The Ivory Cabin

Creation Vs Evolution: Get Back In the Ring

Perhaps you have everything figured out, and if you do then kudos to you but such is not the case for me. For a long time now I have been striving to make the ideas about reality in my head fit the world outside of it, and though the journey has made me ten times smarter it has also led me deep into the valley of unknowing.

I do not know the nature of God, I do not know if God exists, I do not know where I came from, I do not know where I am going, I do not know who can show me, and I do not know how I might turn my unknowing into knowledge. Nevertheless, I cannot retract what I know to be true – or lessen my analytic thought – just so I can have some sort of shallow comfort. If I wanted unsubstantiated illusions then I’d smoke opium, what I am after is knowledge – not belief, not doubt, but knowledge – of the ultimate truth about our cosmic origins, our condition, and our fate.

This is a very hardnosed stance to take I know, and most cannot even see it much less understand it; I do not judge them for this. They are the sum of the choices they have made in response to the influences in their environment as I am the sum of mine, and I do not expect them to fathom me much less follow me.

However, I do have one request – please don’t be stupid. In my search for the answers to the question of God I have listened to a great many arguments from almost every imaginable perspective, and it seems that each side has pet arguments and tactics they use to convince the gullible. Over and over again I have listened to very educated and sincere people commit about every logical error known to man. They spin and twist information, attack the persons, misrepresent arguments, pick idiots to represent the opposition, and refuse to consider seriously any counter evidence to their world view.

I am sick and tired of this. There is no way that human understanding on the topic of God, or the absence there of, can progress as long as we remain stuck in the ruts of classical formulations, bad logic, cultural norms, and personal preferences; which brings us to the purpose of this paper. The debate on origins has turned into a street fight, and it should be a bout between gentlemen in the ring of reason for the prize of truth. Thus, I intend to show the errors of the foolish arguments on both sides, argumentation that equates to throwing dirt into the eyes of understanding, so those who are trying to get closer to truth might pursue their desire without wasting another thought on errant and shallow formulations.

Logical rules, though they are formal and systematized, have arisen out of more than 2,000 years of debate and are extremely effective in revealing bogus ways of thinking and convincing others your thoughts are right. What follows is a list of the errors I have seen both sides commit consistently. By showing the reasons why these errors of thought can never lead to truth we can keep eloquent orators, or even well-meaning teachers, from slapping the sense out of us; perhaps then we can retain honesty, fairness, and an open mind.

Errors – Blocking the Sucker Punches

Resort to Humor or Ridicule

This error is committed when someone, either because they cannot or do not wish to address an issue, makes a joke to distract the hearers, win their favor, or to derail their opponent’s train of thought.

I cannot count the times I have heard someone mock the other side so as to discredit their opposition in their audiences mind. I have watched videos where atheists were talking about God while cartoons of Greek deities fluttered across the screen. The intention of course is to make the viewer feel that any consideration of God is childish and silly, but the theist side of the ordeal punches below the belt as well. Stupid comments like, “They may be a monkey’s uncle, but I’m a child of God!”, or misleading cartoons where a child asks an old baboon, “Are you my papaw?” are propagated with great zeal. I would like you to note however that no matter how entertaining or well-spoken taunts of this nature may be, at no point do they prove anything one way or another. Should I believe there is or is not a divine consciousness merely because a biased part-time comic made me laugh?

When someone is truly concerned about the truth then they state their claims in clear terms, acknowledge differences of opinion, respect their opponents, and listen to what those opponents have to say. If you are reading a piece of information and come across this tactic, simply look through it to the proofs they are offering, if any, that are supposed to lead  you to accept their view. If ridicule is all the arguer has got, then they’ve got nothing.

Attacking a Strawman

In the olden days knights would train for war by bludgeoning, slicing, and piercing dummies made of straw. As you could imagine, conquering one of these flimsy fleshless foes was much a simpler task than taking down an experienced human warrior.

Whenever one is engaged in debate and they misrepresent the argument of their opponent, and then defeat that misrepresentation, they have committed the strawman error. Atheists and theists both seem to find the stupidest person they can to represent the opposing view, and then they destroy the dumb arguments that person formulates pretending to have defeated the entire school of thought that person represents.

