Where Do Bad Folks Go When They Diiiiiiiiiie

Question from Becky:
I was never a big believer in the Christian God but I did read the Bible which showed me nothing but a vengeful God as oppose to one of love. I considered being a deist but hell has latched into my brain and won’t let go. Worst knowing there is fire underneath the earth seems to support hell even more since Jesus said he was going to the heart of the earth I just want to let the fear go since it was a main reason I believed. How do I let this fear go?

Answer by SmartLX:
You’re suffering from what I call faithdrawal, the continued fear of the wrath of God (including banishment to Hell) after belief in God has faded. As the link shows, I’ve discussed it a lot, because you’re not alone in dealing with it. You realise of course that it’s irrational because in a doctrine where God is responsible for the existence of Hell there can be no Hell without a God, but since when was fear rational all the time?

Let’s look more closely at the apparent piece of support you’ve found for the existence of Hell: Matthew 12:40, where Jesus spends three days “in the heart of the earth”. First of all, that might simply have meant he was physically down in his tomb for that long. If instead it is actually a claim that he was in Hell between his crucifixion and his supposed resurrection, I wouldn’t be surprised at the implication that Hell is deep underground. In the same way that it’s easy to imagine Heaven being up in the clouds, the unexplored depths seem like a perfect place for Hell, and may even have been part of the inspiration for the popular image of Hell. People living near volcanoes and elsewhere along fault lines, in Biblical times as in any other, would have seen and documented literal lakes of fire and many varieties of red-hot wrath spewing from fissures in the ground. Miners all over the world would have noticed the increase in temperature in a deep enough cave (though this might often have been caused merely by lack of ventilation). From the science of geology we now know why it happens in great detail, so the God-of-the-gaps has retreated from the subject entirely. Unlike our ancestors, we know the lava isn’t coming from Hell.

To answer your final question directly, It’s not a matter of letting the fear go so much as the fear letting you go. An irrational fear, like a belief, must be reinforced artificially in the absence of evidence, by various means: acts of devotion, new personal discoveries in the source texts (like the “heart of the earth” thing) and so on. If you recognise on the face of it, and continue to actively recognise, that all support for the reality of the danger is unfounded, it won’t kill the fear but it will leave it with no reason to remain. Over time, and without emotional reinforcement, the fear will fade and leave you. Though it’s frustrating to hear, the less you worry about it the faster it will go, so engross yourself in something else for a few weeks or months.

Scripture Outpaces Science Again (Hindu this time)

Question from :
What would be your best argument against someone using the Unpanishads and Quantum Physics as a justification for their belief in God?

Answer by SmartLX:
For those like me who may never have seen the word before, The Unpanishads are the source of a lot of central Hindu concepts. The doctrines behind this particular justification concern the importance of consciousness and awareness to the universe, and the timelessness of certain entities. The argument is that these correspond to the observer effect in quantum mechanics and the general unchanging nature of the fundamental physics of the universe. Here’s an example of an article making this point.

This fits into the general category of a claim of divine foreknowledge. The appropriate category in my article on prophecies and predictions is #4: Shoehorned, because people are taking established science and fitting it to the most relevant parts of a religious text after the fact. No one read the Upanishads and realised as a result that observing individual particles of light would affect how they appeared. Nor does anyone expect to be able to scrutinise the Upanishads now and find new practical details that will advance science any further.

The major complication for someone actually using this as an argument for their particular god is the existence of a huge number of arguments along the same lines using both Christian and Muslim scripture. I’ve covered many of these separately and as a group. A Hindu (or Buddhist or Jainist, since they also use the Unpanishads to a degree) would have to explain why there’s so much similarly accurate-looking material in mutually exclusive texts, or make the effort to debunk everyone else’s claims. Christians in particular have worked to do just that.

“There is NO WAY I could have known that.”

Question from James:
I’ve been a believer since childhood but recently I’ve started to ask myself whether I truly believe in Christianity or not. I find the arguments against it very compelling, but I have seen and heard a few things that I can’t find any explanations, except the work of a God.

