Author Archives: danijel

Types of faith

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A friend yesterday remarked that my article about faith and skepticism doesn’t really deal with the kind of faith that the religious fanatics have.

But of course it doesn’t. I’m not defending the religious fanatics. In fact, they are a part of the same problem as the skeptics, because skeptics summarily reject perfectly sufficient evidence just because they don’t like it, and the religious fanatics choose to believe in things for which no good evidence is provided. So the choice isn’t really between those two, it’s between them and a reasonable approach, where you believe in things based on the evidence that you personally have, but without expectations that others need to accept this evidence.

But first, let’s quantify faith.

Type 1 faith is the faith I have in the fact that my car is still parked in front of the house, if my wife didn’t take it to go somewhere. There’s always a possibility that it was stolen, or that the aliens abducted it, or maybe I’m completely crazy and I’m deluding myself that I have a car, but the reasonable assumption is that it’s where I left it. I can’t verify it from where I’m sitting right now because my workplace is across the building, but I believe it’s there based on my memory and application of reason. If you don’t have this kind of faith, you are mentally ill and you are incapable of performing any kind of common tasks, because in almost everything we rely on memory, and we don’t constantly go around the house to re-check that the kitchen is still there just because we don’t see it from the bathroom. If there is no valid reason to assume that something changed from the last time we established the facts, it’s reasonable to have faith that the gravitational constant is still what it was ten years ago, as well as the speed of light.

Type 2 faith is when you have two possible, equally valid interpretations of the same facts, and you need to choose one based on something other than reason. Reason brought you to the point where you can’t know for sure whether option A or option B is true, because in both cases the same facts remain valid, both solutions will have weak points, and in both cases you will need to ignore or disregard some problems in order to solve others. In order to solve the dilemma, you need to make a leap of faith in one direction or another, and proceed from there. If it turns out that you were wrong, you need to change your mind and admit you chose to believe in the wrong option, but since additional evidence brought you to that point, you actually made progress and you are no longer stuck at the same spot. This is the kind of faith people needed to have in order to adopt the heliocentric system when evidence for its validity was insufficient to make the model work. If you don’t have it, you can’t make progress in science.

Type 3 faith is when you believe in things contrary to evidence, based on strong belief in something that has no rational grounds. This is the kind of faith religious fanatics have, and in order to block the voice of reason that warns them that they are on less than solid ground, they resort to hysteria and borderline madness.

Type 4 faith is when you don’t know what the reality is because your brain is so severely malfunctioning, you’re hallucinating. In this state, you can have faith in things that are not only irrational, but they would be irrational to a type 3 believer.

Applied to religion, type 1 faith is when the disciples believed what Jesus told them because he just saw him rise from the dead, talk to them comfortingly and then ascend to heaven. The degree of confirmation of his supernatural power was such, that it would not be rational for them to doubt his statements. If the statements later proved not to be true in the expected way, they would conclude that they misunderstood him, not that he lied. This is the kind of faith in God that you have when you saw him, but you can’t repeat the experience at will. You trust your memory.

Type 2 faith is what people have if they didn’t directly experience God, but they believe it’s possible that someone did, they just can’t be sure. They therefore make a leap of faith and accept that God is real and can be experienced by some, and it would be great if everybody could do it, but it obviously isn’t that simple and one can’t just verify something like that at will, just like one can’t just decide to verify Moon landing at will, because it’s impractically expensive. You can’t go there yourself to verify, you can’t see someone go there right now because it’s impractical, but there are credible witnesses and documents and it is more irrational to doubt them than to trust them. But this kind of faith can only get you so far. You can’t really make life-altering choices based on some scripture written thousands of years ago if you don’t have a more personal, direct reason to believe it’s all true. This is why type 2 faith is not completely rational, nor is it completely irrational, but is a necessary transitional step from lesser to greater knowledge. It contains a risk of error, but without acceptance of this risk there is no possibility of change and learning.

Type 3 faith is irrational, but not completely insane. This is the kind of faith people have when they decide to become suicide bombers in order to get their virgins in afterlife. You can talk to them, but it won’t do much good, because people snap out of this only because when something changes in their internal reasoning and their inner motives for embracing the irrational faith subside. This is not really religion, it’s fanaticism and hysteria.

