Inductive Reasoning

I think a lot of people naturally use inductive arguments in their efforts to prove facts without really understanding the nature of induction.

Inductive reasoning uses examples of individual instances to try to come up with a generality.

All swans we have ever seen are white.

Therefore swans are white.

Or

Everyone we know of who drinks cyanide dies.

Therefore cyanide is lethal to everyone.

Again, we are using specific examples of an event to try to come up with some general rule.  And this is very good for navigating through the universe and figuring things out, but isn’t good at formally proving anything.  “Swans are white” is great until you actually discover a black swan, or meet someone who has some sort of mutation that renders cyanide harmless to them.

Inductive reasoning is a good first step to figure out what is PROBABLY true, but not good at proving it to be ABSOLUTELY true.  We’ve never seen Bigfoot, but we can’t prove he DOESN’T exist using inductive reasoning.  He could be just behind the next bunch of trees, or he could have circled around behind us to hide somewhere we’ve already looked.

Contrast this with deductive reasoning.  This is the opposite, where you move from a generality to prove a specific.

All zebras are black and white striped.

A baby zebra is about to be born at the zoo.

Therefore, it will be black and white.

The strength of a deductive argument rests on the first line (the generality).  IF that is true, then the following lines should also be absolutely true.  In my example above, I think we should question the first line for its veracity.  Here’s another example:

All even numbers can be evenly divided by 2.

342 is an even number.

Therefore, it can be divided by true.

If A and B are true, then we know for a FACT that C is as well.

They are kind of subtle and hard to wrap your head around at first, but they really come up a lot in theological arguments.

I’ve seen videos of people (Ray Comfort, etc) who will hold up a piece of paper with a circle on it. The circle, they say, represents all possible knowledge of everything in the universe.  What percent, they ask, of knowledge do we have?  The answer is, of course, very little.  No one knows the number of grains of sand on the beach, the number of hairs on our heads.  So the speaker draws a tiny little circle to represent the subset of human knowledge.  Isn’t it possible, then, then God exists outside somewhere outside that little circle?

The answer they want, of course, is “yes, it’s possible that God exists”.  They use this to claim that there are no real atheists, only agnostics, and it basically gives them a foot in the door which they can expand upon.  “You even admitted yourself that God may exist and that you’re a sinner!”

The obvious problem, though, is that using that exact same logic, they have also proved that ANY imaginary or mythological creature may also exist.  Unicorns, leprechauns, the FSM.  We are forced to conclude that they are possible when we see how much we don’t know.

Also, we could turn the argument on its head.  Out of all that knowledge that we don’t know yet, isn’t it possible that there exists some ultimate, conclusive proof that no gods exist at all?  By the same reasoning, the evangelist should be willing to admit that he isn’t sure if he’s right or not.

Basically, you can use that argument to demonstrate that anything is possible, which makes the whole thing generally worthless.

Atheists use it too, of course.  We have never seen direct, incontrovertible proof of God.  This might lead people to claim that he absolutely doesn’t exist.  I don’t think we can draw that conclusion absolutely, but I think we can being to make some statements on probability.

And that’s what induction is really good for.  Making some decisions on what is PROBABLY true, rather than what is absolutely true.  No one has seen Bigfoot, and a lot of people have looked around pretty hard, therefore it’s probably unlikely that he actually exists, but remains “unproven”.

Keep your ears open for people trying to prove things using inductive reasoning.  And note that just because someone is using an inductive argument doesn’t mean that they’re wrong.  Inductive arguments are very useful for figuring out what is probably true, but it’s a common pitfall to use them to try to prove something as absolute fact.

God's Nature

This is paraphrasing from a video I just saw:

How do you know God is the good one and the devil is the bad one?  What logic or knowledge do we use to make that assessment?

Have you ever thougth about that?

Perhaps we observe the nature of God and the devil, and see that one is good and one is bad.  Which is to say, one of them is consistent with what I think is moral and right, and the other isn’t.  If that’s the case, than we must concede that we are the authors of our own morality.  We have an inherent nature of what is good and what is bad, and we judge God and the devil based on that.

But Christians don’t think that.  They think that human morality stems from God.  Which means that we have a god who has instructed us what is good, so that we think that he is good.  If you stop and think about it…  if we really have no choice in our own definitions of what is Good and what is Bad…  if those definitions are hard-wired into us, then we’ll of course think that the creator is good.  Which is exactly what an evil creator would do, too!

What this means then is that God is the good one because he is more powerful than the Devil.  The colloquial term is "might makes right", which means the strongest being gets to make the rules.

I asked someone once what they would do if they believed that God instructed them to do something that they felt was immoral.  They just punted and said “Well, God wouldn’t do that.  It’s not in his nature.”

What is God’s nature?  How do we know it?  Can he change his nature, or is it fixed?  If he can change it, then we know nothing about his nature…  it’s arbitrary.  If it’s fixed, then where did it come from?

Just a quick video...

This video is kind of all over the road, but it really covers a lot of ground in a short period of time.

A Conversation from YouTube

Apparently I left a comment on a YouTube video a few months ago.  It was one of these Kirk Cameron "Way of the Master" street evangelism kind of things where he makes you admit you're a sinner and shouldn't you accept Jesus to avoid damnation?

I wrote:

The woman makes a good point. Is eternal suffering and damnation an appropriate punishment for the occasional sin?  Isn't it strange that rapists, murderers, and thieves can repent and go to heaven?  Isn't it strange that "disbelief" the only unforgivable sin?

