Open Questions

The more I think about it, the less the term supernatural makes any sense. So, can anyone give me a definition of it that does not require natural premises? Also, what makes it outside nature?

Euthyphro, Logic And The Impotence Of Moral Theology

Mark left an excellent comment on the previous thread. He said:

“for morality to be absolute, it must not be able to have been different; in other words, god’s nature from which the absolute morality flows, must necessarily be the way it is. But, if god is necessarily the way he is, then there must be laws that make this the case, and these laws must therefore precede or be higher than god. Thus god becomes essentially a middleman and is not necessary. If, on the other hand, god's nature is not necessarily the way it is, then morality is relative to his non-necessary nature, and thus not absolute.”

This is essentially the Euthyphro dilemma. The problem is that either god is not necessary for morality, or nothing is good until god commands it. Therefore, morality is relative to the tastes of god and there is no reason then why evil acts could not be considered moral if god so choosed.

To try and get around the dilemma, theists often claim that it is not a dilemma and that morality is fixed by the very nature of god. This is however nonsense. If god’s nature is fixed, he is still a god of moral relatives. He just so happens to have a particular set of moral values. He could still be evil. There is no absolute law.

Another problem is that if he can not change his mind, then he is either beholding to a law greater than himself, or he is not omnipotent. The omnipotence of god is of course logically absurd. He could not make a square circle for example. This also means that god is not necessary for the laws of logic either, as he himself must abide by a higher law.

Other things god could not do include making a being greater than himself (already defined as the greatest possible being – what ever greatness means) or make a weight so heavy that he would not be able to lift it.

Theology is just one big inconsistency after another. How can something so problematical have any value? Moral law is one of the “evidences” Christians cite for god, but it is not a tenable position – even if we assume god exists to start with. Christianity needs absolute moral laws or the concept of sin is meaningless. If the concept of sin is meaningless, then the idea of god killing himself to appease himself as punishment for our sins is just absurd – but then, there are lots of reasons to think that is absurd.

The Value And Curse Of Philosophy

A couple of us got together from richarddawkins.net last week and the value of philosophy was discussed. One of the group was skeptical (as I once was). We discussed that one of its values was to think about how consistent your thinking is and how how sound the premises are that you base that thinking on. A position is more likely to be valid if both the premises can be argued for and the argument is internally consistent. This creates a real problem for those who claim supernatural phenomena explain certain aspects of the universe and human nature. How do you make claims about the untestable. At best, a theological argument can be consistent, but its premises can not be reasonably argued for. An example of a consistent argument would be only god eats pencils, therefore anything that eats pencils is god. I went to school with a girl who ate pencils. Therefore, she is god. However, how sound are the premises such an argument is based on? How do actual claims about god differ?

Here is another consistent argument. Watch it and think about the following.

How do we know it is not the truth?

What tools do we have to investigate this?

Is it reasonable to reject this possibility?

It could be true, like a deistic world view could be true, but what evidence is their to back it up

And yes, it was the blondes that drew my attention to the video - wahey, down boy! :-)

What Is Life?

The question of what is life came up over coffee this morning. It is actually not that easy to put a finger on. Some things we have no hesitation in calling alive – like ourselves. With others it is less obvious.
In my first ever biology class at school, I was taught that there were seven characteristics of life, which if memory serves me right include the fact that life has to feed (acquire building blocks), move, grow, respire (produce energy) be organised into cells, be sensitive to the environment and be adaptable. I would also add that it has to locally reverse entropy too.

So, we all do these things, but are they universal? Viruses for example don’t grow or move. They don’t even respire in the sense that they make their own ATP. They get that from their host cells. They are not cellular in nature and are only adaptable in the sense that mutations can occur – they can’t adapt in the sense that a Venus flytrap can turn on antifreeze proteins when they are chilled. So, are viruses alive? They do reverse entropy and appear sensitive to the environment in that some can use cues inside the host cell to reproduce – Herpes for example lies latent for long periods of time.

So, are viruses alive?

Many invertebrate embryos are not initially cellular either – they are syncitial (no cellular divisions between nuclei). Slime Moulds also spend much of their lives in a syncitial state too.

What about salt crystals? It can grow by reversing entropy. Split them in two and given the right conditions, they can grow into two new crystals. It is sensitive to the environment; it “knows” when to grow and when to dissolve. Its component parts have all the information needed to produce an identical crystal, and is organised into unit cells, so is it alive?

Discuss!

The First Cause

Theist argument:

Premise 1: All things that exist have a cause.

Premise2: God does not have a cause.

Conclusion: God is the first cause.


However, we have two contradictory premises here. Premise 1 is also on shaky ground. Where is the evidence that everything needs a cause? Then we have the Casimir effect where particles can just spontaneously come into existence.

