I recently watched this really nice video of a talk given by Andy Thomson at the American Atheists conference that briefly goes over some of the reasons Why We Belive in Gods.

If you don’t wish to watch the video, I’ve recorded the primary arguments below (or skip right to the last bullet for the big conclusion):

• Darwin gives us the only naturalistic explanation of how we’ve become who we are. Together with genetics, his theory can explain religion. Our brains have evolved, with piecemeal mechanisms, to solve problems of social interaction.
• We are risen apes, not fallen angels. As part of our collective development, our frontal lobes have rapidly expanded. Once the development of language and tools allowed us to conquer our physical environment, the most challenging aspect left, and what probably drove the expansion of our brains, was dealing each other.
• Religious ideas are the extraordinary use of everyday cognitions. They hijack the systems responsible for social cognition, agency detection, and precautionary reasoning. They are a by-product of mechanisms developed for other purposes. They can be characterized by ordinary constructs with slight alterations, and are an artifact of our ability to imagine alternative social worlds. They hijack these systems with super-normal stimuli.
• Decoupled cognition. We are able to think of conversations with others (past and future) while conducting one at the moment. We can imagine having a conversation with people we’ve never met, such as The President. In this way we can interact with unseen others. It’s but one step to continue talking to a loved one recently deceased, and one further small step to talking with a god.
• Hyperactive agency detection. All of us with mistake a shadow for a burglar, but never mistake a burglar for a shadow. We defaultly assume that agency is involved, filling in any gaps with intuitive reasoning.
• This leads us to Minimally counterintuitive world, which optimally compromise between the interesting and the expected, creating stories that are attention arresting and memorable. Jousha Trees can walk around, but only under a full moon. God is just a guy, he understands my language, etc. but he’s omni-present. These counterintuitive properties can be physical (omni-presense), biological (virgin birth), psychological (pray and talk to him even though he’s omnipotent). There is also the attribution of mental states: God feels angry, he’s a jealous god.
• We can see this in children, 5-mo old is startled when a box is able to move by itself. They know the difference between inanimate objects and people, they know about intelligent agency. They can also think about people’s mind without having to observe that person’s body. About 1/2 of 4 yr olds have imaginary friends. A story of a mouse eaten by an alligator results in negative responses about the mouse’s physical attributes: eating, drinking, etc. but positive responses for mental state: wanting, desiring, hoping, etc.
• So the Belief in some form of life apart from the body is the default setting of the human brain.
• Causal determinism and Purpose. We are also prone to attribute purpose and design where there is none: rivers are for floating boats. The easy way in which we find ourselves thinking of evolution as an intentional agent.
• All this means that we will naturally invent a god.
• Social Attachment. Distressed persons turn to a caretaker, this is absolutely necessary for early childhood development. We naturally take care of each other. This results in the assignment of God as the parental figure in our life is very, very difficult for a believer to give up, esp when encouraged to have “a personal relationship with Jesus”. We also fear loosing the love of those who share the belief, our parents, friends, community.
• Theory of Mind. We each read into others intentions and desires. We have dedicated systems to read and monitor eye gaze, and can reason about 212 complex and sophisticated emotional states from black and white pictures of only eyes. We can also reason about the state of knowledge of others. I think you think that I think that… to I believe, I believe that God wants… The use and appeal to God can help to keep us in social control: We both know that God wants…
• Neuroimaging. fMRI’s of brains taken while people are given statement about religion (God controls the world. God has views about marriage. etc..) All participants shared common regions of the brain for questions about religion. These were coincident with regions that process Theory of Mind, and Abstract Semantics and Imagery. The components of religious belief are served by well-known neural circuits which mediate evolutionary adaptive cognitive functions: Religiosity is integrated in the brain, and arises from the ordinary mechanisms used for social interaction.
• Death. Theory of Mind conflicts with the physical evidence that our loved one is dead, so we continue talking to them. This gives us Souls and continued life in heaven.
• Transference. We base new relationships on old ones, God replaces our natural father.
• Childhood credulity. Children naturally absorb all information from their environment, and don’t have appropriate bullshit filters. They cannot disbelieve what religious ideas they are fed.
• Deference to Authority. Stanly Miller showed that we are all capable of actions we wouldn’t ordinarily take if we are instructed to do so by an authority.
• Reciprocal Altruism. We all keep a ledger in our heads about who owes us and who we owe. Religion uses this: sacrifice now for a nice mansion in the afterlife.
• Romantic Love; natural Moral Feeling Systems recruited to ‘prove’ the existence of God; Altruistic punishment the willingness to punish social cheats at a cost to ourselves
• Empathy When we observe someone take an action, the corresponding neurons in our own mind activate in a mirror image. Religion hijacks this with images of Jesus’ suffering, to guilt us into belief and obligation.
• Rituals Demonstrate hard-to-fake signals of commitment, communicate our intentions, tie us together as part of a greater whole.
• Kin psychology priests=brothers, nuns=sisters, pope=holy father.
• He ends the talk with a discussion of the atheist agenda. Reviewing the Scopes and Dover trial, reminding the audience that our position in all court cases thus far has been that there is no conflict between Religion and Science. We now have enough evidence that we know this to be false. Our understanding of evolutionary cognitive neuroscience demonstrates this conflict. It won’t be long before this knowledge is important enough that it finds its way into a High School Textbook; resulting in litigation. Bring it on!

