Return to BS5

Sometimes, you return to something that you worked hard on in the past and an obvious aspect leaps out at you that wasn't obvious at the time.  In The Fans of Plantinga's BS5, I was arguing against the claim:

This was primarily because this is used to claim that, since we cannot prove that (a maximally great) god does not exist, it is possible that (a maximally great) god does exist, furthermore since we cannot prove that (a maximally great) god is does not exist necessarily it is possible that (a maximally great) god does exist necessarily and it therefore follows that (a maximally great) god does exist (necessarily).  Sounds like BS, right?

Anyway, I also argued against a more complex version of the argument (raised by cpdavey):

1. ◊□A (Assumption for Conditional Proof (CP))

2. ~□A (Assumption for Reductio Ad Absurdum (RAA))

3. ~~◊~A (2 E2)

4. ◊~A (3 Double Negation (DN))

5. □| ◊~A (4 S5-reit)

6. □◊~A (5 nec intro)

7. □~□~~A (6 E1)

8. □~□A (7 DN)

9. ~◊~~□A (8 E2)

10. ~◊□A (9 DN)

11. ◊□A & ~◊□A (1,10 Conjunction)

12. ~~□A (1-11 RAA)

13. □A (12 DN)

14. ◊□A -> □A Q.E.D. (1-13 CP)

I concluded that the Reductio Ad Absurdum wasn't actually necessary, because you can do it like this:

1. ◊□A (Initial position)
2. A <--> ~B (Assumption for Logical Fiddle)

3. ◊□~B (Substitution of 2 into 1)

4. ~~◊~~□~B (3 double DN)

5. ~□~□~B (4 E2)

6. ~□~□A (Substitution of 2 into 5)

7. □A (6 n2)

8. ◊□A -> □A Q.E.D. (1-7)

But here we can see that the step between (6) and (7) is not valid (because it's reversed) - so there's a problem which is being disguised by the process of going through the Reductio Ad Absurdum.

I pretty much left it at that, inviting the reader to point out where the problem is, if they could see it.  That was five years ago.

So, what was the obvious thing that recently leaped out at me?  The proof put together, or at least presented by cpdavey relies rather heavily on the introduction of double negatives and swapping from ~□~ to ◊ and from ~◊~ to □.  Both of these latter two moves can be reversed (see Classical Modal Logic).  What it doesn't rely on, is the value of A.  Which means we can do this:

1. ◊~G (Initial weakish atheism position)
2. ~□~~G (1 classical modal logic)

3. ~~□~□~~G (2 n2, right way around)

4. □~□G (3 DN removed)

5. ~◊□G (4 classic modal logic)

This means we arrive at the same conclusion whether we assume that it is possible that there is no god (◊~G) or that it is not necessary that there is a god (~□G), namely that it is not possible that there is necessarily a god (~◊□G), which is precisely what we would expect.

Effectively all cpdavey was arguing was that if his presumption was correct, then assuming the truth of the opposite of his presumption would lead to a conclusion that his presumption was incorrect.  Which it did and which we would expect.  That's why there's no great problem within his "Reductio Ad Absurdum"  but there is when we run his proof with no RAA.  His whole argument came down to a "heads I'm right, tails you're wrong" sort of con.

The error is quite clear in Step 12 above, where cpdavey writes "12. ~~□A (1-11 RAA)".  Clearly the RAA started at Step 2, not Step 1.

Sometimes we just don't see things that are staring us in the face.  Perhaps I was trying too hard to be clever.  But then again, so was cpdavey, since the result that he needed to get his RAA to work was precisely the one he was aiming at, via use of the RAA, ie the fallacious claim that, given ◊□A, □A.

Time to Take WLC to Task (Again)

I initially wrote this on Craig-Land, in a post that I titled Is WLC anti-science or unscientific or ascientistic, or something else?  I must have just been riled up, because I’ve had to edit it quite a bit, removing extraneous words and trying to provide some context.

It might seem to be a little bit technical and esoteric for a forum inhabited by amateur apologists, but remember that they aspire to incorporate science into their endeavours and to bend the findings of science to serve their agenda.

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My departure point here is WLC's Q&A response on relativity.

