Tag Archives: Critical Thinking

Recommended Reading

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Yesterday, August 6, was a holiday in many Canadian provinces and territories.  It was also the day that the Mars rover Curiosity landed and the 67th anniversary of the world’s first atomic bomb attack.  Larry Moran’s post, “On this Day in 1945,” on these two events is worth reading:

There are many arguments in favor of dropping the bomb, just as there are many arguments against it. What’s clear is that in the context of 2012 we are not in a good position to judge the actions of countries that had been at war for many years.

The Illusion of Truth

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The mind is a wonderfully complex tool. We truly do not understand it very well, but that is changing. As it turns out, our conscious mind is the tip of the ice burg into our perceptions, recognitions, thoughts, ideas, likes, dislikes, and many other things. Long before we know why we’ve thought of something, our subconscious has been piecing it together for us; without consent.

Interestingly, there is a phenomenon of our conscious-subconscious relationship called implicit memory. This is basically a fancy (and evidently more simplistic) way of grouping the things that you remember, but don’t remember that you actually remember them (yeah… I rofl’d too). Continue reading →

Intellectual Equals

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Recently, I saw a tweet from a fellow skeptic that I follow, @Skepticasm (Adrienne Myers). If you don’t know or follow her, you should. Though we don’t always agree on everything, indicative by this post, she is very interesting, writes wonderfully well, and isn’t afraid to curse in order to emphasize her point (a trinity of qualities I consider fucking essential). Continue reading →

China Bans Tibettan Buddhists from reincarnating

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The title says it all – China will not allow monks to reincarnate without the government’s express permission.

As incredibly asinine and silly as this seems at first glance, the goal of this policy is not so much due to the government’s belief in reincarnation but rather a further attempt to curtail the freedoms of Tibetans. The reason being that to Tibetan Buddhists, only the wisest monks are recognized as having reincarnated, and those who are recognized would naturally become leaders of the religion as well as community. Thus by not allowing Tibetans to declare that reincarnation has happened, the Chinese government would directly undermine the faith as practiced in the region.

The act of the state interfering in religious tenets directly is quite despicable, but is as expected of an authoritarian government like China. I wonder however if this act may even achieve the opposite effect intended in some respects. Chinese people these days have been utilizing the freedom provided by the Internet, and enormous amounts of information – be it insightful criticisms of the government or conspiracy theories and urban legends – circulate very easily and quickly. Enacting such a silly act may strengthen belief in the possibility of reincarnation in the minds of the common people by giving it a significant degree of credibility. After all, Buddhist beliefs are very wide-spread in China.

It will be interesting to see what the reaction to this ridiculously draconian law will be in the coming months.

Majority to Minority: Shut the Hell Up!

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By Andrew Komar

Tom Sears has a new op-ed up in the Daily Star proclaiming that the numbers of the atheist movement ‘doom us to irrelevancy’. I’m not going to spend my time here debunking the numerous attacks, misconceptions and smears against non-theists, but the mere fact that Sears felt it necessary to write it is yet another example of the persecution complex that many Christians seem to have.


Sears mentions the American Atheist recent billboard put up in New Jersey- The “You Know its a Myth” campaign, as yet another example of our shrillness. For the record, the stated purpose of that particular campaign was to reach out to closeted atheists, which has NOTHING to do with Christians. Here are their words :

Millions of atheists are closeted, choosing to go along to get along, and feigning religion to their friends, family, and coworkers. American Atheists understands the pressure to fit in, but we maintain that for people to love you, they must know the real you.

Evidently, Sears thinks the stated motives of the campaign are ‘really’ an attack on Christianity. Look, sir, if your faith is such that a billboard challenging it is enough to destroy it, you must not have had much there in the first place. And if that was the case, you’re lucky that Bill Donahue and the Catholics are there to reassure you on the other side of the tunnel with this billboard:

I applaud these billboards for reaching out to this silent minority. Whether the size of that minority is 3% (as repeatedly asserted by Sears) or closer to 30% the fact is that atheists are not nearly as organized as our religious brothers and sisters. Lacking any cohesive ideology beyond an agreement that there is probably no god(s), we are a diverse group, with many different reasons for that general conclusion. Believe it or not, Mr Sears, but there is no atheist religion. We’re human- and we crave a community that understands us. The billboards are a (repeatedly stated as such) effort to reach out and build that community.