Type 4 faith is pure madness, and there’s not much one can say about that. It’s the kind of faith you have when you’re so stoned you see dragons in the kitchen.

The problem with the atheists is that they assume that religious people have type 3 and type 4 faith, because this is easy to ridicule. They occasionally argue with type 2, but they are on loose ground there and they usually argue as if they are talking to a type 3 person, using emotional arguments. They completely dismiss the possibility of type 1 faith in religious matters, because if they accepted that, they wouldn’t be atheists, they would be type 2 believers.

You can notice how I never mention certain knowledge as an option? You’re right, I don’t. Because there’s no such thing, or almost. Even when you directly perceive something, there’s the question of interpretation. So even in that case you need to have type 1 faith that you understood it correctly. Certain knowledge is the domain of type 3 and type 4 lunatics.

Religion for dummies

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A short guide to understanding religious texts for atheists.

When a religious text mentions that a snake told someone something, it’s a metaphor. Nobody thinks that an actual snake talked. A snake is a metaphor for a dangerous, sneaky, untrustworthy entity which gives crafty advice that is to be the downfall of those who embrace it.

When I say “embrace advice”, I don’t literally mean to hold it against my body with my arms.

When I say “crafty advice”, I don’t mean advice related to carpentry and masonry.

When “hand of God” is mentioned, it doesn’t imply that God is an ape-like entity with hands. It means “influence”.

Human language is complex, and it used to be even more complex in the ancient times, where literal and metaphoric meanings were so deeply interconnected it is difficult to tell them apart, and the best example of this is a myth.

A myth is something that never happened but keeps occurring. No Cain ever killed his brother Abel and said “I’m not my brother’s keeper”, but things like that keep happening. However, some things can be based on factual history and are later mythologized. An example of this is the great flood; it keeps occurring in so many places in mythological form it is quite likely one of the earliest racial memories of mankind, of the great meltdown at the end of the last glacial period, when the global sea levels rose by about 125m.

When Odysseus is said to have heard the voice of Athena counseling him, it is the poet’s way of saying that the guy had a clever, strategic idea on how to solve a conflict to his advantage. Psychological activities and states were anthropomorphized; when one was ruled by sexual desire, it was said that he’s under the power of Eros or Aphrodite. In war, when one was experiencing a certain pattern of bully/coward behavior, it was said that he’s influenced by Ares. If one approached war and problem solving strategically, he was said to be under the influence of Athena. The natural phenomena were anthropomorphized in similar ways; for instance, the known, familiar sea was thought to be under the influence of Poseidon. The unknown, wild sea beyond their reach was thought to be under the influence of Titan Okeanos, in a “hic sunt dracones” manner of the medieval maps.

When it is said that Eve talked to the snake, it means that an evil external spiritual force created a line of thought in her mind, and that she succumbed to temptation.

The fruit from the tree of knowledge of good and evil isn’t an apple. It’s suffering the trials and consequences of choice. Similarly, the fruit of sin isn’t a cherry. It’s punishment. If you think a tree of knowledge of good and evil grows in a garden and bears fruits that can be eaten physically, you’re stupid. If you think religious people believe that, you’re much more stupid than you think they are.

Not all religious imagery comes from the same place. Some of it is a metaphor for emotional states. Some of it is a personification of natural phenomena, like weather. Some of it is a lesson in ethics, and some of it is an attempt to say something about the nature of reality. Some of it is silly, like the cult of Priapus, the god of erect penises. Some of it is quite sophisticated, like the cult of Hecate, goddess of magic and illusion. In all cases, it is meant metaphorically, in the same way in which colors of the quarks are not meant literally, and “red matter” isn’t really red, and there’s nothing really charming about the charming quark. There is also nothing remotely amber about an electron.