In short, WLC is not arguing against relativity per se, but he is arguing for one interpretation of relativity over the other (or, rather, the other two).

The first interpretation that WLC deals with is Einstein's, which WLC implies was from his 1905 paper.  The trouble is that the interpretation that WLC is talking about isn't in that paper.  There's nothing in there that implies that Einstein thought that "there is no over-arching way the world is".  The closest is perhaps this statement in Section 2 of Part I (The Kinematical Part) – On the Relativity of Lengths and Time:

So we see that we cannot attach any absolute signification to the concept of simultaneity, but that two events which, viewed from a system of co-ordinates, are simultaneous, can no longer be looked upon as simultaneous events when envisaged from a system which is in motion relatively to that system.

But this is true in all three interpretations.

I thought that maybe Einstein said something like that which WLC claims in his argument with Bergson in 1922, but even that doesn't seem to be so.  At best, Einstein indicated that he held that the time of the philosophers does not exist and that there remains only a psychological time that differs from the physicist’s.  Perhaps WLC extrapolated from this.

Anyways, WLC calls Einstein's interpretation (one which he may well never have held) "really kooky" and thus dismisses it, purportedly leaving only the interpretations of Minkowski and Lorentz.  However, suggesting that Einstein's conception was different to Minkowski's is ridiculous since Einstein incorporated Minkowski’s four-space into his work on General Relativity.  Sure, he didn't initially go along with it, but once he understood the principles, Einstein not only adopted them but showed that it all works.  The "really kooky" interpretation was no more than an intermediate thing, if even that.

The major problem comes in when WLC is trying to choose between Lorentz and Minkowski and I think that it is at this point that he (WLC) become profoundly unscientific or anti-science.

In order to make the choice, WLC relies on his belief that there is a god of a particular sort with particular characteristics, as his final paragraph shows:

For I claim that God’s timeless existence, given that there is a temporal world, is possible only if a tenseless view of time is correct; whereas if a tensed view is right, God exists temporally in absolute time. Since I am firmly convinced that a tensed view of time is correct, I think that Lorentz was, in fact, right, and that God accordingly exists in time

So, he plumps for Lorentz (which gives him a god existing temporally in absolute time).  Hopefully readers can see what WLC did there, he argued "the god of WLC -> Lorenz".

Furthermore, he's arguing that if Lorenz is wrong and space really is Minkowskian, then the god of WLC cannot exist.  I think this is a little short-sighted of him (WLC, that is).

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WLC also presents a false dilemma between "tensed time" in which past and future are real (whatever "real" might mean in this context) and "tenseless time" which he characterises as "just an illusion of human consciousness".

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So, is WLC anti-science, willing to toss science aside if it is inconvenient with respect to his god beliefs?  Or is he simply unscientific, which would possibly imply that he is pseudo-scientific willing to use science-like pronouncements with little if any scientific basis?  Or is he ascientistic, merely charting a difficult course which requires you to use the boat of philosophy here, then leap onto a scientific cart there, and finally ride the rhetorical slippery-dip to a presupposed conclusion (rather than the scientists who are plodding along in the cart the whole way, wondering who that crazy hitch-hiker was)?  Or maybe ... maybe he's a charlatan making it up as he goes along, using whatever tricks he thinks will convince the punters?  Or something else perhaps?

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There is in fact a way to view fourspace (a form of "tenseless time") which is entirely compatible with a god, in fact it's a view that many physicists reject quite fervently perhaps because it opens the door to a Minskowian variant of a god.  I've talked previously about the expansion of space being time.  Implicit in that model is the idea that there is expansion and a rate of expansion.  This might still not leap out at the reader, but it should be more clear from what I wrote in On Time.  I talk there about an invariant space-time speed, including the speed of time (which would be c in a rest frame).  For this to be meaningful there would be some sort of meta-time against which time in our universe would be expanding and time in our universe would be passing.  (This might just be a metaphorical thing of course, but for a god to use it, it'd have to be real, we humans simply wouldn't have any access to it.)