If your a Christian and you read the billboard, I don’t expect you to magically lose your faith. For all I care, you are welcome to continue believing in Jesus, God or Santa Claus; they are all the same in my books. However, when we have the audacity to speak up for ourselves, I’d be nice if we weren’t challenged at every step by the majority that already has every damn privilege.

As for ‘ tear[ing] down one more longstanding tradition and belief’, I’ve never met any atheists who are actually interested in getting rid of Christmas. I happen to love Christmas, the celebration of which obviously predates Christianity.. The midwinter celebration is a human tradition as old as civilization- why shouldn’t we want to pull together and celebrate warmth and fellowship during the darkest days of the year? If you’d like to claim that it’s all about Jesus, go right ahead. But in the interests of mutual understanding, don’t expect everyone else to agree.

So, to Mr Sears and like minded Christians: Merry Christmas and happy holidays from the bottom of my loving, godless heart! I hope you’ll take a greater effort next time in actually understanding our position before you decide to dump on us during this season of mid-winter joy. I doubt it, but I’m always open to evidence that shakes my beliefs. Are you?

December dilemma, revisited

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A couple weeks ago I wrote about my qualms in preparing a December celebration party for our secular parenting group.  Part of my worries were thinking that educating kids about religious traditions/practices could be an act of inadvertently condoning religious belief.  I wrote more about my dilemma here:

I asked myself: if I set out a bunch of nativity sets for the kids to play with, am I reinforcing the idea that there really was a virgin birth?

I think I may have been overthinking things a bit — especially considering most of our kids were more interested in spinning the dreidel than debating the pros and cons of the Torah. But I’m glad that I have these inner struggles when it comes to raising my little freethinker. I want to raise my little girl with an awareness of how human beings have used faith and dogma in an attempt to answer life’s hard questions — but I also want her to have the critical thinking skills to recognize where these faith systems have failed in their answers and have hurt others. Teaching her about religion isn’t the same as indoctrinating her into a belief system.

If you’re interested in the activities we ended up doing for our December celebration night, here’s the post where I elaborated on what we did to learn about Kwanzaa, Chanukah, and Christmas.

The post is a part of the Parents Beyond Belief blog, where I’m a contributor, along with other facilitators of secular family/parenting groups in the States.  We’re in need of more Canadian voices, so if anyone out there looking to start a secular parenting group in your area, contact me!

Skepticism 101 with Michael Shermer

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By Andrew Komar

Michael Shermer, the founder and editor of Skeptic magazine and demi-god of the skeptic community, was in Montreal a few weeks back for a pseudoscientific symposium hosted at McGill. You can watch the whole lecture series for free online, also including David Gorski from Respectful Insolence, Ben Goldacre, and the Amazing Randi. I had the privilege of attending this lecture in person, and Mr Shermer even signed my book! The lecture itself was a classic skeptic lecture, and a little review of the basics of skepticism are never out of order.

The primary thesis was the fact that our brains are essentially pattern seeking organs, which has been a very successful adaptation in evolutionary terms. Shermer termed this tendency”patternicity“, which is our ability to find meaningful patterns in noise, both meaningful and meaningless. Patternicity leaves us open to two main types of errors in finding these patterns. Type 1 errors, or false positives, are when we think we see something that isn’t in fact there. From an evolutionary standpoint, this type of error is low cost, because you will be more cautious if you think a tiger lurks in the bushes, even when there is no tiger. The second, type 2 errors, are much more costly in these terms. This is the assumption that there isn’t a tiger when there is, which results in lunch for the tiger.

Our modern lives are far removed from these life-or-death errors, but we still have the same basic caveman hardware. This cranial ‘misfiring’ is what causes optical illusions, because our brain’s shorthand draws conclusions about what we are seeing, even if it is impossible. Patternicity gives rise to pareidolia, for example, seeing faces in meaningless noise.

More troubling, this patternicity can be primed with other information. If we are told to look for something, our brains can ‘edit out’ conflicting information, such as in the classic gorilla basketball experiment. Other times, we are virtually powerless to see other interpretations of the data.

Dolphins?Pretty dolphins, right? Or did you see something else? (Pervert)

This pattern seeking tendency seeps into our entire lives without us ever noticing it, and it often influences our decisions. More troubling, the more uncertain or random the data, the more likely we are to see patterns in the noise. This fact explains superstitious pigeons as well as our own, often bizzare superstitions. I have little doubt that the roots of many religions today have some part in this same basic brain error. Michael Shermer concluded, the first step in overcoming the screw-ups is knowing they are there in the first place.

