Sesoron's Logophilia

People Actually Think This Is an Evolution-Killer

2010-01-04T12:00:00.004-05:00

I found this gem in the archives of Fundies Say the Darnedest Things, and I'd like to provide the appropriate response to each of the questions.

Students, give this test to your teachers. When they fail it, ask them why they are teaching this nonsense!

Teachers, give this test to your students if you really want them to know the truth about evolution!

1. Which evolved first, male or female?

Already we're ignoring one of the basic points of evolution. There's no evolution from one species to a completely different species in a single generation. Evolution proceeds by subtle yet useful mutations, which absolutely do not render an organism incompatible with others of its population. So, for any given mutation, it doesn't matter which sex first mutated it. It can thereafter be filtered into all members of the population.

2. How many millions of years elapsed between the first male and first female?

This is based on the assumption that #1 was logically effective or at least intelligible. Next question.

3. List at least 9 of the false assumptions made with radioactive dating methods.

I believe this is a textbook example of the begging the question fallacy: the questioner assumes there are at least nine problems with radiometric dating. The question isn't even clearly phrased, though; I can provide one false assumption: that there's anything wrong with the fundamental science of radiometric dating. It takes ludicrous special pleading in outright defiance of Occam's Razor to suggest that rates of decay might have arbitrarily changed at some point in the past, and especially that they would all have changed in such a way that they're still consistent with one another and with other dating methods.

4. Why hasn't any extinct creature re-evolved after millions of years?

Each species is the result of millions of die rolls (metaphorically, duh). The probability of a species coming out in any particular way is extremely low. That probability would be compounded severely if exactly the same species occurred twice.

5. Which came first:
...the eye,
...the eyelid,
...the eyebrow,
...the eye sockets,
...the eye muscles,
...the eye lashes,
...the tear ducts,
...the brain's interpretation of light?

I bet you didn't think I could actually order them, but I will.
a. The brain's interpretation of light. The first step to eye evolution was the mutation of a patch of light-sensitive cells. Hell, even plants are capable of responding to light, and they don't even have brains. Strictly speaking, it wasn't necessarily a "brain" that came first, perhaps something more primitive like a ganglion. Flatworms may be a better example, with their flat eyespots.
b. The eye. Once we had this patch of light-sensitive cells, it was beneficial to recess it more and more into the organism, because that allowed us to use shadows to determine the direction of light, the better to avoid predators. The logical extension of this results in the pinhole camera, which gives a fuzzy but still useful image; we see this on the nautilus. It protects this primitive eye to give a transparent cover to this pinhole, and further mutations would find that giving this cover a convex shape clarifies the image until we get the true lens focusing light onto the retina.
c. Eye muscles. I'm just guessing here, but it seems like the next logical step.
d. Eye sockets. They're probably be somewhere around here, though many animals that have eyes don't have bones.
e. Eyelids. I don't know about fish, but we definitely have these in amphibians and all later land animals.
f. Tear ducts. These would be more necessary the more terrestrial animals get; amphibians can still resort to just sticking their eyes into the water to keep them wet, but reptiles, synapsids, etc. would need them.
g. Eyelashes. I think these only occur in mammals. At least, I don't think I've ever seen a bird with them outside of cartoons.
h. Eyebrows. If you just have a look at your dog, you'll see that she doesn't have any especially thick fur at the brows. Eyebrows were one of the spots where humans retained hair when we lost most of it.
For a delightful explanation of the evolution of the eye, by the way, check this out.

6. How many millions of years between each in question 5?

See my response to question 2. Next question.

7. If we all evolved from a common ancestor, why can't all the different species mate with one another and produce fertile offspring?

As a matter of fact, if this were not the case, evolution wouldn't produce any of the diversity we see, so we're lucky that it's not. Now, the accumulation of millions of years of divergent mutations renders two strands of DNA unrecognizable to one another. DNA is imperfect, so it can fudge a little when it sees something new, but if you throw enough weird data at it at once, it'll get confused and won't recombine. Similar to learning, in fact. That's why education is broken up the way it is, and they don't just give you the Origin of Species in a 3rd-grade science class.

8. List any of the millions of creatures in just five stages of its evolution showing the progression of a new organ of any kind. When you have done this, you can collect the millions of dollars in rewards offered for proof of evolution!

This depends entirely on your definition of a "stage". If you mean different species, you'll find that, given enough intermediates, there's no clear boundary between one species and its descendant species. If you mean individual generations, then you'd be hard-pressed to find five consecutive stages in the fossil record. But if I can take more liberties, how about this: lobe-finned fish > tiktaalik > early amphibians > reptiles > birds. We get lungs, arms, legs, scales, feathers, wings, and probably lots of internal innovations as well. As for the millions of dollars, see my response to question 13.

9. Why is it that the very things that would prove Evolution (transitional forms) are still missing?

I cannot but facepalm at this. They're not. Every fossil found is a transitional form between something and something else. Next question.

10. Explain why something as complex as human life could happen by chance, but something as simple as a coin must have a creator. (Show your math solution.)

First of all, a coin doesn't necessarily have to have a creator. Look at sand dollars. They occur naturally. Now, the concept of a coin as a unit of money doesn't occur naturally -- but it isn't simple, either. There's an immense amount of symbolic thinking that goes into assigning value to a relatively worthless and definitely useless object, not to mention the symbolism that generally always goes into the things depicted on coins.

Now, I'll get to the actual assertion. The process of natural selection carries us logically from a simple proto-replicator (more on that later) to all the complexity and diversity we see today. The analogy I like to use comes from video games, of course. This video shows a playthrough of what is possibly the hardest video game ever devised, but edited in such a way that it appears he made it all the way through without dying once. In a game where everything can kill you, this is extremely unlikely. Beating I Wanna Be The Guy in one try is the video game equivalent (dropping some powers of ten off the probability, of course) of a human being being randomly formed from nothing but a churning primordial ooze. Like I said, the video is edited -- and the game in fact has numerous save points scattered throughout. Whenever the player died in the making of this video, he cut the run from the last save to the death out of the video. The most unlikely thing he ever had to do was make it from one save point to the next without dying. Granted, this is still unlikely for the typical gamer and will probably take several tries. But we only see the tries that succeeded; the failures were discarded. This is exactly how natural selection works. In the process of random mutation, some individuals make it to the next save point and some don't. Only the successful ones survived to reproduce and pass their successful genes on to the next generation. If one of them is slightly better than the rest, then the genes that gave it that ability are more likely to be propagated. Multiply that probability by many generations, and any beneficial gene (i.e. a gene that increases its own ability to propagate, via mere survival or reproductive success) will filter its way through the whole population.

All that's left is the proto-replicator I mentioned earlier. If we get the proto-replicator, we get all of life as we know it. The trick is getting it. As I discussed in an earlier post, there are rather a lot of planets in the universe, and a certain fraction of those (still rather a lot) will be conducive to abiogenesis (the random shuffling of molecules to result in a proto-replicator). Abiogenesis can be, to borrow a phrasing from Professor Dawkins, very unlikely indeed, and still have occurred. Whatever the unlikeliness of abiogenesis, however, it's far more likely to have randomly occured than for an infinitely complex being like Yahweh to randomly spring into existence and then go about designing things.

11. Why aren't any fossils or coal or oil being formed today?

They are. Next question.

12. List 50 vestigial or useless organs or appendages in the human body.

What would it prove if I couldn't? In any case, the wasteful detour of the recurrent laryngeal nerve is strong evidence that if the human body was deliberately designed, it was done very poorly indeed. Why is fifty the magical number that would prove Yahweh to be a bumbling incompetent? Would a god who built us with 49 vestigial organs be that much better?

13. Why hasn't anyone collected the millions of dollars in rewards for proof of evolution?

Because the creationist challengers have given a standard of proof that is impossible in principle to meet. For more details, see here.

14. If life began hundreds of millions of years ago, why is the earth still under populated?

Not to mention the series of catastrophic extinction events, the Earth has only a limited ability to support life in the first place. The amount of fertile land we have can only support so many plants, which are the backbone of any land ecosystem, and photosynthetic plankton and other waterborne plants are only efficient enough to propagate under a certain density. Even given those limitations, I'd say the Earth is very well populated.

15. Why hasn't evolution duplicated all species on all continents?

See my response to #4. There are many ways for natural selection to reach the general goal of "find better ways to replicate genes". As long as that goal is being served, natural selection is doing its job.

And I'm not even a scientist! There is no reason why a biology teacher would be confounded by this drivel.

The Queue: Update

2009-12-26T01:13:00.003-05:00

This is, um, an update to the queue. Surprise!

Dungeons and Dragons Online. I think I may have hit that snag I was foreseeing. So, I've got Segomedes, my current main, around the middle of level 4. He's going good with most of his business, but I recently started to, well, run out of quests. Now, in other MMOs I've played (WoW and CoH), quests are one-time deals. You get one or more objectives, meet them, and get some nice experience and maybe some cool equipment out of the deal. Then you go on to find some more. DDO, however, is quite a different animal. There's literally no experience to be had outside of quests, and therefore most of the regular quests can be repeated. I've made it to level 4 without having to repeat a quest. Beyond that point, the only quests available to me are quests well above my level. I got onto the in-game chat, curious about the fact that there weren't any more quests hanging around, and was told that the way to go was repeating old quests at higher difficulty settings. While it may have been the only way to go -- considering that, as a nonpaying member, a great deal of material was locked off from me -- it does not seem very appealing to me, as I've confirmed from starting to attempt it. I don't know. I'll still give it a try, but it seems to be going downhill.

Puzzle Quest. I'm consistently finding, as my good friend the TV Tropes Wiki has confirmed, that the Computer is a Cheating Bastard. It's got me so paranoid that, when the computer suggests a move, with all things otherwise seeming equal, I'll make a move other than the suggested one. At first, it often seemed that the computer's move suggestions were setting me up for big combos by my enemies, and now that I've been scrutinizing it, I've caught it, on several occasions, trying to lead me astray. Never mind the fact that the levels of my enemies seem to scale to my own level and not to the story -- I hope rather hard that the level 18 boss I encountered when I was level 12 will stay that way as I grind XP against random enemies that are invariably the same level as me.

Plants Vs Zombies. Still fun. It's got a little harder as I've started the back yard night levels (the fourth "World", if we're to use the Super Mario Bros. hierarchy). That's because certain types of zombies -- namely the balloons and diggers so far -- have proven capable of totally subverting my normal defenses, absolutely requiring that I plant specific countermeasures. These particular special zombies amount to a rather significant game-changer. In I think two levels so far, I've had to fall back on the last-ditch lawnmower defenses for the first time. It's tough, but I hope I can survive the zombie apocalypse.

Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. Holy cow, I can't believe I forgot this one in the last post. Yeah, I only started playing it this past summer. After some other games came into my life, I put it on hold; I'm somewhere in the non-linear section towards the later middle of the game. Excellent game, but it feels like it's going to be too short, if my current level (within the 20-level d20 system on which it's based) is any indication.

Killing Floor. I was extremely surprised by this game. Killing Floor is an FPS, based entirely around the idea of murdering a series of waves of zombies, along with a few friends. It's labeled a "survival horror" game, but if I were to compare it to the leading zombie-killing FPS Left 4 Dead, I'd have to describe it as more of a survival action game. I know I heard or read some videogame pundit saying so -- could have been anyone from Shamus Young, author of DM of the Rings, to Anthony Burch, brother of and costar with the eponymous gamer of Hey Ash, Whatcha Playin', to Ben Croshaw, creator of the excellent Zero Punctuation series -- but a lot of recent attempts at survival horror make no or little attempt at the atmosphere required to produce actual horror, and replace it with difficult combat against creepy-themed opponents. I would say that Left 4 Dead can definitely qualify as horror at times, particular when witches are involved. Killing Floor, on the other hand, makes little attempt to terrify the player; at best, you may be startled to round a corner in a darkened building to be confronted with a Fleshpound or the Patriarch. But! For me, this is to its credit. I don't like being frightened or startled. This deters me from proper horror games like Silent Hill, and from horror movies as well. Call me a wimp. Go on. Anyway, even though it labels itself as "horror", Killing Floor doesn't really horrify me, which makes it just fine in my book. The fact that it's a cooperative game adds even more points: I simultaneously have the support of other players, who will almost invariably be better than me at it, and I don't have to worry about facing intelligent opponents, who would almost invariably be better than me at it.

And you thought you had wasted time reading my last post.

