Ten in 2010

Here are my ten resolutions for the calendar year 2010:

1.     I will not complain within the first ten minutes of coming home.

2.     I will spend at least a few minutes of quality time each day with each of my kids, who are not getting any younger, cuddlier, or sweeter.

3.     I will workout at least thrice a week, perfectly plausible personal excuses notwithstanding.

4.     I will keep careful track of what I’m eating, until I can step on a scale and not see a leading ‘2’ on the readout.
(FYI FTW - There’s an app for that.)

5.     I will drive my subcompact with both of my hands and at least half of my mind on the task.

6.     I will not add any more books to my reading list until I finish at least half of the books currently on the list. 

7.     I will not start on another academic degree – not this year.  I will reread my old textbooks to get by if needs must.

8.     I will not allow my legislators to scapegoat harmless fellow citizens. 
I will not sit idly while civil rights are suppressed in the name of orthodoxy.
We’ve been down that road before, we know where it ends.

9.     I will practice respect for people as people, even though I cannot respect ungrounded opinions. 

10.  I will not tolerate racism, sexism, homophobia, or creedal bigotry simply for the sake of cordiality. 
In such situations, I resolve henceforth to be forcefully, pointedly, and appropriately rude. 

 

Contra Plantinga #6 - Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN)

A bit of background reading may be necessary here, because Alvin Plantinga’s Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EAAN) is fairly technical and most people do not intuitively understand probability theory, especially Bayesian maths. Suffice to say that in order for Plantinga’s argument to go through he must show that humans most always form true beliefs about the world [ P(R)≈1 ] and that probability of this happening on the joint hypotheses of metaphysical naturalism and evolutionism is low [P(R|E&N)≈0]. Alas, Plantinga fails to substantiate either of these claims in anything like a rigorous logical fashion. He more or less assumes the truth of the former premise and merely hand-waves his way to the latter. Whenever you see a brilliant logician such as Plantinga eliding the steps to his conclusion instead of outlining a tightly reasoned deductive argument, well, caveat emptor.

A couple points must be made here. Metaphysical materialists cannot assume P(R)≈1 since we believe that all of the (oddly pervasive) talk of gods, spirits, ghosts, magic, chakras, witches, faeries, etc. is all so much bunk. People all around the world make up all sorts of wacky beliefs about disembodied minds and the imaginary forces emanating therefrom, and thus P(R) is evidently nowhere near unity. Moreover, since most religions (with a few interesting exceptions) assert that all other religions make up all sorts of untruths about the world, which are integrated into their devotees worldviews, it seems odd for any religious person to argue that humans almost always form true beliefs about the world. Finally, it should be evident from the overabundance of material at websites such as http://snopes.com/ and http://nizkor.org/features/fallacies/ that we humans are indeed quite prone to all manner of irrational thinking, not least of which an inborn tendency to attribute agency where none exists. Daniel Dennett and Pascal Boyer (among others) have written extensively and convincingly on this latter point, and I commend them to anyone interested in mapping out the bounds of human rationality.

Secondly, while the probability P(R|E&N) is nowhere near unity, it is neither nearly so low as to allow Plantinga's argument to go through. The crucial question here is whether we would expect naturalistic evolutionary mechanisms to select for true beliefs over false ones. This question is not nearly so simple as it sounds (or as Plantinga's treatment suggests) but it should be fairly obvious that it is generally far easier to program a neural network to solve problems of circumstantial adaptation by providing them with adaptive goals and good data than by providing them with maladaptive goals and bad data, as Plantinga suggests. Indeed, if E&N are both true we must expect that adaptive goals (e.g. craving food, avoiding pain) came first and the neurological wiring which allows for holding propositional truths (and hence the possibility of R) came along some time later.

Solidarity with Kurt Westergaard

May the forces of religious fanaticism and censorship drown in the blood they spill. Amen.