All of this really shows why it is so difficult for people to move from a position of religious belief to one of atheism. It also shows why logically dissecting the Biblical inconsistencies, and pouring over the mistakes in the ‘proofs’ of god’s existence is mostly futile. I hope that it also gives powerfully compelling evidence for Richard Dawkins’ assertion that ‘Religion is child abuse’. Fortunately, though, some of us, such as Dan Barker, grow to have doubts, and slowly drift away from religious belief. So the best strategy for atheists is to promote secular culture, continue to publicize our existence and to welcome converts from religion with open hearts.

In the end Religion will lose out because: Science can explain Religion, but Religion cannot explain Science.

I’m not an Economist, but I thought that I’d share a link to a nice article about why we currently face an economic crisis.

The Infinite Loan Machine. An examination of the effect of loan securitization on the fractional reserve banking system.

Loan securitization has become a widely used method for consolidating collections of loans into financial instruments with sufficiently stable statistical properties that they can be freely traded. In recent years the concept has been generally extended, creating a class of asset backed securities, financial instruments which are created from a wide variety of loan sources, including credit card, commercial real estate and even financial investment (hedge fund) lending. In this paper the money and loan supply implications of these instruments within a fractional reserve banking system are examined. It appears that the interaction of these instruments create an infinite loop within the monetary system, which removes the limit on loan creation that should be imposed by the bank’s reserve requirement. This has effectively disabled the ability of the central bank’s reserve requirements to limit the expansion of credit by commercial banks, leading directly to the current credit crisis. The evidence suggests that loan securitization and the sale of commercial bank loans outside the regulated banking industry are incompatible with the stable operation of a fractional reserve banking system.

One of the reasons that I’ve decided to spend my life studying Computer Science is its deep connections with philosophy. Mankind has been asking deep philosophical questions for a very long time, but we’ve been able to chip away at these questions only recently. I’ll review a few more of these connections later, but right now I’d like to focus on Boundaries.

When a program is running it does so within a ‘memory space’. Modern Operating Systems practice various forms of memory isolation between processes. This is done to prevent the memory manipulations performed by one program from affecting the state of any other programs. So the OS enforces a boundary between the memories of different running programs.

The OS also provides to each program an ‘environment’. The environment can be used for a number of things, and is typically used to pass settings implicitly (via key/value pairs), so that the program is able to behave slightly differently depending on the environment in which it is run. The OS also provides services to the program, so that it may (in a well-defined manner) communicate with the ‘outside’ world. It’s through these services that the program can access files, get keystrokes and other user input, talk to other computers using network protocols, etc.

