GODLESS WEDNESDAY: Opposition To Teleological Thinking

Today's Godless Wednesday post is based around a quote from the physicist Lawrence M. Krauss (@LKrauss1):

"The lack of understanding of something is not evidence for God. It's evidence of a lack of understanding."

An related phenomenon to what Prof. Krauss is talking about here is the tendency to teleological thinking. Teleology is the idea that the material world has a design and a purpose. It is often summarized with the  aphorism "Everything happens for a reason."

I disagree with these notions completely. Sometimes, things just happen.

Godless Wednesday: $5M Grant To Study Afterlife

I'm a big supporter of academic research but this news seems a bit much. The Templeton Foundation has awarded a $5 million grant to University of California at Riverside philosopher John Fisher to study "immortality."

The Immortality Project, as it is called, will solicit research proposals from eminent scientists, philosophers and theologians whose work "will be reviewed by respected leaders in their fields and published in academic and popular journals."

The research will also delve into cultural aspects of the afterlife. For example, there are reports of millions of Americans seeing a tunnel with a bright light at the end. In Japan, reports often find the individual tending a garden.

The professor added that the academic research could include a range of issues, like "heaven and hell: If we are material beings, how can we exist in heaven, where we would not have physical bodies (or not of the sort we have here)?

"There is a lot of interest in near-death experiences. We can carefully catalog them and look into whether there are patterns. There has already been a lot of work on this. Perhaps some cross-cultural studies would be helpful.

"We'll also be open to studying the relationship between beliefs in afterlife and behavior--moral behavior and crime rates."

Really? As my husband tweeted, for just one million dollars, I could do some equally meaningful research about fairies! Hemant Mehta over at  Friendly Atheist has some choice words in reaction to this award:

There’s no evidence of an afterlife and no amount of research is going to change that.

What he said!

Godless Wednesday: Good Without God

Found an interesting blog devoted to atheism called Rosa Rubicondior.

One of the interesting posts on that blog I ran across recently was a discussion of the question of where atheists get their morality, if they do not believe in a supernatural, all-powerful being.

Here's a particularly pithy excerpt:

Do these people really believe that, before their holy book was written down and people heard about their god's laws, that people simply went around killing, raping, stealing and abusing children and it didn't occur to anyone that it was wrong in any way? Do they really believe that suddenly people heard of these new laws and thought, "Ah! In that case I had better stop this killing, raping, stealing and child abuse, or a god will punish me."? Is it realistic to assume that, before the Bible or the Qur'an were taken outside the Middle East to Europe and Asia, society consisted of people raping, murdering and stealing and that no child was safe? 

And what does it say of the person who is implicitly, and sometimes explicitly telling you that THEY see no reason not to murder, rape, steal and molest children other than the fear that a god will punish them? 

Who exactly has the morals here? The person who does right and avoids wrong because they know right from wrong, or more precisely, can work out what's right and what's wrong in a given situation because they can empathise with others and understand what it would be like to have a wrong done to them, or the person who is only hoping for a reward or avoiding punishment and needs to try to remember what an old book says and try to apply it to the situation at hand?

This is often known as the "Good Without God" argument and is also well articulated and illustrated by the cartoon at the top of this post.

What do you think?

Why Do Lost Objects Stay Lost? A Meditation on Ethics With A Miraculous Twist

I've been thinking about the state of the social compact recently after some incidents with lost articles. Last week I was at an ATM on President's Day and I found an ATM card sitting on the ledge of the machine. "Oh my, that can't be good," I thought. "Surely that person will be ripe for identity theft if that bank card falls in the wrong hands." However, the bank was closed so there was nothing I could do to safeguard the card so I just did my transaction and left it there.
My thought was that the card must not have been there long and maybe the person was on their way back to find the card right this instant. Was that the socially conscious thing to do? What would YOU want someone to do if they found YOUR bank card outside a closed bank? The card only contained a generic Latino name (I kid you not, I think it was "Jose Martinez") with no other means of contacting or identifying them.

What people who find lost articles do with those items always fascinates me. Yesterday I finally got around to having my car's oil changed and while I was waiting I read part of a library book I borrowed from the Glendale-Pasadena Public Library system: Stephen Baxter's Manifold: Time. However, when I got home after work I couldn't find the library book anywhere. I'm 99% sure I left the book on the counter of the Alhambra, CA branch of Bridgestone-Firestone Automotive Center. This is pretty shocking to me because I have never ever lost a library book before and I feel awful about it happening now. I'll happily pay whatever the penalty is (it looks like it is $7 plus a replacement cost for the book of $15) but the incident has spurred me to think again about why lost objects stay lost. Surely someone must have seen a library book somewhere in that office and they had a choice: they could take it for themselves or they could turn it in to the employees. Since I have been back to that office (twice!) and the employees report that they haven't seen any library books, I must conclude the former choice was taken.

In the grand scheme of things a lost library book is not a debilitating blow but it does make me think about luck and karma. For example, last year when Mad Professah was visiting the other half for a few days in New York City in early December we bought tickets to see the Tony Award-winning musical Avenue Q and ate at the best burger place in the city before the show (it's called "The Burger Joint" and its hidden inside the Le Parker Meridien Hotel down the street from Carnegie Hall on 57th street). Anyway, somehow on the walk down from 57th street to 43rd street & Broadway our ticketshad disappeared! They were for 5th row center seats we had paid for wth cash at half-price from the TKTS booth in the Wall Street area (always less crowded then the Times Square booth!) Crestfallen and half a block away from the theater we didn't know what to do but we decided to go to the ticket booth of the theater and say what we could do. It turned out someone had found the tickets and returned them to the theater (and somehow beaten us to there even though Mad Professah is a notoriously fast walker). The tcket booth guy said he was just going to see if anyone walked in sheepishly asking if someone had found some tickets. We fit the bill. This was a Miracle on 43rd Street! Rejoicing we walked in to the theater and enjoyed the show immensely.

It just goes to show you, lost objects do not always stay lost. Who knows, maybe someone decided to return my lost library book themselves. Stay tuned (but don't hold your breath!)