The Climate Change Conspiracy

The news and social media are constantly buzzing about the so-called climate change conspiracy.  By climate change, I mean anthropogenic, or human-caused, climate change, because no one can doubt that the climate is actually changing.  Glaciers are melting around the world, the Arctic Sea no longer freezes over, the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are retreating and thinning, the permafrost is melting.  These facts cannot be denied.  But deniers claim that humans are not causing it; that it is part of the normal climate fluctuations the Earth is constantly undergoing.

Well, that's a valid argument.  If we are not causing it, all we can do is to try to prepare for the effects - sea level rise, desertification of the Midwest, crop failures, more extreme storms, mass migrations of dispossessed people, etc.  The future is a daunting challenge, but we will face it because we have no choice - nature is foisting these changes upon us.

But if it is true that this devastation is directly the result of our policies, are we not morally required to change those policies, in order to mitigate damage and reduce suffering?  So determining whether or not we are causing climate change is of primary importance.

How can we do that?  No amount of debate will resolve the issue; no political pundits pontificating will reach the truth.  The only solution is to put people to investigating the issue.  This is the role of science - come up with a theory, devise tests and experiments and measurements that will unequivocally prove or disprove those theories, and publish the results openly to the whole world.  Then other scientists read those papers, repeat the tests or measurements, and confirm or deny the results.  If several of these peers show that the initial paper was incorrect, the originating scientist must either prove that the reviews were inaccurate or admit his error and retract his results.  No scientist can publish a paper that is incorrect or merely his opinions or beliefs, because he knows he will be challenged.  Anyone can make a mistake, but science is self-correcting.  A scientist who willfully or repeatedly publishes false information is shamed and driven from the ranks.  Charlatans and liars cannot survive.

Science has been applied to the question of climate change.  Because it has such an immense impact on our lives, every country in the world put its best scientists to studying the problem.  These scientists are from nearly every country on Earth, of every political party, economic system, and religion.  They studied all the evidence of current climate change.  They studied evidence of previous climate changes in ice cores, lake sediments, and ocean bottom sediments.  They analyzed the gases that are causing the rises in temperature to determine their origins.  They searched for other possible causes of global warming, such as fluctuations in the sun's output, volcanic eruptions, changes in ocean currents, and everything else anyone could propose.

The results are in.  97% of the tens of thousands of scientists, including hundreds of Nobel laureates, who studied the problem say that the climate is changing, that it is changing faster than at any time since humans have lived on the planet, and that it corresponds exactly with the increase in carbon dioxide emissions due to our burning of fossil fuels.  Yes, humans are definitely causing the global climate to change.  We need to get off fossil fuels and onto renewable energy as quickly as possible.  But that just makes sense, because by definition fossil fuels are not renewable.  Their quantity is finite and we can foresee that we will be running out of them within this century.  We'll need all those complex hydrocarbons for making plastics and medicines and fertilizers anyway, and it's just short-sighted to burn them for fuel.  It's like castaways setting their lifeboat on fire to keep warm.

So that should be the end of the story, right?  We need to convert our power plants and vehicles to use one of the several proven sources of renewable energy and the problem is solved.  In the meantime, we need to capture the greenhouse gasses being emitted and sequester them.  Science has saved us again.  We have identified an immense threat to our well-being, determined what's causing it, and identified a solution.  But science has also found that the problem is accelerating, and that many of the effects of climate change cause others.  Melting permafrost, for instance, releases methane, an even more effective greenhouse gas.  Melting ice caps reflect less solar energy into space, further warming the planet.  Carbon dioxide absorbed into the ocean makes the water more acidic, killing corals and disrupting the basis of food chains on which half the Earth's human population depends.  So the longer we wait to start correcting the problem, the worse it becomes.  Moreover, science warns us that the Earth is approaching a tipping point beyond which reducing our burning of fossil fuels will not save us from ecological collapse.  And whether or not you consider yourself an environmentalist or care about spotted owls or desert pupfish, ecological collapse means the end of our food supply.  This is not a liberal or conservative issue or a philosophical debate.  It threatens our survival as a species.  Yes, the Earth is resilient and has survived thousands of shocks much greater than this one, but most species did not survive those shocks.  No, it is not the end of the world.  But it could well be the end of our species.  

But we have known the results of the science for decades now.  Competing conclusions (the ice is actually increasing in Antarctica, this is just a normal fluctuation like others we've survived, the sun's energy output has increased, etc.) have all been conclusively disproven.  And still very little is being done and efforts to control greenhouse gases have consistently met with stiff resistance, even ridicule, from the public, industry, and some government officials.

