Null hypothesis

The null hypothesis (warning, the linked cartoon is satirical) is the default hypothesis of science.  Fundamentally, before considering any other hypothesis you should first prove false some formulation of the null hypothesis.

In earlier articles, like On Evidence, I’ve talked about how Christian apologists attack atheists for their presumptions.  As an example, the Shaved Chimp points out (negatively) the fact that “the starting point for the atheists is that there is no purpose out there”.

Well, yes.  That is pretty much what we all should start out with, that’s approaching a good null hypothesis.

Similarly, if you want to consider a god hypothesis you should first find some evidence to negate the relevant null hypothesis – that there is no god.

If you want to consider a claim like “God saved my cat”, you should first disprove the null hypothesis - that there was no supernatural agency involved in the on-going existence of my cat.  Once you've done that, you can try to zero in on the nature of the supernatural agency involved, given that it might have been the witches down the road rather than some sort of sky-fairy.

But until the null hypothesis is negated, there is simply no excuse for considering anything else.

A lot of atheists are, to coin a phrase, null hypotheticians.  They don’t progress past the impossibility to show that anything supernatural is required to explain the universe.  Such atheists don’t need to actively reject god because there’s no need to even consider the god hypothesis in the first place.  To establish such a need, they’d first have to reject the null hypothesis – and no-one has been able to that.

I doubt that the average theist has even tried.

Planting a Swiss Army Knife

It is vaguely possible that there are people who don’t know what a Swiss Army knife is.  Fortunately these sorts of people are evolutionary dead ends, so we don’t need to worry about them.

Plantinga has, along with Humble Don and the Shaved Chimp and many other apologists, tried to argue something along these lines:

Proper function of the heart is the pumping blood around the body.

If the heart fails to pump blood around the body, the owner of the said heart dies.

However, proper function implies conformance with specifications, which in turn implies a designer.

Therefore, god exists, or you die of heart failure … your choice.

Ironically, Plantinga had a triple bypass operation earlier this year (discovered when trying to find his quote using the string “Plantinga and the heart”).  Thank god for those surgeons, eh?

The idea behind this argument is that the human heart (or whatever human organ you want to use) does a particular job, and apparently does it exceptionally well.  Without it we would die – unless science stepped in.  But if you are going to argue along evolutionary lines, what did the heart do before it pumped blood?  How did it get from there to where it is today?

This is sort of where the argument of “irreducible complexity” tries to get purchase.  One can understand how a heart might scale up along with the owners.  A small shrew-like mammal precursor would not need the half-kilo heart that humans carry around with them.

However, there comes a point where there are simply not enough cells in a heart to support any pumping at all.  In the “irreducible complexity” argument there is a gap between a few cells joining up together and not doing anything particularly important, and a quite large number of cells being assembled with the express purpose of pumping (the smallest known mammal has a heart which weighs about 15mg which comprises in the order of half a billion cells).  People like Plantinga try to slot god into this gap.

A problem with this argument (apart from the fact that the mammalian precursor had a lineage which included smaller creatures with smaller heart like structures – for example insects, the smallest known of which is 0.139mm long) is that it assumes a continuity of function.  Nature doesn’t seem to consider itself thus constrained.  For example, scales and feathers and fur are variants of the same basic thing, petals and leaves and thorns are variants of the same thing.  Plants didn’t specifically develop “pointy things to dissuade grazing animals”, they simply co-opted and perfected pointier than average leaves.  (Don’t take this too literally – there was no Supreme Council of Plants with a 1,000 Year Plan to develop thorns.)

The problem comes in when you assume design and you assume that a function that you are bright enough to recognise must have been designed in (and you’re not overly bright).  This is understandable, to a certain extent, in a technological society like ours.  Everything is designed with function in mind (and somewhere close to half of the population are of below average intelligence – not my readers of course, you are all brilliant).

However, getting back on track … I draw your attention to the Swiss Army knife.  This is a perfect example of something specifically designed for one purpose being co-opted for another.