The OS also maintains for each program the illusion that it is the only one running. As far as the program is concerned it is the only thing in the universe, and the universe (other programs, external devices, etc.) responds to communication in a well-defined manner. Any running program is the center of a virtual universe. It’s this virtuality that I’d like to explore.

Tron: Can a program break out of its universe? and if so, What’s out there?

Operating Systems didn’t always isolate programs as effectively as they do now. It used to be possible for one program to read, and even edit the memory space of a different program. Of course this almost always leads to erratic behavior for either or both programs, that ultimately winds up with a crash. But if a program could step outside of its universe, what would it see?

The memory of other programs. In the Tron link above, the light-cycles were able to break out of their battle arena, and wander around the system. Unfortunately, since they actually wrote back the light trail, the memory they wandered over would be corrupted. But suppose they only read? This would never harm the assumptions made by another program, so it wouldn’t be likely to lead to a system crash. And if assumptions about the size and address range of physical memory is known by the program, then it can be made to never trigger an out-of-bounds exception by the OS. This underlies the classic buffer vulnerability. Using this technique, a program can print out the memory contents of other programs (potentially revealing information that was supposed to be confidential).

So far I’ve been talking about a conceptual boundary that programmers deal with. What about the users of a system? do they ever notice the boundaries? Steve Yegge observes that in games like Mario Kart, there’s an Invisible Wall marking the boundary of game play. Outside the wall lies undefined territory.

When we reason about our own universe, we should adopt the same point of view that we have for programs. We can’t access ‘outside’ our universe. So lets ask some of these questions.

That last question deserves more discussion:

• It’s possible to go the other way! Instead of breaking out of the matrix, it’s possible to put the universe into one. Using the Blue Pill.
• Writers of software for penetration and infiltration wish to avoid honeypots. Honeypots are cheaply created via Virtual Machines, but, as in the case of VMWare, introspection on the drivers can allow a program to tell that its underlying OS uses VMWare devices, and is therefore virtual.
• The program can look for differences in behavior between real and virtual machines: CPU specific bugs, model specific registers, timing of system calls, relative performance of assembly instructions, memory alignment, cache performance, etc.

Wikipedia defines the Teleological Argument as “an argument for the existence of god based on perceived evidence of order, purpose, design, or direction — or some combination of these — in nature.” I’ve always found it a really tough one to battle. William Lane Craig used it in a recent debate with Christopher Hitchens. He set it up like follows:

1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either law, chance, or design.
2. It is not due to law or chance.
3. Therefore, it is due to design.

I admit that my response was weak. I argued that the order perceived, is just that perceived! Unraveling this confusion leads us to curious and subtle reversal of naive logic. First, the anthropic principal states that we’d expect to see an ordered universe if order was a prerequisite for life. But the human mind works in such a way that we’d also have a solipsistic tendency to think that the presence of such order implies it was all designed ‘with us in mind’. But this reasoning is a bit flawed. It’s like a puddle waking up, and realizing that the pothole is shaped ‘with it in mind’.

A real understanding of the issue demonstrates what appears to be a reversal in logic. This is mostly why people fail to really understood the the evolutionary story. Daniel Dennett is fond of pointing this reversal out in his talks: “sugar is sweet because we like it” not “we like sugar because it is sweet”. It’s much easier for us to apply a naive logic and take the solipsistic path rather than the more subtle correct one.

None of this ever convinces the creationists though. They come biased with that solipsistic assumption, and pointing out the logical reversal never seems to raise the obvious flags of logical inconsistency or cause cognitive dissonance. It’s just too subtle a point it, it doesn’t adequately challenge the assumption that’s so deeply enmeshed in their understanding of the world as to be inviolate.