Why?  Because fossil fuels have been essential to our economy for nearly two centuries.  Oil and gas have fueled our industries, technological development, and travel to the extent that they are embedded in our culture.  It is hard for most people to imagine an advanced technological society like our own that is not powered by fossil fuel.  Also, an immense infrastructure has grown up around them.  Millions of people earn their livings in the fuel industry or in dependent industries like transportation and automobile manufacture.  Those companies and their boards and employees see any effort to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels as an assault on their well-being.  The energy industry has poured billions into campaigns of misinformation, asserting that the case for anthropogenic climate change has not been proven, establishing and funding their own "institutions" to publish unsubstantiated claims against climate change, and poured more billions into getting candidates elected who will consistently vote against any measures to reduce dependence on fossil fuels.  They push for decisions like Citizens United, which posits that corporations are people and are free to influence elections and government policies in secret, an idea antithetical to everything Americans hold dear.

So I understand why oil companies are resisting the change.  The conversion to renewable energy will be immensely expensive and disruptive to their status quo.  I can understand why employees of oil companies might feel threatened by the change as well, even though renewable energy is one of the greatest sources of new jobs throughout the world.  I understand why some car companies are slow to develop cost-effective electric cars.

But why are so many citizens still convinced that the threat isn't real?  The social media are a-buzz with conspiracy theories - that the whole issue is a liberal plot.  For one thing, I don't understand why they perceive it as a liberal-conservative issue.  Don't we all want to keep a healthy productive world for ourselves and our children?  Do liberals care more about the planet than conservatives?  I don't get it.

I repeat: all the science comes down on the same side - our activities have already caused the global temperature to rise two degrees Centigrade.  The rise is increasing, and if it goes up another two degrees, there will be massive disruptions - extinctions, desertification of farmlands, droughts, much more extreme storms, etc.  No one wants this to happen.  So if all the facts point to just one conclusion, why do so many people refuse to accept it?

First, they follow media that are paid for by the energy companies - Fox News has been proven to be lying in 80% of what they report.  The titans of the energy industry also control many media outlets and their money pays for advertising and news reports casting doubt and ridicule on the science.  They cherry-pick news items and contend that debates among scientists about the results of climate change mean that the issue is still not decided.  No doubt many right-wing people simply fear and distrust government interference.  But regulations would not be necessary if the oil companies acknowledged the problem and got behind the solution.  But they have not and there is no sign they are willing to.  So, like it or not, only government regulations can address the problem.  

So if all the world's scientists and all the facts are on one side of the argument, what is on the other?  What do climate deniers give as evidence for their case?  That it's a liberal conspiracy.  Let's look at this idea.

First, I see no motive for it.  Why would anyone make up such a frightening idea and try to foist it on the world?  As a way of justifying more regulations?  But what do liberals gain by imposing limits on carbon emissions?  Where is the political or economic gain?

Second, how would they go about this conspiracy?  Supposedly agents of the liberal conspiracy would have to secretly approach the leading scientists and either convince, threaten, or bribe them to start falsifying their results.  Many scientists are not liberals - in fact, many are conservative Evangelical Christians or devout Muslims.  Science is a method, not a religion or political party.  But somehow these agents convince every scientist in the world to go along with their nefarious plot.  Even though there is no evidence of climate change, they would have to make up facts and figures to indicate that there was.  The scientists would have to concoct false data, with convincing graphs and data sets.  They would have to force everyone in their labs to support it without question although they knew it was false.  And then they would publish their paper, knowing that if even one other scientist tried to reproduce the data (as they are required to do), they would be shown to be frauds and lose their positions, their reputation, and their funding. 

When the false papers were published, other scientists would review them and try to reproduce the results.  Many of those reviewing scientists would be competitors of the original authors, and would love nothing more than to prove their rival mistaken.  But everyone would suppress this urge to advance their careers.  They would instead instruct their teams to repeat the experiments, then falsify their own results in exactly the same way.  They would then publish their own papers, exonerating their rivals and putting their own careers at risk.