If I were to find a baby lion and choke it death, would it be misleading for me to tell you that I once fought and slew a male lion with my bare hands? There is something very dishonest about my story, just as there is with winning arguments via a strawman. Just as I did not triumph over a pride leading male in his prime, and thus have no room to boast of my great prowess, so those who defeat weak reformulations of their opposition’s argument – or foolish people who espouse it – have not proved their way is best. In fact it makes them look like they cannot deal with the hard facts and so seek soft ones. And if this wasn’t bad enough through their sleight of hand the truth is made even more obscure.

Sometimes it is hard to know when one side is twisting the true position of the other, and so in order to get a right conception of any idea we need to go to the source. We cannot allow the prejudices of a teacher of our own persuasion to corrupt the information we receive.

Ad Hominem

When people cannot answer an argument, they will often attempt to discredit the arguer. People will say, “Freud was just a cocaine cowboy who wanted to explore his base desires without the thought of God bothering him.”, or “You can’t believe anything Paul wrote; he was just an educated fool who bought into the creed of the cult he was trying to exterminate because he let them manipulate his conscience.”

Notice again that neither of these offer any proof as to why the ideas these men presented are wrong. Rather, opponents say Freud and Paul are vile or stupid just to make their hearers lose trust in the things that came out of those two men’s mouth. Please note however that it is possible for the insults to be true without the ideas espoused by the insulted being false. Freud could really have just wanted to get rid of God for the sake of pleasure, but if his arguments are sound then he is totally justified in doing so. Likewise Paul could have been beaten by his own conscience into conformity with a new religion, but this in no way proves that the tenets of the new religion are themselves errant.

We cannot afford to let mere insults change our opinions about truth. Whenever a speaker is addressing the character of the opponent rather than their information or argument, do not allow this trick to throw you off truth’s trail. Look past the insults and see if anything has been demonstrated, or if some accepted fact on either side has been disproved. If this is not happening, then an argument is indeed occurring but it should be held on the playground instead of the field of intellectual pursuit.

Poisoning and Sweeting the Well

Yet another flaw in the reasoning of both parties is the rejection and ignoring, or the exalting and acceptance, of a speaker due to the speaker’s place and/or experience in life.

When we are talking of the poisoned well, as formulated by an atheist, it looks something like, “I would like to take you seriously Mr. Smith, but you got your degree from a Bible college. And since science is formulating ideas after you have gathered data, and not gathering data to prove your preexisting ideas, you cannot speak about science.”

Conversely, when we are talking about sweetening the well, as formulated by a theist, it looks something like, “Well brothers and sisters, Mr. Smith has a doctorate from Avondale Christian College so there is no need to doubt that his information and arguments are as accurate as they are well informed.”

The problem with both of these fallacies is that, once again, neither of them is an honest consideration of the facts and formulations presented by the speaker. In the first case the information is rejected due to the speaker’s origin and experience, and in the second they are accepted for the same reason. This is erroneous because it does not matter what a person has been through or where they came from, if their facts are straight and their argument valid then that is all that matters. If we do not agree with someone merely because their experience and origin are not the same are ours, then we are doomed to believe whatever is considered truth by the people group we are associate with regardless of whether or not what they are saying is right.

Argument from Inconvenience

This one is wide spread, and is generally accepted because the arguer usually commits this mistake when addressing people of like minds. It occurs when someone denies a point not because it is true or false, but because the outcome of it would be unpleasant and require deep changes to one’s habits and outlook on life.

When it is committed by an atheist is goes, “If there are places we go after death based on what we have done in this world, then that means my conduct is being evaluated by supernatural agencies. If that is the case then I would have to worry about meeting – or failing to meet – those standards. This would give rise to guilt and constant anxiety about my performance. Therefore, I am sure there is not an afterlife.” When this error if formulated by the Theist it goes, “If there is no after life and no God, then that means there is no objective meaning to life, no ultimate moral code, no recompense for the deeds of evil people who have eluded humanities systems of justice, and no hope for a better place. Therefore, I am sure God is real.”