Return of the Queue

2009-12-17T23:42:00.002-05:00

I play some video games. I have played some other video games. I will yet play still more video games. Obviously nobody with a rational sense of what is or is not "wasting time" would be reading my blog anyway, so I'm going to list off the games that are on my to-do list. Without further ado!

1. Dungeons and Dragons Online. Status: In progress. I have three characters I've really decided to work with, of which I believe two are at level 3 and one is at level 2 -- human cleric 2 Rendi, dwarf paladin 3 Tetsuemon, and human barbarian 2 / rogue 1 Segomedes. All are fun in their own ways. Have yet to decide which is funnest, but I seem to be rolling with Segomedes at the moment. Would like to make it to endgame, but we'll see how long the enjoyment lasts. This being an MMO, the journey is far more important than the destination, to a higher degree than for single-player games.

2. Plants Vs Zombies. Status: About halfway through. This game is very fun and very funny. It's stressful and hectic during play, so I'm surprised I like it so much. Ah well. I'm hooked.

3. Puzzle Quest. Status: In progress. This game takes a very odd approach -- a fairly mainstream fantasy world with your typical conflicts and quests, except combat is mediated by what I'm told is a Bejeweled-clone-style of puzzle game. The perfect game for a fantasy gamer who wishes he was as good at puzzles as his IQ score seems to predict. I'm finding it amusing, and nice for a low-commitment diversion.

4. Disgaea. Status: Nearly done. I recently transmigrated seven of my characters (and one of them again, since she was the first of my high-level characters to enter that sort of class... you'd really have to understand the class system to know what I'm talking about), which meant a few hours of repeat leveling. They're getting close to their old levels, which means it's taking longer and longer to advance them, but it's not too far off now. Before long I'll be able to progress further into the actual story, which is very nearly complete. I know there's lots of post-endgame content, but odds are I'll skip it after I do one or two new game pluses, since there's still a sequel to get to.

5. Mount & Blade. Status: In progress. This is really a consistently fun game. My current game is, I suppose, compromised in integrity, because I fiddled with the character's stats (beefing up all her non-combat skills, which incidentally has made it far easier to get into advantageous situations where combat is relatively easy) and I've done a few sieges where I used the health cheat to refill when I was about to die. So sue me. I don't like losing long stretches of play, or castles. Cheating made it more fun. Get off my back. Anyway, looking back on my old queue post, it seems that I was having a fun time of the Peloponnesian War mod, and since my native mod saves were preserved over the hard drive update, there's no reason to believe my old Peloponnesian War saves won't be there when I get around to installing it.

6. Super Smash Bros. Brawl. Status: Nearly done. Now, when I speak of being nearly done with this game, I mean the story mode, whose primary purpose (as far as I'm concerned) is to unlock all the characters for use in multiplayer. And multiplayer, of course, is the true purpose for the game.

7. The World Ends With You. Status: Nearly done. I think there's some post-endgame content, though, but it shouldn't take long to burn through.

8. Disgaea 2. Status: Owned. It makes me sad that I probably won't ever be able to play Disgaea 3, which is on one of them fancy-pants next-gen consoles that I don't own. Maybe someday, when the next generation is out already.

9. Tales of Symphonia. Status: Begun. I hear these are pretty good games, despite being not as big-name as your Final Fantasies and Dragon Quests. I've had fun with it so far.

10. Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. Status: Owned. I think I bought this before I realized it was a direct sequel (though I knew there were previous Tales games, just not in the same continuity).

11. Odin Sphere. Status: Begun. Yes, a side-scrolling action-RPG based on Norse mythology. It's been fun so far.

12. No More Heroes. Status: Begun. This is really a fun game, and I'm looking forward to seeing more of it.

13. Etrian Odyssey. Status: In progress. A classic dungeon-crawler, graphically updated for the DS. I enjoyed it when I played it a while ago, and I'd like to get further into it, though I know there's a hell of a lot to it.

14. Civilization IV. Status: In progress. I've played through this game many times on a variety of different difficulty settings, as a variety of different civilizations. Yet it's still good for more fun every once in a while. Also, I'm starting to like the Colonization mod which I haven't yet finished.

15. Final Fantasy IV. Status: In progress. I'm somewhere towards the middle of this, but it generally does take a significant commitment of time to get anywhere on it, so I'm not sure what its place in my future will be.

16. Lock's Quest. Status: Not yet owned. I expect to have sufficient Saturnalia gift-cardage to buy this. It's a well-reviewed tower defense derivative for the DS. Since I suddenly seem to really like tower defense, this seems like a natural pick.

17. Something Something Something Phoenix Wright. Status: Not yet owned. On the one hand, this looks like a really fun series, and it seems rather popular. I'm familiar with some of the most prominent memes associated with it. On the other hand, there seem to be a lot of games in this series, and that could be a fair bit of money. I'm not sure which to get and which to pass on. We'll see.

The Virtue of DDO

2009-12-15T11:41:00.003-05:00

If you've read anything like all of my blog posts (of which you should be very ashamed if you have), you'll know that I once played World of Warcraft for a month. If you were paying attention, you'd have realized that I didn't much care for it. Is it possible I just don't like the conventions of MMOs? Maybe. But then, that makes it slightly mysterious that I've become so fond of Dungeons and Dragons Online.

So, I'll be referring back to my WoW post as I indicate how DDO measures up to my least favorite parts of WoW. Afterwards, I'll get to whatever else is unique to DDO that I like or dislike.

1. Limits on object types. On the one hand, not only can you not use spears at level 1, you can't use them at all, anywhere, ever. Right off the bat, DDO loses big points for me. I'm barred from faithfully reproducing some of my favorite characters from the past, including [you have permission to skip this list, as they're probably of no meaning to you] Ben the fighter/cleric, Calpurnius the cleric, Harek the dwarf fighter/psion, Rendi the cleric, Lyceus the fighter, Tigranis the cleric, Rathric the rogue/cleric, Sonalt the dragonborn warlord, or (most recently) Boreas the eladrin bard. As a matter of fact, nearly all my past clerics have been spear-wielders, mainly because I always thought they were much cooler than maces. On the other hand, helmets, for example, are allowed to low-level characters. And pauldrons, while not a separate item, are implicit in the appearance of most armor that's heavy enough to merit them, which includes low-level gear. The lack of spears really chafes, but on the whole I'd say it approaches things of this sort a lot more realistically than WoW. For example, with the weapons that do exist, you don't have to be trained, or even be able to be trained, to use them. Just as in 3rd Edition D&D, you merely get the nonproficiency penalty, a rather hefty -4 to attacks. It benefits from D&D's simulationist nature.

2. Inherent inability to enforce implicit behavior guidelines. The classes "Paladin", "Cleric", and "Monk" imply something very specific not only about a character's ability set but about his personality. The game even retains D&D's nine-alignment system. But it's all just aesthetics. There is one saving grace, though. Traditionally, Paladins have even stricter moral codes than Clerics. In WoW, it irked me significantly that the class that was most expected to behave was also one of the most popular and easiest to play, thereby drawing more jackasses. In DDO's gameplay, though, I can easily say that the WoW Paladin plays rather similarly to the DDO Cleric -- combining competence in combat with significant healing powers. Granted, the WoW Paladin focuses much more on melee combat, but the DDO Cleric is still tough enough to stick it out on the front lines all by himself -- and his healing allows him a great deal of longevity, especially in a game where just standing around won't heal you in dangerous areas. Anyway, my point is that Clerics are therefore more likely to be popular than Paladins (I haven't seen the actual numbers, alas), so we'll have fewer Paladins acting like immature jackasses and more of them acting like the pious, self-righteous jackasses they ought to be.

3. MMO Language. It's out in full force. If I used chat channels much more, I'd be extremely annoyed at the constant stream of people who WTS their +3 Vorpal Adamantine Greataxes and are LFM for Misery's Peak.

4. Resurrection Abuse. Prominently averted. Death is far less common, more inconvenient in the short term, and, as far as I can tell, less inconvenient in the long term. Most definitely, getting yourself killed in the middle of a quest will set you back a fair way, and is not a viable strategy for finishing it. Let me qualify that: death is extremely inconvenient if you're playing solo. If you're on a team, odds are you'll be able to be brought back fairly close by. But if the fight you're in is tough enough to wipe your whole team, we're back to the same inconvenience. Fortunately, you can expect to go through hours of play with only a death or two.

5. Restrictive Gameplay. DDO is much better at this than WoW, I think. Before 3rd Edition was spaghettified into the maw of a singularity of expansion sourcebooks and munchkin builds, a highly customized character build was what it thrived on. You can multiclass just as in D&D. You can spend feats on weapon and armor proficiencies outside the norm for your class. You can go far either soloing or grouping with others. What's more, you can progress through the game without having to join groups or stop and grind anywhere. Okay, I'll grant that some classes are a lot easier than others. The game is polite enough to inform you how easy it will be to solo with a given class before you start (though popular opinion seems to be that they grossly underestimate the Bard, spooniest of all classes). While I can expect to repeat the same set of quests with every character I run through the game (so far -- I don't know what the world beyond Stormreach will bring yet), there's a delightful element of randomization to the loot. Store-bought weapons and armor may be rather dull, but the higher-quality gear you find in dungeons is all rather unique. There was a point where my dwarf paladin Tetsuemon had some four +1 heavy steel shields in his possession, and I was left to pick based on which one I thought looked coolest. Imagine that! And this was a character who was less than 15%* of the way through the game; I've played characters over 25%* of the way through WoW, and received no such degree of customization.

*These figures are approximations based on how many levels were available in the game compared to how many levels I had achieved with the characters in question.

6. No opportunities for self-imposed challenge and appropriate reward. Well, the game does have options for changing the difficulty level of quests, which I rather appreciate. Loot in dungeons is generous enough, though, that players shouldn't find themselves handicapped for lack of good equipment.

7. Too narrow threshold for efficient questing. Averted pretty well, mostly on account of the great duration between levels (due to there only being 20 of them in the game). Yes, the game does give you minor abilities at several milestones between levels, but the most substantive changes take place at the true levels, so odds are you'll have a long way to go with quests at just the right level for you.

8. Lack of variation in quest trees. Due to the lack of multiple starting locations, I'd say DDO has this even worse than WoW. However, the quests themselves are often well-designed enough that I don't mind.

9. Gameplay focuses too much on aggro management. Almost completely averted in DDO. In dungeon settings, groups of monsters are deliberately placed in such a way that you should be able to handle the lot of them at once, and they're far enough apart that you almost never risk pulling more than you can chew.

10. Meaningless stealth. I haven't gone very far with a rogue, so I can't say whether I could be using stealth to evade difficult encounters. Probably not. But the prevalence of traps in the game gives rogues an additional unique utility that makes them worthwhile.

11. Too much difficulty in plot-insignificant encounters. Averted. The groups of enemies you encounter most often will be large slices of cake.

12. Required grouping. Averted as far as I've played. I even managed to complete a mission of my level designed for a group in which I had to murder a constant stream of 200 kobolds, although it depleted almost my entire stock of potions.

13. Inverted exponential advancement. I suppose it's present to a degree. I haven't really seen enough of the game to say how tedious it gets later on.

14. Inane quests. Pretty well averted. They do a good job of imbuing each individual quest with plot significance. I'm not finding myself harvesting organs for some dwarf's latest casserole recipe.

15. Proper nouns created by welding common nouns artlessly together. Well, I'm currently adventuring out of the city of Stormreach. The Eberron setting, on the whole, does a good job of hitting us with a deluge of truly invented proper nouns, though.

Now, I'd like to discuss the unique aspects that DDO brings to the table, both positive and negative.

The appearance customization of WoW is laughable in comparison to DDO's. In addition to the variety of styles that exist for various bits of equipment, you have a great many options for hair, skin, and eye color, as well as different facial features, hairstyles, and beardstyles.

On the flip side, there's one glaring inadequacy in the visual customization: only the armor, head, and hand slot items are actually visible on your avatar. I would be able to forgive this if only they had allowed cloaks onto that list as well. While I'm glad that my heroic paladin isn't stuck wearing some dinky little cape that doesn't go past his belt, I just wish I could see the bloody thing.

While we're being superficial, I am rather fond of the graphics. They have some fantastically neat lighting effects in the interior areas -- which make up the majority of questing areas -- and I found the water effects rather impressive when I turned up the graphics to the modest level that starts to display them. I was really quite impressed that my computer, a non-optimized year-and-a-half-old laptop as it is, was able to produce something so pretty. Good show.