Now, though, some nice physicists have come up with some better measures on the amount of order necessary for life. Craig argued that if just one of the fundamental constants was off by as much as a millionth there’d be no life. I remain unconvinced, because I’m skeptical about what order is necessary for life. I don’t want to limit life to being ‘carbon-based’, or qualify the probabilities with ‘life as we know it’. But, the physicists have uncovered some robustness that hasn’t been talked about before. They argue that life, even life ‘as we know it’ may be a bit more flexible with regard to the fundamental constants, we don’t need as much ‘fine-tuning’ as is popularly believed. This is an excellent effort, because it attacks the Teleological argument right where it’s weakest: the underlying probabilities. Their argument also meshes with my personal belief that life, as an emergent property, finds a way!

Of course, I would never think that I was the only one to have the idea of studying computer languages from a linguistics point of view. Well, I found an interesting character, by the name of Chris Barker that gave an interesting keynote at POPL in 2004. He’s mentioned in a recent LtU discussion about the “Influence of cognitive models on programming language design”. Unlike most linguists, that get branched off into anthropology and soft models of cognition, Barker really knows what he’s talking about when it comes to formal models. He even has an (interactive!) tutorial on lambda calculus.

Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to scare up any recording of his keynote, but the abstract is available.

Linguists seek to understand the semantics of expressions in human languages. Taking a computational point of view, there are many natural language expressions—operators in the wild, so to speak— that control evaluation in ways that are familiar from programming languages: just think of the natural-language counterparts of if, unless, while, etc. But in general, how well-behaved are control operators found in the wild? Can we always understand them in terms of familiar programming constructs, or do they go significantly beyond the expressive power of programming languages?

I’d love to take a whole class devoted to this kind of stuff!

Yesterday, I attended a structured debate between William Lane Craig and The Hitch held at Biola University. As far as anyone can win a debate where the opponents talk mostly at cross-purposes, I’d have to give the trophy to Craig. Clearly, my belief system is biased towards Hitchens, yet I feel that he did an inadequate job as an atheist spokesman.

Firstly, the pamphlet that was handed out prior to the show, had a nice listing of Craig’s main arguments, while the space given to Hitchens was entirely blank (useful for notes, but couldn’t he come up with any written opposition? he didn’t even use the space to repeat his challenge?) Before commenting further on the speakers presentation, I’m going to review the arguments used by Craig.

• Cosmological Argument
  1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.
  2. The Universe began to exist.
  3. Therefore, the Universe has a cause.

  The underlying problem here is that, this argument assumes the Law of Causality. Unfortunately, if (as Craig claimed during the debate) the Big Bang was the beginning of both space and time, exploding the universe ex nihilo then it no longer makes sense to talk about ‘before’ the Bang. You see, the very term ‘before’ implies a continuity of time, and it doesn’t make sense to talk about anything ‘before’ time. This is true too of causality, which depends on continuity of time, so we can no longer talk about events causing other events, when there is no universe of time and space in which these things occur. So, premise 1. is inadmissible, and we cannot then conclude that the universe had a cause.

• Teleological Argument
  1. The fine-tuning of the universe is due to either law, chance, or design.
  2. It is not due to law or chance.
  3. Therefore, it is due to design.

  Ignoring the possibility that he has set up a false or incomplete set of choices in premise 1., Craig appealed to the authority of physicists and their testimony that the probability that fundamental physical constants that parameterize our universe have values capable of supporting life such as we observe is vanishingly small. Because of this, the universe could not have been tuned by accident. Nor could it have been by law, because these are initial conditions and are not covered by scientific law. Therefore, our only option left is design.
  Craig also made some detours suggesting that if you were to ally with chance, then you would be forced into conceding the possibility of a multi-verse theory, which he dismissed as being really very silly. I actually agree with this. The multi-verse theories are neither well grounded, nor empirically observed, and smell as if they came from science fiction; but I really don’t have many other options (though there is the Anthropic Principal). I still don’t think an appeal to supernaturalism solves the problem. It’s weak as far as explanations are concerned, for now we must question “Why was the universe created, and what was it designed for?”, and I don’t see any means of empirically testing answers to such questions. I agree that science doesn’t provide very satisfactory answers to why the universe is capable of supporting life as we know it, but God did it. is a non-answer!