When it is said that Jesus rose from the dead, it doesn’t mean he’s a zombie. A zombie is a dead body animated by an external magical influence. The Christians believe that Jesus rose from the dead because he’s God, in order to show disciples that his power reigns supreme over death. This conveyed a very deep meaning that was absent in antiquity, that afterlife offers a form of existence that is not a mere shadow of the physical one, inferior in every way (as Achilles says to Odysseus who called his ghost, “it’s better to be the slave to the lowest peasant in life, than to reign over the dead”), but is in fact glorious and full, the true life to which this one is merely the cave of Plato, the existence of hints, guesses and hopes, and not the fullness of knowledge.

The Christians don’t see Satan as an ugly, repulsive goat-like entity. They see him as a powerful spirit that seduces one to evil, and you can’t seduce one if you take on a repulsive form. In fact, they think he is quite capable of looking like one of the angels of heaven; that is, holy and beautiful. They also don’t think Satan lives in hell. They think he is the prince of this world and has temporary dominion over it, and that hell will be his final destination after the hour of final judgment.

They also don’t think that good people will experience only good things and that evil things will happen only to evil people. They think this life is the valley of tears, filled with suffering and injustice, and if one is to survive all this and keep faith in the Lord, that fullness of true life awaits him on the other side, in eternity beyond space and time.

If you have a problem with understanding those basic concepts, you’re too stupid to offer any kind of commentary on religion, and furthermore, I would place you firmly on the autism spectrum. Personally, I am tired of intellectual and emotional invalids who attempt to claim the smug position of superiority. Also, the religious people who don’t understand the metaphoric imagery of their own religion are too stupid to be religious, and their emotional age is 7. When they reach the emotional age of 8, they’ll become atheists, and when they reach emotional maturity they’ll be able to understand religion. I’m not saying they’ll necessarily adopt it, but they will at least be able to understand it.

The meowing tree

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I am now going to explain the line of reasoning due to which I believe that the near-death experiences should be explained by the most straightforward narrative, which says that those people indeed died and experienced the afterlife. The same reasoning applies for the spiritual experiences of the saints.

Years ago my wife and I were walking along a path and as we passed by a tree, it meowed at us. It was dark and we couldn’t see the cat on the tree, but although we couldn’t see it, it sounded like a young cat, and it wasn’t happy. Since it was too dark to do anything constructive about it, we went our way.

Now, if we didn’t believe in the existence of cats, or if we didn’t believe that cats can climb trees yet forget how to get down, we might have looked for another explanation; maybe someone placed an electronic device for reproducing sound on the tree. Maybe a man was on the tree, imitating a cat in order to fuck with us. Maybe it were little green men in flying saucers. Maybe.

We didn’t see direct evidence of cat on that tree, but we accepted the obvious explanation of the meowing tree, because we are informed and reasonable.

However, in the case of NDE experiences, some people would rather believe in the most idiotic, improbable and flawed explanations, just to avoid the obvious conclusion that if something meows at you from a tree in the dark, it must be a cat.

Why generalizations are good

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Yes, I generalize. Yes, I overwhelmingly rely on statistics instead of individual accounts. And now I’m going to explain why you should, too.

I am extremely sensitive to sample bias, because I tend to surround myself with extremely atypical individuals. This is not uncommon; if you study physics, all your friends can probably do calculus in their heads, and very soon you start believing that it’s something everybody can do, or that it is much more common than it actually is. The problem is magnified by the echo-chambers of the Internet, because similar people tend to form interest groups that exclude the outside world and are in fact rather hostile to opinions that are uncommon in their group. After a while, their perception of reality is so severely skewed by their personal sample bias, that what they think is going on in the world has very little in common with the actual world.

You can call it the Marie Antoinette syndrome, if you like; I’m referring to the anecdote where she was told about the riots on the streets and she asked about the cause, and when she was told that the people have no bread, she allegedly responded along the lines of “Stupid mob, they should eat cake instead”. That’s what I’m talking about when I refer to sample bias. When you’re surrounded only by rich people you can’t really understand that the poor people don’t have the option to choose between this or that food, because they can afford only the cheapest kind, and if it isn’t available, they will starve. You have only what one would call the first world problems (“the line at Starbucks was too long so I didn’t have coffee this morning”).