My variant of the Swiss Army knife has a number of goodies:

two sharp blades – occasionally used

              (when I can’t be bothered getting a proper knife)

two screwdrivers – occasionally used

              (when I can’t be bothered getting my screwdriver set)

a corkscrew – never used (I have better corkscrews around)

a fish-scaler – never used

a helping you to tie fishing line thingie – never used

a thingie for getting stones out of horses hooves (I assume) – never used

a can opener – never used

a toothpick – lost and never used

a tiny pair or tweezers – never used

a little pair of grips – occasionally used

              (when I can’t be bothered getting my socket set)

solid construction (ie a hammer) – occasionally used

              (when I can’t be bothered getting anything more hammer-like)

a lovely pair of scissors – used all the freaking time to cut my nails

In terms of evolution, the Swiss Army knife is in a transitional state between being something which does various things not particularly well into a magnificent device that appears to be designed specifically for cutting nails.  Nothing cuts nails better.

Now, I am pretty sure that the gnomes in Switzerland are not designing towards a perfect pair of nail scissors.  They are just churning out variants of their product, trying to maximise sales.  All that has happened is that I, representing natural selection, have favoured a variant of the Swiss Army knife which performs a key task well.  If the vast majority of Swiss Army knife buyers, like me, purchase them primarily to cut their nails, and a later design change eliminates that function, the Swiss Army knife will die out.  If a later design change maintains the heft of the Swiss Army knife and the scissors but removes unnecessary stuff like the fish-scaler and thus improves its attractiveness on price, then it will become more popular at the expense of more awkward variants.

I suggest that the same thing happened with the heart.  A bunch of cells were already huddled together with some other goal in mind, or even a range of goals, (entirely metaphorically, cells don’t huddle and they don’t have intentions) before being co-opted into the pumping blood malarkey.  

(Similarly, at a much smaller scale, the supposed “irreducible complexity” involved in the inner workings of a cell would also have involved the co-opting of an existing function.)

So, as a last word, if something that was specifically designed for a purpose, like the Swiss Army knife being designed to deprive tourists of their hard-earned Euros, can be co-opted for another purpose, like cutting my toe-nails, then it is surely not too much of a stretch to think that non-directed “design” could co-opt existing structures and modify them to suit a new purpose.  Is it?

Explaining Evidence

In On Evidence, I mentioned an exchange between Humble Don and the Shaved Chimp:

Humble Don (HD): It’s theoretically possible that you could be presented with enough evidence to argue you to a different position …

The Shaved Chimp (SC): Oh, sure.

(HD): At which point, you would begin to intellectually doubt Christianity …

(SC): Well, yes, what, wh-what, what those arguments would have to do is explain the evidence better …

(HD): Right.

(SC): … than the Christian claim.

I only briefly touched on it, but this “explain the evidence” seems to be a recurring theme, so I thought I might look more closely at it.

Note closely the shift in focus away from evidence to argument and then to explanation of the evidence.

What the Shaved Chimp seems to be alluding to is a comparison between one claim (the Christian claim) and an opposing claim.  This is fair enough given that they were talking about a newspaper piece by an atheist.  So Humble Don was suggesting that it is theoretically possible to be presented with enough evidence to argue the Shaved Chimp into assuming an atheist position.

Imagine that archaeologists open a cave to find a treasure trove of documentation including early versions of the gospel according to Mark that deviate significantly from the published version, with copious notes indicating that the story is based not only on the “messiah phenomenon” that is common in Judea but also elements of the mythology of India, Egypt, Mesopotamia and Assyria together with some Greek storytelling techniques.  The documentation, dated to before 50CE (via a comprehensively documented event that led to the sealing of the cave), makes absolutely clear that the author considered the story to be fiction and there is no scientific reason to doubt the validity of the documentation.

Can this evidence be explained by the “atheist claim”?

Well, not really.  Why were the documents written?  Unless there’s a documented explanation we simply don’t know why the author wrote them.  We do know that various authors throughout history have written fiction for entertainment or to make some point.  Someone with an atheist inclination might posit that the author had wondered what would happen if the child of a god were to be born into the world of the day (there are plenty of people who believe that if a Jesus like figure was around today, he’d be eliminated rather swiftly).  Such a theory, however, is not an explanation rooted in the “atheist claim”.

Can this evidence be explained by the Christian claim?

Sure, no problem.  The Holy Spirit moved in the world then as it does now.  While the author known as Mark might not have thought that the story was true, the fact that the Holy Spirit selected someone who did not believe the story is immaterial.  The intent of the Holy Spirit in selecting Mark was to ensure the best possible rendition of the Gospel, to express a higher truth than that perceived by Mark himself.

