Survival of Someone

Everyone who references Phillip Longman's article "Survival of the Godliest" titles thier own critiques "Survival of the Godliest" so I didn't. He writes about the trend of religious people having more children than secular people, so in the future there will be a trend toward more religious people and less secular people. Also, the more religious the person is the more children they have, so more deeply fundamental religious folks have more children than fair weather religious folks, but more on that latter.



Once again we resume our exploration of the topic of the demographic decline of atheism. Modern fundamaterialists of all stripes like to think that we're fucking killing the earf and humans have to go extinct to save the planet. Some like to anthropomorphise the planet, thinking the earf to be their mother goddess. Those who are not dirt worshiping dirt worshipers (when people refer to "mother earth" they mean dirt) are in the Dickey D crowd, folks who think they're better than us and shutter at the fact that they must inhabit the same space-time continuum as us lower forms of life. They don't care about the earth but they are smart enough to use the language of the dirt worshiping dirt worshipers in order to get the dirt worshiping dirt worshipers to join forces with them against their religious enemies.



Not too long ago I got into an argument with someone who may or may not fall into one or both of the above groups. Now, I don't like to get into arguments. They're rarely fun and even rarelyer accomplish anything. I'm more like a reporter. I report things here and then tell you, my valued couple of readers, to go out and do your own research and come to your own conclusions. Often I will give opinions, but more often than not I will admit that more study is needed and we shouldn't jump to conclusions. She used a lot of ten dollar words, said I was mistaking correlation with causation, and that when Muslims move to Europe and secularize their fertility rate drops. Well, big words won't win you an argument, around half the people who take a side on the issue of declining population raise the issue of the decline of secular people and I doubt ALL of them are mistaking correlation with causation (aside from myself and Phillip Longman, Vincent Torely at UD, and secular University of London professor Eric Kaufmann must be mistaking correlation for causation, plus Dean Radin didn't mention any logical mistakes with this argument, though he did question what the world would look like if the trend continues), plus, the argument is that religious people have more children so will outbreed secular people, if Muslims who migrate to Europe SECULARIZE one would expect them to have fewer children if the argument were correct. I'm not trying to make an argument from authority. All the people I've listed fall into the group of humanity, and as a member of that group there is metaphysical certainty that they will be mistaken at least once in their lives. I'm also not trying to make a climate change (hide the decline) type appeal to concensus, which does not exist in science. However, using fancy rhetorical devices won't make the argument go away just because you don't like the implications with regard to your lifestyle choice. Vincent at UD presented a good argument why secular people may still win the demographic battle, due to legislation (some passed, some very easy to pass) that would limit the number of children religious people could have or prevent them from having children in the first place, and those few children they do have, assure that they are given secular indoctrination so secularism survives the demographic decline. On top of that I might suggest that in the future, at the current rate of government expansion, there may come a day when political dissidents (libertarians, fundamentalist religious folks, etc.) may just be rounded up into camps (extraordinary rendition, 110,000 Japanese rounded up during WWII, it's happened before) and exterminated, or at least removed from the breeding population.



Getting back to Longman's article, he writes:



"To be sure, in countries rich and poor, under all forms of government, birth rates are declining across the globe. But they are declining least among those adhering to strict religious codes and literal belief in the Bible, the Torah, or the Koran. Indeed, the pattern of human fertility now fits this pattern: the least likely to procreate are those who profess no believe in God; those who describe themselves as agnostic or simply spiritual are only somewhat slightly less likely to be childless. Moving up the spectrum, family size increases among practicing Unitarians, Reform Jews, mainline Protestants and “cafeteria” Catholics, but the birthrates found in these populations are still far below replacement levels. Only as we approach the realm of religious belief and practice marked by an intensity we might call, for lack of a better word, “fundamentalism,” do we find pockets of high fertility and consequent rapid population growth."



If you're wondering where the Urban Mystic falls on that scale, well, I'm wondering too. At the present moment it's best to let Longman do the talking.



"When confronted with the fact that they are being outbred, secularists often respond that many if not most children born into highly religious families will grow up to reject the faith of their fathers — such is the assumed allure of freedom and individuality....Arguing against this proposition, however, are some stubborn demographic facts. Among fundamentalist families, it turns out, the apple does not fall far from the tree. And the more demanding the faith, the more this rule applies."



According to Eric Kaufmann's new book, Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?: Demography and Politics in the Twenty-First Century, Darwin explains why secular people will be much fewer and farther between in the future and the religious shall greatly multiply.