It's based thoroughly on 3rd Edition D&D. As such, I find the system for building my character to be laughably familiar. That's mostly a personal thing for me. I often found myself feeling inadequate in my knowledge of how WoW worked on a mechanical level, but I can come into DDO with my expertise already in place.

The adventuring areas seem to be engineered, not just designed. In WoW, you spend the majority of your time wandering around open wilderness areas, picking off whichever monsters of the appropriate type happen to cross your path. WoW's typical dungeon areas are little more than bottlenecks that force you to fight enemies in close quarters in order to achieve some objective. DDO's dungeons, which so far have made up the vast majority of my play time, are built to give you a variety of experiences, requiring you to locate keys and switches, and sometimes including genuine goddamn puzzles. It's a lot more exciting than just fighting a series of guys before fighting one really big guy.

Oh, and one more thing: it's free. How about that. Now, granted, there are limitations on your freedom. You have to have leveling sigils to progress past levels 4, 8, 12, and 16 (one sigil for each, of progressive different types). These can be found through normal adventuring. Or they can be bought. My dwarf paladin Tetsuemon found his first one when he was only level 2. If that's any indication, I'll probably be getting another one before 8 without having to grind a bunch of quests over again. But! Apparently, you get some amount of points for the online store for free. The first time I checked (fairly recently) I discovered that I had 275 points. I went to look at how much it would be to get my next leveling sigil. 10 points. How about that. Of course, there are still features that are locked out: two races (drow and warforged) and two classes (monk and favored soul) must be bought, and their prices are in the several hundreds. I might manage that many with just the one character by the end of his career. Considering I've got 275 already and I'm at level 3, I daresay it's likely. So yes, it's limited, but not as limited as it might seem.

On the whole, it's been very fun. I don't know if it's going to take a turn for the boring eventually, but I can take solace in the fact that I probably won't have spent a dime by that point.

No, Atheism is Not Literally a Delusion

2009-12-08T20:25:00.006-05:00

So this guy named Bruce G. Charlton -- I won't stress the ironic similarity of his surname to the word "charlatan" -- wrote this article claiming that atheism is a delusion. P Zed linked to it today, but he left his readers to determine for themselves how it was fallacious. Because I'd like to exercise my rhetorical and logical chops, I'm going to do a paragraph-by-paragraph refutation.

Is Atheism literally a delusion? – A pragmatic proof of Monotheism

Bruce G Charlton

In the press, Church Times

It is a commonplace among Atheists to treat belief in a God as if it were a delusion – sometimes merely a silly delusion, at others a dangerous delusion. My argument is that if a sentient Martian came to earth and observed humankind objectively, and made a pragmatic comparison of devout Monotheists with convinced Atheists, the Martian would be in no doubt it was Atheists that were deluded.

In psychiatry a delusion is a false but powerful belief held with strong conviction. More than this, a delusional belief is one having harmful consequences to the individual. Some delusions are bizarre and are seen only in people with irrational thought patterns – for instance (and this is not invented), I once interviewed a man who believed that the universe was controlled by a budgie. (Yes, I mean the small parrot-like bird!) But some delusions occur in people with ‘normal’, rational thinking processes.

Examples of ‘rational delusions’ include people who falsely believe they are being persecuted by gangs, or some men who falsely believe that their wives are being unfaithful, or some women that falsely believe that their nose has a peculiar shape and is making them hideously ugly. Such beliefs may be held with delusional intensity in people who are otherwise normal. The false belief is in fact a logical conclusion of false premises – for example, if a man accepts the premise that this wife is having an affair, then he can usually find sufficient ‘evidence’ to support this premise.

My modest proposal is that Atheism should be classed as one of these rational delusions.

To say that a delusion is a false belief means that there must be practical criteria for evaluating the truth of a belief – and (since most psychiatrists are not philosophers) ‘truth’ is usually evaluated indirectly by establishing the harmfulness of a belief to the individual. In psychiatric practice, false beliefs are operationally identified by their being maladaptive – in other words by evaluating the consequences of that belief, and deciding whether the consequences are beneficial or damaging.

Yeah, I know I said "paragraph-by-paragraph", but he didn't say anything strictly objectionable before this point. Anyway. Here he introduces the fallacy on which his argument rests: the good old argumentum ad consequentiam, argument from consequences. That's the assertion that something is true because it has better implications than the alternative. Essentially, wishful thinking. He couches it in psychiatric terminology, as if that justified it somehow. It doesn't stop there, though. He's about to go on to claim maladaptivity for the atheist position; I'll be there to rebut his particular points in future paragraphs.

The word ‘maladaptive’ has a strict biological sense, and also a more diffuse social meaning. In strict biological terms a maladaptive trait or behaviour is one that reduces relative reproductive success. Basically, something is maladaptive if it reduced the number of viable offspring. By this strict definition Atheism is a highly maladaptive trait, since Atheistic beliefs are associated with choosing to have reduced numbers of children: less than the 2.1 children minimum needed to replace the parents and cover premature deaths.

The demographic research of Eric Kauffman of Birkbeck College, London has shown that in the Monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) increasing devoutness is associated with larger numbers of children; and religious people have more children than the secular. This rule applies even when educational level is taken into account; and this is necessary because in modern societies Atheism is positively associated with general intelligence. In other words, most Atheists are of higher intelligence than Monotheists.

However, even when compared with equally-intelligent devout Monotheists, Atheists still have lower fertility. So, Atheism is a reproductively-damaging belief system, and this is enough to classify it – objectively - as maladaptive, hence a delusion.

I have two points here. 1. The reproductive difference between atheists and religious people is a result of specific doctrines within religions. Religions, generally across the board, try very hard to adjudicate sex, forbidding forms of it that do not result in childbirth, such as masturbation, oral sex, homosexual sex, and sex with contraceptives in place. Why? Because people who can't do those things will be forced into reproductive acts by their sex drives, and will therefore have more children; if the meme of that religion includes a recommendation to proselytize to your kids, then, blammo, we have a successful meme. The meme is good at replicating itself, which says absolutely nothing of the benefit to people. 2. Overpopulation is a problem. More people means more demand for resources. Not only on the large scale, but on the scale of the individual family as well. A family that has only one child will be able to provide more support to him or her than a family with four, and that one child will have a far better chance of going to college and becoming a successful professional. The time has passed for our society to need more people. The way forward is through quality, and not quantity. I would argue therefore that it is the position that insists on more procreation that it is maladaptive, because down the line it results in more suffering.

Some may say that, in an overcrowded world, it should be counted in favour of Atheism that it reduces average fertility. But that is a different issue altogether – we are here concerned with the effects of a trait on the individual person’s biological adaptation. However, it should be noted that psychological traits such as intelligence and personality are significantly inherited. Insofar as the adoption of Atheism is influenced by innate psychology; by inducing people to chose to have fewer children than needed for replacement, Atheism will tend to eliminate itself from the human gene pool. And causing genetic self-extinction is the defining property of a maladaptive trait.

Self-extinction, Bruce? Are you not aware that our demographics are rather steadily increasing? Certainly, it could be said that some lines have died out because an individual never had a chance or never chose to have children. Many of those lines probably ended in atheists. But the rational force of our position is so strong that our numbers are increasing anyway. Unlike some people, we don't need to get to converts before they develop reason in order to propogate our schema of the world.

‘Maladaptive’ may also have a looser and more social meaning that is roughly equivalent to the effects of a trait on happiness and fulfilment. Research into the effects of Atheism on happiness and fulfilment are somewhat difficult to unravel, especially since Atheists tend to be more educated, richer, and have better health than theists. Nonetheless, my overall impression is that if intelligence is controlled-for then devout Monotheists are very likely to more motivated and positive in their attitude to life.

Have you considered, Bruce, that atheists may be better educated, richer, and healthier because of their atheism? Think about it. People who don't think they already have all the answers (e.g. are certain that their holy book is the one true way) are more likely to go looking for them -- hence better education. People who aren't satisfied with a sub-par economic lot (e.g. they don't think this life is just a warmup for something grander) are more likely to work hard to improve their situation, hence better socioeconomic status. People who realize that death means the end are more likely to take steps to prevent it, hence better health. Anyway, I'd like to know where this "overall impression" is coming from that theists are happier. I would argue that anybody who takes the doctrine of original sin seriously would be more likely to have serious self-esteem issues.

One reason for this could be that Atheism entails discarding many or all of the ideas that sustain a belief in one’s own personal significance in the world. While Monotheistic religions have a basis for motivation in the necessity for individual salvation and the importance of duty; each Atheist must either accept their life as an utterly insignificant dot in the vast context of time and space, or else embark on an heroic journal aimed at the self-creation of personal meaning from nothing. And – perhaps aside from a few geniuses – most people cannot lift-themselves using only their own bootstraps.

Atheists discard the belief that God did a poor job of crafting a universe specifically for us, but Humanists (a substantial subset of atheists) replace it with the extremely empowering belief that we are masters of our own destiny and therefore can and should do something good, fulfilling, and memorable with our only lives. It's not that hard to have a positive influence in the world. Volunteer somewhere. Have a kid or two, and raise them well. Become a teacher, like I'm doing. You don't have to be a famous author or a life-saving doctor or a revolutionary politician to change the world. As long as you leave the world having given more to it than you took, then your life was great and worthwhile. Bad form, Bruce, telling folks we can't live meaningful lives without your Jebus. You need to believe in people more. You're obviously no Humanist.

On the other hand, Atheists probably get more short-termist pleasures since they have fewer restrictions on their behaviours. Indeed I would expect that license to access forbidden pleasures, and liberation from guilt in so doing, are likely to be strong immediate incentives for Atheism.

It is to laugh, Bruce. You really think that there are many theists who can't bear to sin, and therefore must discard their theism before they indulge? Christians would have to be the worst for that, because whatever they do, they can be absolved of any spiritual guilt by visiting a confessional and rubbing out a few Hail Marys. "Hm. I'd really like to attend this bacon, mixed fabric, and gay sex orgy, but my religion is chafing pretty hard. I'd better take it off first." Seriously, Bruce?! Anybody who thought anything only a fraction as absurd as that hadn't been a true believer in a long time.

Nonetheless, the greater long-term fulfilment of devout Monotheists is pretty much accepted by many Atheists, who scornfully regard theism as a ‘happy’ delusion based on weak-minded wishful-thinking. Some regard Monotheism as a useful delusion – in other words as a false belief that happens to have a valuable role in generating a sense of personal significance and/ or social cohesion.

Pretty much accepted by many atheists? 1. Based on what? 2. Define "pretty much". 3. How many? The basic premise of the "happy delusion" idea is that the expectation of an afterlife anesthetizes people to the misery of their mortal one. I'll grant that religion makes theists with a bad lot happier than atheists with a bad lot, but that's not necessarily a good thing. The more satisfied lower-class theists are with their life, the less incentive they have to do something about it. A lower-class atheist is therefore more likely to effect positive change in his or her status. I'll also grant that religion was probably useful in keeping society from imploding during its early development, but only as a scaffold to get us to true rational thinking, which is buoyant enough to rise higher when it finally manages to disengage from religion.

However, this ‘useful delusion’ argument is grossly lacking in plausibility. Pragmatically, there cannot be any such thing as a useful delusion, because delusions are defined as being harmful. Over the long-term and from a biological perspective, if a belief is useful then it is not a delusion; if a belief is a delusion then it is not useful.

Playing at semantics, are you, Bruce? Turning up the contrast on your monitor so you can't see shades of gray, are you, Bruce? Guns exist, Bruce. Guns are both useful (when you need somebody at distance to be severely wounded) and harmful (when someone with a gun needs you to be severely wounded). So if you apply a quantum of imagination, you can see that something can be both useful and harmful. Otherwise you're denying every metaphorical description ever made of something as a "double-edged sword". So can we accept that "useful" and "harmful" are not mutually exclusive? Okay, maybe you were thinking that, as two aspects of a thing, they act against each other: something can have a little of both, but the balance is what's important. If that's so, you'll have to prove that the harm done by theism (deaths from AIDS due to lies by the Vatican about condoms, fanatics killing people on all sides, hampering the economic advancement of untold millions as explained in my last paragraph, in general being a nuisance to scientific advancement, and the list goes on) is of less worth than the happiness it provides.

It is therefore extremely implausible that a false belief would lead to greater long-term happiness than a true belief. Indeed, the main real-life way that we differentiate true from false beliefs is in terms of their long-term consequences. This method of distinguishing truth is (roughly) philosophical Pragmatism, as pioneered by William James (1842-1910): the ‘truth’ is that which leads to the best overall outcome.