I’m not saying that applying personal preference to our personal choice of company is a bad thing. The whole point is to find people who are more like us, so that we can function at our peak potential, which would be impossible if we were surrounded by people who have interests and abilities so different from our own that there’s no significant intersection. It’s a good thing. What I’m saying is, it isn’t healthy to use our personal experience, formed by an extremely skewed sample of the general population, in order to form opinions about the state of society in general.

This is why I rely on statistics. If someone did a meticulous scientific analysis of some social group, using large unbiased samples, I am going to rely on his findings much more than I’m going to rely on my limited experience with members of that group, because if you’re in heaven, you will tend to think that everybody is a saint, and if you’re in hell, you’ll tend to think that everybody is a demon. What you need is a wider picture, which tells you how many people in total there are, of which how many are in hell and how many are in heaven, and of those in each group, you will want a breakdown by certain characteristics in order to see a pattern. Essentially, what you need to do is remove yourself from the picture and acquire sufficient distance, in order to gain perspective.

But this wider perspective doesn’t influence the way I treat individual people. I can have generalized opinions about a certain group of people based on statistics, but that individual you are dealing with can be normal for that group, or extremely atypical. It’s like trying to form opinions about me based on general statistical facts about Croats. Not the best idea. On an individual level, you need to treat people like individuals, and do your best to perceive the actual person you’re dealing with. However, this individual approach is actually dangerous when you’re dealing with large populations, and if you don’t resort to statistics you will be unable to form useful opinions. What you need are generalizations – you need to know what an expected median sample of a population is, and for an individual, you need to know where he is placed on the histogram of his population group. If you’re talking to a +3 sigma individual, you know how many of those you can realistically expect to find where he came from. If you’re in Jet Propulsion Laboratory you need to be aware that each individual there is probably extremely atypical for any population, to the point where he’s more alien than human; the average person there has a PhD and Mensa level IQ. If you’re in the army, everyone you encounter is most likely representative of the general population and it would be unlikely for you to encounter an atypical individual.

If you’re an atypical individual, it is exceedingly difficult for you to find others like you in a general population, and the best thing about the Internet is that it enables you to find others like you much more easily, allowing you to skip the arduous task of checking out uninteresting individuals with very low odds of finding what you’re looking for. However, this opens you to extreme sample bias, because the ease with which you can meet other atypical individuals can blind you to the placement of your interest group on the population histogram. Essentially, you tend to think that everybody is like you and that your group represents what people normally are, and that actually has an unknown probability of being true.

Skepticism as the ultimate douchebaggery

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The role and character of skepticism are incredibly misunderstood.

Every now and then I hear how skepticism is essential to science, that it is in fact the cornerstone of scientific thought. Then, on the other hand, I hear how I should be skeptical of things I hear and believe only in what I personally can attest to with my senses – from people who try to convince me that Earth is flat, and everyone who thinks otherwise is either stupid, crazy or criminal, because that’s what our senses tell us, that Earth is flat, that Sun and the stars are moving, and since we need to be skeptical of everything we can’t personally witness, what is one to do?

I encountered this uncritical praise of skepticism decades ago and my initial response was so unexpected and radical, that it probably didn’t make sense to most people then, because in the 90s the Moon landing skeptics and flat-earthers were almost nowhere to be found, and it seemed implausible that anyone in his right mind could espouse such ideas, but that exactly was my point, that skepticism isn’t about the right mind. Skepticism is a mental disease.

Skepticism is, essentially, the ability to question or dismiss something you don’t emotionally like. You don’t like heliocentrism so you are skeptical of it and you dismiss it. You don’t like the theory of evolution so you are skeptical of it and you dismiss it. It has nothing to do with science, because although it’s true that scientists can be skeptical of something and dismiss it, this is not an inherent part of scientific method. Scientific method is to test theories by experiment and change them if evidence doesn’t support them. This is not skepticism, it’s a feedback loop between theory and observation. It’s evidence-based rational thinking. Skepticism is an emotional response which takes place when your worldview is shaken and your favorite ideas are threatened. You are then defensive of your favorite ideas and skeptical of that which contradicts them. There is absolutely nothing even remotely scientific about it, because I can quote the trial of Galileo, which went something like this:

Inquisition: Sir, it came to our attention that you have been publicizing cosmological theories that contradict the holy scripture. Since you are a very famous scientist, we will now hear your explanation and, if we find it convincing, we are ready to offer a different interpretation of the parts of scripture that contradict your interpretation of the Universe.