The great Richard Feynman once said:  ”Science is a way of trying not to fool yourself. The first principle is that you must not fool yourself, and you are the easiest person to fool.” With the lessons from Michael Shermer’s lecture, we are all better equipped to stop fooling ourselves.

Gnu Atheist Questions

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By Andrew Komar

The factually challenged wingnuts over at the  Discovery Institute have asked the scary new atheist movement some questions. I’ll do my best to answer them, but if the courtier’s reply applies, I’m going to use it. I’m an engineer, damnit, not a doctor of philosophy.

1) Why is there anything?

One of the defining principles of quantum physics is the fuzziness of reality, provided you are looking close enough. Call it the uncertainty principal if you want, but nature as we know it has some inherent randomness  ’built’ into the universe. One of the stranger aspects of this is seen in the phenomenon of virtual particles, which are bits of stuff that pop into and out of existence in time spans shorter than we generally notice. This weirdness also manifests itself in the decidedly spooky Casimir Effect, but the take home lesson is that points of what we think of as empty space actually are teeming with vacuum energy.

The laws of reality allow matter and energy to pop into existence, given small enough time frames and small enough distances. Our cosmological model has that the early universe being of just this fuzzy size, so small and energy dense that time itself got squished into another spatial dimension (see: A Brief History of Time). This was just before the inflationary epoch. which expanded the size of the universe by a factor of 10 followed by 43 zeroes. If Stephen Hawking and the string theorists are correct, than a self-consistent understanding of physics demands that universes can and will be spontaneously created from nothing. We’re just lucky enough to be in a universe that happens to support our kind of life and allows these questions.

Now, it should be noted that we are beyond any experimental evidence regarding the ‘creation’ event, even in theory.  As for the ‘why’ bit, that implies intentionality, which is straight up silly. Try asking gravity ‘why’ it is keeping your butt in the chair. Moving along.

2) What caused the Universe?

Again, ’caused’ implies intentionality, but I think I’ve just explained that the universe is essentially self-caused, randomly, as a necessary outcome of the way physics operates.  This question also seems to require time existing independently of the universe, as causality requires time for a sequence of events. Asking about sequences ‘before’ the universe, or what caused the universe without time existing is as meaningful as asking what is north of the north pole.

3) Why is there regularity (Law) in nature?

I’m going to invoke the anthropic principle here, it’s doubtful that we’d be here to ask that question if the universe wasn’t ordered enough for complex life to arise. If our universe is a probabilistic fluctuation in some grander design, than there are also an infinite number of other universes that would not have perceived regularity, because their variation on the laws of nature wouldn’t allow for beings capable of observation. Call it a self-selection bias with a sample of 1.

Besides, just because we call an observed pattern regular doesn’t make it so; ask the financial markets. The two theories that best explain different properties of our universe are mutually incompatible, but we consider both laws. All we can do is attempt to characterize our observations in a systematic fashion, incorporating them into self consistent models that explain and predicting relevant aspects. Science is the endeavor of weeding out the bad explanations based on evidence, but you are still left with models that are limited by what we know, or even can know.

4) Causes in nature proposed by Aristotle (material, formal, efficient, and final), which of them are real? Do final causes exist?

Buh? Anyway, I don’t know what injecting a thinker who didn’t even get inertia has to do with a modern scientific understanding of the universe, but honestly, I have no idea what to say to this question.

5) Why do we have subjective experience, and not merely objective existence?

I think consciousness, an intrinsically subjective experience, is a property of a functioning brain. The specific mechanics of this process are still an active field of research, but I think we have the basics mapped out. We certainly understand the underlying behavior of chemicals, but the 100 trillion or so neurons all interacting with each other in potentially infinite ways is a particularly difficult problem to tackle, but I suspect it is all our neurons firing in a time-dependent fashion that causes our subjective consciousness. That is, mind is what brain does, and consciousness is an epiphenomenon. The fact that it isn’t ‘real’ in some objective sense is no more consequential than the fact that this website is no more than a series of ones and zeroes being interpreted by machinery.

6) Why is the human mind intentional, in the technical philosophical sense of aboutness, which is the referral to something besides itself? How can mental states be about something?

Courtier’s Reply. I don’t really know what is being asked, but if this is some question intended on injecting some mind-body dualism into the mix, I’m not biting. Mental states are, as far as I’m concerned, a product of neuro-biological phenomenon in time, and it is an unnecessary step to include some soul. You are your brain, and your brain is you.

7) Does Moral Law exist in itself, or is it an artifact of nature (natural selection, etc.)