Wait, "therefore"? You think there was a logical connection between that last paragraph and that sentence? I'll pretend that word wasn't there and address these points as if you had only just now asserted them -- which you in fact did. [At some point I think I transitioned from Bruce being the third person to being the second. Just roll with it.] It's immaterial how plausible it is for a false belief to lead to greater happiness than a true one. In any case you were using the usefulness of a belief to gauge its truth value earlier (did I say argumentum ad consequentiam? I did? Okay), so according to your fallacious schema, which I'm unwillingly forced to adopt temporarily in order to get within range, the happiness factor of a belief does indeed inform its truth value. Unfortuantely, you haven't successfully established that theism is more useful. Then you go on to claim that this is the primary way we discern truth in real life. Is it, Bruce? Do we think the sky is blue because we'd be called crazy for thinking it's yellow, or because we look up and see that the bloody sky is blue?! You'd have to be pretty damn paranoid if the plurality of your decisions on truth were decided on the basis of whether people would think you're crazy. In any case, it is irrelevant. This is all back to the argumentum ad consequentiam.

However, there must be a deeper psychological reason than short-termist hedonism why so many intelligent people have chosen the maladaptive trait of Atheism. I have recently published a theory trying to explain the phenomenon of ‘Clever Sillies’. Clever Sillies are people whose professional and expert attainments may be at the highest level, while their psychological and social beliefs and behaviours are just silly – I was thinking in particular of the prevalent lunacies of Political Correctness among the ruling elites. In essence, I argue that the root of the problem is that high intelligence often brings with it a tendency to overuse intelligence – even when ‘instinct’ is a better guide to reality.

1. You have not established atheism to be maladaptive. If you've been reading my side of this commentary, you already know this. 2. I have no idea what your point is with political correctness, but it's apparently the subject of another one of your essays, which I will not pursue. 3. You suppose that instict is a better guide to reality than intelligence. Well, in the kind of contexts we evolved in, usually. Our brains evolved to intuit the reality of what Dr. Richard Dawkins calls "Middle World". We can intuit Newtonian physics, because it relates to things we see in our lives. We cannot intuit Einsteinian physics, because it applies to things that happen at extremely high speeds and scales that are very large or very small. But nonetheless we find that our science holds up, makes correct predictions, and leads to working technology even when we've passed beyond the limits of our intuition. In some cases intelligence is a better guide to reality than instinct.

By this account, Atheism is a ‘clever’ but maladaptive explanation for reality; which is preferred by many smart people exactly because it is goes against natural instinct, and therefore both requires and signals greater cleverness among its advocates. Pride in one’s own cleverness thereby overwhelms the fundamental adaptation to reality; indeed willed-nihilism and desired ideological self-extinction are, to a remarkable extent, precisely the hallmarks of an intelligent and Politically Correct Atheist.

The false maladaptation aside, this is only a hypothesis and therefore bears some rigorous testing. Conclusions in science that defy human intuition were reached not because scientists rolled some dice and added whatever coefficients they needed to make the math come out right. They were not made unintuitive just because Einstein really really hated Newton. They represent the best explanation for the data collected by our most precise instruments. Bruce's hypothesis suggests that atheists created their philosophy to be deliberately obstructive in its complexity. In fact, the core notion of atheism -- that there's no cause to believe in any gods -- is remarkably simple. The complexity comes when religious apologists counter this simple atheism with tortured logic that requires unwinding and subsequent destruction by thinking atheists. The notion of gods had rhetorical force before we had science to explain weather, disease, and the motions of heavenly bodies. In this age of science, it's the theists whose position is obstructively complex. Anyhow. Nihilism is only one end of the spectrum of atheism, opposed to Humanism at the other end. And as I explained earlier, the low birth rates of atheists do not in fact amount to self-extinction.

Of course, there is a ‘grey area’ between Monotheism and Atheism, namely ‘Atheist converts’: people who were brought-up as Monotheists in a religious society but have stopped believing or practicing as adults. However, these people are transitional-cases and should not be taken to represent pure Atheism, since childhood culture often has a lasting effect on adult behaviour. The situation of a cradle-Atheist brought up in a secular society is the proper comparison, and such ‘pure Atheists’ have over recent decades been becoming much commoner and the assumptions of this perspective more socially dominant.

1. As a matter of fact, converts to atheism make up the majority of the atheist population. That's why we're growing so rapidly. I don't see why we should discount their relevance. 2. This is piddling and semantic, but we're all technically cradle atheists. Children don't start believing in gods until they're out of the cradle. This is just a question of terminology, so I won't ignore the point on that ground alone. 3. Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchins were raised Christians. I'd bet that Douglas Adams, Sam Harris, P Zed Myers, Hemant Mehta, James Randi, and lots of other influential atheists were also born in religious families. Sam may have said something in one of his books, but I haven't got around to them yet. I can't say for the others. Does this make their viewpoints less valid to the discussion?

I believe that this can be seen in the greater average levels of achievement of those adult Atheist artists and scientists in past generations who were raised as Jews or Christians (I do not know enough about Islam to comment), when compared with the thoroughly-secularized creative people of today.

Again, it's a simple matter of statistics to sort this out, even if it is true, which you haven't established. The majority of atheists were born to religious parents. Therefore, statistically, the majority of famous and successful atheists would have been born to religious parents. That's like saying that since more famous North American English-speaking people are from the US than from Canada, there's something about being from the States that makes you more successful. No, it's because there are more people in the States than in Canada, so naturally more of the successful North American English-speakers will be from here.

For example, Einstein continued to believe in the reality of Truth after he abandoned his childhood Judaic belief in a personal God; James Joyce believed in objective Beauty even when rejecting Roman Catholicism; Nietzsche believed that there was such as thing as Virtue (albeit a rather idiosyncratic notion of virtue) although he violently thrust-away the Pietist Protestanism of his youth. By contrast modern Atheist artists and scientists believe in the ultimate reality of nothing deeper or more fundamental than their own state of mind (all-too-soon to be extinguished leaving no residue); hence most lack the motivation or courage even to attempt scaling the heights of previous generations.

See my last paragraph.

In a nutshell my argument is that if it is accepted that devout Monotheism objectively leads to a more adaptive overall outcome than convinced Atheism (and this is the consensus of modern research), then Monotheism should be regarded are true-er than Atheism. I personally find this argument so convincing that it led me from cradle-Atheism to a personal belief in Monotheism followed later by conversion to Christianity.

That's too bad, because it's not accepted that theism leads to a more adaptive outcome than atheism. I want to see support for this supposed consensus of modern research. Because if it's just the things you talked about above, I'm not buying it. Even if it were, that would still be *gasp* argumentum ad consequentiam! And so you decided to start believing that God existed because you assumed it would make you happier? I really don't think many atheists are capable of just up and deciding to believe in God. It seems like a very peculiar form of lying to one's self.

Of course the empirical argument I present here works merely for Monotheism (and does not in this form imply any specific type of Monotheism); and is merely a pragmatic argument, based on normal secular and scientific criteria for determining the operational and relative truth of propositions. It is not an argument about the ultimate nature of reality, but only about which belief has the most damaging consequences for the individual in modern societies.

And it took all that babbling to finally get here, to the essay's confession that the whole thing is a big argumentum ad consequentiam. What's more, it doesn't even establish the truth of the consequences, either!

However, the argument might perhaps be enough to convince an Agnostic Martian scientist who was trying to compare the consequences of Monotheism and Atheism. And it suggests that - if any group on the planet earth is vulnerable to the accusation of suffering from a maladaptive belief or ‘delusion’ – then it is the Atheists.

Yes, the Martians -- and would it have killed you to use a kind of alien that are actually likely to exist? -- would look at one group who believes that there is one entity that is three persons, one of which is the son of the other, with the son having had to be tortured by humans before the father was willing to let anybody into heaven, and that this tripartite entity is the omniscient, omnipotent, benevolent creator of a universe that obviously has no qualms about brutally murdering its inhabitants, and who murder each other for slight doctrinal nitpicks, and who mutilate their children because obviously omniscient and omnipotent God made them wrong; and then they'd look at the folks who step back, ask questions about the doctrines, and conclude that they were probably invented by iron-age desert tribes: this will lead them to conclude that obviously the atheists are deluded. And if you couldn't tell that that last bit was dripping with sarcasm, you're obviously from somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse and you're not concentrating hard enough.

Aliens and the Razor

2009-12-05T21:59:00.007-05:00

It's okay to believe in aliens. That in and of itself is a perfectly reasonable position. After all, there are estimated to be somewhere on the order of 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (ten sextillion, or 10 to the 22nd power) planets in the universe. About 25% of the planets in our solar system alone are in the neighborhood of being able to support life, which means, if our solar system is typical (which it most definitely may not be), there are two and a half sextillion planets that can support life. Even if it only ever happens on one in a trillion (and estimates by reputable scientists have gone more likely than that even) of possible planets, then we'll still have life in some form on 2,500,000 planets. If it's only one in a sextillion, then there'll still be at least two planets in the entire universe, including this one, with life. So aliens, in the strictest sense, are really quite likely. The problem, though, is believing that aliens have discovered, reached, and interacted with us here on Earth. In this installment, I'll be exploring the many reasons why it's far more likely that believers in alien contact are far more likely to be deluded than right.

Let's start by listing off the propositions that would have to be true in order for alien encounters to have occurred.

1. Intelligent life. Sentience may be very common, a natural thing to occur at least once on every life-bearing planet. On the other hand, it may be extremely rare, making us for all intents and purposes unique. Alien encounters require that it happened on our chosen planet.

2. Scientific intelligence. The nature of the human brain has given us some big hurdles to scientific development. Religiosity during the Dark Ages managed to set back Roman achievements about 1500 years. What if our natural tendency towards superstition and tribal warfare were even more pronounced? Might we never have discovered the scientific method and started on the road to present technology? At the very least religious instincts would shave off a certain percentage of planets that would have otherwise made it further.

3. Faster-than-light travel. It doesn't matter how; what matters is that aliens are capable of moving faster than the 186,000 mile per second hard speed limit we know in our physics. It's extremely helpful if they have to cross the several light years between the nearest planets. It's absolutely necessary if they want to cross our 100,000 light year diameter Milky Way, even more so if they're visiting from the 2,500,000 light year distant Andromeda. With sufficient cryogenics, it's possible to get living aliens across thousands of light years without faster-than-light travel, but it would necessarily have to be a very important mission. After all, it would practically claim the lives of the crew: by the time they got back home, everything about home would be fundamentally different. Language and culture would be unrecognizable, and everybody they ever knew would be dead. So, unless we're proposing very nearby aliens (which would also imply alien civilizations at intervals every dozen light years or so), our aliens need faster-than-light travel. We have no idea whether it's possible to even do so. We have to assume it would take a good while beyond our current level to get there, if we ever will. So our aliens have to be a long way ahead of us. We've already discovered at least one planet that's 9,000,000,000 years older than ours (albeit not a terrestrial one), so I'll give this a plausible.

4. They've found us. It's tough to locate exoplanets. In the two decades we've been seriously looking, we've discovered some 20 a year (on average, though it's been rapidly curving upwards). Without getting pretty close, you need damn sharp instruments to spot planets. If there are a hundred billion planets in our galaxy alone, an alien civilization would need to check each one rather closely (at least closely enough to detect signs of life and intelligence). Our radio transmissions are at present filling a radius of about 100 light years, which is a tiny portion of our galaxy. Our aliens would have to listen from a point at least that close to identify us by our transmissions. This would at least imply that they've been searching for a very long time.

5. They care that we exist. From the aliens' perspective, what makes us interesting enough to investigate? If we're within their radius of travel and we've reached point #2 on this list, statistically speaking there would also be planets within that radius that have not: intelligent civilizations that don't practice modern science, or merely unintelligent animal life. Unless aliens are staggeringly different from us in many fundamental ways, it seems like they could learn enough about us by looking at the biology of non-sentient organisms, unobtrusively observing our cultural transmissions, and looking back at their own history. Why would they even have to go to the trouble to interact with humans?

6. They aren't interested in helping us. Highly advanced alien civilizations have a lot to offer to help out our primitive species. Medical technology to cure diseases. Agricultural technology to solve the world hunger problem. Energy technology to ease our struggle for resources. These things alone might be enough to foster world peace. The aliens could do it. They choose not to. Perhaps they're following some prime directive that prevents them from interfering in our business. That, however, causes dissonance with the next point.