The problem with this way of thinking is that the truth is the truth regardless of its consequences. When someone is told they have cancer, they cannot say, “If I had cancer it would produce a horrible outcome, thus you are lying.” Likewise, when the police appear at your door at 4am and say, “I’m sorry your child has been killed in a car wreck.” you cannot respond, “You’re lying, because if it were true I would suffer great pain.” If there is a God in heaven, then there is a God in heaven and we have to adjust to the fact of the matter. On the other hand if we really are the products of purely unconscious processes and chance events, then we have to find a way to adjust our way of life to that fact. Our preferences, hopes, and habits have no effect on the truth.

Arguing from Ignorance

Tiny Jim came running up to big brother one day screaming, “The tooth fairy just left me ten dollars for my tooth! I can’t wait to see what I get next time.” Big brother, being annoyed at his sibling’s joy over a fantasy said, “Jimmy, I hate to tell you this but the tooth fairy isn’t real. Here, watch the video I recorded.”

After Jimmy finished watching the video his brother had made of their parents placing the money under the pillow- because brothers go out of their way to squash any hopes held by younger brothers – Jimmy retorted, “Sure mom and dad did it this time, but what about all those other times? Those were definitely the tooth fairy!” At this point his bewildered big brother snapped, “But I told you the tooth fairy don’t exist!” And just as quickly lil Jim replied, “Well you can’t empirically prove to me it doesn’t exist, and thus it must be real!”

This is a classic example of arguing from ignorance, and it occurs when the proof provided for the existence of something is the absence of proof against it. Many times I have heard, “Absence of proof is not proof of absence”, and, “I know my redeemer liveth because no one has ever proved He doesn’t!” While it is true that absence of proof is not proof of absence, it is also not proof of presence. In fact it is nothing at all, and this is why it is not an acceptable reason to make any positive (it is) or negative (it is not) claims based on this type of logic.

Hasty Generalization

If I should see a Chevy truck broken down on the side of the road, and then assume that all Chevy trucks are pieces of junk, then I have committed this error. Whenever one points to a single instance of a thing, and then assumes that all things of the same kind are just like it, that is a case of hasty generalization.

As I have listened to speakers on both sides, this is an error that appears continually in their arguments. Without fail there will be a Christian who says something like, “Listen to the depressing words of this poor suicidal, and ethically confused atheist….insert quote….You see! This is the fruit of atheism; it will make you depressed, suicidal, and hopeless.” Then there is the atheistic version where they find some poor idiot who voices their disgust with science, uses the dumbest reasons imaginable to try to establish the truth of whatever religion they are practicing, and then complicates the issue further by spouting still more nonsense. After repeating the faithful sap’s words the atheist then goes, “Behold what religion does to the mind! It makes you stupid, keeps you stupid, and tries to pull everyone else back into the Stone Age.”

Both of these are cases of hasty generalization. Are they depressed atheists? Of course, but then some of the most miserable souls I have ever met were religious. Are there stupid religious people? Without a doubt; most people who are involved with religion assume they already have the answers and so see no need in studying logic or pursuing truth.

I have met some very smart practitioners of faith as well as some atheist who could rival the ignorance of the simplest Christian. This is why this is not a sound argument; there are too many cases to the contrary for it to be true. Further, you could prove anything right or wrong by simply pointing to one instance where someone or something did a certain thing.

Bad General Fallacy

Once there was a very powerful and kind General who occupied a large portion of disputed territory. Her soldiers were broken into different brigades, and each brigade was given charge over a plot of land. Many brigades were kind and genuine, like their General, but there were others who lacked her most valorous attributes. Away from their superiors, and the system that would make them accountable for their actions, they became cruel, exacting, and greedy. One day, in one of the towns where a brigade had forsaken the model of justice, a townsman said, “I despise these troops. They steal our food, rape our women, and break the men. I hate them, but I hate their general even more; only a selfish and rapacious bastard would employ troops of this nature!”

This is an example of what I call, “The Bad General Fallacy”, and it happens when one infers from the behavior of a group that the source of their power, or their ideas, is errant. When spoken from an atheistic perspective it goes, “Christianity, and Religion in general, has been used to manipulate the poor and justify countless atrocities; it would be better if it would just disappear from the earth.” And when it is spoken from a theistic perspective the formulation runs, “If ever you wonder about the fruit of atheistic ideas, all you have to do is look at the effects of socialistic and evolutionary thought on China, Russia, and especially Nazi Germany. Atheism is a poison that creates disrespect for life and slavery for the individual.”

