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ATHEISM AND THE CITY

Exploring Philosophy, Religion & Atheism In The Context Of Contemporary Urban
Life


PAGES

 * Man Vs. God
 * Objective Morality Without God
 * Atheism Vs Agnosticism
 * My Atheist Journey
 * Why I'm An Atheist
 * The Thinker - A Novel




SUNDAY, JANUARY 10, 2021


WHY THE KALAM COSMOLOGICAL ARGUMENT IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH LIBERTARIAN FREE WILL
(MEME EDITION)



I've argued before that the Kalam Cosmological Argument is incompatible with
libertarian free will, but it requires a few assumptions. First it must be the
case that thoughts are not merely events but are things that pop into existence.
Second, to say the "agent" is the cause of its thought requires an agent to
somehow be distinct from its consciousness, such that it can make decisions
prior to consciousness. For example, if an agent causes its thoughts it can't do
so consciously, because the cause would be prior to the thought, which is the
consciousness. I fail to see how an agent can have any control over such an
unconscious experience. I created this meme to illustrate the problem.

Feel free to download and share on your social media.











Posted by The Thinker at 9:36:00 PM 0 Comments
Labels: Free Will, Kalam Cosmological Argument



THE PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT REASON: WHY EVEN GOD CANNOT SATISFY ITS REQUIREMENTS
(MEME EDITION)



Appealing to the principle of sufficient reason is something almost all theists
do. I created a meme years ago on why Munchhausen's Trilemma makes the PSR
impossible to adhere to. Realizing that version was too big, I've now created a
more social media friendly version. Feel free to download this and upload to
your social media.











Posted by The Thinker at 9:12:00 PM 0 Comments




SOMETHING FROM NOTHING: WHY ALMOST EVERYONE GETS THE BIG BANG WRONG (INCLUDING
ATHEISTS) MEME EDITION!



I created an infograph years ago on why almost everyone gets the big bang wrong
but realized it was too big for social media, and so I created a more meme
friendly version. This topic is one of my biggest pet peeves because it allows
the theist to make claims that just aren't true, especially regarding
cosmological arguments. Feel free to download this and upload to your social
media. Spread the word!











Posted by The Thinker at 8:59:00 PM 0 Comments
Labels: Atheism, Kalam Cosmological Argument, Science



WEDNESDAY, APRIL 15, 2020


IT'S BEEN A WHILE...



I haven't blogged in months and it's mainly because I've gotten tired of
refuting theism and religion. I just don't have the time and interest for
long-form blogging anymore, so I'm taking an extended break. I might
occasionally post an argument I think of, but I don't know how often I will do
that. If you want to follow me in any capacity, you can follow me on Twitter,
because that's the only place I'm still active. Just click on the Twitter link
over to the right.

I recently made a simple argument there:




What this argument demonstrates is that the Christian god's intrinsically
trinitarian nature is not logically necessary, and therefore the Christian god's
existence is not logically necessary. Since it is logically possible a different
(non-trinitarian) god could exist, such a god is not necessary. This is the same
logic theists use when they claim the universe could have been different, and
therefore is not necessary. What's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander!

One could claim god is not logically necessary but is metaphysically necessary,
instead. But I could make the same argument about the universe. (And I have.)
Once you acknowledge god is not logically necessary, you can't argue its
metaphysically necessary without allowing the atheist to make the same argument
about the universe. I really hope most atheists and theists come to understand
this, since most currently don't.



Posted by The Thinker at 12:43:00 PM 1 Comment
Labels: debating, god, religion



SATURDAY, AUGUST 10, 2019


QUOTE OF THE DAY: A NEURAL NETWORK FRAMEWORK FOR COGNITIVE BIAS





A particular question comes up for me when debating god's existence about why we
homo sapiens would have so many cognitive biases built into our thinking if it
is the case that god created us for the purposes of knowing god's existence and
the truth (as many theists claim): Why would god design us with so many flaws
hindering our ability to know the truth if our very purpose was to know the
truth?



For example, why would god give us a confirmation bias that makes it difficult
for us to notice contrary evidence? Can this all be swept under the rug with the
ol' "God has morally sufficient reasons for this" explainer? If that sours the
theist, one attempt to deny all this is by saying our cognitive biases are not
hardwired. But, here's a paper demonstrating A Neural Network Framework for
Cognitive Bias.


I leave you a select quote from it (emphasis mine).

> The brain (like all neural networks) functions in a highly associative way.
> Correlation and coincidence detection are the basic operations of neural
> functioning, as manifested in, e.g., Hebb’s rule (Hebb, 1949; Shatz, 1992),
> the ‘Law of Effect’ (Thorndike, 1927, 1933), Pavlovian conditioning (Pavlov,
> 2010), or autocorrelation (Reichardt, 1961). As a result, the brain
> automatically and subconsciously ‘searches’ for correlation, coherence, and
> (causal) connections: it is highly sensitive to consistent and invariant
> patterns..........Examples of heuristics and bias resulting from associative
> information processing are the control illusion (people tend to overestimate
> the degree to which they are in control (Langer, 1975; Matute et al., 2015),
> superstition (Skinner, 1948; Risen, 2015), spurious causality (seeing
> causality in unconnected correlations), the conjunction fallacy (Tversky and
> Kahneman, 1983), the representativeness heuristic (Tversky and Kahneman,
> 1981a), and the previously mentioned story bias......In line with the Hebb
> doctrine (Hebb, 1949), the neural network framework contributes to an
> explanation of these phenomena by the way (the weight of) connections between
> neurons are affected by covarying inputs. Synaptic strengths are typically
> altered by either the temporal firing pattern of the presynaptic neuron or by
> modulatory neurons (Marder and Thirumalai, 2002). Neurons that repeatedly or
> persistently fire together, change each other’s excitability and synaptic
> connectivity (Destexhe and Marder, 2004). This basic principle, i.e., “cells
> that fire together, wire together” (Shatz, 1992), enables the continuous
> adaptation and construction of neural connections and associations based on
> simultaneous and covarying activations.