7. They're only slightly concerned with secrecy. However they communicate across space, it would have to be undetectable to the SETI researchers -- which is an impressive feat, considering it's the sole mission of SETI to, well, Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence. And they obviously put some effort into not leaving their ships around in places where lots of people will see them clearly, or take clear photos or videos of them. But they're obviously not very good at this secrecy thing. Their ships are often briefly spotted, and they leave lots and lots of eyewitnesses. The ship sightings are just carelessness. The eyewitnesses are slightly more difficult to deal with, but not at all hard if you think about it, as we'll see in the next paragraph.

8. They're only slightly concerned with our rights. This bit deals specifically with alien abductions, which aren't necessary to believe in alien contact but are frequently included in reports of it. So we have aliens who value our rights low enough to abduct us and perform invasive experiments on us. I've thought of three possible ways for them to get away with this without leaving eyewitnesses. The first is to have memory modification technology. For the sake of argument, we can say that that might be impossible. The second is to simply destroy the experimental subjects when they're no longer needed. It's possible that they value our rights too highly to do this. The third is to keep the abducted in captivity, so that they can live a pampered and relatively happy life -- possibly even with other abductees -- without going back to tell everybody; for minimal impact on our society, they could select only people who have no family or friends, and don't otherwise make a big difference in the world. These people's lives would likely be improved by being kept in an alien zoo. But it could be said that doing this impinges too much on our autonomy. So our aliens here have a very specific code of ethics: you can mess with individuals for a short period of time, even as much as performing embarrassing experiments on them, but you can't kill them or keep them. There are no such animals that we humans consider in such terms, so it's hard to imagine why that would make sense.

9. They're at least vaguely human-shaped. The most common form that these aliens take is that of the Greys, the famous image of big-headed bipeds. Now, this model for alien life is either remarkably naive or remarkably arrogant. Naive if we think that our body plan is the only viable one that can lead to intelligence: the smallest bit of imagination allows us to imagine vastly different general body plans, from the variegated creature designs of Spore to Douglas Adams' Hooloovoo, a hyperintelligent shade of the color blue. Arrogant if we presume that ours is the most likely body plan to be successful. Even a casual study will show how bizarrely different animals on Earth can be, and every single one of them is related to us. Just think how unimaginably, well, alien these aliens are likely to be if they evolved from a completely different origin in a completely different context.

I find that points #6, #7, and #8 are the most compelling reasons why alien contact is so unlikely. There's a very specific level of both secrecy and ethics required to produce a level of evidence that is only credible to some people and not accepted by mainstream scientists. It seriously smacks of special pleading, that the aliens are not willing to communicate openly with us but are bad enough at keeping their presence secret that almost everybody has heard fringe reports of contact with them. What's more likely: an alien civilization has reached us and has that specific level of policies that would cause this controversy, or some people dreamed or hallucinated a close encounter and some other credulous folks believed them? The best evidence for alien contact is photos and videos of lights and blurry objects in the sky, alongside eyewitness testimony. Photos and even videos are incredibly subject to tampering, as we can see all around us (ever watch a movie with compellingly realistic CG special effects, for instance?). And, as famous astrophysicist and skeptic Neil deGrasse Tyson tells us, eyewitness testimony makes for terrible evidence, as we're constantly subject to "brain failures", his apt renaming of optical illusions. Eyewitness testimony is only reliable if it's even more incredible that the evidence is false than that it's true.

So, odds are there are alien life forms somewhere. But there is no cause to believe that they've actually made it here; there won't be until either they make open contact in broad daylight in a populated area, or we at least manage to retrieve some obviously alien artifacts from them.

A Question of Motive

2009-11-27T14:43:00.005-05:00

Scientists say that the entire vast diversity of life on Earth was caused by genetic mutation (which changes individuals) and natural selection (which distributes the most effective genes around a population). Whenever a population divides for a long enough time, they become genetically isolated and will thenceforth continue to be divided even if they share a territory; the two groups will go their own way, and over millions of years they can become astonishingly different. We have a sequence of fossils that demonstrates this gradual change throughout consistent strata of rock. We have several independent dating methods that corroborate one another, including tree-ring dating and many different types of radiometric dating, all of which support the notion that the fossils we've found are many millions of years old if not more. We've seen bacteria adapting through random mutation in laboratory settings, and, as we'd expect, the mutant bacteria thrive and take over the population.

Creationists, if they subscribe to the Intelligent Design hypothesis, say that, while evolution may happen in much the way scientists describe, there are some things that were too complex to have evolved naturally and required some sort of intervention from an outside force. Naturalistic evolutionists still posit that these complexities may still have arisen naturally, even if we have yet to puzzle out how: we say that a declaration that such and such cannot have possibly happened naturally is a failure of imagination. History has shown us that people who insist that we'll never be able to know something are generally proven wrong, if not in their lifetimes. Creationists who adhere to biblical literalism say that, for every bit of science that supports an old earth or common descent, either our data are wrong or we're misinterpreting them.

The problem we're left with is that either one of these groups is honestly mistaken or one of these groups is lying. How do we find out which? All right, well, there are two particular dilemmas we can pick out:

1. Is our science correct, at least in the broad picture? Scientists and the ID crowd say "yes", while the literalists say "no".
2. Are some things so complex that they definitely can't have evolved naturally? The ID crowd says "yes", scientists say "no", and literalists don't even need to address the question.

I think we can better approach an answer to which groups are right about these things if we consider motive, which, as you may have guessed, is the topic of this post. Only an extremely naive person would take every claim at face value; a more realistic individual should consider the possibility that somebody is either deliberately deceptive or at least misinformed somehow. It's possible that somebody's prior corpus of experience will inform the way they approach a particular question, such that they can receive the best information, come to an honest conclusion, and still be wrong. So we have to look at reasons why somebody would arrive at a particular conclusion about the world.

First, to simplify matters, I'd like to lump the ID folks and the literalists into a single group, the creationists, and I'll explain why it makes sense. Officially, the position of ID is that "something" intelligent intervened in the evolutionary process to make us the way we are. It could have been Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. It could have been a Flying Spaghetti Monster. It could have been one of many deities. However, in reality, we find that the only people who buy most of the science of evolution but fail to imagine the possibility that some organs could have arisen gradually are religious people. The leaders of the movement were rather specifically religious: as it was shown in the Dover case, the leading ID textbook was discovered to be essentially an edited version of a creationism textbook. ID is simply the necessarily scientific face they put on their position in order to try and make it fly in science classes; the concession that their hypothesis doesn't rule out non-God designers is a technicality that arose out of political necessity. So, for all intents and purposes, ID is just another manifestation of creationism: we can call it metaphorical creationism, which attempts to reconcile with science, in contrast to the literal creationism, which denies the science outright.

Right. So, metaphorical creationists assert that some features of organisms could not have happened naturally. Scientists assert that they can have done so -- we just might not know how in some cases. Literal creationists assert that the science we use to form a picture of the history of life on Earth is in some ways fundamentally flawed. Scientists, again, dissent. Why? What does anybody have to gain from the answers to these questions? Well, there are two major motives for each side: an individual motive and an institutional motive. The individual motive is what one person gains from believing a given answer; the institutional motive is what one person gains from other people believing a given answer.

There's actually a great deal of individual motive to believe in a creationist viewpoint. It's obvious that some degree of divine intervention is necessary for any of the major religious belief systems to be true. If you espouse a completely scientific worldview, then there's no cause to ever suspect a supernatural explanation (since being able to be described by science is part of the definition of "natural"), so it's necessary to concede at least some part of our origins to the inscrutability of God if you're going to believe in God at all. And belief in God is where the motive lies. If God is real, then not only do you no longer have to worry about the oblivion of death, you get at least a chance at eternal paradise. For such social animals, humans are remarkably egotistical: we're willing to sacrifice a lot for the promise of heaven. So, even though this is a logical fallacy -- the argumentum ad consequentiam, or argument from consequence -- it's easy to see why people would choose to believe in this chance at heaven. But there's more. As I've mentioned in an earlier post, it's often extremely difficult for people to go against the traditional religion of their families. They risk being disowned or at least very uncomfortable around them. What's more, they're often forced to accept a particular religion long before they start learning the science necessary to adequately describe evolutionary theory.

Contrast the individual motive for a scientific worldview. It is virtually nil. Now, mind you, I'm only talking about motive beyond and independent of truth value. But if we're judging a scientific perspective on what it brings to the table besides truth, it turns out to be very little indeed. Certainly, many scientists are deeply and emotionally awed by some of the most mind-boggling implications of their work. Richard Dawkins says, of the notion that matter is constantly flowing into and out of our bodies such that we don't have any of the atoms in our body that we had at birth, "Some people find that thought disturbing. I find the reality thrilling." Yes, oftentimes reality is much stranger and more wondrous than what we can imagine. But do you really think we couldn't have done better? If scientists were inventing a false belief, as creationists suppose, why wouldn't they invent one with some more rhetorical punch to it? Something that actively favors those who follow it? As it is, even the most amazing things about science are staggeringly neutral.

Next, let us look at institutional motives. Religious leaders are certainly the people who benefit the most from other people believing in religious worldviews. Most cynically, they make money based on their rhetorical ability to maintain a congregation. At a slightly more sophisticated level, they receive large amounts of admiration merely by being qualified as a cleric. If nobody else believed what they were preaching, people with these particular skills would have to go elsewhere -- probably into politics, where their particular skills would be most relevant. So the religious hierarchy obviously has something at stake in the battle for the minds of the people. What's more, for people who genuinely believe in a particular religious worldview, it will often benefit them at a personal level for friends and family to follow suit, such as when a religion promotes proselytizing. It will be a personal emotional benefit for a person if he or she doesn't have to worry that his or her relatives are doomed to eternal hellfire.

Set against that is the question of what sort of motives scientists would have for other people to believe their worldview. Money, yes. Scientists get funded based on doing credible research, and they make money off of books that sell well enough. Somebody would have to do a study, but I'd wager that the median scientist probably makes a lot less money for how much hard work he does compared to the median cleric. I think it's fairly universal that people become scientists not out of a desire to strike it rich but out of love for the field. In any case, you'd have to upset very large amounts of extremely well-established scientific knowledge in order to render any scientists obsolete. Most could merely redirect their research if evidence for some creationist hypothesis were found. I'd say that scientists certainly do receive admiration for their position, but I estimate that it's rather less than comparable clerics, at least in total number of people.

So, ultimately, I conclude based on these things that in both individual and institutional cases (though far more strongly in the former), there is far more cause to deceive in favor of a creationist worldview than a scientific one. Scientists gain little for themselves by believing in their fields -- aside from the wonder at how amazing their fields truly are -- and don't risk their entire jobs being rendered obsolete by a potential discovery of a truth in creationism. Why would they bother to fight so hard against the vocal creationists just to put forth some meaningless science-fiction as fact? Creationists, on the other hand, have rather more to gain by being disingenuous.

What's important here is looking at why your opponent would argue a certain way, and not just dismissing his entire argument out of hand because it nominally opposes yours. If believing in religion X makes you happy, it's in your interest to do logical gymnastics in order to hold that belief. Believing in science, however, doesn't always make use feel good inherently. I'm sure many if not most atheists would like to have eternal paradise, depending on how, exactly, it's defined. We don't oppose religious folks because we hate God. We do it because we're free from the psychic tyranny of a rationally untenable worldview, and we think you'd appreciate the rationality if you allowed yourself to think about it.

Revenge of the Problem of Evil

2009-11-25T15:10:00.004-05:00

The Problem of Evil has apparently been a cornerstone of religious criticism for a rather long time, dating back even to the Greek philosophers. I recall reading that the guy it's usually attributed to probably didn't actually say it, so I won't bother looking him up just to mention him by name. In its original form, the argument went something like this:

1. If God is willing to prevent evil but not able, he is not omnipotent.
2. If God is able to prevent evil but not willing, he is not benevolent.
3. If God is both able and willing to prevent evil, why is there evil?
4. If God is neither able nor willing to prevent evil, why call him "God" at all?

4 is relatively easy to dismiss, but it's not even material to the argument, because this combination of truth values isn't necessary to give us the world we see. In any case, I suppose it merits a better definition of "calling him 'God'". There are plenty of figures I can name from the various polytheisms who are neither omnipotent nor benevolent, but whom I would still call "gods" (minuscule "g" as if you couldn't read it, but I find it necessary to point it out for the sake of contrast) based on their descriptions. Perhaps the majuscule "G" in "God" tells me that this is a more particular kind of deity, in which we expect to find the qualities of omnipotence and benevolence. If that's the case, I could say that either points 1 or 2 could include an implication that the god we're talking about isn't the God that we expect him to be. In any case, point 4 isn't terribly relevant, nor is it particularly difficult to attack logically.