This plot couldn't succeed if even one scientist broke ranks.  If there were even one honest, conscientious scientist in the world; if even one paper were published pointing out the false data, the whole thing would collapse.  The liberal agents must have secretly visited every lab in the world, met with every employee, and convinced them to further the plot, all before the first false paper was published.  They got the Russians and the North Koreans and the Muslim scientists in Iran to further the secret agenda of the Democratic Party.  And everyone is so great about keeping such a secret.  Not one has broken the biggest story of the century.  Not one scientifically-trained reporter or journal reviewer has noticed the false data in all the hundreds of thousands of papers published; not one investigative reporter has broken the story; not one climate scientist has been forced to retire in disgrace; not one of the scientists has ever gotten drunk and blabbed the story.  No disgruntled grad student has gone to the newspapers.  Those liberal conspirators sure have done a great job.

So who is telling the truth - the tens of thousands of scientists who investigated the facts and who have nothing to gain and everything to lose by lying; or a dozen oil companies who could lose a lot of money if the world knew they were killing the human race?

Why Believe in God?

Why Believe in God?

    Many of my cousins, nieces, and nephews have friended me on Facebook, so I see snippets of their lives - in many cases stunningly uninteresting, as I'm sure my posts are to them.  But most of them are Christians, and all too often their posts are religious, asking me to pray for someone or praise Jesus for something.  Hundreds of these go by, and usually I just scroll past them with a mild sadness that my relatives - who are very nice people - not only believe this silliness, but want to tell me about it.  But often I feel a compulsion to reply - to point out how absurd their ideas really are.  I usually resist, for I know I won't convince them and will only get the whole family mad at me.
    But I feel sorry for them.  Of course we disagree on many points, but most don't matter.  Blood is thicker even than politics.  But religion is the defining principle of their lives.  They're proud of their beliefs.  They make big life decisions and political choices based on it.  They spend a large percentage of their lives involved in it - going to services, holiday activities, church social events, etc., as well as praying and talking and thinking about it.  Religion dominates their lives and colors and filters their view of the world and their place in it.
    I always come back to the same question: why do they believe in it so strongly?  How can they be so certain of a set of ideas that can never be proven or disproven?  What is the immense motivational force that makes them cling so tenaciously to this particular set of ideas, without an iota of hard evidence?
    And the answer seems so blindingly obvious: they want these beliefs to be true because they make them feel good.  There's a God who watches over you and loves you.  If you're a good person, He'll protect you and keep you safe.  He's even given you instructions that explain everything.  He tells you how to live and how to know what's right and wrong.  And best of all, you won't have to die and will live forever in some kind of perfect paradise with all your lost loved ones.
    What a wonderful thing to believe.  All the terrible things that happen - accidents, disease, war, cruelty, death - it's all part of God's plan.  It seems terrible, but it must be for a good end - to teach us, or to make us stronger, or as some kind of karmic payment for some wonderful result.  Who wouldn't want to believe in that?
   I would want to believe in that.  I don't want bad things to happen to me and mine; I don't want to die; I want to know why there's so much pain and suffering in the world.  But the fact that it would be nice if it were true is totally irrelevant to whether or not it is true.  I'd like to believe unicorns were real and magic existed, too.  I'd love to think that we could travel through time and voyage across the galaxy.  But no one's ever provided evidence for unicorns or magic, and the mathematics of physics say such travel is impossible.  Bummer.  And for me, that's the end of it.  Fun to think about that stuff, but it's just plain not true.
    But for believers, they somehow ignore the fact that the only reason to believe in religion is because it feels good.  My Christian relatives believe Jehovah is the only true God, although they know that if they'd been born in a Muslim country they would believe just as passionately in Allah.  There are thousands of religions in the world today, and no doubt millions more that have gone extinct.  They are mutually exclusive - if one is right, all the others must be wrong.  Believers think every single one of them is mere superstitious nonsense - every one but theirs.  Isn't it much more logical to not make that exception?  Isn't it infinitely more likely that people all over the world are confused about life and afraid of death and they've made up stories to help them face it?  Why believe, as Mark Twain put it, in something you know just ain't so?
    It's not just a philosophical issue.  People are using these myths as a basis for decisions and opinions.  They depend on these beliefs to determine their duties and responsibilities, their morals, their sense of right and wrong.  It determines their relations to other people, other species, and the larger world.  They judge others by their beliefs, and support or oppose those others based solely on those beliefs.  The world is all "us" and "them"; those who agree with our beliefs and those who oppose them.  This is a terribly simplistic and unrealistic view of the world, and an immensely dangerous one.  If we align ourselves with bigots and zealots of our religion and despise the good, kind, moral people of other religions, we are on the wrong side.
    If my Christian relatives are right, there's nothing to worry about - we're all God's children and He will take care of us.  But what if they're wrong?  If they're wrong, all the choices they make throughout their lives, everything they think and do, is based on false information.  To my mind, religion is just too dangerous an idea to believe in.