From outside the universe, a god would notionally be able to observe everything simultaneously.  It could tweak events in the "past" and watch (in meta-time) how they play out in the "future".  This has the benefit of avoiding the horns of the predestination-free will dilemma.  Humans in a universe like this one could have absolute free will, but the god watching from outside would be able know the consequences nevertheless, since all of history (including future history) is there before its gaze, simultaneously in meta-time.  Theists could use this model to explain why there were far more interventions (miracles, visitations etc) in the past and none recently.  All the necessary tweaking, or at least major tweaking, has already been done.

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Note that while I do think we all have an invariant space-time speed (c), meaning that I can agree with both Minkowski and Lorenz, I don't think that there's a god out there tweaking our universe.

Misuse of the Material Conditional

I'm going to start off easy.  First, check out the wikipedia entry on the Material Conditional.

Note that there are two usages:

As a truth function, and

As a formal connective

Now, note that the truth table for one has p->q being true for all conditions except where p is true and q is false.

And then, note that the material conditional p->q as a formal connective:

can be considered as a symbol of a formal theory, taken as a set of sentences, satisfying all the classical inferences involving ->, in particular the following characteristic rules:

Modus ponens;

Conditional proof;

Classical contraposition;

Classical reductio ad absurdum.

Now, I take the use in a modus tollens to be precisely the same sort of use as in modus ponens.  You can try to argue differently, but that would put a bit of a hole into modus tollens, and how it is generally shown to relate to modus ponens.

Finally, note the truth table at the SEP entry on Conditionals.  In the Non-Truth-Functional Interpretation truth table, A->B is true when A is true and B is true, false when A is true and B is false and could be true or false when A is false (so we simply don't know).

This does not correlate with what WLC stated in his answer in his Q&A Formulating the Moral Argument (see my earlier take on this here).  He got it wrong because he tried to use the Material Conditional as a truth function when he clearly should have used it as a formal connective.  Anyone who has subsequently or coincidentally followed him on this is also wrong.

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One of the objections I got to the argument above was a little confused.  The objector complained that 1) WLC “intends the argument to be interpreted subjunctively” and 2) “(t)he truth table (Craig) gives is for the indicative mood”.

So, which is it?  Why give a truth table for the indicative mood if WLC intends the argument to be taken subjunctively?  Why not present the argument subjunctively if he meant it to be taken subjunctively?  And what does he think he's doing changing what is claimed by some to be a material conditional (which I think it probably is, but not with the truth functionality interpretation) into a counterfactual (conditional)?

If he wants to be using a counterfactual condition, and to be using the subjunctive ... he should use the subjunctive.  It's not hard, even I could do it (although I think the major premise that follows is false, because the protasis is true while the apodosis is false):

• If WLC's god were not to exist, then objective moral duties and values would not exist
• But objective moral duties and values do exist
• Therefore, WLC's god exists.

See the "were not to"?  This is a calling card of the counterfactual.

If WLC did intend to use the subjunctive mood and create a counterfactual conditional, then all talk about the material conditional as a truth function (the sin committed by the various people who thus motivated me to write this piece) is misguided. 

See also philosophical treatments of the counterfactual conditional.

The Naughty Earth

One of the arguments that we are at the centre of the universe is that, when we use right sort of telescope, we can see that (almost) all the galaxies around us (the visible ones) are red-shifted, indicating that they are moving away from us at speeds equivalent to the current distance between us and them.  This "seems" (caveated enough?) to imply that we are in a privileged position because the speed of any galaxy that we can see is related to the distance of that galaxy from us, not from just any old galaxy, but from us.  The further away a galaxy is from us, the quicker it is running away from us.

So, what did we do?  Why is the rest of the universe doing its darnedest to get away from us as quickly as it can (with the notable exception of the Andromeda galaxy which is on its way towards us and will crash into our galaxy in approximately 4 billion years)?  Did they all get together and have a chat about it, perhaps deciding that Andromeda, the largest galaxy in our group (larger than ours), should sacrifice itself in its glacially slow destruction of us while the rest ran away?  Or did some creator god decide that the rest of the galaxies should move away from the bad boys of the Milky Way to ensure that there is no contamination from our sin and corruption, and since floods are out (thank you rainbows!) the next best thing is (possible, but frankly improbable) stellar catastrophe in 4 billion years or so.