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If your focus is entirely on explaining evidence as it arises, then the Christian claim can always suffice.

The sorts of people who actively seek out evidence (atheists, legitimate scientists and materialists) aren’t looking to explain evidence.  They also have a higher standard when it comes to what constitutes evidence.

The idea that the scientifically inclined don’t try to explain evidence might have Christian apologists snorting into their beards so I had better explain.

In the scientific method, one tries to explain observations, not evidence.  Science, as a method, attempts to integrate our knowledge into a seamless whole.  What science does not do is simply list the observations and then attempt to explain them individually.  As Sean Carroll says in The Great Debate – Has Science Refuted Religion? – “the dumbest, but most accurate, scientific theory would just be a list of everything that ever happened, everywhere in the universe”.  Science sacrifices this level of stupid accuracy in favour of a theoretical framework that is testable and that has predictive power.

(Science is not alone in this.  Not even humans are alone in this.  Any creature that can learn to use tools will use a variation of the scientific method to develop an understanding of a tool in order to use it successfully.)

The steps of the scientific method, put roughly, are:

·         Informal observation

o   An apple falls to the ground

·         Systematic observation

o   Various fruit in the garden fall to the ground, as do leaves and twigs

·         Formulation of a generalised, falsifiable hypothesis

o   “Unless otherwise supported, an object will when released always approach the ground” – if we drop an object and it hangs in the air or rises, then this will prove the hypothesis to be incorrect

·         Testing of hypothesis

o   Systematic release of a variety of items

o   Each test constitutes evidence for or against the hypothesis

·         Falsification of hypothesis

o   A helium balloon when released floats up

o   If a falsifiable hypothesis cannot be shown to be false, it will eventually become a Theory

·         Modification of hypothesis

o   Based on the results of experimentation (evidence) the hypothesis may be either rejected as false or, if appropriate, modified

o   “Unless otherwise supported, an object that is heavier than air will when released always approach the ground”

Theories can serve as the basis for new hypotheses, with the example above, we could posit that objects with mass will accelerate towards each other in proportion to their combined mass divided by their separation.  This new hypothesis would be tested and refined until a Theory remains which is not falsified.  Any new Theory which has more predictive power and which explains a greater range of phenomena will replace lower level theories – as neopolitan’s basic theory of stuff dropping is replaced by Newton’s theory of gravitation which is then replaced by Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity.

This explanation of phenomena and the predictive power of a hypothesis are what are meant when scientists refer to “explanatory power”.

William Lane Craig continually refers to the explanatory power of the God Hypothesis – his whole “Cosmological Argument from Contingency” is predicated on the idea.  Here’s the argument again (from his debate with Lawrence Krauss):

1. Everything that exists has an explanation of its existence (either in its own nature or in an external cause).
2. If the universe has an explanation of its existence, that explanation is God.
3. The universe exists.
4. Therefore, the explanation of the universe is God.

Later in the debate, while summarising, Craig says:

… I explained that contingent beings are more probable given God’s existence than on atheism. Dr. Krauss will have to say that the existence of contingent beings is just as probable on atheism as it is on theism. But that seems incorrect because atheism has no explanation for the existence of contingent beings.

Note that by “contingent beings” here Craig means things that did not have to exist, but do.

Take a moment for Craig’s words to sink in.  If his words don’t seem silly to you, try reading them again.  Usually, a summarisation papers over the gaping holes in an argument but in this case, the summarisation make absolutely clear that Craig’s argument is incoherent.

First we need to decode the term “probable on” in reference to hypotheses.  If you do a Google search on this term, you will reach two types of uses:

·         a statement is evidence for an hypothesis if and only if the hypothesis is more probable on the statement than before (Florida Philosophical Review)

·         What about the first point of evidence that the existence of contingent beings is more probable on God’s existence than on atheism? (William Lane Craig)

The first usage here is the form you’ll be more likely to see, unless you restrict your search to apologetics sites (and sites critiquing apologetics sites).  It refers to the probability of a hypothesis being affected by the presentation of evidence.  Presumably, a statement is evidence against a hypothesis if and only if the hypothesis is less probable on (the basis of) the statement than before.