First, I’ve met people who supposedly had these visions about others. In those visions they could see details about someone else’s life, like their past, things that no one would have a clue about. For instance I know of a guy who just met a couple and instantly knew, by revelation, theirs names and the names of their relatives and how they got to know each other, all of that full of details so that no one would suspect it wasn’t a real revelation/vision. I know there are a lot of people faking theses things, but I truly believe these folks I know were at least honest in believing they’ve got a gift from the Lord. So I’d like to ask you guys if you can think of any explanations for what I have described. I no longer think that religion makes sense, philosophically speaking, but how can these, “supernatural” things happen? Any thoughts?

Answer by SmartLX:
Leaving aside the charlatans, a lot of people do think they’ve had genuine visions and premonitions. For most people (including me at a younger age) it’s little things, like seeing details of their car before they bought it, or talking as they play cards and drawing a number immediately after saying it, or guessing that someone’s future child will have blonde hair. Some people have more remarkable stories to tell.

Many of these can be explained through coincidences, which happen all the time because the number of possible coincidences on a given day is higher than the probability of any given coincidence is low. Many more stories are simply untrue and spring from imperfect memory, particularly memory-of-memory. If you get fuzzy on how you know something or when you learned it, you might start to remember having used (or simply thought about) that knowledge before the point when you think you acquired it.

If you have one of these stories, in the back of your mind you know people will consider three different possibilities:
1. that you had a moment of genuine clairvoyance for some indiscernible purpose,
2. that you don’t realise that you gained the knowledge some other way, or
3. that you’re just plain lying.

You might believe #1, but you know that if people think #2 or #3 it won’t reflect well on you, and that if either were actually true then you’d think less of yourself. So there’s an obvious pressure to make the story more convincing every time you tell it, and subconsciously people gradually give in to that pressure. The conviction in the voice becomes greater, little details are exaggerated or made more convenient. If the changes are small enough they’re not even remembered as changes, you literally edit your own memory and they’re just the way it always was. Give it enough time (a few months can be enough) and you end up with a profound airtight declaration that you believe absolutely, that no one can verify and that someone would have to impugn your integrity to reject. You end up daring people to doubt you.

I’m saying that these stories should not be taken at face value, no matter how much you trust those who tell them. Everything I’ve described above is part of the reason why anecdotal evidence, the proper term for such stories, is not legally (and especially not scientifically) regarded as similarly reliable to other forms of evidence. People test it if they can, and if they can’t there’s always a cloud over it.

With that point made, let’s suppose your guy’s story is actually 100% accurate and he really learned about the couple by supernatural means. That would tell us nothing beyond the fact that there is a “supernatural” of some kind. It doesn’t support the existence of any god because the world might simply have some inherent psychic energy which your guy momentarily harnessed. It doesn’t speak to any kind of purpose unless something significant occurred as a result of your guy rattling off this bewildered couple’s details to them like a stalker – and any significant result could still be coincidence. And it gives us no insight on how to reproduce the circumstances and actually be psychic instead of just winning some pointless lottery and getting nothing more than a chance to show off.

The View from Outside (your body)

Question from Violeta:
I am currently an agnostic, and I do believe in evolution, the Big Bang, I am a big fan of Richard Dawkins, Laurence Krauss, Hawking, just to name a few atheists. I think that for the most part, science does its job when explaining the universe, and the world in general. However, the concept of Near Death Experiences and Out of Body Experiences causes me to scratch my head. Recently, Dr. Jeffrey Long published a book where he analyzed 1600 cases of NDEs and he claimed that they were all strikingly similar, regardless of cultural differences. For example, many people reported seeing a bright light, feeling a lot of love, meeting deceased relatives, having a life review. I am wondering if you have ever read the Dr. Jeffrey Long book Evidence of the Afterlife? In his book, he even debunks the ideas of the brain hallucinating, and the idea of chemicals being released in the brain to cause these experiences. About 95% of participants thought that these experiences felt more real than real life, and hallucinations cannot feel that real. Also, many claim to see A god, but without a particular title. If 1600 experiences are very similar, would you say that it could mean that these are in fact snapshots of an afterlife? I just don’t know how they can be so consistent, and how they can be so life changing if they are not real.
So, what is your opinion on Out of Body Experiences and Near Death Experiences in general?