I'm not sure one can fully deny that cognitive bias has any neuro-biological
basis at all.



Posted by The Thinker at 8:58:00 PM 1 Comment
Labels: debating, god, Neuroscience



WEDNESDAY, JULY 3, 2019


QUOTE OF THE DAY: "NONES" ARE GROWING AND THEY'RE NOT CIVICALLY ENGAGED



Ryan Burge, an associate professor of political science at Eastern Illinois
University and opinion writer for the Religion News Service is fearful for the
future of civic engagement in the US because the rising "nones" (those with no
religious preference), are the least likely to volunteer.

In his recent OP-ED, he created the following treemap of the religious
composition in the US as of 2018 taken from the Cooperative Congressional
Election Study:





Protestants, once a dominant majority, now are only 39% of the US population,
followed by the "nothing in particular" nones at 20%. Further down the list,
atheists and agnostics make up a combined 12%. So the percentage of atheists,
agnostics, and nones according to this study would be 32%, a third of the US.

This worries Burge, as those with nothing in particular are less likely to
volunteer or engage politically, he writes:



> No matter how one feels about religion, it’s undeniable that religious
> traditions have spent decades building networks that operate behind the scenes
> to support those who are most vulnerable in our society. As the number of
> socially detached people grows, the ability of faith groups to fill in the
> gaps will be diminished, and once these ministries disappear, it seems highly
> unlikely that they can be quickly or easily replaced.
> 
> Finding ways to get these individuals to reintegrate into their communities
> might lead to benefits not only for these individuals but also for towns and
> cities in their fight to re-create social capital.


Should those who promote secularism be worried if this is true? Unintended
consequences have a nasty tendency of rearing their ugly heads in unexpected
places. It seems to me that those who are "nothing in particular" are nothing in
particular because they are less likely to be socially and civically engaged.
Religion is just one more thing they are disengaged from. If that's the case, it
may be impossible (or at least very hard) to get them to participate in the
areas traditionally done and cultivated by religious communities and
institutions. And while secular organizations have made some inroads in
promoting volunteerism in recent decades, the bulk of the future civic
engagement might indeed by at the hands of a shrinking population.

Interestingly, Burge separates the nones from atheists and agnostics in his
piece and argues that educational level is the main factor of decreased civic
engagement. The nones have the lowest levels of educational achievement while
atheists have some of the highest. So while all this news looks bad on the
nones, it doesn't necessarily look bad on atheists.







Posted by The Thinker at 1:34:00 PM 1 Comment
Labels: Atheism, Christianity, religion, secularism



FRIDAY, MAY 31, 2019


RELIGIONS AND BIRTH RATES: NOT WHAT YOU THINK? | HANS ROSLING



It seems that I discovered Swedish born statistician Hans Rosling a little too
late. He died February 7th, 2017 of cancer, just before I stumbled upon his many
inspiring talks on the changing facts of world data.

A point Rosling made over and over again is that many of us are operating with
20 or 30 year old statistics in our heads in terms of how we think the world is.
We tend to think, for example, that many third world countries today are
statistically where they were in the 1980s and 90s in terms of birth rates and
poverty rates. This makes us mistakenly think that in countries like India and
Bangladesh, women are still on average having 6 or 7 kids. In the last 30 years,
birth rates have dropped in almost the entire world, and it is always directly
correlated with reductions of poverty and rising standards of living.

This brings me to the topic of religion and birth rates. It is commonly believed
that religions like Islam encourage high birth rates and that this will ensure
that the population of Muslims around the world will outpace and outnumber all
other religions and those without religion. While it is true that Muslim
majority countries have on average more children per woman than non-Muslim
countries, when the standard of living is raised, the birth rate drops, just as
it does in the rest of the Western world.

In India in 2018 the birth rate is 2.2 per woman, in Bangladesh it is 2.0,
Indonesia, 2.3, Iran, 1.6, Bahrain, 1.9, Qatar, 1.8, Turkey, 2.0, and Saudi
Arabia, 2.4. These countries have dramatically increased their standard of
living since the 1980s, when they had birth rates 2 or 3 times higher. To put
this in perspective, the US birth rate in 2018 was 1.9, roughly on par with many
of these countries.

Muslim majority countries that haven't increased their standard of living, like
Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and Mauritania, still have high birth rates of 4.3,
4.2, 6.0, and 4.5 respectively.

What this all means is 2 things: (1) the Islamic world is not immune to lower,
Western-level birth rates. That is to say, there is nothing necessarily
intrinsic about Islam that prevents countries from lowering their birth rate as
they economically advance, and (2) to lower birth rates one must tackle poverty.
This means it is not necessarily the case that Islam will come to dominate the
future population with its higher birth rates as organizations like PEW have
predicted (to which I think they made several mistakes).

Watch Rosling explain in his eccentric way in more detail in his 2012 Ted talk.
(Also check out his site gapminder.org to see the data for yourself).






Posted by The Thinker at 2:26:00 PM 0 Comments
Labels: Islam, overpopulation, religion

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