Medical Miracles

When you see a doctor, you present them the symptoms you have and they use that information and check for the most probable cause of your symptoms. If you get a second opinion, the symptoms have not changed, and if they both have the same level of training, they should reach the same conclusion. This does not change if you go to two, three, four, or more doctors, they are all giving an inference to the best explanation given the symptoms. Increasing the number of people saying so does not increase their probability of getting it correct. Knowing this, misdiagnosis of rare diseases that share symptoms with more common terminal diseases is inevitable. If you are diagnosed with a common terminal condition and you miraculously return to good health, it is within reason to attribute it to a misdiagnosis.

Similarly, if a condition at a certain stage has a 90% fatality rate within a year, chances are they will tell you that the prognosis is not promising and that you have less than a year left to live. When a year comes and passes, and you're still alive, it is not surprising to find out that you're part of the 10% that survive the condition. I'm sure there are some diseases that have an even higher fatality rate, but it still obeys statistical odds that some people diagnosed with fatal conditions will survive.

This is why anecdotes are not sufficient to demonstrate the claims being made, since they fall within the bounds of chance. I fail to see how these situations constitute any evidence of miracles, since it is what we would expect to see if there were no miracles. Its ludicrous when what we expect to see without a god is used as evidence for its existence.

Moral Principles & Justice

I'd like to take for an example, the moral case of the German national courts' decision to stop "haftpflichtbewaerung" (keeping especially dangerous criminals in jail after their sentences are up), merely because of the basic morality of "one crime, one punishment" (and, of course, maximum life sentence being like 20 years or so). It's obvious that these criminals belong in jail for the rest of their lives or dead-they will continue to be ridiculously dangerous. So why do we follow the morality of respecting their rights, even though it is ridiculously detrimental to the community?

It would depend on how the society wants to model their judicial system. If imprisonment is supposed to be serving a debt to society, then a fixed time would be adequate, such as in this case, and extending that time would be unfair. If imprisonment is to separate violent criminals from society, then the sentence would not be 20 years, it would be life with possibility of parole, and their behavior in prison would indicate whether or not their violent behavior has changed. This would also be consistent with using prison as a form of rehabilitation. Basically, they decided that it is more "fair" for someone to receive the time they received than to prolong their sentence.

This principle of fairness has value to us and can be demonstrated by experiment. "The ultimatum game is a game often played in economic experiments in which two players interact to decide how to divide a sum of money that is given to them. The first player proposes how to divide the sum between the two players, and the second player can either accept or reject this proposal. If the second player rejects, neither player receives anything. If the second player accepts, the money is split according to the proposal. The game is played only once so that reciprocation is not an issue."

So, experimenter gives Person A 10 dollars, and then Person A offers Person B part of the 10 dollars and then Person B decides to accept the deal or reject the deal. If both people are perfectly rational, Person A would give Person B 1 dollar and Person B would accept the deal since receiving 1 dollar is a better payoff than zero. However, most people reject an offer of 1 dollar. People value "fairness" so people reject the offer since the other person is being unfair. Knowing this, if you ever participate in such an experiment, don't offer 1 dollar, but something more fair such as 3-5 dollars. It might seem like both participants would have a net gain in happiness if they left with more money than they came in, but that is not what experiments show.

We value fairness, so we want society to have fair rules, and haftpflichtbewaerung was judged to be unfair by that society. On the surface, it might appear that implementing haftpflichtbewaerung would result in a net gain, but it is not necessarily the case. It would be similar to saying, "why do we have the burden of proof on the prosecutor and not the defendant?" It would result in more arrests and make society safer. But in the process, we would have to sacrifice our values to implement it. It has been traditionally said that it is “better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer." Society has determined that these principles are more consistent with their values and if it means a little more crime, it is worth the cost.

Science & Religion Compatibility

Is science and religion compatible?

Most answers to this question focus on the compatibility of scientific findings and theistic beliefs. By pointing to a large demographic of theistic scientists, that some sets of beliefs are compatible with some scientific facts, but beliefs can be compartmentalized and religious beliefs come in all forms and sizes, which is why I think this is a poor way to show their compatibility.

However, I think this misses the point. Science is not a particular belief. Scientific findings overturn old ones, but science is not the current state of knowledge, it is a method of discovering how the world works. When we compare these two methods of discovery, at a minimum, we can conclude that science is a philosophy of discovery and religion is a philosophy of ignorance.

Science is a philosophy of discovery. Intelligent design is a philosophy of ignorance. You cannot build a program of discovery on the assumption that nobody is smart enough to figure out the answer to a problem. Once upon a time, people identified the god Neptune as the source of storms at sea. Today we call these storms hurricanes. We know when and where they start. We know what drives them. We know what mitigates their destructive power. And anyone who has studied global warming can tell you what makes them worse. The only people who still call hurricanes “acts of God” are the people who write insurance forms.” — Neil deGrasse Tyson : The Perimeter of Ignorance

Religion operates on a wholly different set of epistemology, an epistemology that is incompatible with that of science. The methods that religion uses to discover how the world works, divine revelation and sometimes tradition, is incompatible with the philosophy of science. Absolute truths are not present in science. Nothing held to such a standard because each finding must be supported by evidence, and if evidence is discovered in the future that overturns the present paradigm, that is what is dictated by science. However, divine revelation is not meant to be changed, because that would indicate that the source was in error, and an omniscient being cannot by definition be incorrect. Also, the method of how we discover scientific facts are available to anyone who wishes to learn; however, the methods of divine revelation are only viewable from the messenger. These small differences of discovering the world conflict with each other, demonstrating that the scientific method and theistic method of discovering the world are incompatible with each other. Simply summed, "In religion, faith is a virtue. In science, faith is a vice."