• Moral Argument
  1. If God does not exist, objective moral values do not exist.
  2. Objective moral values do exist.
  3. Therefore, God exists.

  Unfortunately I don’t quite remember what Craig termed ‘objective moral values’ but it wasn’t what I expected: moral values that can be objectively or empirically measured. Rather, it seemed that he used a definition that nearly presupposed a universal standard of morality which must have been inserted by a God into the fabric of our being. I really wish I could remember his exact words here, but I think he had buried his conclusion into the premises. I do remember that he dismissed objectively measurable moral values as not being truly moral. That is, he didn’t think that atheists had any real logical reason to discount, say cannibalism, other than the fact that it doesn’t allow the formation of large, stable societies (which isn’t itself a moral precept). On this point, he’s absolutely right. Atheists can’t claim an objective or universal set of moral scriptures, we are forced to admit that much of morality is relative, that we’re figuring it out as we go, that advances in technology force us to reconsider some of the relative balances, that fundamentally there are no moral standards, and we are forced, by nature as evolved social primates, to adopt those values that allow us to best get along with each other. But, this position draws doubt on premise 2.

• The Resurrection of Jesus
  1. There are three established facts concerning the fate of Jesus of Nazareth: (a) the discovery of his empty tomb, (b) his post-mortem appearances, and (c) the origin of his disciples’ belief in his resurrection.
  2. The hypothesis “God raised Jesus from the dead” is the best explanation of these facts.
  3. The hypothesis “God raised Jesus from the dead” entails that the God revealed by Jesus of Nazareth exists.
  4. Therefore, the God revealed by Jesus of Nazareth exists.

  I actually this that this argument is completely beside the point. But it is useful from Craig’s side in making the leap from a God to a personal God of the Bible. Hitchens failed to take this on, except in a very wishy-washy fashion arguing that any God who is capable of intervening must be an immoral one. To presume that God had a design which includes the extinction of 99% of all species ever to have lived, the annihilation of galactic expanses in supernovae, black holes and other cosmic dangers, the revelation to a primitive, illiterate desert people without good recording devices, the inhumane and unwarranted suffering cause by natural disaster and disease, and then to claim “but he cares about you” is not at all humble. Rather, it’s presumptuous and immoral. He also added, that as far as prayer for personal intervention, at least as an Atheist, “I can’t be accused of wishful thinking”.

• The Immediate Experience of God
  1. Beliefs which are appropriately grounded may be rationally accepted as basic beliefs not grounded in argument.
  2. Belief that the biblical God exists is appropriately grounded.
  3. Therefore, belief that the biblical God exists may be rationally accepted as a basic belief not grounded in argument.

  This one is very easy, and I wish that Dan Barker could have been there to address it. Having an experience doesn’t prove the existence of God, it only proves that humans have such experiences.

Overall, Craig was extremely well spoken, and his points were well-delivered. When he presented the Atheistic viewpoints, he didn’t set-up a strawman. Hitchens, in contrast, appealed to emotion (which doesn’t always work on a Christian biased audience) and failed to address Craig on a logical, structured, point-by-point basis. He let a number of the easy quibbles fly, he let Craig leap from Deist to personal God, he never raised the point that our current morality is better than that of the Old Testament God, nor did he contend that it’s up to the supernaturalist to provide proof, he persisted in alluding that Christianity held a deeply depraved view of us as wretched sinners and strayed from the premise of the debate “Does God Exists”. I’ve seen Hitchens do much better in other venues, even when espousing the exact same arguments! He was an unfortunate disappointment.

I think Craig is setting a very good bar for logical debate. He stayed on topic, and was very straightforward. I wish that all Christians would follow his standard, so that my side might have the opportunity to win the ongoing debate with clear and sound reason. Many of Craigs arguments are available in his book “Does God Exist?” (unfortunately listing Antony Flew (who swapped from atheist to deist to christian as old age took its toll) as a co-author.)