Answer by SmartLX:
I’ve had very long discussions about NDEs in particular (here’s one of the tamer ones) and I remain entirely unconvinced of their authenticity. I haven’t read Jeffrey Long’s work though I’ve read a little about it, but I’ll respond to what you’ve put forward with a set of discrete points rather than mash it all together.

– The specific experiences that commonly form part of a supposed NDE are likely to be images, actions and sensations that the human brain falls back on in times of great mental and physical stress on itself. A light in the distance is a simple image to conjure, the feeling of love may be caused by a flood of adrenaline, endorphins or other hormones released as a coping mechanism, the ancestors may be a result of being preoccupied with thoughts of mortality before losing consciousness.

– The timing of the experiences is impossible to determine after the fact. There may be a period of near-total inactivity during which the brain is unable to render anything like a dream, but there are periods before and after that state (assuming the person eventually comes to) when the brain is unable to be conscious but still active. This is important to remember when reading arguments about what chemicals were present at any given time.

– That the experiences feel real is nothing out of the ordinary for a dream; who hasn’t been surprised at least once when waking up from one? As for more real than real life, this is dubious given that it can only be claimed in retrospect about an experience that the person cannot easily or safely reproduce. That may simply be what a dream or hallucination feels like in that state. One’s memory of the event can also be very clouded, but unfortunately this can cause a person to reconstruct the event in more detail than they remembered at the start, and assimilate certain additions as true memories.

– Stories of accurate observations of the world around the unconscious patient are plentiful but so far impossible to confirm. Most commonly the details of what was happening are not available separately from the subject’s description, or the subject describes something obvious (like doctors talking or parents praying), or it simply turns out to be wrong upon examination. James Randi, the famous skeptic, talks here about an apparent out of body experience which he might very well have believed he had, had certain facts not come to light. If you’d like to comment with a particular case, we can discuss it in detail.

– In Evidence of the Afterlife, more than one featured subject was 3 to 5 years old at the time of the supposed NDE. At this age memories are difficult to describe and all too easy to influence. As with Colton Burpo, the Heaven is for Real kid, if they are asked leading questions by the first people they tell what they saw (often parents, friends or even clergy before the researcher gets there) they will actually shape their experience around them in retrospect. In fiction this is referred to as retcon, but it’s disturbingly easy to apply to real life.

Sex Isn’t Gender Anymore

Question from Claire:
I am a college student taking a Philosophy of Gender class and need to interview people of different religions, including an atheist, on their opinions on sex and gender, and I realized I don’t know any atheists. I was wondering if you would be willing to give your answer to the following questions for me (and allow me to use them in a paper).

1. Please define what you think “biological sex” means. For example, when someone says that “Paul is biologically male” or “Jennifer biologically female,” what do you think that means?

2. What does “gender” mean? Is it different than biological sex or the same? If the same, why do you believe this? If different, how are they different?

3. What would you say is the basis for your answers? For example, science, religion, tradition/upbringing, etc.? Why do you trust that basis?

I realize this is a lot to answer but if you had the time I would really appreciate it and if not I understand. Thank you,

Answer by SmartLX:
It’s not so much to answer. You may use my responses in your paper. So, let’s get to it.

1. “Biological sex” is the sex of your body’s anatomy, including hormones and chromosomes as well as genitals and other obvious features. If someone is biologically male, either he lives as a man and their body suits the role or she feels she’s a woman and may need to explore the possibility of transitioning.

2. Gender is imposed by culture and society. It’s what a man or a woman should be, do, and want. “Biological gender” is sometimes used to mean the same as “biological sex” above, but only because “sex” and “gender” are so often treated as interchangeable when people aren’t thinking about gender issues. “Gender” is not the same as “sex” or “biological sex” because, and this is what blows people’s minds, it has nothing to do with the state of one’s body. This is why people with one sex essentially belong in the other gender, or somewhere in between.

3. As trans people and others in related situations (e.g. intersex, bigender) are allowed and encouraged to tell their stories and be open about their circumstances (including a good friend of mine), it’s becoming increasingly clear that traditional and most or all religious positions on these issues apply very poorly to reality. in these worldviews a person should not grow up as an unhappy man and suddenly begin to flourish as a woman or vice versa because sex is equivalent to gender, but it happens and it gets sillier and sillier to deny it. So I try to keep up with the biological science but I mostly go by academic positions based on large-scale survey data. These are based on what people say about their own situations and what their doctors say about them, but they have sufficient sample sizes and statistical analysis to go beyond the anecdotal. It’s the best kind of source to tell you what’s really going on.