Premise 2 is equally shaky. Just defining something does not impart it with existence of a particular set of values; for example square circles are pink. Square circles cannot exist, and therefore can not be pink. Why should defining god make him any more real?

So, lets re write that argument and keep it logically consistent.

Premise 1: All things that exist have a cause.

Premise2: God does not have a cause.

Conclusion: Therefore God does not exist.

The theist now has to abandon this argument, or concede that God does not exist (If he wants to maintain consistency).

Parasite Adaptation 1: The Trypanosome

Parasites justifiably get a bad rap. At best, they are gross things that burst out of the bodies of other organisms alien style. At worst, they can cause severe human disesase. One species (Ascaris lumbricoides) infects a quarter of people on the planet. This however is a relatively benign parasite compared to those of the malaria parasites – which infect up to 200 million new people a year, and may kill up to 3 million people a year. It is therefore understandable that we should feel uncomfortable about them. However, if we can think dispassionately about them, and consider them as organisms, they are really quite remarkable and have evolved some amazing solutions to survive in a hostile environment. In fact, parasitism may be the most popular lifestyle there is as most species have several parasites, and even parasites have parasites of their own.

All organisms live in an environment that presents challenges that have to be overcome – be it a lack of water, light, oxygen or predators. Parasites though live in an environment that is actively trying to kill them. Animals (and plants) have evolved elaborate immune systems that try and kill invading organisms, and in return, parasites have evolved counter measures. Some species, such as Leishmania sp. effectivly live in baths of digestive enzymes, bleach and toxic radicals called phagolysosomes. Others can also immunosuppress their hosts. An example of this would be the hook worms (Ankylostoma sp). As an aside, these are actually being tested to treat allergies. Some species (Leishmania again) can make the host produce an entirely inappropriate immune response that actually antaganises the type of response that would kill the parasite. Some species (Schistosoma sp) even cover themselves in host molecules to disguise themselves.

One group called the Trypanosoma brucei complex have a rather interesting way of evading the immune system. These are transmitted by tsetse flies and cause a wasting disease called ngana in cattle. In humans, two subspecies (T. brucei rhodesiense and T. brucei gambiensie) cause sleeping sickness. Normally, an infected individual will show peaks and troughs in the number of parasites in their blood. See Figure 1.

Figure1

This is due to the immune system clearing the parasites from the blood and new variant parasites arising that have different properties. The surface of trypanosomes is almost completely covered by a molecule called the Variant Surface Glycoprotein (Figure 2). This coat also forms a barrier that prevents the immune system seeing or reaching important membrane proteins. This is important, because if the immune system could see and reach an essential parasite surface molecule, that does not vary, that could be the end of the infection.

Up to 10% of the Trypanosome genome may be devoted to different VSG genes. The proteins they encode invoke a strong antibody response and as this response develops, it kills the trypanosomes that express that particular VSG type. Some individual trypanosomes will suddenly change the VSG molecule they express at the surface. The result is that the immune system can no longer recognise them and has to generate antibodies to the new VSG. This process repeats itself and keeps the parasite about a week ahead of the immune system. This will continue until the host dies or receives chemotherapy. The energy costs involved in producing large amounts of antibody also affects the host and results in a reduced capacity to produce more antibodies. This means that the infection ultimately gets worse.

Now the god bit. Fundies who believe in a literal garden of Eden and talking snake claim there was no death and suffering before the fall, therefore no trypanosomes (and Tyrannosaurs ate plants!) One particular one that some readers will be familiar with wrote this sick piece on the boxing day tsunami in which he wrote “He [Darwin] makes one big mistake – he assumes that the world as it is now is the world as God created it. But that is not the case. When you read Genesis One notice the repeated refrain, ‘And God say that it was good’. God did not create the world to have natural disasters, cancer and death. Something came into the world which has upset the natural order of things and polluted the whole environment. That is why, as Paul tells us in Romans 8, the whole creation ‘groans as in the pangs of childbirth’. We are faced with two choices – either the world is as it is because that is the way things are, or things are the way things are because sin came in and corrupted a good and perfect creation.”

Apparently we are to blame, and Robertson later writes “What is the explanation and solution for all this? How can we explain and more importantly cope with this bent universe and our perverse human natures?”"

This is just total bollocks (no apologies for terminology, a spade is a spade) and contradicted by fossil tumours, fossil deformities, fossils with bites, fossils with their last meal of a conspecific inside them, evidence of volcanism and earth quakes and mass extinctions all considerably pre-dating the existence of man to name but a few. It really is pathetic that people hold this view.