Galileo: Thank you. Using magnifying glasses I made a telescope, which made it possible for me to observe otherwise invisible celestial bodies. This way I discovered that Jupiter has four satellites that revolve around it, which makes the geocentric theory, which states that all celestial bodies revolve around the Earth, implausible. From this I infer that the theory of Copernicus, which states that the planets actually revolve around the Sun and not the Earth, is true.

Inquisition: Your observation is very interesting, but does it really prove what you infer from it? Wouldn’t it be a more parsimonic conclusion if we said that both Jupiter and its satellites revolve around the same thing we previously assumed Jupiter to revolve around?

Galileo: You are all stupid unenlightened buffoons! (fuming)

Inquisition: Be it as it may, what we need to do is decide which theory is more consistent with available evidence. Our current Ptolemaic system is able to predict eclipses of celestial bodies with a certain degree of accuracy. Compared to that, what is the degree of accuracy of predictions made by your alternative heliocentric model?

Galileo: It is worse.

Inquisition: So what you are saying is that the system you are proposing we adopt as better has worse accuracy in predicting celestial events than the system we are currently using?

Galileo: Yes. However, the Ptolemaic system has been refined and improved for centuries, and mine is brand new, and needs much work in order to show its full potential.

Inquisition: But isn’t a better model supposed to immediately show its superiority by offering better predictions?

Galileo: Not necessarily, because we need to have faith that mathematics will be improved in the future, allowing us to refine the model and make sense of things in ways that are currently not possible.

Inquisition: So essentially you are asking that we have faith in your model, because at the moment evidence and reason argue against it?

Galileo: You are all stupid and don’t understand science! (stomps his foot helplessly)

Inquisition: We heard enough. We are going to stick with our “inferior” model which at the moment offers better accuracy in its predictions, thank you very much, and you sir are going to stop publicizing unproven theories as of now, and this is our official verdict.

I’m slightly embellishing the narrative for dramatic purposes but you get the picture. The Church actually approached the issue from the position of scientific skepticism, and Galileo needed to resort to faith. The trick is, they were both right and wrong. The Church was right not to embrace a model which was based more on sacred geometry than on mathematics and physics, and Galileo was wrong to recommend official adoption of a model that obviously wasn’t ready. The right thing to do would be to concede that Galileo’s model is a contemporary equivalent to the superstring theory: it looks like a promising direction in which to look for potential solutions, but the mathematics doesn’t yet work, the theory doesn’t predict anything well and it simply isn’t ready for mainstream. However, the main stream theory is ugly enough and bad enough for one to rightly conclude that it can’t be really true, because something as inelegant can’t be the right answer, so it’s warranted to look into alternative directions, based merely on faith and aesthetics.

Where I agree with Inquisition is that Galileo needed to be told to shut the fuck up until his theory is ready for peer review. However, they were wrong to put their confidence in the Ptolemaic system just because it worked better and agreed with their scripture. They knew something was wrong with it but they chose the easy way, and that’s the main reason behind their skepticism – not some great love for the truth, but inertia and spiritual laziness.

Galileo, however, was an arrogant, pompous fool and was more wrong than right about anything. He was actually on the bad side of science regarding the tides and the comets, for instance, and gets so much undeserved credit in the history of science only because it serves a popular myth of science vs. Church, which was hugely popularized with the invention of the printing press. He happened to be right regarding the structure of the Solar system, but only based on aesthetics and faith. He didn’t have any actual science to back it up. Why did he assume that the celestial bodies move in circles? Based on sacred geometry, because the Greeks thought that circles were the perfect shape and what else would a perfect God put in heavens? There was no theory of why the planets move at all, no theory of gravity, no theory of inertia. All they had was aesthetics and gut feelings.