In scholarly study there are two types of inferences, or conclusions, one can draw from a portion of writing. The first is a necessary inference. For example, if I said, “When that rock hit me on the head, it hurt like the dickens”, to say the rock hurt me when it hit would be a necessary inference. The second type of inference is called possible inference. If someone said, “When the rock fell I screamed”, to say the rock hurt them when it fell would be a possible inference; maybe it just scared them or maybe it hurt someone they loved.

Having the distinction between possible and necessary inference in mind, let us turn to a review of the above accounts. Is it necessary to infer that religion, or the lack there of, is bad simply because corrupt governments were religious or irreligious? It is undoubtedly possible, but it could very well be that corrupt people took popular philosophies, or philosophies that would help them convince the masses of their ideals, and used them to bring about their desired ends. Merely because a bad person held a certain philosophical view doesn’t mean that system of philosophy is bad. Baptists would be appalled if you judged their entire system by the horrors of Jones Town, just as Atheists would be appalled to hear someone blame the activities of Stalin on evolutionary theory; a fruit can be rotten without the root being diseased.

Causal Oversimplification

The above fallacy flows right into this one, which – like the name states – occurs when someone lays the blame for a chain of events onto a single cause when more are involved. In the above section all the horrors of the Dark Ages, Socialist Russia, and Nazi Germany were said to have arisen due to the presence of a single philosophical item. However, if you look at history the people involved were corrupt, greedy, and manipulative. They had a failed personal ethic, and this they passed onto those under them through psychological programming and social indoctrination.

This is not the only area where this happens though, and of all the places it occurs it is most frustrating when it crops up in explanations of the events we currently see happening in the material world. From a religious perspective, many people will look at the world and say, “Oh, the terrible power of Sin!” or “What evil hath Angra Mainyu wrought in our world!” It is possible that these things play a role in the happenings of our world, but to say these are the only things wrong with our world is to take the responsibility we have for our actions and choices and lay it onto unseen and unknowable spiritual powers.

When you look at the hate, violence, disease, hunger, and suffering that are present in our world, and trace the branches back to the roots you find nothing but crappy human decisions. People give millions of dollars away on game shows for ratings while people are dying from malnutrition, they hold grudges against entire people groups for crimes committed hundreds of years ago against their ancestors, and refuse to listen to the voices of reason and history. Psychology, biology, sociology, stupidity, and evil in the human heart provide clear, testable, and complete explanations for the violence and death in our world. Could these things have been initiated or augmented by super-natural causes? Sure, but without ancient books to tell us about these powers and what they do there would be no way we could ever discover their existence or behavior. These powers may indeed be at work in some way we do not yet know, but the manner in which the human mind works and perpetuates evil are known. And by applying definite steps and clear knowledge we can improve persons without having to ever address their over-beliefs – things that can be known only by faith – or attempt to achieve an outcome with outdated and ineffective rites.

However, it is not just religious folk that oversimplify things. It seems that in the materialistic world views evolution has become the beginning and end of every explanation on the origin and fate of all living things. Now, the fact that evolution is at work in the world is undeniable. And it is not altogether clear that species are fixed within a kind: there are birds with fingers in South America (Hoatzin), the well documented changes in horse morphology, and even evidence in human DNA that two of our chromosomes have joined together; putting the number we possess back up to 24 which just happens to be same number possessed by the other great apes.

Nevertheless, evolution can only work on existing biological systems; it cannot work where there is no genetic information to select from. Thus the idea that all of  atomic reality, and all of life itself, is simply a progression from the simplest of elements – nothing – into the intricate web of balanced and clockwork energies we see today seems to me to be a slight overstepping of the available data. In order for that to be the case the First Cause, which we do not know the source of – naming it God or Big Bang does nothing to reveal its nature – would have had to just have happened to have exploded an unimaginable mass of energy that was of such a nature that it would balance perfectly after cooling to create matter, that was of such a nature as to create other matter, that was of such a nature as to get together to form chemicals, that was of such a nature that they got together to form an eating, growing, reproducing, reactive, and adaptive piece of living energy. And all of this is to have happened by raw randomness? How do you know that? How can you substantiate that? It seems to be a projection of biological processes onto non-living energies and Causes; about which we know only the effects they produced.