Slave States and Religion

Here are the fifteen slave states and two territories in which slavery was legally practiced prior to the American Civil War. To each I've added an ostensibly unrelated ranking from a relatively recent Pew Forum poll:

Mississippi (1)
Alabama (2)
Arkansas (3)
Louisiana (4)
Tennessee (5)
South Carolina (6)
Oklahoma (7)
North Carolina (8)
Georgia (9)
Kentucky (10)
Texas (11)
Utah (12)
Virginia (15,18)
Missouri (17)
Florida (20)
Maryland (21)
Delaware (24)

Before I tell you what the ranking means, I'd like to point out a few obvious things. Firstly, all of these former slave states are clustered in the top half of the states, which is statistically vanishingly unlikely on chance alone. Moreover, every single one of the top twelve (12) states in the Pew poll are formerly states or territories in which slaveholding was legally practiced.

Now, here I the kicker: The Pew Forum poll had nothing to do with slavery or race or even civil rights. It was merely a measure of religious faith, and not even some particular religious faith historically tied to denominational support for the institution of Negro slavery, but really just ANY faith at all.

Now, here is the poll page itself:
http://pewforum.org/docs/?DocID=504&loc=interstitialskip

I know as well as the next stats geek that correlation is not (necessarily) causation, but these massive overlaps cry out for some common factor. What is it about faith which facilitates slavery, or vice-versa, or what might be the hidden variable here? Is it that religious faith allows people to override their own sense of morality, which might well balk at seeing a fellow human in bondage? Is it that some Christian sacred texts expressly condone slavery? Or is it something else entirely?

WAR on XMAS #10 - Christmas Cards

Ok, this one is a bit of a soft target. Greeting cards are the Devil's Memos, cutting us off from even a perfunctory attempt at meaningful interpersonal communication by way of personal letter or electronic mail. A chain of so-called "Family Bookstores" have taken this concept a step further, though, finding ways to infuse perfunctory seasonal greetings with evangelical messages encouraging the recipient (in somewhat softer language) to either find Christ or be damned. How uplifting is that?

WAR on XMAS #9 - Christmas Crèches

Truth be told, I've nothing against these displays, so long as they are aesthetically pleasing and found adorning the lawns of homes or churches. For reasons quite beyond my ken, however, they are often found on government property, in an attempt to make a political statement to the effect that we are a Christian Nation, State, County, or City. This practice has provoked a long series of legal and political controversies here in the U.S. (many of which may be found on the Wikipedia). Every one of these controversies could have been avoided by adhering to the historical principle of separation of church and state, heeding James Madison’s timeless warning that throwing the support of government behind any particular religion or sect “will destroy that moderation and harmony which the forbearance of our laws to intermeddle with Religion has produced among its several sects.”

Since the various counties and municipalities have had a fairly mixed history of successfully balancing the secular and sacred so as to appease citizens, politicians, and courts alike, I’d recommend one of two courses of action:

1) Privatized Christmas – This is a solution which both civil and economic libertarians should prefer, as it turns the symbolic displays back over to private citizens and free markets, leaving the government (including official buildings and property) out of the picture altogether, thereby preventing both the possibility of civil rights lawsuits as well as a diversion of tax dollars to extraneous purposes other than governance. On the downside, though, people have referred to this elegant solution as a “Naked Public Square” and we all know how important bumper sticker sloganeering can be in swaying both the public and its servants.

2) Socialized Solstice – This solution is more or less precisely the opposite of the other one, that is, to deliberately throw open selected public spaces (e.g. courthouse lawns) to any and all winter holiday displays, so long as they meet basic content-neutral criteria. This solution might be dubbed the “Tackily Overdressed Public Square,” or TOPS for short, and it probably should include at least one 6-foot-tall dreidel, like the one in Briarcliff Manor (just for the sake of consistency) and perhaps a traditional festivus pole as well.

In between these two extremes lies the solution preferred by majoritarians, who would prefer to maintain complete creative control over public spaces, dressing them up the particular religious garb authorized by their own sect. I cannot begin to square this mindset with the golden rule, a form of which exists in most major religious and ethical traditions, but I suppose if people thought deeply and lived ethically we’d never have to deal with the inevitable intermixture of church and state in the first place.