Perhaps, taking as humble and non-arrogant position as possible, the facts are that we are so immensely central to the creator god's aeon-to-aeon thinking that using a galaxy that is about as twice as big as the Milky Way to destroy what remains of our civilisation in 4 billion years from now was a hugely pressing concern and the creator god absolutely wanted there to be no witnesses (move on all you other galaxies, there's nothing to see here).  Perhaps over the next 4 billion years, Andromeda will contract into some sort of divine sledgehammer or pile-driver (via a mechanism that will appear totally natural, but [wink, wink] actually isn't), and be aimed directly at us.  And one descendent of our species will be encouraged to build a space-ark ... for forty days and forty nights, stars shall fall upon the face of the Earth, but you, decendent of Noah, shall build a space-ark and collect all the animals that we can currently think of, confusingly numbered based on whether you can eat them or not, and sail above the destruction.  Now that would be story to tell your grandkids, right?

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Did anyone get the point, carefully concealed in that satire?  Distant galaxies cannot be both affecting the solar system so as to make the Earth central (as argued by some geocentrists) and also receding at speeds that are ever greater the further from us they are.

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Some context might be required here.  There’s a chap over in Craig-Land who is a serious geocentrist, as well as a bit of a literal fundamentalist.  His argument is that the universe is created just-so such that Earth is in a point of zero gravity at the centre (and is thus not pulled into any sort of motion).

It’s an entertaining enterprise to argue physics with someone who primarily bases his understanding of the universe on Genesis (the book of the bible, not the band).   A huge waste of time, of course, but entertaining.

Contingency

Is christianity contingent?

Of course, I think it is.  But I don't believe in the god of christian theists, so I see christianity as something largely made up by Paul, perhaps together with some advisors, partly based on a mythical or mythologised Jesus character.

My question pertains more to the world view of a christian theist.  There are problems on both sides, as I see it.

In short, if christianity is contingent, then the god of christian theists screwed up and created creatures that unexpectedly ran off the rails and had to be saved by the uncomfortable execution of the Jesus character.  The ability to screw up is not a recognised characteristic of the god of christian theists.

If christianity is not contingent, which seems to be the preferred position of christian theists, then either the Garden of Eden event was staged and the "Fall of Man" was a known outcome right from the start, which could have been prevented but wasn't (thus making the god of christian theists responsible for the event, since that god is so much more powerful and knowledgeable than its creations), or the god knew that there was "sin" built into humanity that would eventually require the uncomfortable execution event (which again could have been prevented, but wasn't, thus the god of the theists is responsible for the "sin" that is built into humanity is).

Personally, I so see christianity as contingent, even within the christian theist's paradigm.  Assuming Adam and Eve existed and had free-will, they could have chosen to ignore the serpent.  Assuming an old universe creation, events could have been different, due to small decisions anywhere in our history, such that the Jesus character never existed (or was never invented), or Paul could have decided to go to the pub for a few refreshing ales rather than head to Damascus the day that he fell over and had his vision.

This sort of contingency is transferrable to other Abrahamic, if not all religions.

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When I initially floated this argument (which I admit only hints at the problem), the primary defence seemed to be a total misunderstanding of what "contingent" means.   There was some variation in the lack of comprehension though, which was nice.  I took it to be a sign that some of the WLC fan-club were thinking for themselves rather than just following the party line.

The point that I was trying to make with this argument was that if the universe itself is contingent (per WLC), how could anything within the universe be fundamentally necessary?  If something in the universe is fundamentally necessary, then the universe itself would be necessary - so long as it's also essential to that universe and/or being in the universe is part of the inherent nature of that thing.

That might take some explaining.  Say we have a thing "P in a bucket", say that this "P in a bucket" is necessary, there is no world in which there is no "P in a bucket".  It would therefore follow that there is no world in which there is no bucket just as much as there is no world in which there is no P – because in any world that exists, there would be P and that P would be in a bucket.

The question that could be raised is whether, given our universe, is X necessary (is X like "P in a bucket" or is X like a different type of P, P that may be in the bucket, but might easily be somewhere else, like in a can, or lying on the floor)?  Note that X can be "something", "anything" or "a specific thing", like christianity for example.