Regardless though, to say that all the woes, and origins, of man can be blamed on or attributed to a single cause is to cast a blind eye to the almost endless interactions between innumerable causes and effects in the human and physical world; we cannot understand any one thing until we understand something about everything and how each of its part affects the whole.

Appeal to Consequences

Perhaps the most famous appeal to consequences ever formulated is Pascal’s Wager. Pascal, who was a very thoughtful theologian, said that to try to ask a Christian to prove their faith with reason would be asking them to deny it. He felt that there was no way one could prove the presence or absence of God by reason, but nevertheless he arrived at a reasonable solution to the problem. Pascal said that if we believe in God and he is not there then we have lost nothing, but if we never profess faith and God turns out to be real then we have lost everything. Thus, we should believe so our whole life won’t be for not.

Whenever you use, “If you do this, then you will get that” as the basis for your argument you have committed the error of appealing to consequences. The fact there is reward or damage for doing or not doing something tells nothing about its truth value or whether it is the best way. I could say to you, “Kali is God, and you will believe or I will tie you down and drain your blood away”, and you may willingly profess faith as a result of my threat but that tells me nothing about the existence, history, or true nature of Kali.

When people threaten you with hell or promise you heaven, when they threaten to fire you for doubting evolution or hire you for believing it, they have assumed the truth of their claims and expect you to agree due to the amount of pleasure or pain that will follow if you don’t. There is a great deal more to say in the way of Pascal’s weak argument, but we will have to leave that to another piece of writing.

Empiricising the Questionable

Once George found a book, and opening its pages he found that it was an old text from the Jain tradition. As he read he learned about how Mahavira had been blessed by the gods and goddesses, and how he reanimated the Jainist truths of liberation in ancient India. Later that week George was retelling the account to his friend when his friend spoke up, “How do you know that really happened in that way? Heck, how do you know it happened at all?” George replied, “Because the book told me so!” When George replied in the above way he became guilty of empiricising the questionable, or treating as fact something that is very doubtful and almost impossible to prove.

From where I have been seated it seems that all involved in the debate on origins commit this. The theist will say, “My book says miracles happened in the Jordan River, and so I know they did.” But how can that be? Even though the places where the events are said to happen are real, that doesn’t prove the miracles said to have happened there did. Did not the Greeks write about their gods, aren’t these gods said to have done things in real Greek cities, and if you follow the above reasoning does that mean we must accept the Greek myths as historical facts also?

On the other side of the issue are the atheists who say, “The universe began when a lump of energy exploded due to the influence of some unknown cause, and later life came about by purely materialistic processes.” How can this be known? Sure we can look back into time, deep into the universe, and see the effects of a massive energetic release but what does this tell us about the nature of what caused it? If space and time did not even begin until after the explosion, then how can we discover the nature of the cause completely by looking at the things inside of space and time? Further, even though there are countless fossils and observable biological patterns what can these tell us about the generation of life?

Science deals with and explains the operations of the material world as it is today, and arrives at its theories on the origination of the material world by assuming the forces we now see at work not only have always been as they are now but could have also created themselves. To say there is or is not a divine consciousness is to step beyond facts into the realm of interpretations of facts. What is can fit just as easily into either interpretation – God made reality or reality made its self – and so it could be that all viewers are simply projecting meanings onto reality. Maybe God is not like anything we now see, or maybe God is everything we see, maybe God is, maybe God is not, and though that is the hardest mental place to be it seems to me to be as far as raw fact can take us. Beyond this there are only speculations and inferences, all of which involve differing degrees of error depending on the intellect and understanding of the one making them.

Band Wagons and Tandem Bikes

Often people will try to prove the truth by taking a public poll. However, the absurdity of this is instantly obvious to those who know that at one point people thought you could grow rats from water and wheat, the earth was flat, and that sucking all the bad blood out would cure you of disease. The opinions of the public do not of themselves prove anything one way or the other, and stating them only proves the opinions of the public.

