Overview

From wikipedia (the best definition I could find):

Atheism, in a broad sense, is the rejection of belief in the existence of deities. In a narrower sense, atheism is specifically the position that there are no deities. Most inclusively, atheism is simply the absence of belief that any deities exist.

The last definition here is important, because it implies that you can be an atheist without consciously existence rejecting the idea that all gods exist. Different Atheists have their own beliefs and philosophical outlooks in addition to Atheism, so the label “atheist” really doesn’t pin down a person’s views in the same way “Catholic” generally does. You can be an Atheist Agnostic, who lacks belief in God, but doesn’t claim to know that his belief is right. You can be a Hard Atheist, with an active belief that there absolutely is no god. Agnosticism and personal belief are actually totally separate: here is a table to show you what I mean.

Another important position (which wouldn’t really fit well on the table) is Apatheism, which takes the stance that it doesn’t really matter if God exists, no one’s really made any progress on the question, and that the whole issue has no practical significance. Pragmatic Atheism is a type of Apatheism/Atheism I particularly like which says: “I live my life as if there are no Gods. For all practical purposes, I am an atheist). I’d also like to define a position of my invention: Inconsequentialism: The view that a particular definition of God may ‘exist’, but is so reduced that any statements it makes about reality are indistinguishable from the laws of physics and secular philosophy.

My views

Naturalism is the central tenant of my world-view. It is the view that Nature is everything. Anything which can be said to exist, exists in nature and is natural. If we discover something new about the universe that does not fit with the laws of nature as we understand them (for example, something fitting the description of God), we simply must extend our understanding of nature to cover it. Thus supernatural entities are necessarily excluded – I find the phrase “A supernatural entity has an existence” as contradictory as “A square has three sides”.

Another view I have (similar to what is apparently called Ignosticism) is that you can’t answer the simple question “Does God exist?”, because God has far too many definitions. Instead, each definition of God must be judged on its own merits. I am a gnostic-atheist with regards to any definition of God which defines God as supernatural, due to my naturalism.

This leads to my rejection of a global Strong-Agnostic view. If the only Gods worth considering are natural, then the assertion that any meaningful God exists is a scientifically falsifiable hypothesis. Of course, you might argue that one cannot know of the non-existance of anything. Can we check every star in the universe for invisible orbiting teapots? No, but the burden of proof lies on the claimant, so I think it’s fair to say that we know beyond reasonable doubt that stars are not accompanied by invisible teapot satellites. I do understand the issues here though. You may ask “Can we know that humans are able to investigate all existent phenomena?”. We can’t know that. Nor can we know that we can’t. However, even if humans do not have the resources to falsify a particular hypothesis, it is still falsifiable. Weak-agnosticism makes more sense here: “I don’t know, we might never know, but it’s not necessarily impossible to know.”

Some people’s versions of God often seem like they’re just metaphors for “that which is right”. Towards these Gods, my view is inconsequentialist. We could call these Gods anything – they’re just philosophical systems. Other versions of God include statements about physical reality. Any true statements are indistinguishable from nature, the false ones will gradually be reduced away (as has been happening to the Christian God throughout history).

So in a word, I am an Atheist. I have never come across a version of God that I believe exists, and those which might exist, I probably wouldn’t call God. I feel like Aspiring Pragmatic Atheist might sum me up quite well though, basically saying “I’m basically an Atheist. I have a bunch of other philosophical viewpoints (this blog) but honestly no one really gives a fuck, and neither should I.”

Here is something high-school (and lower) students often do not realise: teachers are our equals. If a teacher cannot justify an action, they should not be doing it, and “I’m a teacher, do what I say.” is not a valid justification. “It’s just policy, take it up with the headteacher” is also a pretty dubious response. Why are they implementing a policy they cannot themselves justify? If they didn’t believe in it, they should have questioned it. Always, when faced with injustice from school staff, ask “Justify yourself”, and if they cannot, calmly disobey. You are automatically in the right until they can demonstrate otherwise, so don’t be afraid to let things propagate up the chain of authority. Heads in schools can be surprisingly sympathetic towards students, and I’ve heard a number of times of unfair detentions and punishments being quashed by headteachers.