Despite the total absurdity of the claim, there are also internal inconsistencies in the fundie argument – although it is also applicable to the loving god argument in general. The point is that supposedly only god creates and he does so with a purpose. Now, if there was no suffering or disease, then why invent an immune system? If he is loving, then why create a trypanosome that has “built in” methods of specifically overcoming an immune system? This leaves you with the problem of loving God designing something that could have no purpose because there was no disease, then creating something to overcome this non purpose and cause suffering. It’s too mental for words.

More Thoughts On Perfection

Jonathan made a good point on the perfection thread and has sent me on a philosophical ramble. He pointed out that “creation” was not perfect. It made me realise (the blindingly obvious) that anything that does not conform to the qualities of god cannot be considered perfect. Genesis tells us that man did not originally know right from wrong or live forever (two qualities that god supposedly possesses). Man was therefore not created perfect! It makes the biblical narrative all the more bizarre when we consider that god created man in an imperfect state then punishes all mankind for the consequences of this. Is this fair?

This is a bit of a loaded question, if you say yes, then you are basing that solely on faith that god knows better than you – not a rational position. If you say no, you are subscribing to the view that there is some sort of standard by which to judge actions by.

However does this mean that there is an absolute moral standard that we are using here? Well, of course it doesn’t, it just means that there is a standard –and obviously one not accepted by everyone. If it is absolute, we have no means of knowing it is. A more serious problem for the theist however is that if an absolute does exist, then it must be something that is defined in a manner not dependant on god. This is because to be perfect you cannot deviate and act in an imperfect manner – something is restraining you.

Can God himself define the nature of perfection? Only if he limits his ability to act in certain ways. This would then define choice as something that is not a requirement of perfection. As any fundie will tell you, man’s original sin was a question of free will – a choice (although how you can be accountable for doing what you don’t know is wrong escapes me). If God then created man with free will, he has then given him yet another quality of “imperfection”. The free will argument then becomes internally inconsistent with the idea that choice corrupted mankind. The ability to choose would have meant that mankind was already less than perfect.
As an aside, if you have free will thrust on you, is it really free will? You can’t choose free will either, because that means that you have to have it already to make a choice. Can free will then logically exist? Does it exist at all or do other factors influence our choices?

A god who restricts his power would also not be omnipotent (presumably another feature lacking in perfection). The idea that god cannot be omnipotent is not new though. For example, can god make a weight too heavy for him to lift? If yes, then he lacks the ability to lift it, if no, then he lacks the ability to create such a weigh. I also doubt that he would be able to make square circles or make 2+2=27 while keeping the values the same.

I hate and love philosophy in equal measures. You can use it to justify or deny any concept. Personally I think it is more of a problem for the religious, as they are the ones who have the burden of proof.

The Problem Of Perfection

Christians often get upset when they are told that aspects of their faith are unreasonable. One such example is the idea that their god is perfect. Often god is defined as perfection, but a definition does not impart either existence or consequent defining qualities on a concept.
The entire foundations of Christianity is based on the idea that mankind is definitely not perfect. How then can a non perfect being speak rationally about perfection? He has no concept of it! It has to be taken on faith that god is indeed perfect. The bible even tells the believer that he can not understand god:

“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts " (Isaiah 55:8-9)

Concepts of perfection are subjective. I’m pretty sure that if we all defined our ideas of our perfect partner, there would be considerable disagreement. So it is with god – some Christians think that punishing sinners and an intolerance of sin is a requirement for perfection, others that forgiveness is a requirement of perfection. Yet others that love is a sign of perfection – or justice – or beauty. This subjectivity concerning perfection is also a problem for Anselm’s ontological argument where existence is supposedly derived from ideas of perfection. Apart from the unsound logic of this circular argument, everyone by using their own ideas of perfection , is essentially “providing evidence” for a myriad of different entities. To someone suffering, perfection may entail relieving suffering, to Bart Simpson, perfection may require being a robot with laser eyes. Surely, god would be an absolute, so, is anyone actually deriving this perfect being at all?
The trouble is that these are human ideas of perfection, and if you allow your thinking to be restricted by Isaiah 55:8-9, you are just in no position to comment on perfection; it is purely a matter of faith. This leads to the problem that what ever argument someone uses can be countered by substituting “imperfect” for “perfect”. It is like the idea that god is good. If you can’t understand or clearly define good, then the idea of an evil god, that works to the greater bad in ways that you can not understand can be just as valid. There is no way to choose between these options – let alone define the options.

Finally, if a being is perfect, then what does the act of creation do for that being? It can add nothing to its perfection. If that creation is imperfect, it can only lessen that being's perfection. If for example, that being happens to create an evil (imperfect) being, surely that act is imperfect. If a perfect being can only act in a perfect way, then that also means that being is restrained by something outwith itself, and is therefore not perfect.

Naturally, perfection is not defined but assumed for the sake of the above argument.

Any comments?