I have heard some say, “We’ll of course Christianity is right, look at how many people believe it!” Whenever someone appeals to the belief of the majority to establish the truth of their claims they have committed the fallacy of the band wagon. On the other hand I have also heard people say, “Of course evolution is true, it is the most prominent opinion among the educated elite.” Whenever one appeals to the beliefs of the minority to establish the truth of their claims they have committed what I call the tandem bike fallacy.

The number of people who believe a thing no matter how big or small is no proof of its truth or error. The accuracy or error of a thing hangs not upon the amount of subscribers it has but upon facts, demonstrations, and evidence that it is or is not the case.

Arguments from Antiquity or Newness

This is a less abundant fallacy, but it is nevertheless committed. Have you ever heard people try to establish the truth of their claims by telling you how old the document was that said it? Those who attempt to prove a thing true by appealing to its age are committing the mistake of arguing from antiquity, while those who attempt to prove it based on how recently it came to life are erroneously arguing from newness.

There is a lot of valuable information in the works of antiquity, but there is just as much bull crap. You cannot know the truth of a thing simply by dating its source otherwise we could all very well be the followers of Gilgamesh, a figure named in ancient Babylonian tablets. Neither can you prove a thing true simply by citing its recentness. Over and over again science and study have disproved theory after theory that was the most cutting edge idea of its age, and there is no reason to suspect many of the current hypotheses will fare any better.

The date a thing was formulated casts no weight for or against its truthfulness; again I say fact must be established by observation, trial, and proof.

The ‘Obvious’ Error

Mr.Jones was born into a very educated and wealthy family. His father was a doctor and his mother was a lawyer, and they provided him with all the money needed for education. Mr.Jones always loved science, and so he dedicated his life to the study and teaching of it. Mr.Jones has now taught geology for thirty-five years, and it is obvious to him that the world is billions of years old.

Mr.Smith was born deep in the mountains to good parents who were moderately educated. He never had everything, but since his father was a minister he never went without affection or the basics of life. He finished high school but never really thought highly of it, he knew he was called as a young man to preach; and that is just what he did. Mr.Smith has now taught Pentecostal theology for thirty-five years, and it is obvious to him the world is only about 6,000 years old.

The two above stories quickly reveal that what is obvious to us is only so because of our current perspective, our past experiences, and our environments.  To try to establish the truth of a thing by suggesting it is too obvious to even wonder about is to commit the obvious error.

Nothing in the entire world is obvious, and each of us only think things are such and such a way because of the information we have encountered, and where and/or how deeply we have chosen to follow that information. Whenever you step outside your culture and view life through the eyes of all who experience it, you quickly realize that everyone is in deep disagreement with each other over things that are obvious. This makes it clear that what is called obvious, certainly in regards to the origins and operations of reality, is not really obvious for if it were the opinion would be universal; for example no one thinks it is good for humans to stick their heads into buckets of water and start breathing.

The truth of the matter can only be obtained by collecting every available piece of information on the topic, from as many perspectives as one can find, and then comparing the theories to the flow of reality and its mechanics.

Appeal to Authority

If you and I are engaged in a conversation and you assert that something is true, and then I ask you how you know and you say, “Because so and so, or such and such, said so” you have committed the fallacy of appealing to authority.

Now I want to be very careful here. I am not suggesting that there are not people who know truths, or that we cannot use the truth they have shared to validate a point. If someone has studied cellular biology or physics for forty-five years, then they possess oceans of knowledge it would behoove me to shut up and acquire.

However, simply because someone has been in a field for forty-years – or even a thousand – it doesn’t mean that they are infallible or unbiased, and it is for this reason merely appealing to an authority cannot absolutely prove or disprove anything. All the information we have in our head began as a thought in someone else’s, regardless of what new forms it has taken inside of us. If we did not respect and listen to authorities we would know nothing at all. Authorities should not however be pointed to in order to solve disputes of fact, rather the facts they have discovered, the truths they have demonstrated, and the proofs they used to substantiate these should be the basis of our appeal. Thus, when seeking to prove a fact we should not look to the words of men but rather the facts about reality their words represent; assuming they indeed represent something true.