The necessity or otherwise of X, given my caveat above (“given our universe”), would depend on the nature of the universe, would it not?  And what is responsible for the nature of the universe?  In a sense, what the objections to the argument revolved around was what could be called “the contingency of necessity”, because the theist’s god apparently gets to choose what is and what is not necessary.

On the grand scale, what that means is that what some theists consider as "necessary" is, in fact, contingent.  Unless, of course, their god is not omnipotent.

cnearing's argument, subjective probability and the whole Reverse Monty debacle

Over at Craig-Land, in his thread on what constitutes a "good argument", a forum member called cnearing wrote this:

I would point out that I take a strictly subjectivist approach to probability.  Probability is not an objective feature of reality (probably--set aside potential quantum weirdness for the moment) but rather a representation of the uncertainty one has about the way things behave.

Probability comes from models.  Models are built through inference from experience.  Both are subjective.

This reminded me of the terrible trouble I got myself into with respect to the "Reverse Monty Hall Problem".  I went into it with an assumption which, for one reason or another, had become implicit rather than explicit and which then became forgotten, hidden and/or overlooked.

There are a lot of articles connected with the one I've provided a link to, so I'll try to distil it down to essentials.

If we don't know, and have no way to know, the probability of a particular claim or premise in terms of it being true or false, we are required by the principle of indifference to assign it a notional probability of 1/2.  If we know more, for example that there are more options, say:

A is true, B and C are false.

B is true, A and C are false.

C is true, A and B are false.

One of A, B and C is true.

Then, knowing nothing else, we are required to assign a notional probability of 1/3 to A, B and C.  We don't know anything that makes A more or less likely than the others.

Say then, that we have an urn in which there is an arbitrarily large number of balls that are identical in size and that is all we know.  We draw out all but one of them (say 999 of them), and they are all white.

What is the likelihood that the last one is also white?  If we know nothing else, then the answer is one in a thousand, the same likelihood of a single non-white ball being placed in any specific position in a sequence of one thousand extractions.

What was the likelihood, after having drawn 99 balls, that the 100th was non-white?  The same logic applies and it was one in one hundred.  As more white balls were drawn, the likelihood of a non-white ball being drawn went down.

Now, compare this to the likelihood of drawing a non-white ball as assigned by someone who has one more piece of information, the knowledge that the balls were initially drawn from an enormous barrel in which there were 900,000 white balls and 100,000 black balls.

Unlike us, who had no additional information and could only work on the basis of what balls we had drawn out, this other person will know that there is an increasing likelihood of drawing a black ball after each white ball is removed.  In fact the likelihood of the 1000th ball being non-white after a sequence of 999 white balls is very slightly higher than one in ten.  The likelihood of drawing 999 non-white balls in a row is extremely low, but that is immaterial, since we are only looking at the likelihood associated with the next draw once this extremely unlikely scenario has already played out.

We can fiddle with the figures to make it more explicit.  Say we only know about 999,999 balls that we've drawn, over a period of a couple of boring days.  All of them are white.  We have to say that the likelihood of the next ball being non-white is one in a million.

But if our more knowledgeable friend knows also that there is one black ball in the barrel, then she will have to say that the likelihood of the next ball being non-white is one in one, 100%.

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My point here is that we have evidence, and we might also have assumptions.  The assumptions that we make about the distribution of balls in the urn will change our assessment of the likelihood of a non-white ball being drawn.  If we characterise our (potentially false) assumptions as "knowledge" - as theists are often wont to do - we will consistently misjudge the likelihood of our premises (and subsequent conclusions) being true.

Add to this the possibilities that we don't consider (i.e. thinking only of A being true or false, rather than factoring in other possibilities like B and C), then we end up with very little likelihood of reaching reliable conclusions.

One God, Two Cups

If you want a headache then, so long as you are not a theist, a good destination is Craig-Land.  I was able to carry out a long meandering discussion on the nature of “objective moral values” over a period of more than three months and, while a little frustrating at times, this discussion was reasonably stable – we knew what we are talking about and we pretty much stayed on track.  Not so in another thread on the “Ontological Argument”, which took off a few weeks later.

My claim in this thread, a thread that I initiated, was that Craig continues on a cheat in the modal logic version Ontological Argument that is initially committed by Plantinga and I posed the questions: “Are there people who are seriously persuaded by this argument?  Surely some of you have worked out that something is not quite right in it?”