The second usage is the sort of misuse of logic that we’ve come to expect from Craig.  Let me rephrase him a little to take out the deceptions:

·         What about the first (point of evidence) argument that the evidence (existence of contingent beings) is more probable on the hypothesis H (God’s existence) than on the hypothesis H’ (atheism)

Can you see it?

I’ll tidy them both up and let you compare them on more even footing:

·         the hypothesis is more probable on the evidence (than another hypothesis) (FPR)

·         the evidence is more probable on the hypothesis (than another hypothesis) (WLC)

Okay, so Craig has it back to front.  No surprise there because he’s trying to defend a hypothesis rather than find a truth.

Looking at his statement again:

… I explained that contingent beings are more probable given God’s existence than on atheism. Dr. Krauss will have to say that the existence of contingent beings is just as probable on atheism as it is on theism. But that seems incorrect because atheism has no explanation for the existence of contingent beings.

and rewording:

·         X argued that:

o   the evidence is more probable on hypothesis H than on hypothesis H’

·         X states that Y must argue that:

o   the evidence is just as probable on hypothesis H’ as on hypothesis H

·         X believes that the argument that (according to X) Y must present is incorrect because

o    hypothesis H’ provides no explanation for the evidence

In other words, Craig is arguing that the probability of evidence is affected by the ability of a hypothesis to explain that evidence.

If you have ever been amazed by the way some theists simply dismiss good evidence against their position and unquestioningly accept any evidence in support, no matter how flimsy it may be, this might give you some clue as to why. 

I cannot explain this good evidence in light of my hypothesis that God exists, therefore I reject this good evidence. (There are no fossils!  Have you looked in a museum? … There are no fossils and no museums!) 

In the light of my hypothesis that God exists, this flimsy evidence is probable because even an idiot can explain it in terms of God, therefore I accept this flimsy evidence. (The Earth is perfectly designed for human habitation - so long as we ignore storms, earthquakes, droughts, solar radiation, disease, large infertile regions, depleted fish stocks, etc etc)

 

Where did I come from?

Unlike many atheists, I am not an apostate.  I have never been anything other than an atheist.  For as long as I remember, I have had a total lack of belief in anything spiritual, or magical, or paranormal, or supernatural.  Even in my earliest coherent memories, from when I was five, I was well aware that Santa and the Tooth Fairy were made up.  I simply don’t recall ever believing in them, although I do accept that I may have when I was very little.  I have no recollection of the experience of belief in anything magical or supernatural. 

When I was still quite young, again about five, we lost a few cats to local traffic.  I held no belief, even at that time, that death was anything other than final.  This lack of belief wasn’t restricted to cats since I had the same sense of finality when my grandfather died a year or so later.

(This is not to say that there hasn’t been some wishful thinking on my part from time to time.  I recall that when I was a teenager, I did want to have paranormal powers, such as telekinesis and the ability to teleport at will.  However, this was on a par with wanting to have my own fire lizard [see Dragonriders of Pern] or my own light sabre.  I knew it wasn’t possible, but I thought it would have been so cool if it were.  To be honest, I’d still like to have a fire lizard.)

I was not totally ignorant of Christianity, which is the religion generally held by people who were into that sort of thing where I lived as a child.  For a while, when I was perhaps seven or eight, I even attended Sunday School (although I have absolutely no idea who made that decision).  My father did some work at a tourist beach from when I was about seven until I was about nine, so I spent whole summers – every single day – taking advantage of the only free entertainment on offer, something known today as “Beach Mission”.

During that time, I learnt the Bible stories inside out.  I was the most knowledgeable atheist on the beach, even winning Bibles during the quiz competitions. (I still keep the best of those prizes together with the rest of my science fiction and fantasy books, although it has the first page of Genesis ripped out which is a bit sad and, I’d have thought, totally unnecessary – there are no nut-hatches in Genesis are there?)

I do not recall my state of belief ever coming up as a topic of conversation.  The young beach crusaders seemed to be happy enough that I was a keen and involved listener and they probably assumed that since I was absorbing their lore, I was also absorbing their message.  The issue of atheism simply never came up.