Naturalistic Foolery

Jane grew up in a good home, had a good life, but still she could never shake the feelings she kept finding in her bosom for women. Over and over she fought them off calling herself broken or bad, but no matter how hard she swung she just could not seem to beat them. One day it finally became too much for her, and she decided to talk to her older sister Lin about it. After Jane had explained her years of struggle and self-doubt, Lin turned to her and said, “I’m sorry you’ve had to go through that but you did right to fight those wrong feelings; it is unnatural for a woman to be with a woman.” And in so doing this Lin committed the naturalistic fallacy; that is she looked at what was and assumed that it was what ought to be.

It is a notorious philosophical mistake to move from what is to what ought to be.  Imagine a person from the Deep South in the early 1940’s saying, “Ain’t no niggers got the right to vote, ever since the beginning of America it has been white men whose framed our government and that’s the way it always needs to be.” Again, I say that it is a dreadful mistake to infer what ought to be from what is currently going on around us.

I can hear someone in the audience going, “Sure that is wrong, but we are talking about what is natural, and politics aren’t natural.” Fair enough, let me ask you then if all things that are natural are good courses of action for humans to take? Do you think that we should control our populations like bees or eat our spouses after breeding like black widows? There are things that are natural that are also immoral. Not only this, but there are creatures in the natural world who involve themselves in homosexual acts. What behavior or aspect of nature then shall we use as the basis to define what is natural? It seems we are picking and choosing what we call natural to prove what we think, and not to establish what it true.

Not only is the natural not always moral, what is unnatural is not always immoral. Do you think it is immoral to plug wires into your ears and pump sound into your head? Is it immoral to wear clothes or to create medical compounds that do not exist in nature? Merely because a thing is not done by the other living things around us, human or otherwise, does not mean that is necessarily immoral.

Factualizing Perceptions

Everything you have ever felt or thought is a type of perception; when you perceive the external world it is called sensation and when you perceive the internal world it is called thought.

Many times when I have asked people, “How do you know God is real?” they have replied with, “I feel his/her presence”. Then at other times I have spoken with people and asked them, “How do you know God is not real?” and they have replied “I just know it is the case ever since my loved-one died tragically.” In the first instance the person is making the mistake of factualizing feelings, and in the second they are factualizing thoughts.

We cannot think our feelings are at all reflections of truth, they are instead only the reflections of what we are thinking. Imagine a young child, called Tim, who was found amid the rubble of a ransacked village, and who later travels back to that place to make peace with the tragedy. On the way he meets a hitchhiker, and after picking him up Tim learns they know exactly where the massacre took place. Eventually, the car comes to a stop and the two men make their way to a set of burned and faded remains. Tim’s heart is full of sorrow, he feels the pain his family felt and seems to even hear their screams. After about twenty minutes of this the hitch hiker returns from having slipped away to do an errand, and upon seeing the pain in Tim’s face is forced to admit this is not at all the place Tim’s family died; he just had to go there to dig up some loot he stole a year before.

This reinterpretation of a Taoist parable shows well how what we feel is not at all related to what is true. If we imagine we are in a Godless universe with no afterlife then we will have feelings that match that thought. And if we imagine that the million golden rays of Buddha are shining from where we cannot now go then we will have feelings that match that thought. This is basic pure psychology, and a definitive proof why feelings are no indication of truth.

The second error, factualizing thoughts, is only one step beyond this one and hinges upon how it is we know something. There is a Chinese proverb which illustrates this well, “It is better to see once, than it is to hear a thousand times.” Why would this be the case? It is so because words are just information, they are not knowledge. Knowledge is a blend of experience, insight, study, and proof. But, if you take experience out knowledge turns back into information. For example, I can read 1,000 books about the flavor of apples but I will never know what an apple tastes like until I bite into one. Again, I can hear about the shaman of South America, read books about their culture, and see pictures of men dressed in native cloths, but until I go to South America and meet them personally I do not know them.