This claim attracted the attention of self-described logicians who wanted to prove to me that Plantinga’s BS5 is actually a logically valid argument.  Because this was not precisely what I was saying (remember I was claiming that Plantinga and Craig were cheating, not that the argument was not "a logically valid argument"), I claimed that this was a diversion and that, eventually, the argument broke down into counter claims of playing the “pea-and-cup game” - involving switches between claims of (in)validity and claims of (un)soundness.

There is some similarity between this discussion and that on “objective moral values” given that my theist opponents were trying to limit the discussion to a question of the “logical validity” of a specific theorem, namely BS5, (and they wanted to define that as meaning “internally consistent”, rather than applicable in the context in which it was being used) and were trying to avoid discussing whether the modal logic version Ontological Argument as a whole was “sound”.

I thought that I might share two things that stood out to me in these discussions, noting that these were “logicians” and thus apparently sophisticated theists.

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If I was presenting an argument about something as important as the existence of a god is to theists, I would be concerned if I could easily replace “god exists” with “my car is green” and I could logically show that my car is green when it is, in actual fact, blue.

Admittedly, in the excitement of finding an apparently brilliant argument to show that my car is green (when it's not), I might initially fail to notice that I can prove whatever the hell I wanted to prove with this argument (for example, one of the sophisticated theists used BS5 to prove that I don’t exist which, under the circumstances, I didn’t find threatening in the least).  But once it was pointed out that I could “prove” logically that I was the world’s best Morris dancer as easily as I could prove something that I actually wanted to prove, for example that spanking (as defined by my buddy, LNC) is bad, then as a rational person I would become very wary of such an argument.

Not so the sophisticated theist.  Instead, the sophisticated theist will zero in on the internal consistency of BS5 and ignore the fact that their argument (which makes use of BS5) is unsound.  This sounds like intellectual dishonesty to me, but I suppose theists are rarely accused of being intellectual.

Interestingly enough, I got challenged a couple of times on whether I was a logician, as if I wasn’t welcome to point out the fact that BS5 can be used to prove that the moon is made of green cheese when one so desires.  The reason I find it unnecessary to be a logician is that when Craig has presented this argument, he hasn’t carefully checked his audience to ensure that they are all logicians.  If he’s willing to present his argument to non-logicians, then I don’t see why non-logicians should be prevented from pointing out that an argument that relies on BS5 is bollocks (after all, the argument might work perfectly in a logician’s ivory tower and fail miserably when brought out into the real world).

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The second thing I noticed was a far more obvious case of intellectual dishonesty.  During my three weeks of discussion, the more coherent theist involved seemed to be cpdavey24.  This positive assessment of mine might be due to the halo effect given that he noted a few times that he didn’t consider Plantinga’s Ontological Argument to be particularly good.  However, the halo was tarnished somewhat by his last post.

From as early as reply #24 in our exchange, cpdavey24 began to admit that perhaps Plantinga’s and Craig’s arguments might not be good (“But look, I never said Plantinga’s or Craig’s OA was a good argument.”)  He maintained this position of strategic neutrality in replies #38, #56, #82, #117 (two mentions) and #120 (a staggering six mentions).  When I replied to #120, applauding him for effectively arguing my point, I quoted all six instances:

• If by "logic can't be used to show that it does" you mean that when "god exists" or "a maximally great being exists" is plugged in for A, the argument is unsound (though valid), then you may be right. But if by this you mean the logic itself is invalid, then this has yet to be shown

• As for for the second part of your statement, let me reiterate a fourth time that I am not arguing that God exists, nor am I arguing that Plantinga's argument is a good or "convincing" proof

• The reasoning is unsound given certain instances of A

• If by "dodgy" you mean unsound, then I agree with you; but, again, this is the case with all valid forms of reasoning

• So, again, if you want to retract your claim that Plantinga/Craig's argument is invalid, and simply hold that, like the argument above, it is a terrible and unconvincing argument (though valid), then that's fine

• First, I would never use the OA to try to save your soul, neopolitan, because it is a very complex argument and I'm not convinced it's a good argument anyway.  //  Second, I've never said the OA is the best argument one can present for the existence of God. Others on this thread might be making that claim, but I certainly am not

However, despite this, cpdavey24 had the gall to include in his reply (#130) not only further confirmation:

• First, if by “works” you mean is sound, then I’ve never said it works.

but also denial of that confirmation:

• If by “he argues my point” you mean that I have anywhere in this thread argued that Plantinga’s or Craig’s OA is unsound, then I am afraid you are simply mistaken.