Witchcraft

I was just watching a TV show, Mysteries at the Museum, which tells the stories of little-known artifacts at museums around America.  The format is very annoying, with the exact same presentation every time and the identical dramatic music and camera pans in every story.  They are introduced by Don Wildman, who seems to add no value whatsoever to the show as the voice-over narrator actually tells the story.  Wildman reappears after each commercial break, trying to look intense and dramatic with little success as he tells us what we just watched two minutes ago.  But the stories are often interesting to an amateur mystery buff, so I record them and watch them when there's nothing better on.

Tonight's episode had a story about a witch's ball, an ornate blown glass ball with a tab to hang it by.  They were used in Colonial times as protection against witches  I had never heard of these things, and I've done quite a bit of reading about witchcraft lately as part of my genealogical research.  I kept stumbling upon a notorious trial and execution for witchcraft of one Goodwife Knapp in Fairfield Connecticut in 1653.  The magistrate, the accuser, and a witness for the defense were all ancestors of mine.  Fascinated, I read several accounts of the case.  As in Arthur Miller's The Crucible, a roughly historical play about another witchcraft trial, the accused women seemed to have just been too uppity for their neighbors and they were hanged for it (no witches were burned in America - though one was ironed flat).

So I was very interested in the TV story about the last witch convicted in Virginia.  She was 46-year-old Grace Sherwood of Pungo, Virginia.  When her husband Jim died in 1701, leaving her with a farm and three young sons, she resolved to run the farm herself.  To work in the fields, she wore her husband's trousers.  She also made money on the side as an herbalist and midwife.  She was said to love animals and kept a pet raccoon.  The ideal model of a tough pioneer woman, right?  But apparently she had too much land and she was too pretty, so the neighboring wives accused her of witchcraft and she was brought to trial.  They searched her house and could find no evidence of witchcraft.  But they also found no witch's ball, and who but a witch would have no ball to protect her home?  But they didn't want to judge her hastily for a capital crime.  They wanted proof.

Everyone knew that if a person were tied up and thrown in a river, they would drown.  Only witchcraft could save such an unfortunate.  So they essayed the experiment - they stripped her naked, tied her thumbs to her toes and tied a bag over her head.  They rowed her out into the middle of the river and threw her in.  She floated.  The sheriff rowed over and helpfully tied a 13-pound Bible around her neck, which dragged her to the bottom.  But plucky Grace pulled off a Houdini stunt.  She untied herself underwater, removed the bag, and came to the surface.  Heroine's courage hailed as she survives superstitious nonsense, right?  No, they dragged her to shore and a group of impartial women (the prosecution witnesses and her accuser) examined her naked body minutely.  They found two moles on her private parts, which could only be explained as witch's teats, which she uses to nurse her familiars and stray demons that drop by for a tipple.  Well, with this overwhelming evidence, who wouldn't convict her?

I'll say this for the good people of Princess Anne County.  They didn't hang her - they were civilized people.  Her children were taken away to be raised by strangers, her land was seized by the county, and she was imprisoned for eight years.  She didn't pine and die, though.  Grace was made of sterner stuff.  She survived her prison sentence, fought for years to regain her property, and was at last successful.  She lived there to the age of eighty, a reclusive widow.  The taint of witchcraft hung about her the rest of her life though, and it was said that after she died black cats frequently came to visit her grave.  The townspeople, fearing that her spirit would raise the cats against them, killed every cat in the village.  I am happy to report that Princess Anne County was subsequently overrun with an infestation of rats and mice.

The TV show ended with Wildman looking sententiously into the camera and telling us that 300 years later the Governor of Virginia pardoned her.  And that was that: another tale about those funny Colonial ancestors of ours.

I was struck by the horror of the story.  Here's this brave widow, living on her own on the edge of Indian country, managing a frontier farm, raising three children, healing her neighbors, and taking care of animals.  And these superstitious idiots put this woman through this torture and humiliation, try to kill her, then take away her family, farm, livelihood, and freedom.  So the governor pardoned her posthumously for a crime that never existed.  What about those responsible?  Shouldn't the churches admit their blame?  The Bible says that witches exist and a believer should kill them.  And the churchgoers followed their scriptures and did just that.   Those who believe in the Bible, who claim it is the word of God, implicitly support these kinds of superstitious cruelty and ignorance.