Irrelevant point 4 aside, what we have is a conflict between two qualities, omnipotence and benevolence, and the world we see. It's not difficult to escape through the metaphorical horns of this constructive dilemma, though.

For the sake of form:
1. IF [God is willing to prevent evil] AND [God is able to prevent evil] THEN [There is no evil]
2. It is FALSE that [There is no evil]
3. Therefore, it is FALSE that [God is willing to prevent evil] AND [God is able to prevent evil] (modus tollens, 1, 2)
4. Therefore, EITHER it is FALSE that [God is willing to prevent evil] OR it is FALSE that [God is able to prevent evil] (De Morgan, 3)
5. IF it is FALSE that [God is willing to prevent evil] THEN it is FALSE that [God is benevolent] AND IF it is FALSE that [God is able to prevent evil] THEN it is FALSE that [God is omnipotent]
6. Therefore, EITHER it is FALSE that [God is benevolent] OR it is FALSE that [God is omnipotent] (constructive dilemma, 5, 4)

On the one hand, I'm glad that I was still able to do that after over a year since my last Formal Logic class. On the other hand, I apologize for subjecting you to that. I probably should have told you beforehand to just skip it.

Anyway, proofs aside, it's relatively easy to posit that "God is not omnipotent" and "God is not benevolent" are not the only two possible ways to reconcile God with the fact of evil in the world. Perhaps there's a reason why some degree of evil must be tolerated -- for instance, a greater ultimate good that will outweigh the minor evils along the way. So far I've come up with two rather compelling arguments for why this may be plausible.

1. Free Will. Humans have to have the freedom to choose to be good or evil, or else their goodness will be meaningless.
2. Character Building. In order for life to have a point at all, people must endure some form of suffering so that they can come through it as better people.

The argument of Free Will falls fairly easily. All I have to do is introduce the concept of natural evils, i.e. those that aren't caused by humans. Your natural disasters, for example. It's easy to see that natural evils would still be relevant to Character Building, but if Free Will is God's only rationale for tolerating evil, it doesn't explain the existence of natural disasters that in fact do not disproportionately target the houses of atheists. I still feel it's necessary to address Free Will, though, because it relates closely with the concept of the afterlife and divine justice.

I'll start, though, with one of my famous* metaphors. Imagine a robot. No, no lasers. No, he doesn't beep like R2-D2. Something more like the sort of robot the Mythbusters would build. The purpose of this robot is to roll dice. And no, I don't mean a dice-rolling program on a computer. Not just to roll them, but to actually predict the result of a physical die-roll that the robot itself makes before the dice are in motion. This robot is attached to a closed-off, airtight rolling box, so that air currents from outside have no effect on rolls. The robot has a small flicking arm capable of holding (say) one six-sided die (which you'd rather read as "1d6" if you're awesome), and this arm is capable of making minute adjustments to the vector of the toss and the sum of forces on the corners at the time of release, the better to control the die's rotation in the air. The robot has a computer programmed with an elaborate schema for correlating a range of various toss vectors with specific rotation characteristics, ultimately resulting in a predictable result. If the potential for random Brownian motion to interfere is weighing too heavily on your willing suspension of disbelief, you're welcome to imagine that the rolling box contains a perfect vacuum, aside from the robot and its d6.

*My metaphors are not actually famous. Yet.

Now, this die-rolling robot is capable of predicting everything that might pertain to its die rolls, aside from the potential for humans to interfere by suddenly moving the rolling box or introducing a foreign substance into it, which needn't be considered for the sake of this argument. Our theoretical robot here is omniscient for the intents and purposes of rolling its die in its rolling box. If we plug a number from 1 to 6 into its little console, it will faithfully and reliably throw the d6 such that it rolls several times and lands with the face we specified pointing up. This process in the hands of a human would be considered random, because we have nothing close to the precision and calculating power of this robot. In addition to our robot effectively knowing everything there is to know about its rolling space and the behavior of its die, it is also capable of effecting any of the six possible results that can be achieved from rolling a d6 (minus the patently ludicrous possibility of getting the die to balance on an edge or, more so, a corner), which makes the robot also omnipotent as far as rolling this die is concerned.

Even though our robot is capable of reliably effecting our desired roll results at will, it does so without manipulating the die every quantum of time along the way, or even at all once it is released from the flicking arm. The point is that, because of its effectively omniscient computer program, the robot can predict how the confluence of many significant forces, including the direction and speed of rotation, the angle and speed at which it strikes the bottom of the box, and the cumulative effects of every single bounce, will come together to create the same roll every time. If humans were capable of the precision necessary to throw a die the exact same way into the exact same environment, we'd be able to effect the same result every time.

Now consider causality. Every event that happens in our experience can be traced back to a first cause. There's a chain of causes and effects leading from everything you do, back through every interaction since the moment of your birth, back to the random shuffling that gave you the particular genes you got from your parents, to the events that drove your parents together in the first place, etc., back through the history of life on Earth and matter in the Universe. This chain of causes is one thing that gives time travelers so much trouble. This chain of causes is analogous to the various forces acting on our die. An omniscient God is cognizant of all of these causes, and how every single interaction between entities will result. If God is omniscient, then he knew every single result that would come from creating the universe the way he did. This God is the ultimate die-tossing robot. Before God created Adam and Eve, he knew that they would fall. Before God decided to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, or to flood the Earth, in order to purge them of their sins, God knew that the sins would take place.

In essence, if God was omniscient when he created the world the way he did, he therefore knew that his creation would lead to everything every person ever did wrong. To say otherwise is to posit that God is not omniscient. This leads me (and hopefully you as well) to the conclusion that, if God is omniscient and benevolent, he could not possibly punish anybody (even a little) for acting the way that his own actions determined.

I've got another famous metaphor** for you. Imagine a soldier is on patrol in enemy territory. He spots a camp of enemy soldiers situated at the top of a cliff, which he confirms does not have any civilians on hand. He calls back to base and orders a cruise missile strike. The missile flies in, explodes at the center of the enemy camp, and kills all the bad guys; the civilian village at the base of the cliff, however, is promptly destroyed by the resulting landslide. Is it the patrolling soldier's fault or that of the base officers who launched the missile? What if, back at the base, they had easy access to a live satellite feed of the area, which clearly showed the civilian village at the base of the cliff? Is the onus for the lost lives now on the officers who failed to check that feed?

**In the past four paragraphs, my metaphors became actually famous. Read about them in Time magazine!

Effectively, God sending somebody to hell for actions they performed in life is no better than the soldier above getting severely punished for wiping out the civilian village. Omniscient God was aware, when he created the universe, that the great confluence of forces within it would cause particular individuals to perform in less-than-optimal ways; in fact he knew what each individual was going to do from the moment he decided to create creation. The officers at the base knew that there was a civilian village in the line of fire before they launched the missile. It's within omnipotent God's power to prevent any particular instance of evil, and it's also within his power to design the world in such a way that those evils are naturally avoided. We cannot have free will, because everything that happens in our brains is the result of genetics, experience, or quantum die rolls; omniscient God knew beforehand how the world would resolve to give us the genetics and experiences we each have, and omniscient God knew how every die roll would come up. Yes, the calculations are far beyond anything that we humans can conceive, but hey -- this is omniscient and omnipotent God we're talking about.

So, here we have it that a God who is omniscient and sufficiently powerful to change the way he creates the universe cannot endow any of his creations with free will. If God was the first cause, and all other causes flow forth from that cause, and if God is omniscient, then nothing that happens could possibly be outside of God's knowledge prior to the creation. While that doesn't perfectly shore up the Problem of Evil, it does render the notion of cosmic punishment patently ludicrous.

Now, if you recall from way back when I first mentioned it, there's another reason why we might conceive that a benevolent and omnipotent God might have to allow evil: Character Building. If people never suffer, then their lives are worth nothing, because they will then have no concept of happiness versus sorrow. But if all we're looking for is a Crowning Moment of Heartwarming to teach us a nice lesson about life, it rather seems that God is going a tad overboard.

Most glaringly, different people suffer in different amounts. One particularly lucky person might go through life with nothing worse than a nasty flu one season and a handful of crummy days at work. Other people have their families tortured and horrifically murdered before their eyes, and then have the same happen to them. The idea that one of them deserves it more than the other is right out, because we did away with the concept of free will and cosmic punishment in the last bit. At the very least, can't God put some kind of cap on the suffering per capita?

While we're at it, consider the fact that the quality of life we see these days is probably, at least on average, much higher than it has been in earlier human history. If the suffering we see today is sufficient to give our lives character, why did people of centuries past need so much more? Why not take a look at the progression of suffering throughout an individual's life? The worst thing a small child will have to suffer (aside from the possibility of abuse by adults and other tragedies) is the loss of a beloved toy or otherwise being deprived of a chance at something enjoyable. This is, forgive the metaphor, child's play next to the pressures of school and the inevitable angst that comes with being a teenager. This again is rather eclipsed by the work and financial difficulties of adults, not to mention the fact that adults have to deal with the births and deaths of people who are important to them. Further still, we can see the average civilian adult's complaints pale in comparison to the horrors witnessed and suffered by a veteran soldier. And yet, many people die before reaching the next level of suffering, and most of them go their entire lives without participating in violent warfare. If any one of these levels of suffering is sufficient for God to consider a life "complete", why not stop at the lower ones?

So. At the crux of benevolence, omnipotence, and omniscience, we can see that there's no good reason to have the particular degree and sort of evil we see in the world. Remember, though: the problem of evil should never be taken as a supposed proof against God. It should only be taken as a proof against the sort of God we're usually told we have. If the Bible tells us we have an omniscient, omnipotent, and benevolent God, and we can use reason to see that at least one of those traits has to be out of the game, we can therefore determine that, at least on one point, the Bible is wrong. If the Bible can be wrong about one thing, then we know it's false that the Bible is right about everything: the credibility of the whole document is shot.

So my point in invoking the problem of evil is not to say that God does not exist. It's to say that if God exists, we don't know what he would want us to do in life because we don't have an authoritative source. We cannot know whether God wants us to pray or how, and we don't know what he considers "moral". The rational conclusion from this is that the only criteria for how best to live life are secular criteria: the greatest possible degree of good for the greatest possible number of people. Don't accept evil, and don't assume that praying is enough. Do something about it yourselves.

Religious Indoctrination

2009-11-12T15:13:00.004-05:00

The non-religious demographic in the United States -- that is, people who run the gamut from atheists to agnostics to the simply non-religious -- is growing. It has doubled in the last 20 years, and the current rate of growth is stable. We're at 15% of the American population right now, and it's projected that we'll be something like 25% by 2030. I tend to think that this says a lot about the indoctrination of children into their parents' religion.

From my studies of language, I know that a child's brain is much more easily malleable than an adult's. Basically, they're wired to accept what they get when they're very young, and that capacity for learning diminishes gradually as they get older. I think parents realize that they play a huge role in how their children grow up. I don't think they quite suspect how difficult it is for them to change their minds when they're older. Therefore my argument here will posit that it is ignorance, and not malice, that causes parents to rob their children of choice.

59% of people who identified themselves as non-religious at the age of 12 have remained so. 88% of people who identified as religious at 12 have remained religious. At first glance, that may appear to be a strike against the ideological attraction of non-religion, but there are other facts to consider. Individual religious sects only retain 59% of their members. That means that, on average, among religions, 41% of people will leave the group they started in, including 12% who drop religion altogether. Also bear in mind that not every non-religious person, including parents, is particularly conscientious about it. Of the non-religious, only 10% consider themselves atheists, so the remaining 90% will be generally less opinionated, and likely won't have strong input one way or the other regardless of which direction their children go. Add to that the fact that religions, especially the ones practiced in this country, tend to have strong theological or at least social sanctions attached to apostasy, and it's easy to understand the difference in retention rates.

Consider the forces at work here. For a child raised religious, it is necessary to overcome first the worldview that's been driving your understanding of the world since childhood, then the fear of cosmic punishment for apostasy, then the fear of damaging relationships with family and some friends. Pulling the individual towards non-religion is only rational persuasive force, which may include criticism of particular scripture and reasoning based on the plurality of mutually exclusive religious belief systems. The sum of these forces causes about 11% of the total population to stop being religious. Let's look at the flip side. For a child raised non-religious, he must first see value in believing a particular religious worldview, then become convinced that whatever he's learned about science that contradicts the chosen religion (which varies based on the particular worldview to be assumed) is wrong somehow, then overcome whatever misgivings his family might have (which will tend to be scant if present at all in the case of an agnostic family, like most in the non-religious group). Given all that -- including much weaker familial repercussions for becoming religious than vice versa -- only 4% of Americans become religious who started as non-religious.