Nothing, Something, Everything

Question from Niki:
Hi, it’s me again, with my ORIGIN OF MATTER IN EMPTY SPACE question. Or not so empty, even before the big-bang.

I tried again googling the question with some other words, like what caused the big-bang, why then and not sooner or later, and how did the matter in whatever is called singularity, or is it the event of big-bang that is called so, or both, how did the material got there and where it came from.

So, having read this time what Stephen Hawking says on the issue, as well as many other relevant articles, I got to realize that science has no idea where that matter, that later big-banged, came from and how it got there. So much for the answer about the origin of matter, cos big-bang only explains what happened to the matter in singularity, after it had been there for no one knows how long, but not the origin of that matter there.

But, here I have another question. It has to do with the notion that if THAT matter came out of nowhere and that in the moment of singularity time was created, it’s totally unfathomable for my earthen brain, dumb or smart, relevantly educated or not, then what is the difference from that with the divine creation. So, the matter we now see and know is out there, and we ourselves are part of it, came from nothing, say the scientists and it satisfies the scientists who say so, however it does not satisfy the lay people who believe in divine creation of matter. And now I wonder, what is the difference between the origin of matter being from nothing, scientifically, and from a divine entity, again from nothing.

My answer, and I believe all scientists who claim it came out of nothing, but not from divine entity, is that the difference is really MAJOR, that in case of origin of matter from the universe, or its state before the big-bang occurred, there was no intelligent and intentional agency that created matter out of nothing, whilst in case of so called ‘god’, this entity is intelligent and intentionally created matter, no one of them can tell us the reason, motif for ‘god’ doing so, again out of thin air, as is the case of what scientists claim. No intelligent or any other intention. Just an accident, for scientists, and intelligence and intention for the believers. Or, the universe, let’s call it so, before the big bang, was such a place, that it had in it the ‘pre-matter’, and it once happened to get into this little spot (or was forever in the past, before, in it), and then blew up. Why, what is the cause of it in both solutions, according to the law of causality, or we are asked to believe Einstein who told us time began then, so there is no sense in asking what happened before, thou there is very much the question of the origin of the matter in the little ball, what caused the scientific explanation, and divine one too, it is interesting to know, but even more interesting, in my humble opinion, cos my knowledge of physics is from the secondary grammar school…well, I was listening to the teacher and reading my physics text book. But, still, very modest knowledge. However, I now have ample time and internet, together with great curiosity and kinda master English, so I think, think, think. And, what I finally realized is that even Stephen Hawking does not know, so I am OK with not knowing the first question of the thinking brain: the origin of matter. So, what is YOUR take of it?

I, of course, don’t ask about the purpose of humanity or whatever happens and is felt and thought of, decided by our brains, our consciousness, cos I firmly believe in the causality law, that says everything is a consequence of previous causes, a chain of them, and going backwards in time I came to the beginning of the universe, where the first question was awaiting me and every thinking human, well not everybody, cos MOZART thought of better things than I do, how to move my feelings. And believed in ‘god’ firmly, my darling Wolfgang… So, no purpose in anything, and thus not even in humanity. But, since life is kinda nice, then we want to live it, thou we will die one day, just as we go to a holiday knowing it will be over soon. Well, holidays will repeat themselves, but there are nice things we do, thou knowing they will be over once and forever, just as is human life. But while we are here, why not enjoy the journey?! And, as for unhappy, sad lives, people normally don’t end them themselves, evolution took care of that, for good or for bad in their cases…

Answer by SmartLX:
You’ve certainly given this a lot of thought Niki. My thoughts on these matters are similar in many ways.

The scientific hypothesis that the universe came from nothing uses a nuanced definition of “nothing”, because it can refer to the “quantum foam” or some other ground state. The simplest explanation I’ve read is that it counted as nothing because its total energy was zero. It was unstable, so from the zeroed-out state emerged a positive quantity and a negative quantity at the same time: matter and antimatter, which then acted out the Big Bang and everything that followed. When you added it all up it was still zero, so rather than something from nothing it was technically a case of nothing from nothing. The entire universe may be a zero sum game, and one of many at that, since there’s no indication that the quantum foam went anywhere.