If the Bible is your scripture, your guide to ethics and morality, then you are responsible for what happened to Grace Sherwood and hundreds more like her.

That Government Which Governs Least

"That government is best which governs least," first quoted in the United States Magazine in 1837 and the opening argument of Thoreau's 1849 Civil Disobedience, has been often quoted ever since, usually in arguing against a proposed new power of government.  The Republicans especially have used it against what they see as increasing government interference in our freedoms.

It is important, however, to examine Thoreau's expansion of the thought.  When all the citizens accept responsibility for the society they create, they will not need a government at all.  But Thoreau saw that many people had not evolved to this point - they "were not prepared for it," as he put it.  Until then, government is a necessary evil - an expedient (though he notes that most are inexpedient).  I submit that we still have not reached this Utopian state of society, and we never will.  Until the Singularity occurs and we can all relax into the protective arms of our robotic masters, we will have to govern ourselves as best as we can.  Still, most of us humans - and especially I think Americans - long for a world without so much bureaucracy and so many rules.

What strikes me when I hear this quote or its concept invoked, is that so often it's used on the wrong side of the issue.  Gay marriage is a perfect example.  Opponents say that government (especially the judicial branch in this case) is interfering with traditional marriage and we need laws like DOMA to protect it.  I want to ignore the pros and cons of gay marriage for now (perhaps in a later rant).  But isn't passing laws to give the government the power to tell you who you can and can't marry just such an expansion of government power into our lives, depriving a large proportion of citizens of one of their freedoms?

Abortion bans, another hot-button Conservative issue, continue to pour out of the new Republican Congress.  This is another example of new laws to take away a freedom that Americans have - I can't say enjoyed, but certainly exercised freely - for a half century.

So are prohibitions on alcohol and drugs, costing the Country over a trillion dollars since Nixon declared his War on Drugs.  Nearly 3% of all Americans are either incarcerated, on parole, or in probation.  Taking away a citizen's right to take drugs takes away some of his freedom, and it creates a vast bureaucracy.  Yet many Conservatives support these laws.

In all three of these cases, the actions to be prohibited have no direct effect on the voter.  These laws do not make you safer.  They do nothing to increase your own freedom or advance your pursuit of happiness.  If you disapprove of these actions, don't marry someone of your sex, don't have an abortion, and don't take drugs.  You have that freedom.  But you are not affected in any way if a lesbian couple marries, a woman has an abortion, or somebody gets high (DUI will always remain a required law).  Yet conservative voters consistently vote for more government and less freedom.

Wouldn't it be better to not pass new restrictive laws and repeal those already on the books?  No, we're not yet Thoreau's perfect society that can do away with government.  But can't we let people make their own decisions about their own lives, especially when those decisions do nothing to lessen our own freedoms?  Marriage (gay or otherwise), abortion, and drug use are all complex and serious issues, with huge effects on the lives of those engaging in them.  Many people make terrible mistakes.  People should be thoroughly informed of the pros and cons of each choice, and competent and unbiased advisors should be readily available to help people make those decisions.  Each person's conscience should be their guide.  But get government the hell out of the way.

If you're going to use Thoreau's quotations for your argument, I suggest this one:

“Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward.” 

Religion vs Science

Religion vs Science

It is a common meme, especially among those who believe in one or more gods (hereafter referred to as believers) that science "has it in" for religion, that the scientific establishment is actively opposing the religious establishment or its beliefs.  This idea is completely false.  Many scientists are believers and no scientific journal has ever published a paper attacking religion.  No scientist has claimed that he can prove that God exists or does not exist.  God's existence remains completely unverifiable (by either school of thought), and therefore by definition it is not a subject for science.  If you define religion (or just your faith) as a belief in God, then science has no opinion on the matter.

However, if your faith depends on (or even includes) the literal truth of the Bible, Koran, Torah, Bhagavad-Gita or any of the thousands of other allegedly sacred writings (hereafter referred to as the Bible), then science can and does conflict with your religious beliefs.  Again, no scientific paper attacks these beliefs directly.  For example, I have never seen a paper in a peer-reviewed journal that said "Genesis never happened."  Science isn't concerned with the Bible, so it doesn't address it, much less attack it.