I'll put it here plainly: losing religion has far stronger social barriers associated with it than gaining religion, yet more than twice as many people lose religion (11%) as gain religion (4%). To say nothing of truth value, which I'm sure I'll address later, that means that the rhetorical force of non-religion must be far stronger than the rhetorical force of religion. Rational adults, when freed from the fear of social sanctions, leave religion more often than they seek it.

It's not difficult to see, given that, that there are many people who would have left their religion if it weren't for the combination of social sanctions and the fact that they were wired from a very young age to accept their religion as fact. This is why the indoctrination of children into their parents' religion should be seen as an abuse of their undeveloped critical faculties. But again, it's hard for me to fault individual parents. The meme of religion includes, as part of its program, an instruction to share it with your children: that's how it keeps itself going. It's what I call "meme insurance". The parents are no more at fault for that than your computer's operating system is for being vulnerable to any particular virus. Caveat, though: whether religion on the whole is bad is a topic for another discussion. What I'm asserting is that it's abusive for parents to favor one religious worldview over any other in their child's upbringing, because that robs many if not most children of the choice to change their minds later on in life. If you disagree on the grounds that your particular religion is more correct than all the rest, I suggest you find someone who would say the same thing for a different religion, talk it out, and please be informed by the fact that neither of you could convince the other.

You might retort, however, that it's no better to raise children as non-religious, because that's just another worldview, and doing so prevents them from changing their minds later in life. Here I must take care to define terms: when I say "religious worldview" or "religion", I mean a worldview that is explicitly supernatural. While it could be said that Humanism, Confucianism, and some manifestations of Buddhism have nothing really supernatural about them, they are still sometimes classified as religions; for my purposes in this post, those are merely philosophies, because it's useful for me to use "religion" as shorthand for "supernatural religion". Right. So, the core of my argument here is that a religion is (or contains) a set of propositions about the world that can be neither proved nor disproved. Religion is based not on evidence from our experience in the world but on a set of fables of dubious origin; this is why the concept of faith is so important, as it acts as more meme insurance.

As a set of extraordinary propositions, a religious worldview has the burden of providing the extraordinary evidence to support it. It is the right of adults to believe or disbelieve unsupported extraordinary propositions at their leisure. We know lots of ordinary things about the world, like the characteristics and behaviors of animals and plants around us; nobody questions whether we should teach these things to children. We also have a pretty good idea of some extraordinary things about the world, which would be useful for parents to know when their precocious toddlers begin an infinite regress of "why" questions; for these things, we have extraordinary evidence. A great deal of scientific inquiry has gone into the workings of weather patterns, the history of life on earth, and the movements of the planets. We have sufficient piles of evidence that it is responsible to teach these things to children.

Every religion has a set of holy writings and a number of personal revelations to back it up; yes, all of them, so it's impossible to say which revelations are the correct ones. It's easy to understand how they all could be false and still have arisen as they did in the light of science; in order to understand how all the science turned out the way it did in the light of a particular religion, however, you must assert a degree and quality of divine meddling that has to imply deliberate mischief. I'll grant, of course, that not all religious worldviews conflict so strongly with science as the young-Earth creationism view; if the scripture nevertheless states a recent creation which it intends as metaphor, then the mischief lies in the fact that its status as literal truth or figurative metaphor is in no way clear from the text alone. In any case, the evidence for one religious view is strongly enough equivocated by other religious views that we cannot say which is best on a rational basis; therefore, to mold a child's mind to believe that your particular religion is more correct than anybody else's is, to put it mildly, an affront to rationality.

My argument that raising children without religion is better than choosing a particular religion for them is based on the premise that learning scientifically established facts about the natural world will not be harmful to them in the future. A true understanding of science may bias children against some religious beliefs if they encounter them later in life. If that's the case, then it's incumbent upon the religions to adapt to the persistent flood of scientific evidence. If you deny that, then you posit that noncritical religious thought is somehow superior to critical scientific thought. My simple retort to that is to ask, if science doesn't have a lot going for it, how do you think they built the machine that's allowing you to read this? And if science works far more often than it fails, on what basis do you suppose that it's wrong in the case of your religion, with which, I remind you, most of the world disagrees?

So, to recap my points, not necessarily in the order I presented them above. 1. What you teach your kids is hard to undo later in life. 2. More Americans conclude, when liberated from their childhood belief structure, that religion is wrong than that it's right. 3. Many if not most people are prevented from choosing their worldview by indoctrination by their parents. 4. No religion has more positive evidence for its truth than any other. 5. Scientific propositions have positive evidence for their truth. 6. Therefore the only moral choice is to teach children only evidence-based truth, holding off the subjective and equivocal philosophies until they're old enough to choose for themselves.

The Problem with WoW

2009-11-07T23:47:00.003-05:00

Last year, I would have told you that I refuse to play Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games on principle. The very concept of a static-state world that I can never meaningfully save, shared with an obscenely large population of peer heroes and heroines, was anathema to my concept of a good game. Two months ago, I would have told you that even though I spent a few months playing City of Heroes, thereby redacting my earlier stance that such a static world could not make for a good game, I would still refuse to play World of Warcraft, because Blizzard was making far too much money to tolerate based on relatively little content. Has any single video game ever had a larger profit margin? I haven’t run the numbers, but my perception as a consumer is that it’s unprecedented.

Nevertheless, I could not have commented on the quality or the experience of WoW the game; my objections were purely philosophical, and I could not rationally say that it was a bad game. In the mean time, I’ve corrected that fact. I broke my long-standing boycott against Blizzard and shelled out $20 to purchase the game, which gave me a month of play time, most of which I used before deciding to allow it to lapse (as I quite adamantly refused to set up a repeating payment). As a result of that experience, I can now report on why I do not like World of Warcraft.

Barred from an Entire Class of Objects

One of the first things I disliked about WoW was how difficult it was to even attempt to emulate an old D&D character. His name was Harek. He was a dwarf, and his class combination was so specialized I didn’t hope to find an analogue in WoW, so I just made him a Warrior. Rather particularly, he wielded a glaive and wore a (roughly) Corinthian helmet. Now, I’m a fan of polearms. I think they get far too little play in fiction, despite their prevalence in actual ancient combat. I was appalled that pole weapons of all sorts were perfectly absent from the MMO D&D Online, thus ruining my chances at emulating a good few D&D characters I’d once played. And if DDO can’t do it, what game can?

I learned at about that time that, while spears and other polearms exist in WoW, you can’t get them (even if you’re one of the classes that ever can) until level 20, which amounts to a good many hours of gameplay. So, if I want to play Harek, I have to slog through the first 20 levels and then pick up a spear. What’s more, I learned that headwear – of all sorts, aside from the useless, ridiculous, and temporary Halloween masks – is similarly barred to lower-level characters.

What really cheeses me off about that is how it grates against the concept of a simulation. In real life, spears were an extremely common rank-and-file weapon, because they strike an excellent balance of killing power and cost (wood being far easier to come by in ancient times than copper or iron, and a minimal spear requires only very little metal). Swords, on the other hand, were far more commonly found in the hands of the better-trained warriors; in any case, they were more difficult to manufacture and required more metal. Basically, this means that a new recruit is most likely to start off with a spear. I simply cannot imagine what rationale would make it reasonable to allow swords to a level 1 warrior but not spears. I find it quite unlikely that Blizzard used a highly exacting simulation model to determine the damage and speed ratings of the weapons, which drove them to the conclusion that no spear or polearm would be balanced for a level 1 character. And it’s not even like it’s particularly rewarding to get a spear; they manufactured a sense of reward for those of us who want to go the spear route that wouldn’t otherwise have been there by holding them off for 20 levels.

I’m not sure whether the prohibition against headwear is more or less reasonable than that. Why can’t my level 1 character wear a hood or a goddamn hat? I’m not even saying I want to gain some big benefit from it. I’m willing to pay my hard-earned gold for a little optional aesthetic customization. The whole concept of putting a minimum level on powerful items is perfectly reasonable, because it prevents the potentially abusive practice of decking out your level 1 alternate character with endgame-level gear from your main. However, in a world full of magic where the external appearance of an item does not necessarily determine its functional qualities (i.e. how many points of armor, or how much damage per hit), there’s no game-balance reason to prevent low-level characters from wearing any sort of hats or, for that matter, pauldrons (often known in the game’s own terminology and the parlance of its players as “shoulders”).

The fact of the matter is that certain entire classes of objects – spears, hats, and shoulder armor – are prohibited to the lowest level characters, for no logical reason and in fact against logic. This was one of my first problems with WoW, but by no means a deal-breaker. It just contributes.

Honorable Paladin and Warrior of the Light, Leeroy Jenkins

This game takes itself seriously, to a degree. It has pretensions of telling an epic story about the battle between good and evil. The music that plays when you ride into Stormwind can give you chills, if you’re in the right state of mind. The problem is that, though the game takes itself seriously, the players wouldn’t be caught dead doing the same. As a D&D player, I imagine that I have some concept of what should be expected from the roleplaying of certain concepts. To name one example, I would emphatically say that if you don’t have a good concept of how to roleplay and you don’t plan on putting lots of effort into spoken interactions, you probably shouldn’t be playing a Paladin in D&D. The very concept of Paladins, with their dogmatically static alignment and code of conduct, begs for strong roleplaying. An orthodox Paladin should be expected to be the wet blanket when less pious characters decide they want to take liberties. Every once in a while, you may have a Paladin who flouts tradition, acting and speaking more roguishly while managing to maintain proper conduct. This is an effective trope when it’s done rarely and deliberately. If every Paladin is like this, it gets old very quickly, and you start to wonder what it means to be a holy warrior in the first place.

In contrast, your typical WoW Paladin did not choose that path because it would make for interesting roleplaying. Your typical WoW Paladin chose that path because they’re competent in melee and have substantial healing powers, making them versatile and easy to play, particularly solo. In D&D, the difference between the Fighter and the Paladin is mostly one of personality. They do essentially the same thing for the party, with significantly different aesthetics. In WoW, the difference between the Warrior and the Paladin is just a different power set. Paladins have no required code of conduct in WoW – how could they, without a Dungeon Master to mediate individuals? – so they have no reason to behave differently.

Why does this even matter? Well, I personally find it sad that a perfectly serviceable fantasy world is overlaid with a ridiculous army of loot-farming psychopaths with arbitrary diacritics in their names (which, in their defense, allow them to recycle unoriginal names without tagging the completely immersion-breaking numerals we usually see on usernames elsewhere). I wish Blizzard had had the foresight to know that their game would be ludicrously successful, so that they could dial down the aesthetics to a degree that would at least approximate the level of inanity that’s demonstrated by the players. Perhaps a consult with the writers of Munchkin d20 would have done them right.

Are You Really in That Much of a Hurry?

If you’ve ever looked at the chat window in WoW, especially in a city, you’ll notice that sometimes people abbreviate things. A lot. Stormwind is SW, which runs a substantial risk of being confused with the direction “southwest”, which has no small chance of being used, considering the extensive geography of the game. Ironforge becomes IF, which on numerous occasions has led me to assume somebody is inserting a rather emphatic conditional into their sentence for some odd reason. You may be familiar with the old “lfg” for “looking for group”, “lfm” for “looking for member”, I assume, and a whole bevy of abbreviations for various trade- and profession-based requests.

In this section, I find it necessary to bore you with linguistics. See, these abbreviations constitute a linguistic change in the dialect of WoW players. There is a widespread agreement that these abbreviations are appropriate and will be understood as the user intends them. I would question whether they’re justified, though. For instance, the greatest volume of chat that goes on is in cities, which is generally considered downtime, since there’s next to no questing done in cities. I would argue that the small amount of time saved by failing to type large chunks of words is only a small gain compared to the substantial cost of it. As I demonstrated above, it is very easy for the uninitiated to be confused by the dialectical changes among WoW players. Before I’d even played an MMO, I heard people speaking of “mobs”, pronounced as the Standard English word, and I assumed them to be talking about large bands of monsters, in accordance to my understanding of the word from prior experience. I later learned that a “mob” is in fact a single monster. Still later, I learned that, rather than having anything to do with the word “mob”, it was an abbreviation of the word “mobile” that dated back to text-based games.