I forgot I wrote this, until I got a response back and was notified via email:

Well, everyone is a sinner. No one is perfect. However, if we repent and ask for forgiveness, we will have eternal life. That's the message here. :)

To which I responded:

Then disbelievers can never be saved, because by definition, they can't ask for forgiveness.

And he wrote back:

Yep. You're right.

So everyone is a sinner (apparently), yet only those who ask for forgiveness can be saved.  This necessarily excludes atheists (let's leave aside small children, mentally handicapped, other religions, etc). Only Christians go to heaven.
 
On a very fundamental, this does not make sense to me.  Not only that, but it shouldn't make sense to any decent person.  It's not fair.

Now, if the Christians would actually step back and say "We don't claim our religion is just or moral.  It actually does reward thoughtless sycophants rather than honest, intellectual seekers of the truth (mistaken though they may be)", then I wouldn't have a problem.  But Christianity claims God to have granted and bestowed this sense of right and wrong and fairness upon us, but then doesn't play by it's own rules.

Best Intro of All Time

The best introduction to a video of all time goes to Eric Hovind, as he introduces his dad in his video about the dangers of evolution.

You know, people say that evolution is not a bad philosophy.  But at the same time, it was Hitler’s religion during the Third Reich in Germany.  Hi, my name is Eric.

The Egg

Go read this short story right now.

I thought it was interesting.

Pascal's Wager, Part Deux

It's very simple:

1)  Either the Flying Spaghetti Monster exists, or it does not.
2)  You can choose to believe, or disbelieve.

If you believe, and he exists, then you earn infinite warmth and cuddles in his noodly appendages.
If you believe and he does not exist, nothing happens.
If you disbelieve and he does not exist, nothing happens.
If you disbelieve and he exists, you are forever separated from his glory.

Therefore, it is logical and rational to believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

The Age of the Universe

I’ve been reading and watching a lot about the age of the universe, and the implications for young earth creationists (YECs).

Consider this: 

We have come up with pretty reliable ways of measuring the distance of astronomical objects.

Not only that, but we can analyze the signatures of the energy coming from distant stars, and make some conclusions about their elemental makeup, etc.

YECs claim the earth and stars are less than 10,000 years old.

Yet we’ve measured the distance to stars that are millions and even billions of light-years away.

This presents an obvious problem.  Observed reality doesn’t match up with scripture.

Bill Nye is in the news for this recent video slamming creationism.  In it, he says:

… Here are distant stars that are just like our star but they're at a different point in their lifecycle. The idea of deep time, of this billions of years, explains so much of the world around us. If you try to ignore that, your world view just becomes crazy, just untenable, itself inconsistent.

The YEC websites that I’ve seen list a few possible “solutions” to this “problem”, which classically illustrate what Bill Nye was talking about.

Here are four:  

1)  We can’t accurately measure distances to astronomical objects.  

 “Greater distances are determined by the presumed sizes and intensity of stars, red shift, and many questionable factors which may have nothing whatever to do with distance.  In fact, some astronomers feel that it is possible that the entire universe could fit into an area within a 200 light-year radius from the earth! Therefore, there is no guarantee that the actual distances in space are as great as we have been told, and light from the farthest point in the universe could have reached us in only a few hundred years.”

No actual argument is given.  Just an assertion that astronomers don’t actually know what they’re doing.

2)  Light may take a “shortcut” through space.

Using a math formula, it’s demonstrated that the maximum amount of time for light to reach us is actually 15.71 years.

Googling around shows that only Creationist websites appear to talk about this notion, and one of them says “However, this idea never really caught on and appears to no longer have adherents.”

3)  The speed of light was different in the past.

There is no actual evidence to support this idea.  It’s just floated out there as a solution that fixes the problem.  There are a couple of cosmology theories that have been thought up specifically to solve the problem

4)  Light was created in transit

The implication that what we’re seeing what we look up in space is just a created image rather than reality has some pretty serious theological implications.  It’s analogous to God creating the illusion of an old earth by creating fossils in situ in the earth.  At its core, it’s deceitful, and God isn’t known for lying and deceiving.

The main problem here is that the star light age issue isn’t just a single question in a vacuum.  The age of the universe and the earth itself figures into so much of what we know.  Again, looking at Nye’s words, you have to come up with all sorts of solutions to support your world view when  your world view doesn’t actually match up with what we see around us.  We know species change over time.  We know that land masses float on the surface of the earth.  We know that stars are really far away.  We know that rocks and fossils take a long time to form.  Everything neatly dovetails together when we accept that the Earth is really old.

I suppose, to be fair, the YECs think the same thing.  They think all the evidence neatly fits together with the Biblical account.  The Grand Canyon was created by the great flood.  The old fossils of the simplest creatures were the once who died first in the flood.  The growth rate of humanity supports the claim that the earth is 6000 years old and started with a population of 8 people (post flood).

 

Reasons.org just gives up on the matter and comes closest to aligning with observed reality:

“The young-universe creationist is in an untenable spot. If the earth is six to ten thousand years old, then virtually nothing we see outside of our solar system is real. All observational astronomy of distant heavenly objects is a fiction….  On the other hand, if we see real stars when we look heavenward, and those stars are a billion light years away, then they must have existed a billion years ago.  If our eyes and our instruments can be trusted, then the universe is ancient.”