Long ago, before the age of science and reason (and even later for Mormons and Moonies), people had no way to understand the world around them.  Everything was inexplicable.  What are the stars, sun, moon, and planets, and why do they move as they do?  What causes thunder, lightning, earthquakes, eruptions, disease, accidents, weather?  Why do bad things (disease, accidents, natural disasters, death, etc.) happen to us?  Why is the world as it is; how did it arise and what will happen to it in the future?  What happens to us after we die?  What is the best way to live?  Do we have free will, or are we helpless bumps on the karmic log?  What rules govern our existence?  These are huge questions, and everyone would like to know the answers.  But how could they possibly be answered?  It seemed impossible for people to ever find out.  And all over the world, people did the only thing they could: they guessed.  They made up answers.

Since it was obvious that people didn't make the world and couldn't create or prevent celestial events and natural disasters, someone else must have - someone immensely more powerful.  If we don't understand life and death and chance and fate, someone else far wiser must.  So people invented gods and myths.  What is thunder, you ask?  Why it's made by Zeus or Jupiter or Thor or any of several hundred other versions of a god who makes thunder.  Why does the moon change phases?  Simple, it's one of the moon gods.  What causes earthquakes?  No problem - a god of the underground is restless.  What happens after we die?  We go to a better place where there are no diseases or accidents and everybody's happy.  Or we come back and have another life.  Or we become one with the gods.  Where did the world come from?  The gods made it.  How should we behave?  The way the gods tell us to.  Every question is answered, nothing left out, no reason to wonder any longer.  It was the perfect (and only available) solution.

And it worked, in every society in the world.  People were happy to have all their questions answered.  They loved their gods and creation myths, and they came to define that culture.  We, and only we, are the chosen people, the ones created by and beloved by (our) god.  We are the ones who obey his laws, and everyone else in the world does not.  The others are wrong - perhaps just mis- or un-informed, but perhaps evil because they don't believe in the true god.  The only downside was that every culture developed its own myths and gods and they were mutually exclusive.  Each god declared that their way was right and all others wrong.  This resulted in uncountable wars and genocides, which continue today.  Still, a small price to pay for the satisfaction and security of knowing the answers to everything.

Then, probably around 1600 BC in Egypt, another method of finding answers was developed.  It started in medicine.  Doctors would try a treatment on an ailing person, then wait to see what effect it had.  If nothing happened or the condition got worse, they would try something else.  Writing was developed about this some time, so we have records of those early experiments.  A few centuries later in Mesopotamia, people began carefully measuring the motions of the heavenly bodies and recording their observations.  They discovered that it wasn't random motions, but repeating patterns.  You didn't need gods and myths to predict eclipses, for instance.

The Greeks codified the new method of learning about the world, and called it science.  Faith was not required.  Someone proposed an explanation for some phenomenon, just as they had always done with religion, but then you tested it with experiments carefully designed to eliminate error.  If you thought you had proved (or disproved) a theory, you told others about it and they repeated the experiment.  If they could not, you did more experiments to see which of you had made the mistake.  When an experiment could be repeated by anyone and they all got the same results, everyone knew that the right answer had been found.  It didn't matter what you believed, what religion you were, what culture or continent or era you inhabited.  If anyone didn't believe it, you could do the experiment with them and prove them wrong.  Any high school class can prove the truth of evolution or the atomic theory or relativity.   It was no longer a guess or an opinion or dogma - it was simply true.

The new method fairly quickly started running up against religious dogma, and the religious establishments, seeing how the irresistible power of logic and reason threatened their holy scriptures, fought long and bitterly to suppress science.  For fifteen hundred years, the Catholic Church held back any advance in knowledge, while Asian, Semitic, and American civilizations quickly surpassed the Europeans in their understanding of the world around us.  When the Enlightenment started to liberate European minds, however, that culture made stunning strides in pushing back the domain of superstition.  Men could make and understand thunder and lightning, calculate the orbits of the heavenly bodies, peer into the distant past and future, and begin to understand our place in the universe.

The answers poured in: no, God didn't make the universe four thousand years ago - it was created 13.8 billion years ago; no, the sun doesn't go around the Earth - it's the other way round; no, supernatural magic doesn't exist - not one example of miracle, extrasensory perception, communicating with the dead, prescience, ghost, or soul has ever been detected in a verifiable setting; no, God didn't make all the animals at once - species are constantly going extinct and changing into other forms.  No, it does not require a creator to create all the complexity and beauty we see all around us.  Every time there was a religious belief or given truth that could be tested, hundreds and thousands of cases, science won every time.  Not once did religion win by proving science wrong.  Religion doesn't work that way.  You believe it because you believe it and it can't be proven right or wrong.  But if your religion makes some statement, and that fact can be tested, religion always loses.  We know, with 100% certainty, that Genesis is wrong.  Those events never occurred, and we can prove it.