"In a world in which childbearing is rarely accidental and almost never rewarding economically, birthrates increasingly reflect values choices. And so, by Darwinian process, those who adhere to traditions that preserve and celebrate the ancient injunction to “go forth and multiply” wind up putting more of their genes and ideas into the future than those who don’t. As Kaufmann shows, fertility, over time, plays out like compound interest. That is, even if religiously fundamentalist families only have a few more children than secular or religiously moderate counterparts, and they can keep those children holding on to fundamentalist faith and values (especially related to child-bearing), the passage of generations will greatly magnify their numbers and influence. Similarly, secularists and others who choose to have only one or two children, and who pass those values on to their children, will, over time, see their population decline precipitously."



Will religious people inherit the earth? Will secular people go extinct? I will say this only once, so pay attention: I don't know.



I am NOT an unbiased observer. There are few such people, maybe none. I do have a stake in the matter, and you may as well. I can only present to you the information that I am given and then ask that you draw your own conclusions.



-Dee

Balking Someone

Up on The Procrustean we see a piece on Roger Penrose's new aeons of time cosmology, which I alluded to in Georg Cantor's Infinities Part Two. Basically here's what aeons of time is:



"after all the matter in the universe is swallowed up by black holes, and after they evapourate leaving behind nothing but photons, everything gets bigger and somehow the universe starts over again, forever."



Using data from sophisticated equipment, Penrose has claimed to have found irregularities in the CMB (cosmic microwave background) that could only be produced if his aeons of time cosmology were correct. However, the supporters of the various inflationary models also claim the data corresponds to precisely what would be expected if inflation occurred. Since the aeons of time and cosmic inflation are incompatable one or both of them has to be wrong (about the data found in the CMB and in general).



After reporting this, Rob at The Procrustean then makes a conclusion about Penrose, inflation, and intelligent design. He says (this whole issue is a bit of a head scratcher for me so I'll just point you in the right direction and let you figure this out for yourself):



"Neither Sir Roger nor the conventional inflationary models have made solid predictions. At best, they can be tweaked to some, but not all aspects of the data. They possess far too many adjustable parameters drawn from some sort of metaphysical repository of models that is itself questionable. Sir Roger attempts to address the metaphysical problem with Creation, and inflationary models address the metaphysical problem of contingency. Neither is particularly convincing. (And a closer look at CCC theory raise more questions about the infinite pressure of dark energy, the rescaling time, the supposed decay of protons and electrons, etc.)



"Which may mean that it is time to assess the situation. Some of the best minds of two generations have addressed cosmology since the discovery of the 3-degree blackbody CMB radiation and not found solutions to the twin problems of a necessary Creator and a necessary Design. Given their failure, and I do mean abject failure to find anything beyond a metaphysical black box with lots of dials, I would suggest that we claim support for the contrary. All of them have put the cart before the horse, trying to create a no-beginning-no-design theory by massaging the data, post-dicting their data to support their theory, and still have not succeeded, thereby proving the very thing they did not want to prove."



I'm not so sure I would jump from Penrose and inflation being wrong to the alternative being correct, but it does give one something to think about.



-Dee

A House of Cards Built in Midair

The pseudoscience of psychiatry is practically the seventh topic I investigate, though I rarely say anything, except to the radio. Every time someone on the radio tries to sell drugs, or the "central dogma" of psychiatry, that mental disorder = brain disorder and that chemical imbalances in the brain are the cause instead of the effect blood shoots out of my eyes and I start yelling at the radio. I have admonished friends to throw their drugs away and stop listening to these quacks who want to steal their money and ruin their lives. Psychiatry is a complete fraud, fueled by drug companies, and is a $2 trillion a year industry. Psychiatry is not based on science and has, to date, never cured a single person, although it has killed millions. Psychiatry is based on voting and concensus, which is the complet opposite of real science, which is based on gathering evidence and testing hypotheses (sound familiar? Climate change (hide the decline) is also based on concensus). Here are four videos where psychiatrists break the bond of silence and reveal the lies of psychiatry.

The Human Brain

From cnet news comes a story about the human brain. Well, it's really a mouse brain that was experimented on, and not even a real mouse, a chimera created by combining DNA from a mouse and a jelly fish.



In the story we learn that "A typical, healthy one houses some 200 billion nerve cells, which are connected to one another via hundreds of trillions of synapses. Each synapse functions like a microprocessor, and tens of thousands of them can connect a single neuron to other nerve cells. In the cerebral cortex alone, there are roughly 125 trillion synapses, which is about how many stars fill 1,500 Milky Way galaxies."



Not only are there hundreds of trillions of synapses, but each synapse has around 1,000 "molecular-scale switches," more than all the computers on earth. Once again we are shown how the human brain is the most complex thing in the known universe and that the ideas certain people ("transhumanists" and such) entertain regarding the possibility, or certainty, of artificial intelligence, or of downloading minds onto computers, are patently absurd.