When in particular should you do this? A great example is teachers denying you the right to drink water in class. There is no way to justify this outside of science labs (they should let you go outside to drink), yet this STILL happens. If you have younger siblings who go to a school that discourages water bottles in class, tell them to fight it. Get your parents to complain. Even the government is pro-water-bottles. Teachers who don’t let students drink are outdated, and abusing their power. If enough students’ parents complained about this, they would change their policy straight away, but kids are often too scared to initiate this.

“Collective Responsiblity” (detention for the whole class for the actions of a small group) is another terrible idea. Schools try to justify punishing innocent children with the logic that “No one would misbehave if other students put pressure on them not to. By punishing everyone, students will be encouraged to shun bad behaviour.” What exactly do they want students to do to those who screw it up for the rest of them, beat them up after school? Tell them to stop? (doesn’t work) Many a time I have seen people get told off for telling others to stop talking, so that clearly doesn’t work. All collective responsibility does is give good students no reason NOT to misbehave. They’re going to be punished anyway, so why not mess around? I have actually seen people whose behaviour in class gradually deteriorates because they get punished for the actions of others so often. Eventually they become one of the miscreants, and the cycle simply continues. I encourage everyone to challenge undeserved punishment.

Phones are another interesting issue. I understand that phones can be a distraction, I have nothing against people being told to put their phones away if they’re playing games or texting friends. However, phones are a very important tool for students for two reasons. The first is obvious: being able to call emergency services. The second is a less obvious: camera phones are a vital tool for keeping teachers in check. I’ve heard many stories of students being treated unfairly (punishment for differing opinions, peaceful students being forcibly dragged) which might not have happened if students were able to record the teachers. However, you try getting a camera/recorder out in a class: you’ll be told straight away to put it away.

Many schools use cameras to keep students in check outside of classrooms, so I feel that it’s only fair that students are able to use cameras to keep teachers in check too. This is how the public keeps the police in check: abuses of police power are often caught on camera by the public who have the right to film them. I’ve even heard of a case of a teacher using a recorder to gather evidence on how bad the class was. A student questioned this, and they were given a detention. Imagine how that would work the other way round: he would get a detention for using a phone in class. That, my friends, is called injustice.

Most people reading this will be people in sixth form/college, where you generally are treated like more of an adult, so this applies a lot less. However, if you have younger siblings, you’ll be doing them a favour if you get them to follow the mantra: Do not submit to anything that cannot be justified. If this mindset were hammered in to everyone from a young age, abuse of power from authorities of all kinds would be far more difficult than it is now.

I made this image recently for a 4chan troll physics thread (the only good type of thread left.) Although it’s obviously wrong, it’s not immediately obvious why this is wrong, and a lot of people can’t seem to figure out why. Why doesn’t pushing the metal rod at one end simply push the end of the other, thus transferring information instantly? Well, imagine compressing a material: the atoms in the material cannot move faster than the speed of light, so the compression wave actually travels through the material in the direction of the applied force, at a speed less than that of light’s. So it follows that, given the situation in the diagram, it must take no less than 2 years for the poke of the rod to propagate from one end to the other.

Of course, a vast ammount of force would be required to carry this out. Let us assume that our rod is a cylinder made of carbon nano-tubes with a density of 1300kg/m³, with a radius of 100metres, extended 1.892×10¹⁶ metres (two lightyears). This gives us a mass of 7.73×10¹⁷ kg. We want to move this rod a distance of 1mm in 1 minute (for example), from rest, so an acceleration of 5.56×10^-8 m.s^-2 is required. Presuming that the gravity of each planet pulls equally on the rod, this means to calculate the force required we simply multiply our values and discover that our experiment requires 4.298×10¹⁰ Newtons. Wolfram alpha seems to think that this is only 3500 times larger than the thrust of a Space Shuttle solid rocket booster at liftoff, so… anyone up for building a two lightyear carbon-nanotube pole?