The theistic alternative to this is that a god existed before the universe, made the universe, and still influences it to this day. It’s impossible to prove that this didn’t happen, but that doesn’t mean there’s any good evidence that it did, or particularly that there’s good reason to believe that it did. There are reasons mind you, and Christians will happily tell you theirs, but it must be asked whether those reasons are good ones.

One point I haven’t seen many people raise is that we’ve never seen anything come out of absolutely nothing. New objects, new lifeforms and even new thoughts consist of the matter and energy that came before. When the Kalam Cosmological Argument claims as a premise that everything that began to exist has a cause, it has no basis to extend it to something that may have come from nothing, except for an assertion about the universe that pre-empts the conclusion of the argument. We don’t know what it takes for something to emerge from nothing in a void without time or space, if anything is required at all.

Adam and Eve, not Ug and Eev!

Question from Dontay:
Evidence of dinosaurs has been found…museums show that cavemen existed…. But… How can cavemen be real if Adam and Eve are supposedly the first people on earth?

Answer by SmartLX:
If by “cavemen” you simply mean people who lived in caves and hunted and gathered for a living, then perhaps Adam and Eve’s immediate descendants did that once the garden of Eden was closed to them. The timing doesn’t work out at all when you count the supposed 34 generations from the Biblical Adam to the Biblical and historical King David and compare them to the scientifically estimated dates of the cavemen’s remains, but people who are motivated to prop up the story of Genesis will accept it anyway.

If on the other hand you mean Neanderthals and other departed species within the genus Homo, there you have a conflict which is less easily dismissed. The story goes that God not only made Man more or less in his present form (or a super-version that was huge and could live for centuries) but He made Man in his own image, which is poorly defined but usually taken to mean an image of perfection. “Lesser” or more primitive versions of Man don’t jibe with this idea at all. That’s why creationist explanations of the evidence simply assert that they were all just modern-type humans with primitive lifestyles.

As for dinosaurs, all evidence points to the fact that the last ones were dead millions of years before the first humans were born. Not so for most creationists; rather than deny they existed, many of them say dinosaurs were present on the Ark, and they’re depicted as such at the new Ark Encounter park in Kentucky. Any evidence or argument that so much as requires the expression “millions of years” is explicitly demonised.

The Irreducibly Complex Everything

Question from Robert:
Hi! I’ve recently had a Christian professor of mine talk about the creation of the universe, and say the spontaneous creation of life was impossible due to irreducible complexity. As an atheist, how would you refute that?

Answer by SmartLX:
I’ve covered irreducible complexity before, so I’ll let you read that piece for a primer. It’s often claimed to be the case with biological features like the eye, the immune system and the blood-clotting cascade. In every one of these cases, there’s a great deal of scholarship that’s produced feasible evolutionary paths that work up to these mechanisms that supposedly can’t get any simpler without being useless, because in most cases they simply did something else first. As I pointed out in the other piece, most of the research happened well before the claims of irreducible complexity were made, if they’d cared to look. If you want to respond to any such claim, just Google “evolution of” the subject.

To apply the same principle to the origin of life itself is a naked argument from ignorance, though at least it’s one where there isn’t already an answer. If you don’t know how the first life could have come together from non-living components, to presume that there’s no possible way is to assert that your knowledge on the subject of biology is not just vast but absolute and all-encompassing, beyond the reach of any human biologist. If it wasn’t life if it got any simpler, then okay, it wasn’t life before. That’s the point, it was something else. It could still have been a set of components in a membrane with some autonomous functions, from movement (optional, since tides or winds could have moved it instead) up to and including reproduction using the material around it. There are compounds like that around right now, as this TED Talk explains.

If your professor is also trying to apply the idea of irreducible complexity to the whole universe, he’s stretched it way too far. Irreducible complexity is only a barrier to natural development in something which has to develop or emerge gradually, and supposedly couldn’t get over some hurdle without divine help. All evidence points to a very sudden origin of the universe as we know it, inasmuch as our concept of time applies to the event. It probably wasn’t a half-universe first.