The story also included a video where some scientists used new imaging technology to view the workings of the chimera neurons.

Unstoppable

I've recently seen the film Unstoppable, about a runaway train and inspired by actual events. Directed by Tony Scott, who has a thing for films about trains, Unstoppable is the story of a jackass mistake that sets a rather long train carrying several tanks of deadly poison speeding down the tracks in rural Pennsylvania with no one at the controls. The train is going so fast that it won't be able to make a sharp turn in a major city. The train will derail and release the toxic chemicals, killing tens of thousands of people. The railroad people throw everything they've got at it and nothing works, so a veteran engineer and a rookie conductor, whose families happen to live in the target city, come up with a dramatic plan to stop the train or die trying, just like REAL heroes (not anti-heroes, vigilantes, or some sort of grey area villains).



This is the best film I've seen in a long time (and the only one I've seen in 2010; the last time I went out to see a film was 1 November 2009, Law Abiding Citizen, which was the only one I saw in 2009). I highly recommend seeing Unstoppable.






Unstoppable Trailer



Unstoppable is based on the real life incident involving the CSX 8888 "Crazy Eights," which was carrying poisonous phenol (though not nearly as much), and did travel under power with no one at the controls in rural Ohio in 2001. Crazy Eights chugged along for three hours before a similar plan was used to bring it to a stop before the train derailed. Like in the film, all the other attempts, such as using a portable derailer and police shooting at the fuel shut release valve, failed. While elements of the story are exaggerated for dramatic effect, Unstoppalble is not a documentary. It does, however, portray the actual events closely enough to merrit the "Inspired by True Events" tag proudly displayed on the poster and at the beginning of the film.





News Footage of The Real Train




-Dee

I'm A Skeptic

From Entangled Minds (from Xtranormal.com) comes a five minute video in which a self-proclaimed skeptic from the 1980s approaches an attractive scientist (as attractive as a computer generated image can be I guess) and they have a discussion about what is and is not science. The self-proclaimed skeptic (skep-dick as they are referred to on The Urban Mystic) talks about how folks like him make proclamations from preconcieved beliefs about what is and is not real. The scientist, like Ken Wilber did in his deep science video, explains that there is a scientific method and that experiments need to be conducted and theories revised. Science, unlike skep-dick-ism (or fundamaterialism), does not start with the conclusion and work its way back using circular reasoning. Science is open-ended and willing to change based on new data.


"I'm A Skeptic" video




Ken Wilber on deep science





Also, Daniel Drasin's "Zen and the Art of Debunkery" has just been updated for 2010. The link on the official Irked-Confusion site will have to be changed now.

Georg Cantor's Infinities (Part Two)

Continuing the last post on Cantor and how he overturned the entire world, this story comes from UD and is called "Infinitely Wrong."



Cantor demonstrated that some infinities are bigger than others (infinitely so). Robert Sheldon, in the post linked above, attempts to demonstrate that cardinality can be used to show how the multiverse can't save Darwinism.



As Roger Penrose pointed out, in order to avoid conflicting with the second law of thermodynamics, the Big Bang had to be insanely precise. According to Penrose (who now believes that after all the matter in the universe is swallowed up by black holes, and after they evapourate leaving behind nothing but photons, everything gets bigger and somehow the universe starts over again, forever, but that's a different story), the force causing the expansion of the universe has to match the force of gravity to at least one part in 10^(10^123) or the universe would have either exploded into nothing or collapsed back right after it banged. I'm not sure just how many zeroes are in that number, but think of it like this: if the universe had one more or one less proton (or probably less mass than that) at the Big Bang it wouldn't be here right now for us to talk about (or me to bore you about). Hawking, who was balked in September, places the ratio at a more reasonable one part in 10^60.



The Hawking solution to this seemingly fine-tuned feature? Infinite time + infinite space. Hawking et al. propose universes popping into existence all the time in their bubble multiverse. With infinite universes being created in a process that has infinite duration anything that can happen will happen, no matter how improbable, including gravity matching the expansion of the universe to that whole stack of tens. However, at least one part in 10^(10^123) does not mean that the fine-tuning is exactly that precise, just that that is the minimum precision of the fine-tuning. It could be more. It could even be infinite.



To deal with this, according to Sheldon, the anti-design folks ask Hugh Everett for help with creating infinitely more universes. Doing some fancy mathematics, if I'm reading it right, the anti-design folks can get an Aleph-naught infinite number of universes out of their quantum fudgery to solve a design problem with an Aleph-one cardinality, something that is impossible because the fine-tuning is now infinitely larger than the attempts at explaining it away by chance.



So, if all that made sense to you, it should have clearly been demonstrated that an infinite multiverse cannot solve the problem caused by the fine-tuning of the physical constants.



-Dee