I think it is much more likely that ‘moral law’ is something humans made up to help us make sense of the world as it relates to us. That is, right and wrong are words we use to describe events that happen to humans, as opposed to some set of events that are objectively right and wrong. By this definition, we can understand how moral law has changed through human history (see: slavery, genocide, CO2 emissions) because moral law is simply how we define the rightness of any given action.

However, to assert that your particular preferences on right and wrong are some objective feature of the universe is offensively self-centered. All I can say with any certainty is what I think is right and wrong, and if we agree on those definitions, than maybe we can build a society together that implicitly respects our definitions. We might even build institutions (like a church, or a police force) to enforce those definitions, but they are not, nor have they ever been, objective things in a universal sense.

8) Why is there evil?

Evil is a matter of definition, overwhelmingly as actions relate to us (see the last answer). Sometimes, events like earthquakes happen that affect humans, but the events themselves are not intrinsically evil, because they are the result of a non-thinking process that is incapable of intentionally causing harm. The universe on grander scales is completely indifferent to the trials and tribulations of the little apes on the pale blue dot, but what we do have in our control is how we act towards each other. We are what we choose to be, and if our fellow monkeys choose to act in a way we think is evil, we have the choice to accept or challenge that.


Ultimately though, ‘evil’ will die with the last human being that understands what is meant by evil. The universe got on just fine for 13.7 billion years before us without our metaphysical hand-wringing about evil, and I suspect it will do just fine when the only remains of humanity are our electromagnetic transmissions speeding endlessly through the cosmos.

Any questions?

Secular Countries Often More Developed

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This is an opinion article of mine that was published in the local university newspaper.

A recent study in the U.S. conducted by the Pew Research Center has shown atheists know more about religion than the religious. It’s hardly surprising that atheists everywhere are enjoying a feeling of smug satisfaction. But the study highlights something rather unexpected — while the United States is a very religious country, it’s also relatively uninformed when it comes to religious knowledge. Ignorance is a dangerous thing, and there can be little doubt that the current religious tensions in the U.S. are caused, at least in part, by a lack of knowledge. However, this study gets at something deeper — a lack of critical thinking south of our border.

The study, published in late September by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, asked basic questions designed to test religious knowledge. About 3,500 Americans from various religious denominations completed the 32-question survey. Self-identified atheists and agnostics scored the highest, followed by two religious minorities: Jewish people and Mormons.

Some factors were far more important than others in determining the extent of religious knowledge. For example, gender made little difference, and religious affiliation was relatively important; education, however, was the most significant determinant of performance in the survey. The difference between the genders amounted to only four per cent, while the performance difference between the most educated and the least educated came to a whopping 30 per cent — on average, 40 per cent correct for high school or less, and about 70 per cent for recipients of post-graduate education.

What can explain this difference? It’s interesting that global studies of religion and intelligence have shown a very strong relationship between IQ and religious affiliation — more secular countries tend to have higher average levels of intelligence in their citizens. But less religious countries also tend to be more developed countries, so it’s not as simple as assuming that less religion translates to intelligence. There’s a link between high levels of education, proper nutrition, and low levels of religiosity in more developed countries; impoverished countries tend to have poorly developed educational institutions, higher levels of malnutrition, and more religious citizens.

What I think is a very important lesson to learn from all these studies is that secularism is somehow related to high intelligence and economic development. I’m not going to say that we should all abandon religion if we want to make the world a better place. What we should do instead is identify the underlying causal factor, or factors, that link secularism, high intelligence, and development.

One of the contributing factors is likely critical thinking, the willingness to analyze problems from a certain perspective, with an attempt to find an optimal result, drawing upon the best knowledge available. Developing countries don’t have enough critical thinkers willing to seriously tackle the problems of their society — or perhaps they’re all too busy trying to secure food and shelter to sit around and ponder. Among those few educated people in impoverished countries, the tendency is to move elsewhere. It’s a vicious cycle of under-development.

Assuming that developed countries have more critical thinkers, this idea might also help explain the association of secularism and development. Having a critical-thinking approach to religion often gives rise to the rejection of religion. Atheists can be found debunking religious claims all the time, thinking critically about the evidence for and against gods, angels, and flying spaghetti monsters.

Perhaps the lesson to learn from all of this is that the United States should work on their education and critical thinking abilities. Having a high level of ignorance — especially of subjects important to societal cohesion, such as religion — is clearly not a good thing. People may not like learning about one another, but it’s better to have an enlightened knowledge of their neighbours’ religious beliefs than not.

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