But guess what? When science is actually the weakest tool that you have at your disposal and doesn’t really tell you anything, you need to use guesswork and gut feelings and aesthetics and make shit up, throw it at the wall and see what sticks. You need to watch apples fall, and ask why. You need to throw a ball in the air, observe the curve it makes, and make lots of guesswork regarding why it goes up, then slows down, and then accelerates again falling down. Then you need to say “Wow, what if a cannonball does exactly the same thing, only too fast to see? And the faster you launch it, the flatter the curve. What if you launched it fast enough that the the curvature of its descent matched the curvature of the Earth? And what if the Moon does the same thing, falling around the Earth forever, following the curvature of the Earth? And what if all the planets do the same around the Sun?”

What is absolutely guaranteed to lead you nowhere, is skepticism. With skepticism, you will simply reject everything that doesn’t support your preconceived notions and you will remain a happy douchebag, convinced that you are on the right side of science and knowledge. And the worst possible thing you can do is trust yourself and your own observations, and be skeptical of everything else, because you are most likely just not smart enough. The path to not being a stupid fool is not called skepticism, it’s called faith. You need to have faith in order to go to school and learn things. You need to have faith in order to actually bother with science. You need to have faith in order to persevere throughout your difficult times and ignorance and inability to personally test and verify things. But eventually, if you had enough faith and confidence and perseverance, you do get to be smart enough to personally verify and test things. You do get to be smart enough to be able to know, and then you no longer need faith, because now you have knowledge. Just don’t forget that knowledge didn’t get you there. You got there through faith, because you walked the path without seeing the goal, and you put your trust in the words of others and in the sign posts. If you were skeptical, you’d have failed. If you had doubts, they’d have sapped your will to persevere throughout difficulties. If you listened to the voice of reason, it would have told you to quit on the 90% of the way because you invested all that effort and you still can’t see the goal and you still can’t verify that you made the right choice to have faith.

The scientists (as in “adherents of scientism”, not “practitioners of scientific method”) usually divide the world into two parts: science and bullshit. They always did, even at the early times of science, when it didn’t really explain much of the world, and when such sentiment was mere faith. However, I see things differently. I divide the world into the part for which we have reasonably convincing explanations, the part that we know is bullshit and falsehood, and the part of which we are ignorant, of which we have no knowledge or explanations. For instance, up until recently we didn’t have any knowledge of what Pluto’s surface looks like. It was a blurry dot. Now we know it looks like this:

But it looked like this even when we didn’t know it. It looked like this even when we didn’t know Pluto existed. What does Eris look like? What do Haumea and Makemake look like? That’s the part we don’t know, and the good thing is that we know that we don’t know. What is it that we think we know, and we actually don’t? That’s the part where we would normally react with skepticism to defend what we think we know, but we should be highly skeptical of our motivations in doing so, and we should be especially skeptical of our skepticism, because it might well be the result of our ignorance reacting in self-defense.

We might look at the flat-earthers and the Moon landing conspiracy theorists and see them as pathetic figures, but I see them as something more sinister. I see them as victims of that same vile beast of skepticism that threatens to eat us all if we allow it to roam unchained. You see, skepticism is not what made Yuri Gagarin climb into that capsule on top of that rocket. Skepticism would have told him there was no reason to believe he would succeed, and, even more importantly, that he wouldn’t die. Nobody did it before and therefore there was no evidence that it could be done. But he had faith, and he had courage, and he had trust, and he had confidence.

And when I see “skeptics”, atheists, materialists and scientists of all kinds, in their arrogant mockery of faith, I want to stomp their smug faces into the ground, because if it were left to the likes of them, we’d still be living on trees and in caves. The likes of them ridiculed the first ape-man who used fire to roast his meat, they ridiculed the first ape-man who used a fire-hardened spear to hunt, they ridiculed the first woman who planted seeds into the ground to grow more instead of eating them. They are fucking idiots, and if it were left to them, only evil, ignorance and darkness would rule in this world, and all light and beauty would have been extinguished before it had a chance to show its potential.