Not terribly much later, von Däniken released a new book, which renewed interest in his first book “Chariots of the Gods” and also in Velikovsky’s “Worlds in Collision”.  I didn’t read any of their books, but I was aware of the contents in so much as both of them tried to explain Biblical (and other) events in terms of aliens and/or non-standard solar system cosmology.  It was at this time that I was struck for the first time by the thought that there are full-grown adults, who have not yet reached the point of senility who actually believe what is written in the Bible and, not only that, some of them believe it literally.

I need to keep a theist (or apostate) reader in mind here and explain some things which may seem obvious to other readers.

I was aware of myth.  I knew about Greek mythology (and, to the extent that it was slightly modified, Roman mythology), Egyptian mythology, Norse mythology (and the variant introduced to the British Isles by Angles and Saxons), Irish mythology, a little Native American mythology and some Australian Aboriginal and Maori mythology, plus I was vaguely aware that there were African and Asian mythologies.

I also knew a fair bit of Christian, Jewish and, to a lesser extent, Muslim mythology.  I was aware that these monotheistic religions were all quite similar to each other as well as being quite similar to some earlier religions from the region.  I was possibly a little better informed than the average child who would more easily fall prey to one form of indoctrination or another.

I remember a particularly loud thunderstorm from when I was about eight and recall knowing a story about how the ancients used to think about thunder in terms of giants moving their furniture around (there was a lot of rumbling thunder in this storm).  I didn’t believe that this was true: I just knew that I’d been told that people used to think that.  Note very carefully my use of words here.

I did not believe that “giants moving furniture caused the thunder” was true:

I just knew that I’d been told that people used to think that “giants moving furniture caused the thunder”.

There are four separate and distinct concepts there.

·         I didn’t mention believing anything was true.  All I had was an absence of belief.

·         I knew something (i.e. what I had been told).  This knowledge was based on some evidence (i.e. the recollection of being told something). 

·         I’d been told something, the fact that I am told something doesn’t necessarily mean I believe or, in fact, that I know it. 

·         People used to think something.  I’d been told, as far as I remember, that people used to think, not believe, that gods or giants or something magical and powerful controlled the weather, including storms.

It’s possible to say that I “believed” that the thunder was due to lightning activity, which might even be accurate since I did not fully understand the mechanism by which lightning produces thunder, nor did I understand the mechanism by which storm clouds generate lightning.  But I was most certainly not actively disbelieving that the thunder was due to giant activity, or Thor’s hammer, or any one of dozens of possible superstitious explanations.

If asked, I am pretty certain that I would have reported a considered opinion that none of the adults around me held superstitious beliefs about the thunderstorm.  I was quite used to the idea that there were many myths available to explain various phenomena and I was quite used to the idea that no-one really believed them (except possibly young, more gullible children and anyone old enough to have become senile – note that at eight, the term “old” had a lot more scope for me than it does now).

My default position then, and to a certain extent now, was to assume that unless there are indications to the contrary, a person probably won't be a believer in myth and superstition.  Yes, I realised that old people were more likely to go to church, but with the constant blathering on about things being great in heaven and the fact that death is looming, this was hardly surprising to me.  (If you are ever going to indulge in Pascal’s wager, do it when you are old and can blame it on senility.  Not that everyone will believe the senility claim, judging from the content of various blogs that crow about Antony Flew’s conversion to deism – more on that in another post.)

But when people started talking up Velikovsky and Däniken, it became apparent to me that even average people would seriously consider attempts to “scientifically” explain myth.  This was a bit of a shock.  Science, in my experience, had always served to replace myth with workable theories and this was, certainly as far as I was and remain concerned, the natural order of things.

It was probably at around this point that I became a true atheist, as a reaction to what I saw as a ludicrous situation in which people were taking selected myths seriously.  This is not to say that I was not already, to all intents and purposes, an atheist.  However, until this time, I thought that pretty much everybody else was as well.  You could say that I became a “harder” atheist, or a “newer” atheist.  If you like, you could say I was “born again” as an atheist.

Something else that might have been instrumental in my transition to a stronger stance was my introduction to Baptists.  They may well have been around before, but when I moved to a new High School I met a small group of Christians who were more overt, and more vocal, in their faith than any I had met previously.  Their tendency to challenge others on their faith meant that I had my first opportunity to publically identify as an atheist.