Religion and science are both in search of truth – as such they will have things to say to each other. For that to happen we need to listen.

Its not a discussion, its a lecture given by science to religion and religion better take notes or it will be laughed out of the arena for good reason.

Observer Bias

I'm not sure if this has a label for it, but its an informal logical fallacy. The one I want to describe is when one looks at a continuous process and concludes that the present form is the end result. The most obvious would be evolution and people concluding that humans are the end result of evolution. I would classify this as an observer fallacy. A fallacy that results when the time of the observation effects the outcome and people don't recognize that it does. One comparison would be looking at the continuous innovation of products and concluding that the current model or other standard is the most optimal product possible. When put into this context, the conclusion is laughable, but somehow, it becomes ungraspable to some people when it comes to evolution.

Game Theory & Morality & PoE

One way to get good at a given game is to emulate those who are more experienced and have more knowledge of playing the game. The elite players are implementing the correct choices for each given situation and as long as you can mirror their moves, you can win without knowing why it is correct. Take the game of Chess for example, the computer, Deep Blue, that beat Kasparov only relied on the data of thousands of previous games between grandmasters. Deep Blue did not know why particular moves fulfilled the objective of winning, only that they did. In choosing the moves that tend to fulfill the objective among the players with extremely high knowledge of the game, Deep Blue was able to consistently choose the correct decision. So, given that we have enough background knowledge of an elite player's decisions in particular situations, we can determine what the correct decision is and can emulate being knowledgeable about the game without knowing the reasons behind what makes the decision correct.

Then we come to the traditional characteristics of god: omnipotence, benevolence, and omniscience. From the properties omniscience and benevolence, we know that he will always be making the morally perfect action in every situation because we know from his omniscience that he know the morally perfect action and from his omnipotence, he will be able to actualize that action.

What can we conclude from his decisions? In general, he is hidden, never interferes in affairs. According to specific traditions, he may decide that vicarious sacrifice redeems immoral behavior, or that one should interfere only when society is at the precipice of disaster. These decisions must reflect what what is ultimately moral for moral agents to do for the above reasons, however, I think that one would be hesitant to concede that these represent moral values.

Lets see how these moral values exemplified by god conflict with what we know about morality. Taking the non-intervening notion of god as the example, if it is ever moral to interfere with anyone else, then god does not exist. As a corollary, if you believe in such a god, then you must also think that it is immoral to intervene with someone who commits evil. In the essence of Christopher Hitchens, I contend that this is a very sinister idea that poisons everything.

Inductive Positions

Inductive reasoning: is a kind of reasoning that allows for the possibility that the conclusion is false even where all of the premises are true.[1] The premises of an inductive logical argument indicate some degree of support (inductive probability) for the conclusion but do not entail it; i.e. they do not ensure its truth.-wiki

The classic example is the black swan example. Before black swans were discovered, it would be rational to conclude on partial information that all swans are white in the following way.

1. All of the swans we have examined so far are white.
2. Therefore, all swans are white.

This conclusion has the possibility of being false with further information and evidence. In this sense, it is falsifiable because of an inference made from the conclusion. If all swans are white, then we can make that conclusion a premise in the following syllogism, which makes it falsifiable in the following way.

1. If all swans are white, then we will not observe black swans.
2. Black swans are observed.
3. Not all swans are white. (Modus Tollens)

This shows that all inductive claims made in this way are falsifiable simply by showing a counterexample to it. This is pretty much the stance of uniformitarianism in which known observations take precedence over the unknown. This is how to distinguish between figurative and literal language in historical writings. When a writer says that it rained cats and dogs, we are reasonably assured that it is figurative language, but if we suddenly observed cats and dogs falling from the heavens, it would lend credibility to the writing's historical credibility. This principle could easily be summarized as positing the known over the unknown for historical events.

This makes positing supernatural claims unwelcome for historical purposes until they can be verified in the present by credible observation. In this sense, I am a naturalist, I don't think any supernatural claims have been established and have tentatively taken the position that all supernatural claims that have been investigated are false, therefore all supernatural claims are false. To falsify this conclusion, all one needs to do is demonstrate one observation of the supernatural. A similar explanation could be made for the atheist position. These positions are not held to a standard of absolute certainty, they are tentative, for they have the possibility to be falsified, but that does not discount their ability to account for the processes of reality.

Christopher Hitchens

Besides the charming accent, this is much more reason to listen to Hitchens. His points, usually hidden underneath barbed attacks on religion, using pejorative language to emphasis his point, can sometimes give an impression of going off-topic. However, this brings back to the main point, it is much better to project to the people in the pews than to sway the theologians in ivory towers that have an entirely different view altogether. This may appear to be a straw man, since he is not directly attacking his opponent's views, but I think the medium used is more conducive to making speaking points to the audience than actual discussion so I've learned to accept it as a debating tactic. If the difference between these two types of believers differ too greatly, he has one at least one occasion asked the rhetorical, abiding by Harris's request to call a spade a spade, "I thought I was debating a religious person?"

The scorecard objectively shows the damage of Hitchen's forte. His rhetoric pertaining to the ill effects of religiosity bar none better. One could not help leaving out his trademark phrase concerning the Catholic Church of "no child's behind left." A force to be reckoned with, but it is unfortunate that he is sometimes downplayed because his antics cloud some people's ability to see his underlying points. Here, Hitchen's makes his case of how religion poisons everything.