In the face of all this new evidence, believers have become divided.  Some cling tenaciously to their beliefs, insisting that their scriptures are the word of God and every word is literally true.  As the evidence continues to mount, this position becomes harder and harder to hold.  It means shoving your fingers in your ears and refusing to listen to any argument (or read any book), saying, "No, No!" with no argument to back it up.  Millions of fundamentalists all over the world are doing this right now.  But as knowledge of the world and the obvious effectiveness and correctness of scientific knowledge disseminate through our global culture and technology, surely this irrational backlash will eventually subside.

Other believers simply retract the borders of the realm of religion.  Sure, science is right about cosmology and physics and geology and evolution.  That was a bunch of creation myths those old guys believed in that somehow got into the Bible.  The real story is that God is real, He loves us and listens to our prayers and we'll get to meet Him after we die.  Science can never touch that faith.

In a way they are correct.  No scientist will ever prove that God does not exist or that there is no afterlife.  There is not one iota of evidence for these beliefs, but absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, as Astronomer Royal Martin Rees so concisely put it.  But science has a remarkable record of being right about the world.  We have spacecraft on other planets and GPS here only because both relativity and quantum mechanics can be written down as mathematical formulae and solved.  If those principles - or any of the knowledge that supports them - were wrong, these things would not be possible.

If you made a table of reasons to believe or not believe in God, 100% of all experiments, physical data, and known facts would be against it.  No experiment has ever confirmed a religious idea.  There is no evidence that prayers work or believers have better lives than non-believers; that miracles occur, now or in the past; or that there is a heaven, hell, or any other kind of afterlife.  On the other side of the ledger, what reasons are there for ignoring 100% of the evidence and believing in a God that can never be proven?  There is only one, and it is so glaringly obvious it constantly astounds me that many believers seem to have never thought of it.  We want to believe.  It feels good to believe that there's a powerful, beneficent being who understands all the strange and terrible things that happen in the world; that loves and values us; that our lives have a larger meaning than just procreating and dying; that we will live again after our deaths and be again among the loved ones we lost.  God has a plan, and he has rules to live by.  We don't have to wonder what's right and wrong, whether what we're doing could have terrible and even fatal results - it's all in the book.  We're not confused and scared and unsure aging adults - we're children, guided and loved and protected by a caring, wise, and all-powerful father.  If you were trying to make up a happy comforting myth, you would make up exactly this one.  And we did.

Of course, there is another powerful reason to believe in a religion.  It's what is taught to us as children.  As we start to learn about the world as infants, we turn to our parents to provide the knowledge.  They teach us so much - how to behave with others, how to avoid getting injured, how to dress and talk and eat.  Most of what we know we learned from them.  And when they teach us their religion, of course we accept that too as truth.  Why should we doubt them, when they have been so reliable in every other way?  So all over the world, children grow up in their parents' religion, and they pass it on to their children.  If you had been born in Iraq, do you really think you would not be Muslim?  No one reasons their way to religion.  The number of people who come to religion as adults or who change religions (other than for a marriage or to avoid discrimination) is vanishingly small.  And where scientific knowledge is readily available and there is freedom of thought, even people raised in a religious upbringing frequently abandon it.

To my mind that's the distinction between atheists and believers.  Some of us want to know what the world is really like and turn to impartial science for our answers.  Knowledge allows us to take an active part in shaping the world - to try to avert climate change for instance, or plagues or mass extinctions or depletion of resources or avoiding a comet impact.  Believers would rather not know the facts because they'd rather feel safe.  They truly believe that what you don't know can't hurt you - one of the silliest and most demonstrably, dangerously incorrect aphorisms ever created.

Noah

Noah

I see there's a new biblical epic movie out about Noah.  I don't intend to see it, because I am pre-judging it.  I can assume that because it was made in America, it will not dare to present the story as an exciting fairy tale, but will pander to the evangelical Christians and include all the divine miracles.

Normally I abhor prejudice and try to avoid it, but with this film I feel safe in assuming that I would hate it.  This is because it is about the Noah story, and of all the biblical fables, it is the most absurd and demonstrably false.  Let me count the ways:

First, God caused the flood because every single person - man, woman, child, and infant, except Noah's immediate family - had offended Him and fell short of His requirements and therefore deserved death.  Well, He created them complete with all their desires, strengths, and weaknesses, so all their actions and failures are by definition His fault.  Also, He is omniscient, so He knew before He created them exactly what they would do.  So why should He be surprised, much less offended?  And if He wanted to punish all those millions of people, why not just kill them?  Why have a flood?  Knock them on the head and be done with it.