His compatriot, Biep, also tried to argue that Plantinga himself wasn’t actually arguing that his Ontological Argument was sound (I’m not sure what the point of making that claim was).  When I posted Plantinga’s own words from the document in which he presented “A Victorious Modal Version”, in which Plantinga claimed that his argument was sound very clearly at least three times, Biep responded with:

• Indeed, those are not claims about the logic, but about the truth of the premises, especially the first one.

This reality realignment on the fly really makes it difficult to maintain interest in reasoned argument.  It certainly doesn’t indicate any willingness to work towards truth and understanding.

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Anyways, what I have learnt from this, yet again, is that theists are very resilient.  They will believe a ridiculous proof if it gives the answer they want, they will hide behind definitions and authority and they are more than willing to warp reality if they think it will aid their cause.  And while it just might be possible that they are not totally mad themselves, arguing with them can certainly drive a poor fellow to distraction.

Mea Culpa Rursus ... and Exorcisms vs Epilepsy

Rarely do I find myself banned from places where the banning has not been part of my plan.  Nevertheless, I have found myself banned from Craig-Land (temporarily so I was told, but at time of writing I am now heading towards the 40th day of a one-month suspension, so who knows).

I have to admit that it was my fault.  The moderator who suspended me was nice enough to list my infractions:

needlessly insinuating that another community member is an idiot (not guilty, your honour, I implied that the guy doesn't think things through – but I will plead guilty to a lesser charge, "insinuating that another community member is intellectually lazy" … and "needlessly" is a bit of a stretch, it was quite necessary for my argument that I point out that the other community member doesn't think things through)

calling a community member crazy, christians a little bit crazy, and implying that you don’t have to be nice to someone if their views seem insane to you (you do) (oh, that extraneous comma is an offence to human-kind, more on the meat of this later)

saying “bullocks” a lot (um, no, I specifically wrote "bollocks", but yeah, I wrote it four times in that post, for effect)

either being unintentionally obnoxious or trolling (they don't know me well enough if they think I was being unintentionally obnoxious – and trolling seems to be a term bandied around far too easily on this forum, I wasn't trolling, I was just having a light-hearted exchange with a fellow non-theist in enemy territory.  These theists get far too hot under the collar when we point out that their priests have been abusing children for centuries.  Or maybe it was the reference to the inquisition that they object to?)

So, yes, I did err.  I should have been more careful in my wording.  But worst of all, I fell into a little trap regarding the use of the term "crazy".  It was a sort of honey-trap, I was lured in and then smashed.

I was discussing how theists use certain types of arguments in support of their god hypothesis because they lack proper evidence (which I call "the argument from lack of evidence").  As an example of a hypothesis that has actual evidence, I used the Theory of Relativity.  This attracted the attention of a person called Trinity who made a comment that there is no such thing as "time dilation", that time cannot expand and contract.  I commented that the term "time dilation" might be a little vexed, but the phenomenon it describes certainly exists.  Trinity then replied he does not believe in "spacetime".

That got my interest.

We tic-tacked for a while and then something he wrote made me stop and think.  He was a geocentrist, the one who had started a thread recently calling for people to provide him with evidence that the Earth is moving, specifically some way of measuring the Earth's motion (see Gyroscopes on the Moon, Gyroscopes on Earth and Gyroscopes and Relativity? What's that all about?).

So I called him that "crazy person who thinks that geocentricity is actually correct".  Soon after, he set his honey-trap, asking:

I don't think this is irenic, neopolitan. What if I think that geocentricity is actually correct? Why does that make me crazy? More than two billion people on Earth think that Jesus walked on water. Are they crazy as well?