Why Fight the Young Earth?

Question from Jerry:
I very often hear about if the Earth is ~6000 – ~10.000 years old or if it is billions years old.

But I don’t understand how this is an argument, just because in the Bible it says God created the heavens and the earth and all live on the Earth in 6 days.
So.. if Adam would do scientific research on the universe and the planet, would the planet look like its only a couple of days old?
I can’t imagine how that would look like, because scientifically, a 6 day year old planet would look nothing like a planet, more a ball of lava.

So If God created the Earth to be habitable, it would HAVE to be a billion year old planet, there is no other choice. So of course the planet looks old, even if it’s created just a second ago.

So many atheists use the evidence for an old Earth as an argument against Creation. I don’t see how it has any argumentative value though.
I’m wondering what an atheist’s response to this is.

Thank you ever so much 🙂

Answer by SmartLX:
Young Earth creationists (YECs) do say that God created the Earth more or less the way it is, without working through the lava-world phase over millions of years. As you say, there’s strong evidence for an old Earth (geological, astronomical, radiometric, etc.), so a young Earth would have been created with all that evidence essentially falsified. This is the problem though, because why would God go to so much trouble to deceive us into thinking it was so old? Especially if we’re supposed to take the roughly six thousand year history of the world in the Bible seriously?

Of course the problem with any anti-religious argument that goes, “Why/how would God do this?” is that it’s possible to assert as gospel (sometimes literally) any answer which explains it away. The Earth looks old because God’s testing our faith, for example. Thus faith is insulated from any attempts to make their beliefs sound silly, and plot holes in scripture can be ironed out.

The main point of this particular battleground is that young Earth creationism follows on from Biblical literalism. The Bible says the world was created in six days, and that there have only been a small number of generations of humans since then, so that’s the way it was. There’s no good reason to believe it except if you want or need the Book of Genesis to be literal. Outspoken YECs try to convince nonbelievers that the world is young so that they will accept that God created it, because supposedly nothing else could explain a young Earth. Even if they fail, they often succeed in reassuring other Biblical literalists.

To give their position a respectable veneer, in order to appeal to nonbelievers and impress believers, YECs need to make it look like it has secular scientific support, which means presenting scientific arguments that the Earth is young. The proper use of the real evidence that the Earth is old, rather than to jump straight to advocating atheism, is to simply counter these arguments by YECs, and the evidence does so very easily. Thus there is no intact evidence for a young Earth, YECs are reduced to claiming God made the world look old, the young Earth becomes a mere assertion and it cannot serve as a solid premise for arguments for the existence of the God of Abraham. Thus you can believe in a young Earth if you want but it won’t get you anywhere with those who don’t already agree with you.

Information Sources

Question from Louis:
Where does new information come from? Material does not generate information.

Answer by SmartLX:
New order and information is generated where there is a local decrease in entropy. (If the concept of entropy is new to you, pause here and read my article on the subject.) Entropy can decrease in an area when energy is transferred to it from a connected area, because the transfer increases entropy in the source area and the overall entropy stays positive.

The application of this to our general situation is that the sun generates a huge amount of entropy by burning itself up, and the resulting energy radiates to us where it can fuel the emergence of all kinds of new stuff. Considering evolution in particular, which is usually the reason for asking an atheist this question, new information enters the genome via the events of natural selection between organisms. When a gene makes it significantly more likely for a subset of a population to survive and procreate, useful information in the genome is favoured and junk is slowly weeded out (though there’s plenty of junk still in there, no matter what organism you’re looking at).

For a simple way of understanding how simple selection acting upon random mutations can create order and recognisable information, imagine a row of ten random digits, e.g. 1907632438. If you repeatedly randomise all ten digits with no further guidance, you might get some coincidences but it will remain random. Instead of that, you fix a digit in place for one round if it is larger than the digit to its left and smaller than the digit to its right (for the two on the ends, only one of these rules is applied) and randomise the rest. Over time the numbers will tend towards an ascending order from left to right, and it might be inevitable that if the digits are all unique then the final sequence is 01234567890, without any number ever being deliberately chosen. Making this actually happen would be an excellent programming exercise for any students out there.