Knowledge cannot be passed from person to person, only information is exchanged. And if the receiver of the information is diligent and adventurous they can turn that information into knowledge. This is why merely calling the information we have in our head fact is a mistake, we have to validate, invalidate, or follow into the realm of unknowablity the data we have received before it becomes a known fact.

If the data we are poured full of is not real knowledge – true facts – how much less are the untested ideas we are disposed to accept without proof? I once had a tremendously beautiful soul tell me that at the age of three or four they suddenly knew that God was not real. As sweet as they are I cannot help but gravely doubt their conclusion. Merely because we get a sudden and strong idea in our mind does not mean that we have suddenly gained an unknown fact. We may have, but we need to analyze it from beginning to end and see if it turns out to be accurate before we can call it a fact.

Naked Before the Infinite Except for the Gloves

I am here writing this now, and hopefully you are reading this later; this indicates to me that we all need  to restructure what we think is ‘possible’ or ‘rational’. As you trace back the chain of causation to the First Cause, you realize that either some aspect of the universe has always been or that it all began suddenly from nothing. Both of those seem ridiculous to say, but in fact one of them has to be true.

Where in reality do we ever see anything arising from pure nothingness? And I am not talking about quantum particles that seem to bounce into and out of our perceptual field; even these are something and come from something. I am talking about pure void suddenly becoming something. It would seem from everything we can know that only nothing comes from nothing, and so the fact that there is now something would indicate that there has always been something. But how can this be? Imagine someone asking you, “Which came first the chicken or the egg?” and you reply, “Neither.” They would think you had gone off of your rocker, but yet that is the exact thing we are forced to admit when we look into the infinite; we are either dealing with a cycle that has always been in motion or an eternal principle that sets cycles into motion.

What is that cycle? What is that principle? Is it conscious or unconscious? How can we know? Sure, I have beliefs and ideas but these are just inferences from data and not pure knowledge. I want to trade that data in for some fact; I want some definitive, objective, testable, repeatable proof of the First Cause’s nature, being, and behavior.

As I have went looking for these I have found much insight and wells of information from which I have managed to get a few cups of knowledge. However, I have also had to cut through the deepest, stickiest, and stinkiest piles of bull-crap. I have watched otherwise rational, intelligent, and kind gentlemen and ladies relapse into their days on the school yard kicking back and forth ignorances like, “I know you are but what I am?” It is the duty of each and every one of us to get our thinking right, for if it is wrong, invalid, and shallow we will be locked in cages we aren’t even aware of.

Each and every one of us must look up into the sky and realize our smallness. We must look at the pain and death in the world and seek to know why and why it is allowed. Is God there? If so what is the Divine nature, and if that nature is conscious and aware of our suffering why is there not more done to clarify the issue? Or if there is much being done by such a God for us then why is it not made apparent by that power; especially if that being will judge us later for our habits and attitudes?

Either God is there or God is not, and either of these options is not enjoyable or easy to swallow. If God is there then I am shouldered with the responsibility of realizing the Divine nature and ways and complying with said nature. If God is not there then I must look into an infinite abyss and accept that all the injustice here will never be righted, that this moment is all I have, and that someday – I know not when – I will dissolve into the nothingness from which I came. I am fully aware of the issue, and as I move back and forth between these two views I am filled with cycles of pain and bliss; each arising from entertaining and interacting with both conclusions. But more than this, I gain an insight into the human condition and how the other people I share this condition with must be feeling. Then I think about how muddled the issue is with bad logic, shallow thinking, blind hope, greed, hate, and ignorance.

As if this were not bad enough, there are millions and millions of agents who are actively perpetuating this tragedy. I dare say that this ought not to be. If we were drunks fighting over a whore in the street outside of a pub, then dirty fighting and knavish tactics would be acceptable, but we are debating the very nature and purpose of existence itself. Such an encounter as this, with such a high prize, requires that each of us become gentlemen and ladies, and take our differences into the ring of justice, discipline, understanding, compassion, and empathy.

Only when each of us look into the eyes of the endless from atop the raft of infinity we ride, and remove all that hides or conceals our self from this realization, will we find the power to be honest and kind with one another.  And only when we are honest and kind to all living things will the fog of error be blown away, and this world – whatever its origin – will finally have the potential to become the heaven of which we all dream.

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