Well of course I think that people who believe that Jesus walked on water are at least a little bit crazy.  They believe something that is patently false and their belief is impervious to evidence, logic and reason.  They almost certainly think the same of me.  I tried to be diplomatic though and wrote:

Anyone who believes that Jesus (existed AND) literally walked on water is probably a little bit crazy, but not necessarily as crazy as someone who denies reality enough to believe that the Earth is the centre of the universe.

See, I wrote "a little bit crazy"!  That's a concession, isn't it?

But I'd already fallen into the honey-trap.  Once I'd overtly accused Trinity of being crazy for his geocentricity, I could not equivocate on my position that theists in general are (at least a little bit) crazy.  And making this position clear was already something that I was tempted to do – a temptation that I have to consciously and continually resist.

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I didn't get banned, but I have since left Craig-Land of my own accord.  Maybe I'll visit again in the future, who knows?

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I wrote this piece more than half a year ago and, like a few other articles that I've not yet posted, it has just been sitting in a directory collecting dust.  There's no real reason for me to not have published most of them, other than I got busy with other things … so I plan to trickle release from this treasure trove over the next month or so.

This article, however, is serendipitously relevant because of something I saw the other night.  I initially closed with the comment to the effect that I am consciously and continually resisting the urge to call theists "a little bit crazy".  Now, it would be inaccurate to say that all theists are as crazy as the ones interviewed in the short SBS documentary, however … these beliefs are there in the major three monotheistic religions (judaism [yep, written by that David Wolpe], christianity and islam).

I have no issue with adults choosing to rid themselves of the spirit of masturbation, although the level of fixation seems a little odd when we're talking about something (self-reverence) that is over and done with within a few minutes  and surely doesn’t happen more than half a dozen or so times a day …

However, I do have considerable issues with what is effectively child abuse when toddlers going through their "terrible twos" are deemed to be possessed by demons, especially when this abuse is thought to be protected as "freedom of religion".  Parents have the right to believe all sorts of crazy things, I suppose, but this does not justify putting their children through anything like an "exorcism", or denying their children proper medical care, or preventing them from getting proper education.  (Which are more likely to put their kids through an exorcism - publicly educated parents or parents who as children were home-schooled by an earlier generation of religious nut-jobs?)

It's this sort of thing that has me biting my lip and struggling to not call religious people "a little bit crazy", because standing not too far behind them are religious people with a whole ship-load of crazy.

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I am aware that Linda Chaniotis has epilepsy, but her unapologetic father tells of how she was a placid child up until she was two.  Babies can have epilepsy-like convulsions, although these are usually related to fevers (febrile convulsions) which only become a risk factor for epilepsy if they are prolonged and recurrent, and even then this only increases the risk by about 10% above that of the general population (so from about 60 in 10,000 to 66 in 10,000).  The onset of epilepsy in children is usually from about age four, rather than age two, but even if she did have an earlier onset, the complaint expressed by her father was not in regard to convulsions but rather about her behaviour.

There are some inconsistencies in the reporting, for example:

"She was a very good baby, placid," her father Damien told The Feed. "At about the age of two she just changed overnight."

(The fact that her father has the name Damien would be endless amusing, if it weren't all so horrible.  You can hear Damien making this statement in the video which can be accessed from the Guardian link above and from the SBS link below.)

Linda herself reports having had screaming fits from three months to about three years, but then also writes that her "parents decided that when (she) was about two, (she) had been cursed by a witch, and that (she) was demon possessed".  This is a little awkward wording, making it unclear as to whether the parents came to the conclusion, at the time when she was two, that she had earlier been cursed by a witch, or whether the curse, according to her parents, had been laid upon her when she was two.  Elsewhere it seems more clear that her parents told her when she was two that she had (apparently earlier) been cursed by a witch.  However, this seems inconsistent with her being a lovely, placid child until two and then changing overnight into a demon-possessed nightmare.

In any event, no matter whether it is convulsions or behavioural issues (perhaps due to episodes of petit mal epilepsy, or absence seizures, which can be mistaken for "misbehaviour" - although Linda does describe auras which are associated with grand mal seizures, which lead to convulsions), a child should be given appropriate medical care in the first instance - religious parents should be encouraged to place exorcism as an activity of last resort, so far down the track from rational behaviour that it is never actually resorted to.