Now, “mob” is an especially problematic word, and I’ll tell you why. No, you can’t get out of this. See, first of all, when people pronounce rather than type it, they generally do so in a way that, objectively, could be considered wrong. I say this because the word originated as a truncation of the word “mobile”, particularly its first syllable. In the context of that word, the pronunciation is “mowb”. Yet, when isolated, we pronounce it “mahb”, by analogy to the actual word of the same spelling and a different meaning. The larger part of the problem here is that it is extremely easy to confuse the WoW word “mob” with the English word “mob”, which have very different meanings; since WoW dialect is a subset of the English language, a newcomer will naturally have a difficult time telling which bits of player speech are WoW-specific and which would also occur in the English they already know.

The question here is whether the time saved by abbreviating – usually not a matter of character survival; if it were, I would forgive it – is a fair tradeoff for the alienation of newcomers. I say it’s not. The fact that I have to endure the obscene lag caused by a crowd of superpowerful yet idle heroes with their particle effects and epic mounts – not to mention their goddamn helmets and goddamn pauldrons – is alienating enough, without having to piece my way through a forest of dense abbreviations.

My Superpower is Unlimited Resurrection

If you’ve played WoW, especially solo, for any significant period of time, you’ve probably died. Quite a fair bit, I’d imagine. If you’re like me, you’ve probably used the death system to accomplish a quest. What do I mean by that? I’ll start by explaining the death system for the two of you left who haven’t played WoW. When you die, your ghost appears at the nearest cemetery, in front of a “Spirit Healer”. You’ve already taken damage to all your equipment equal to 10% of the max endurance for each piece. You now have a choice. Get resurrected by the Spirit Healer right there, take 25% more damage to your stuff, and suffer the debilitating resurrection sickness for 1 minute per level above 10 you’ve reached. Or, run off (albeit at a modestly faster rate than when you’re alive, but you still can’t fly) and find your body, at which point you’ll resurrect at that location (or close to it) with no further penalty, appearing with half your HP and (if you use it) mana. It’s usually the best idea to do the latter. By now you’ll realize that when I say “unlimited resurrection”, I do concede that you won’t be able to do it more than 10 times before you have to get your gear fixed up.

Like I said, I’ve used this death system in order to complete quests. There’s one particular quest, at the end of a chain in Loch Modan, where you have to kill three named troggs (troll-like monsters, whose name was probably pilfered from Tolkien’s “torog”). These troggs are in the back of a cave dungeon. I should be rather thankful that the death system allows me to resurrect right there in the cave, rather than forcing me to run the whole dungeon again, because they can be rather tedious (never mind that the irritatingly rapid respawn rate usually means you’ll have to fight your way back out just as hard as you fought your way in). Take a look at how I accomplished this task. Remember that I have to kill all three of them. Also remember that they’re huddled close together, so there’s no chance of fighting one without attracting the attention of (in game parlance, “pulling”) the others. This is a quest appropriate to my level. I shoot one of them, effectively pulling all of them, and start whacking away at the one. I manage to eventually bring one down, but by that time I’m critically wounded and I lack the ability to keep myself fighting or to escape, so my only choice is to die.

Now, remember also that no matter how badly wounded a monster is, once their current encounter is over, unless they’re dead, they snap back to full health and return to their hangout point. So nothing I can do short of killing one of the three will make a lasting impact. Even then, the impact won’t last terribly long; I’ll only have a few minutes before he’s back up. Sure, I won’t actually have to kill him again, but it will make it harder to take down the other two. So, after I killed the one, I died, and ghosted my way back to my body, where I resurrected close enough not to have a hike but far enough that they wouldn’t jump on me immediately. Once I was back in fighting shape, I repeated the process I started at the end of the last paragraph. I bring down the second. Still, I’m in no shape to bring down the third. I die again. Repeat. My quest is done. I probably died again while rushing out from the cave.

I hope you found something wrong with that. At their best, video games should allow their players to more or less emulate the kind of actions their supposed character would do. Most if not all of us want our games to play out as cinematic simulations of action or adventure stories. But look at what I had to do to accomplish this quest: I beat the troggs not by being a totally badass warrior; I beat them by having the ability to resurrect within a minute or so and come back for more. That’s got nothing to do with my character and everything to do with the game system. I was forced to abuse the game system in order to accomplish this quest. Goddamn, WoW, you made me metagame, and you know how much I hate metagaming.

You Can Do Anything, but You Probably Shouldn’t Do Most of It

Part of the charm of MMORPGs is the wide open sandbox. You’ve been provided with a world, and a number of brief story paths that are completely optional. You don’t actually have to quest at all, as it would be technically possible to grind your way through the monster-infested wilderness all the way to 80. But what truly irks me about WoW is that there are simultaneously so many options and so few good options.

My biggest problem, and the one that really sent me over the edge, is that I can’t play the game I want to play. I could try, sure, but it wouldn’t get me anywhere. A relatively early example was when I had it in mind to remove some of my warrior’s armor, a purely aesthetic choice that I knew would bring gameplay consequences. If I attempted to fight monsters and complete quests appropriate to my level, I would find myself getting damaged beyond normal tolerance levels. The only benefit was that I would save money on repairs – and, of course, I’d look more original, and isn’t that supposed to be part of the draw of MMO games? At that time I imagined an alternate reality where the game adjusted for my (by choice) inferior armor by supplying me with proportionately higher experience rewards, to reflect the greater self-imposed difficulty of what I was doing. The World Ends With You, a quirky JRPG for the DS, does that nicely: you can move a slider to level yourself down as far as level 1 or as high as your current actual level in order to get better material rewards from monsters in exchange for greater challenge. I know it would require some playtesting on the part of Blizzard, but it couldn’t be that difficult to have something of the sort.

It bugged me from the beginning that some classes were described as being “better” than others. To wit, Paladins and Hunters. I played a Warrior, a Rogue, a Priest, a Paladin, and a Hunter for significant periods (to levels 22, 13, 17, 20 and 20, respectively), and I can certainly say that I had easier times of it with those two. It really annoys me, both in computer games like this and tabletop games like D&D, when there are such obvious “best” choices; it makes me feel cheated by the game when I try to go a more original route and suffer for it. Even as I was playing my Warrior, I was consistently finding myself being pressured into choosing one build over another, and I was met with scorn when I expressed a desire to play a balanced character, who was decent at multiple roles. I was further confounded by the apparent necessity to follow very strict guidelines when playing in a group for the game’s earliest major instanced dungeon, the Deadmines. In retrospect, I can’t fault my other players for wanting something of me that I wasn’t giving; I must instead fault the game for making some courses of action so much better than others.

The quest structure, as well, annoys me consistently. Aside from the inanity of individual quests, which almost always amount to killing X number of monsters, gathering Y number of item by killing monsters, or something not too dissimilar from either, I take issue with the fact that, when following optimal practices, every character of a given race will do approximately the same set of quests. The limit of 25 quests at a time is far too generous to prevent a single character from accepting and completing every single quest in a given zone while it’s still remotely close to his level. This essentially means that every human character will be playing more or less the same game, but with a different set of powers. I think it would vastly improve the replay value of the game, as well as increase the individuality of characters (I’ve often observed a set of mail armor on other characters that I recognize very specifically as a sort of uniform, because it’s different from actually precedented medieval armor in the exact same way as mine was) to have mutually exclusive trees of quests, rather than the same old chains repeated ad infinitum nauseamque. If everybody is always doing the same quest chains, and the best gear always comes from quest rewards, then there’s a tendency for characters to look a lot alike if they’re questing in the same area.

When I was starting to have a rough time with my Priest (whose original D&D incarnation wielded a spear rather prominently, thankyouverymuch), I decided to take him to Dwarf territory in order to get him some lower-level quests, sort of a vacation to get him a level or two before he went back to the higher-level stuff. It’s surprising, really, how much of a threat monsters who are only slightly below the “appropriate challenge” threshold actually are in large groups. In that experiment, the reduction in experience reward was in fact too much to justify the small degree to which the tasks were easier at my level.

I think the thing that bugged me the most, though, was what the game actually is. A game can be defined by what’s challenging about it. Action games require you have quick reflexes and react in real time. Turn-based RPGs require you to manage your magic wisely and appropriately build your characters (and sometimes grind for experience) outside the battles. The challenge in WoW is aggro management. In groups, it means keeping the monsters focusing on a designated “tank” while the damage-dealers perform their eponymous role and the healer does likewise (for the tank, who should be absorbing all the hits, making the healer’s job simpler). In solo play, this means being pedantic about where and how you engage in combat. Especially if you’re adventuring on the knife edge of your capacity to best single monsters, your worst fear will be attracting (“adding” in game parlance) additional monsters before you’ve dealt with the first. It can be difficult to know beforehand how far two monsters have to be from each other before they’ll reliably pull separately. What’s more, some monster camps are so designed that you cannot possibly hope to achieve a necessary objective (the body of the guard being watched by murlocs in Elwynn comes to mind) without engaging two or more at the same time. And you have to be well above a monster in level before you can handle a whole gang of them at once; by that point, they’ll be worth crap for experience, if anything. As a side note, I was rather disappointed that, even given my Rogue’s hiding ability, I could not achieve these objectives without breaking my cover and having to fight whatever’s there, even if I was able to stealth my way through an entire dungeon to get there.

What’s It All Mean?

I like playing a game where being strategic is compatible with being heroic. In World of Warcraft, I’m afraid that attempting to roleplay a character in the context of the world and the tasks I’m given would result in great amounts of frustration and wasted time (if time spent on WoW is not considered wasted on principle). Quite simply, the game that I want to play isn’t there in WoW.

There’s a rather large body of theory about tabletop gaming that addresses three aspects: gaming, simulation, and roleplay. Gaming refers to the issues of balance, playability, and fun that make a game what it is. Simulation is all about creating an imaginary world that emulates a consistent if not realistic world. And roleplay has to do with storytelling and characterization. It is usually said that D&D as a system is almost exclusively gaming-based, but it doesn’t close any doors against roleplaying, and simulation is still possible to achieve with a little effort on the part of players and Dungeon Master. The fact that my level 1 character can’t wear so much as a hat makes the simulation aspect extremely hard to reconcile with WoW. And the fact that attempting to react to the environment in a character-appropriate way would result only in frustration makes it next to impossible to consider roleplaying in a way that’s meaningful to gameplay.

I’m sorry, WoW. It’s not you, it’s me. I’m sure there are 11 million other people who can accept you for who you are.

Appendix: What Changes that will Never Actually Happen would Make Me Want to Play Again?

1. Devise a system that scales experience rewards to the quality of your equipment. Some characters have the best possible gear for their class and level. Others don’t. That makes the same tasks easier or harder to complete; I’m just saying the experience should reflect that. I should be able to send my warrior unarmed and unarmored into monster-infested territory and still get an XP reward that’s appropriate to the actual difficulty.

2. Broaden the curve of experience rewards, at least downwards, so that I can make meaningful progress from an easier challenge.

3. Create a richer tree of quests that reflect multiple aspects about a character’s past, and that result in aesthetically different rewards.

4. Either reduce the aggro radius for monsters, or spread them out so their respective radii aren’t so damn close to each other.

5. If you’re going to give stealth abilities to Rogues, let them use them to bypass the most difficult fights in some circumstances (i.e. when the objective is to get something, not to kill something), not just the tedious series of easy fights on the way.

6. Make the rank-and-file fights in instances a little easier, so we have time to relax between big challenges. It’s fine if I have to manage aggro in a big important set-piece battle, but I don’t want to do it for every stinking minion along the way.

7. Tweak the difficulty so that characters die less often in areas appropriate to their level (which could go hand-in-hand with #2 above, if you’re making a broader range of foes “level-appropriate”), but it’s okay to proportionately increase the cost of dying. As it is, dying is too frequent and too cheap. If, say, it were made half as frequent and twice as expensive, I would consider it an improvement.

8. Give us level 1 spears, hats, and pauldrons.

9. Make advancement easier for solo players. The World of Warcraft is populated with millions of illiterate yokels and teenagers. Some of us still have the self-respect to not want to deal with them.

10. My progression, which is fantastic up to 10, slows to a crawl through the teens. Do something about it. I’m getting bored and seeking out bigger challenges only results in frustration.

11. Bring me 17 Mountainfang Gnoll vertebrae. They all have full spinal columns, but they’re so brittle they’re liable to crumble into dust during the fight, so you may only find one good one for every six you kill. Good luck with that.

12. While we’re at it, don’t think I haven’t noticed that every single proper noun is just two common nouns artlessly welded together. I’m on to you.