This result is probably wildly inaccurate, and isn’t particularly interesting – it’s just a simple application of Newton’s laws to a solid body. However, here’s some food for thought: if this rule applies to our rod, it applies to everything. Push something on your desk. It looked like it moved instantly, right? Well, you now know that actually, upon applying force to your object, a wave of force propagated through it, causing the end of the object to move a fraction of a second after you pushed it. If you don’t believe this, consider a swimming pool. Push some water in a pool with one hand and you can feel the wave hit the other some time later. Is it so unreasonable to think that a solid behaves any differently?

I have a sneaking suspicion that this wave propagates at the speed of sound in the object. I have no evidence for this other than some dodgy reasoning, but if you think about it, sound IS simply the propagation of vibration through a material. Earthquakes generate “sound” waves, a.k.a Preassure Waves. The speed of these waves represent the speed of propagation of force throughout the earth, so it stands to reason that we could calculate how long it would really take for a message through our experimental rod to be transmitted. Using 6700m/s as the speed of sound in carbon nanotubes (obtained through a quick google search), Wolfram Alpha makes this nice and easy: 89,552 years. That’s about 45,000 times longer than it would take for us to transmit a radio signal between our planets. I spent a good few minutes trying to convince someone at school that the rod wouldn’t transmit information instantly, and we now know that this is done 45,000 times slower than the speed of light. Counterintuitive much?

Philosophy is an interesting thing. Often, you’ll come up with some view or opinion entirely independently, then find out that there’s actually a name for exactly what you were thinking in philosophy. An example: a while ago I had a discussion about free will vs fate vs God. The person I was talking to said that she doesn’t understand a person can believe in fate and God, if God gave us free will. My response was that you can believe in fate at a physical level; everything that happens in the universe was bound to happen from the beginning of creation because the laws of physics are set and – like a set of dominoes toppling one another – everything has a theoretically predictable reaction. Or, as I put it then:

I mean, everything is a consequence of the next thing, right? Our choices are just chemical reactions; they’re just an illusion of choice. We do the things we do because the atoms are arranged in the right way. Everything that eventually happens, was always, from the start of the universe, going to happen with 100% probability.

The question is, how can that be compatible with God and free will? Well, the answer I gave then was somewhat vague:

You could believe that god giving us ‘free will’ simply means that he moved the responsiblity of the management of fate from himself, to the physical laws of the universe. Then god and fate can work, no? …

He gives up his ability to affect our choices, and thus gives us ‘free will’, to the degree that our fate us  governed by physics instead of himself.

I was recently reminded of this discussion and thought about it some more, and considered that perhaps, although we may not have free will at an atomic level (unless you consider quantum physics and uncertainty principles), we still make choices on a human level. It feels like we make choices when we make them. You could stop reading this paragraph right now. Although, technically, you were always going to if you did, you still make a choice. The world just isn’t simple enough for us to deny free will; if we did, who is responsible for evil? Physics? Without a concept of free will at a human level, is a tree falling on someone any different to someone being shot? Both actions would just be unfortunate accidents – the product of a series of events which were always going to happen. Moat was always going to go on that shooting spree, it’s not his fault! That might physically be true, but I feel that the concept of free will at a human level is vital for moral reasoning.

Then I found out about this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compatibilism_and_incompatibilism#Compatibilism. I wrote this blog after having read all about that so I may have mixed some of the new ideas/examples I read about in to my description of my original ideas, but I assure you that when I read this I basically thought “Well that sums up exactly what I think I think.” I’m sure you probably have your own ideas about all of this too, so which are you?