At the same time, I was developing a teenage interest in philosophy, which means I used to argue solipsism with people in order to annoy them.  I would be able to keep up these arguments for about as long as it took for them to punch me, which they would do in order to prove that they did, as a matter of fact, exist rather than being a figment of my imagination.  As far as I can tell, this is a standard rite of passage for a pubescent philosopher.

At some point I either challenged the Baptists on why they believed what they did, or they challenged me on why I didn’t, and a couple of years of heated debate followed.  I was probably a curious animal to them, firstly because they were used to talking to people who had a tepid, almost translucent, gossamer-like faith rather than people who had no faith whatsoever and, secondly, because my knowledge of the bible was in many cases superior to theirs despite my lack of belief in it.  I found them curious too, because they weren’t overly interested in learning more about what it was that they believed and what it was they were trying to proselytise.  They just seemed to move, as a group, from esoteric passage to esoteric passage and none of them appeared interested in understanding the whole of scripture in context.  (Later I realised that these theological herd migrations were the aftereffects of bible study sessions and sermons.)

At university, I fell into a social group which included a number of (initially tepid) Christians who were slowly ensnared in an evangelical campus group.  This experience highlighted to me the sect-like nature of these groups, with their pastor having a huge influence over their behaviour – for good or ill.  Again, there were many heated debates, but this time with a group who were increasingly interested in reading more and more of the scripture that they held to be infallibly true.  It was at this time that I became aware of the mental gymnastics required to integrate belief in the bible and an understanding of the real world – as an observer of these Campus Christians as they were being forced down the path of what I later came to know as apologetics.

I wasn’t overly concerned by these Christians; they were relatively few in number and they had little influence outside their own clique.  However, through having a privileged position among them (I was an accepted atheist who even attended the occasional Friday sermon as a precursor to a night out), I came to notice that more devout Christians can be intensely hypocritical and intolerant.  I was told more than once that I was heading to hell, when I was not being told that I was already there.

My understanding of faith and belief, such as it is, crystallised around this time.  I was talking to Dee (not his real name) about the nature of “grace”.  He explained to me that, in his conception of things, nothing he or anyone else could do would result in him being among the saved.  He would only be saved if his god so willed it.  The same, apparently, applied to me; nothing I could ever do would affect the outcome.  This was intriguing.  Is it possible that Dee, the believer, was not among the saved but I, the atheist, was?  Yes, Dee told me.  The same applied to people of other faiths.

However, Dee was unshakeable in his faith that he was saved through the grace of god.

He believed with utter conviction that he was saved.  He believed with equal conviction that I was not going to be, that Jews possibly could be saved due to a prior agreement with the man upstairs and that Muslims, who were deceived by the devil, were all going straight to hell – unless of course that god decided that he wanted us, in which case god would do what was required for us to be converted, irrespective of any ideas that we might have about it.  So much for converting me!

I’m not certain that this sort of unyielding, uncompromising faith is common to all Christians, or even to all born-again Christians.  What I can say is that while I have no personal experience of this sort of mind-set from the inside, I suspect that it is corresponds at some level with the way the majority of Christians think.

Atheism, or at least my atheism, is not similar to this mind-set at all.

Over the years I’ve ebbed and flowed on the atheism front.  I’ve discussed things theological with theist friends, been amazed that agnostic friends fanatically defend Christian culture against "invading cultures" and argued hotly with people who knock on my door to tell me that I am going to hell (no, not Mormon punks, I mean Jehovah’s Witnesses).  For the most part, so long as they are not on my doorstep taking up time that I could be wasting in some other way, being a theist is fine with me.  Sadly, theists have started to encroach on my life more over the past few years, with attempts to change how schools are run, to influence what can and can’t be taught at school, to define what is “good” in theistic terms and to corrupt science with creationist nonsense.  Theists are particularly annoyingly when misusing logic.

So that’s where I came from, and sort of where I am – standing up and pointing out where people like William Lane Craig and his ilk are wrong.

I should point out that I am totally aware that I don’t fully comprehend this whole faith thing and my take on it may well be completely wrong.  If anyone out there can go some way towards explaining what faith actually means to a Christian, I’d be very interested to hear about it.  Don't bother recounting biblical stories.  I've heard them.