Second, except for the animals saved in the ark, the flood presumably killed every terrestrial animal on Earth, plus all the birds and insects (they could not stay aloft for the six or twelve months the flood endured).  These billions of creatures were presumably blameless, but God destroyed them as well.  He is omnipotent - why didn't He just strike down those who offended Him?

Third, Genesis 7:19-20 says: "All the high mountains that were under the whole heaven were covered.  Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail and the mountains were covered."  Fifteen cubits is about 23 feet - so clearly 23 feet of water wouldn't have covered even the smallest hill.  The only way to make sense of this is if the water covered the highest mountain by 23 feet.  The highest mountain is Mount Everest at 29,029 feet, so we have an accurate figure for the depth of the water - 29,052 feet, or five and a half miles above normal sea level.  This is an increase of a billion cubic miles of water - immensely more water than exists on the whole Earth, but never mind - He can do anything.  It rained for forty days, so that's 726 feet of rain a day, or an inch of rain landing every two seconds, over the whole surface of the Earth, non-stop for forty days.  Never mind that a rainfall that hard would have pounded the ark and its crew to jelly.

Fourth, raising sea level by five and a half miles would kill all marine plants and animals that depend on the shore or the bottom.  Even the incredibly hardy animals that live at the bottom of the trenches would have been crushed by nearly doubling the pressure.  Also, all that fresh water would have diluted the sea to the point that it would be essentially a brackish world.  All the animals in the ocean would have died in days, as would the freshwater species.  Too bad He didn't suggest a few saltwater tanks in the ark to hold all the whale sharks, blue whales, and giant squid.

Fifth, the ark itself.  It is to be built of gopher wood.  There is not now, nor was there in ancient times, any tree by that name.  Gophers are North American animals and were not known to the Jews.  When Noah took his shopping list down to his local Home Depot, he must have had some trouble filling the order.  Supposedly he substituted some other wood and hoped God wouldn't notice.  Whatever he used, there must have been a lot of it, because the ark was huge - 450' long by 75' wide by 45' deep - larger than any other ship built until around 1900.  It would have rated a cargo tonnage of about 12,000.  A lot of work for one guy and his kids.  A hull of that size would require vast engineering knowledge, unlikely for a goatherd.

Sixth, those animals.  Even a 12,000-ton ship could never hold two of every kind of animal known to the Jews - elephants, giraffes, hippos, rhinos, lions, tigers, snakes, etc.  Then there are all the animals they didn't know about but must have somehow rounded up anyway (because they survived the flood) - water buffaloes, bison, kangaroos, wallabies, grizzly bears, platypi, gorillas, condors, yaks, etc. etc.  Then there are ten to twenty million species of insects - over 350,000 species just of beetles.  The beetles alone would have buried the ark in a huge mound.  As for bacteria and viruses, no one has even estimated their number of species.  Still, Noah and his boys must have rounded up a couple of every single one.

Seventh, the plants.  Being submerged under five miles of brackish water for half a year would have killed all the land plants.  The Bible simply ignores their problems and what the survivors would have eaten after the flood.  Did they have two of every plant in there as well - redwood trees and all?

Eighth, Genesis 8:3-4 states: "And the waters returned from off the earth continually; and after the end of one hundred and fifty days the waters decreased.  And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month upon the mountains of Ararat."  Now Ararat is 16,854' high, so the water had receded from 29,209' to 16,854', or 12,355' in that time - about 82' a day, or 77 cubic miles of water every second.  Where did all those billion cubic miles of water go?  It can't have run off anywhere because it was already covering the ocean.  It can't have evaporated because the atmosphere can't hold that amount of water,

So, for all the above reasons and hundreds more, the story of Noah's flood cannot be true, even allowing for miracles, blind faith, and an omnipotent God.  There are scores of similar examples in the Bible.  If there is a grain of truth in it, some village was probably devastated by a flood and many people died.  The old tale was used by the authors of the Bible to keep people in line - if you don't do what God wants, he can kill you, so be good for goodness' sake.  Like Paul Bunyan and Little Red Riding Hood, this is a fairy tale.  It was made up by ignorant camel herders, just like the tall tales and creation myths of every other culture in the world,  Anyone who thinks it is factual does not live in the real world.

Trust me.  Skip the movie.