proof that you are wrong?”

An answer of anything other than a complete willingness to abandon that which they cling to most if the facts demand it, and a need only for objectively verifiable evidence in order to do so, is a proclamation that they cannot be reasoned with and are not capable of a discussion based on empirical reason. One cannot claim to champion reason if one will not allow oneself to be swayed by it; the objective person must be prepared, always, to be wrong.

The religious sometimes like to imagine themselves as wholly logical creatures who alone are capable of being objective, while those of us trapped in our lives of sin are doomed to be beguiled by an invisible yet mighty devil with access to all the minds of the world simultaneously. But is such a tricked and tangled mind more duped than a mind wrapped in promises of lifelong purpose, salvation from all pain, and joy unimaginable? Such a mind as the latter appears nearly unrescuable by any information to the contrary, no matter how grounded in reality and empirical evidence that information may be, since they already imagine infinite gain for themselves and infinite loss for everyone else. They are trapped by Pascal’s wager, so enticed by what they stand to gain that they can’t even imagine the very real possibility that they could lose.

Keep the separateness of the playing fields in mind when next you attempt to induce critical thought into the mind of the faithful; reason is a powerful tool, but, like the Almighty Mystery in the sky, can only influence those who accept it into their hearts in the first place.

Other related posts:
Faith, the Other F-Word
“I Used to be an Atheist, Just Like You”
Word of the Day: Shermer’s Law
Christianity, the Ultimate Unfalsifiable Hypothesis
Stupid Argument #13: Pascal’s Wager

Faith is the surrender of the mind;
it’s the surrender of reason,
it’s the surrender of the only thing
that makes us different from other mammals.
It’s our need to believe, and to surrender our skepticism and our reason,
our yearning to discard that and put all our trust or faith in someone or something,
that is the sinister thing to me.
Of all the supposed virtues,
faith must be the most overrated.
— Christopher Hitchens

Remember the movie Groundhog Day? Phil Connors (Bill Murray) must relive the same day, over and over. The cause of this time loop is never explored or even brought up—he simply endures the drudgery and pleasures of reliving the same day, hundreds of times, until he gets it right.

The many mechanisms of time travel

That’s time travel of a sort, but it’s a very different kind than we see in Back to the Future. Here, Marty McFly (Michael J. Fox) is accidentally thrust back in time so that he becomes a classmate of his parents-to-be, but he must tread delicately to avoid damaging his own timeline.

The crew of Star Trek IV goes back in time in a captured Klingon warship to retrieve extinct (in their time) humpback whales by going really fast. Superman (in Superman: The Movie) goes back in time to undo the death of Lois Lane by spinning the earth backwards. And in About Time, a few people can time travel by going into a dark place, clenching their fists, and thinking about when they want to go to. The father, an experienced traveler, assures us that multiple futures and the Butterfly Effect aren’t problems.

It works like this in religion. Religion A says that one god is in charge. Next, religion B says instead that it’s a pantheon of independent gods. And religion C says that it’s a Trinity of gods who are actually one. As with time travel, different fictional domains have their own view of what the magic is and how it works.

Fictional creatures

Partisans of this or that interpretation of time travel might argue for the logic of one approach and laugh at the idiocy of another, but you’ll probably find more spirited debate among the fans of various fictional creatures—vampires, werewolves, and so on.

For example, are vampires simply nocturnal, with no particular vulnerability to sunlight? Do they die or explode when touched by a single ray of sunlight? The vampires in the television drama True Blood burn on exposure to sunlight but can quickly recover if the exposure isn’t long. The vampires in the novel Twilight avoid sunlight simply because their skin reflects it like diamonds, which would reveal their true identity (why artificial light doesn’t do the same isn’t discussed).

What about garlic and crosses? What about wooden stakes and silver bullets? Do the vampires cast shadows or make reflections in mirrors? Are they hideous or attractive? What are their vulnerabilities, if any? Different fictional worlds have different answers.

There’s no authority. It’s not like you make a claim about the mythological with the fear that real vampires will present themselves to prove you embarrassingly wrong.

Religion

The same is true for religion. It’s is a worldwide Comic-Con—some people take things very seriously and get dressed in character, while others take a more casual approach. Some people are fans of this TV show or that movie character or some other comic book hero.

Scientology can claim that the galactic tyrant Xenu attempted to solve his overpopulation problem by destroying hundreds of billions of frozen people in volcanoes on earth using hydrogen bombs. Or the Mormon church can claim that God the Father was once mortal but attained godhood, and believers can do the same.

There’s no authority to reject these stories. No authority, that is, except common sense and our well-established understanding of how things actually work. Christians can say to the Scientologists or Mormons, “Hold on—you’re breaking the rules,” but then they break the spell and acknowledge that they are doing the same. They can’t awaken someone from their dream without being awake themselves.

You can ignore reality,
but you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality.
— Ayn Rand

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 9/23/13.)

Image credit: Jason Cipriani, flickr, CC

The history of the abolition movement in the West isn’t complete without William Wilberforce. His drive was instrumental in abolishing in Britain the slave trade in 1807 and then slavery itself in 1833. There’s much more to the story than just Wilberforce, of course, but the story wouldn’t be complete without acknowledging his work.
What does a central figure look like?
Martin Luther King has a similar position within the U.S. civil rights movement. The story doesn’t begin and end with him, of course, but the story wouldn’t be complete without noting his substantial contribution.
Or Gutenberg in publishing. Or Einstein in physics. Or Shakespeare in English literature. Or Charlemagne in the history of Europe. Perhaps their fields would now look to us roughly the same without them; perhaps others would’ve stepped in. No matter—these great leaders were central figures in their fields. You can’t explain the facts of the history of their fields without them. A history book without these figures would have holes, like a jigsaw puzzle with pieces missing.
Who gave the “I have a dream” speech? How did the Slave Trade Act get through Parliament with so much opposition? Who developed the theory of relativity? Did the printing press just poof into existence?
There aren’t partisans here, with some historians of science acknowledging Einstein (or Darwin or Newton) and others saying that these figures never existed. Historians might rate their importance differently, but that they were important isn’t questioned.
How does God fit in?
Now that we know what a central figure looks like, consider God, the central figure in reality. He’s behind life, the universe, and everything. No historical figure so dominates their field as God dominates reality—or so we’re told.
Imagine God removed from reality, like the story of abolition without Wilberforce, or an Einstein-less history of physics. Beyond a superficial summary, we simply can’t explain abolition without Wilberforce or the history of physics without Einstein. So what of reality can no longer be explained without God?
Nothing!
Admittedly, we have riddles at the frontier of science. How did abiogenesis happen? What caused the Big Bang? What causes consciousness? But surely the Christian’s argument is more than, “Science doesn’t have all the answers, therefore God.” And, of course, Christianity doesn’t have any better answers. It can wrap a scientific puzzle with “God did it,” but that explains nothing. Science continues to deliver while Christianity continues to not deliver, but even if science delivered no more, that would say nothing about God’s existence.
Hot water
Have you heard about the recipe for making boiling water? First put a pot of water on a hot stove, then stir with a magic spoon (just once, clockwise), and then wait for the water to boil.
God is the magic spoon. He’s not necessary. He only complicates the explanation. Invoke Occam’s Razor and drop both the magic spoon and God.

The problem with quotes on the internet 
is that it is hard to verify their authenticity.
— Abraham Lincoln

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 5/13/13.)
Photo credit: Wikipedia