My World View - Part 2

Being labelled Part 2, you might be assuming that this article should be preceded by a Part 1.  We don’t want anyone to be rushing around making any wild, unjustified assumptions so I’ll confirm up front that, yes, there was a Part 1.  Here.

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Recapping very briefly, there is a “Set of All Things” (where Thing is defined broadly) in which there are the subsets: the “Set of True Things”, the “Set of False Things” and the “Set of Neutral Things”.  The “Set of True Things” is far smaller than either of the other two sets.

True Things don’t conflict with other True Things.  False and Neutral Things can conflict with each other, and with True Things.

I also mentioned that I can’t necessarily know which Things are True and that my world view is an intellectual construct consisting of thoughts, ideas and concepts about Things.

As individuals we all divide the “Set of All Things” is into the “Set of Things Held to be True” and everything else (that is the “Set of Things Not Held to be True”), as illustrated below:

Over the years I have come to realise that some effort is necessary to make crystal clear something that should be reasonably obvious.  If I seem to be labouring the obvious, please accept my humble apologies.

Look carefully at the diagram.  You will see a yellow circle representing the “Set of Things Held to be True”.  Outside that circle, is the remainder of the “Set of All Things” which is labelled the “Set of Things Not Held to be True”.

There is no “Set of Things Held to be False”.

There is no “Set of Things Held to be Not True”.

A question that often comes up concerns default positions or presuppositions.  Let me try to make this as clear as possible:

Nothing ends up in my “Set of Things Held to be True” by default.  Before I add a Thing to this set, I need to be convinced that I am justified in holding this new Thing to be True.

Nothing that has wormed its way into my “Set of Things Held to be True” is sacrosanct.  If I am given reason to doubt that a Thing is True, then it gets removed.

Once I hold certain things to be True, I reach a situation as illustrated in the diagram below:

Note that I hold to be True (or “believe”) some Things that are True, some Things that are False and some Things that are Neutral.  The remainder of things I simply do not hold to be True (in other words, I don’t believe them).

Despite my efforts above, you may still be thinking to yourself … “Are you saying that you don’t hold some Things to be False?  Really, I mean, really?”

Well, yes, really, I don’t.  Let me explain by example.  Say that Trudy turns up and tells me that new research reveals that Napoleon Bonaparte was a monkey.  Now I think this assertion is a False Thing, but should I really go to the effort of actively believing that Napoleon Bonaparte was not a monkey?  I don’t think so.  I put as much effort into this claim as I would to the assertion that Napoleon Bonaparte was a tit-mouse, or a small piece of cheese, or a mortal avatar of the Grand Pixie.  I simply withhold belief.

Note that I don’t need justification to withhold belief (to not hold something to be True).  But let’s say Trudy is insistent and desperately wants me to accept her assertion, do I have any justification for such an acceptance?

When I look at her claim, and my existing “Set of Things Held to be True”, I find that I don’t.  An Emperor of France who was a monkey would conflict with many Things I hold to be True.

But let’s say I was particularly ignorant about history and not able to use the internet.  If all I held to be True about Napoleon Bonaparte was that he was hairy and short, that he lived in a tree, that he had a prehensile tail and that he was fond of bananas, then I might be willing to accept that he was a monkey.  The reason for this is that the new Thing presented by Trudy would correlate with all the other Things I hold to be True on this subject.

Correlation is the tool I use to work out whether I should hold a new Thing to be True.  Correlation is particularly useful as the number of Things you hold to be True increases.  If I know 100 Things pertaining (directly or indirectly) to Napoleon Bonaparte, and all of them correlated with the assertion that he was a monkey, then I would be justified in thinking that “Napoleon Bonaparte was a monkey” is a True Thing.  However, if only 96 of those Things correlated with that assertion and 4 of them conflicted with it, then I would need to reconsider.

The protection against erroneously holding False Things to be True is the fact that it is only True Things that always correlate.  If two Things do not correlate then, at most, only one of them can be True.  This allows me to “falsify” a Thing, to show that I should not hold that Thing to be True.

I have to be careful, of course, since if I held “Napoleon Bonaparte had a prehensile tail” to be True, this would correlate with “Napoleon Bonaparte was a monkey”.  I am aware that some of the Things I hold to be True are, in fact, not True.  I don’t know which they are, or I would do something about it, but experience tells me I occasionally trip over “facts” which conflict with new, more authoritative and well-supported “facts”.