Incompatibilsm asserts that free will and determinism can’t go hand in hand and thus leads to libertarianism (free will exists, fate is not set), or hard determinism (no free will, fate is decided). There’s also hard indeterminism, which considers that physical events are not deterministic due to uncertainty in quantum mechanics, but the probability of our choices is still set and thus we still don’t have any free will. Compatibilism is essentially expressed by my view above, although I feel that it really depends on what type of free will you’re talking about. For any useful definition of free will in society, I agree with compatibilism. For a strict interpretation of free will, I think that hard indeterminism or hard determinism make more sense (I don’t feel I have enough understanding of quantum science to decide between the two).

That leaves me pretty unsure about everything really. What I usually do in this situation is doublethink my way in to a nice rosy place where everything works and I don’t have to look at the inconsistencies. Is everything in the universe determined (or, statistically the most likely situation)? Probably. Is that compatible with free will? Yes and no! What is free will? I’m not even sure any more, and I don’t think philosophers agree on a definition either. Does any of this work with the concept of God? I stopped caring at the third paragraph.

Problem solved!

There was a young girl named Sinéad,

Who was partial to cold lemonade.

But one day as she drunk,

She dropped dead with a thunk,

Drinking tetrasodium pyrophosphate.

I often find that people misuse the words “fact” and “theory” in relation to science, so I’ve decided to educate you on what exactly they mean. If you’re reading this, you probably don’t need this education but nevertheless I shall provide it anyway.

A “fact” is something that we observe. For example: we have a large number of fossils – fact. Dating systems place them as being formed many thousands of years in the past – fact. The bible says that Jesus walked on water – fact. These things are facts because there is no opinion or interpretation involved. They’re just statements describing what has been observed. Indeed, it is possible to perceive something falsely; it simply results in an untrue fact. Facts aren’t necessarily true, but they’re always either true or false, and this should be verifiable.

A “theory” is an explanation. Usually in the realms science, the ‘theories of the time’ are the best explanations for a given set of facts. So take the theory of Evolution: most scientists agree that it’s the best explanation for the vast wealth of its evidence, but it’s not the only one worth considering. Take “God did it” for example. It’s conceivable that the evidence is the result of God trying to mislead us and test our faith. Flies mutating in labs and antibiotic resistant bacteria strains might simply exist for the very purpose of leading us off-track, or perhaps these phenomena only exist in short time frames and can’t be extrapolated millions of years back in time. Perhaps the world was created half an hour ago and all of our memories concerning evolution were crafted by aliens and entirely false.

Those are also theories, but are they the best theories? No. They rely on facts which can’t be categorically proven or disproven, whereas the current theory of evolution does not. Even though none of those theories are fact, that doesn’t mean the theory of Evolution is “just a theory” (even though it technically is) or “unproven”. Most people who say “just a theory” are usually mixing up ‘theory’ and ‘hypothesis’; one being usually the best explanation science has to offer for observed phenomena, and the other being an idea which has yet to be proven beyond a reasonable degree of doubt.

However, as mentioned earlier, verifiability is very important. Let us take the Jesus walking on water example. “Jesus walked on water” is a fact, as reported by the bible, but can it be verified? Not today. However, given the options – Jesus actually walked on water, Jesus faked it, and Jesus didn’t walk on water – Jesus actually walking on water requires that he break the laws of physics as we know them. Thus (in my opinion), one of the other theories provides the best explanation of the fact that the bible reports that Jesus walked on water. This doesn’t mean all historical evidence should be discounted, but – however nice it would be to believe that everything we have ever written is a true and honest account of reality – historical evidence should only be accepted alongside multiple separate accounts or other tangible evidence.

So, as you continue your life, remember to keep the concept of fact distinctly separated from theory. Never jump straight to conclusions. Lipstick on your husband’s face when he gets home from work doesn’t mean he’s been cheating on you, it means he has lipstick on his face. His theory is as good as yours unless you can bring some more facts to the table. Not that that’s relevant to me or anything. That’s just an example of analytical thinking.

Yeah.