Therefore, when I hold a Thing to be True, I only do so probatively.  This means I only hold the Thing to True tentatively, but when I am tentatively holding something to be True, I can use it as evidence in assessing whether other Things should be probatively held to be True.

When I do stumble over a more authoritative and well-supported fact (or set of facts) that shows that a Thing I am probatively holding to be True is not True then I consider this Thing to be falsified so, figuratively, I take that Thing out of the “Set of Things Held to be True” and toss it into the “Set of Things Not Held to be True”.  This could be a gallery of contemporary paintings of Napoleon Bonaparte, which cumulatively demonstrate that he did not have a prehensile tail – or perhaps an autopsy report, or a DNA sample.

Similarly, when I notice that a Thing in my “Set of Things Held to be True” is inconsistent with the majority of other Things in my “Set of Things Held to be True”, then I will remove it.  I might already know that a friend of mine is related to Napoleon Bonaparte (through an obscure cousin of the latter).  I also know that humans and other species can’t interbreed and that humans don’t have prehensile tails.  The idea Napoleon Bonaparte had a prehensile tail is not consistent with these facts, all of which I hold to be True.

I try not to assimilate new Things that are inconsistent with Things that are currently held to be True, but it does happen.  Generally, I’ll first perform the step of working out which Things are more reliable: those I currently hold to be True or the new ones.  I’ll clean up my “Set of Things Held to be True” accordingly, and then assimilate the new Things as appropriate.

So, in short, while I don’t put effort into actively holding False Things to be False, I do put effort into an attempt to align my “Set of Things Held to be True” more closely with the “Set of True Things”.  The picture below illustrates:

  

 

During discussions, I might take a position that “Assertion X is False”.  I take this to be rather different to realigning my world view to create a new set, the “Set of Things Held to be False”.  Instead, it is just adding a new probatively True Thing to the “Set of Things Held to be True” – in this case the notion that “Assertion X is False”.

When pushed frequently on a Thing I do not hold to be True, I might get a stronger sense of where that Thing is objectively, but even if I suspect a Thing is probably in the “Set of False Things”, I still don’t realign my world view.

As an atheist, my world view can be illustrated as in the following picture which should make clear how I categorise the following:

• the Christian god
• the Muslim god
• the Jewish god
• the Hindu gods
• the divinity of the Buddha
• Santa
• ghosts
• aliens that visit Earth to abduct and probe random humans
• the Easter Bunny
• pixies
• faeries
• satanic or Brothers Grimm variety witches 

I don't waste effort actively holding Things to be False unnecessarily.

My view on magical beings is an example of this in action.  I’ve put in Ganesh as a god I don’t hold to be True, but Ganesh is only one of an estimated 330 million gods associated with Hinduism.  It’d be far too much effort to hold each of these gods to be False, along with all of the various types of magical creatures.

You could say that I am eucamenical when it comes to the treatment of gods and other magical beings.  Including your god and any other magical beings you might hold to be True.

In my world view, it seems rather bizarre that one should pick a single icon from the limited range I have illustrated in the “Set of False Things Not Held to be True” and place it into the “Set of True Things” on the basis of a book that is internally inconsistent or the testimony of enthusiastic people who are extremely vague about exactly what it is they believe.

Penultimately, please don't expect special treatment for your pet icon unless you can bring me some evidence that fits in with all the existing facts to hand. If you can bring such evidence, I promise you that I will take you seriously. If you can't, you should seriously consider giving up kidding yourself.

To wrap things up, here are my “presuppositions” together with my process for rationalising my “Set of Things Held to be True”:

• True Things do not conflict with other True Things
• False and Neutral Things will conflict with each other and with True Things
• the number of True Things is vastly outnumbered by the combined number of False and Neutral Things
• All Things in my “Set of Things Held to be True” are held to be True probatively
• I will remove a Thing from my “Set of Things Held to be True” if I discover that it conflicts with the majority of Things in my “Set of Things Held to be True”
• I will remove a Thing from my “Set of Things Held to be True” if it conflicts with a new Thing, where that new Thing is authoritative, well-supported and well correlated with the Things in my “Set of Things Held to be True”
• I will add a Thing to my “Set of Things Held to be True” if it does not conflict with Things already in that set