Category: environment

Kalam’s Cosmological Claptrap

I am often astounded at the level of ignorance and scientific illiteracy among many theists. This surprises me because I attended university as an undergraduate with many intelligent Christians who thought somewhat critically and evaluated evidence. Sadly, they do not appear to be the norm.

Many theists – particularly those who can be found on YouTube debating Chris Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Tracie Harris, Matt Dillahunty and others – often seem to fall back upon their holy scriptures and religious privilege as an insulation against having to do the ‘hard yards’: reading, research, evidence-based analysis and nuanced critical thinking. My own conversations are further evidence to me of this common laziness borne of religious privilege and an undeserved veneer of respectability often afforded religious ideas by default.

Using Kalam’s Cosmological Argument is one example. Arguing that things exist, therefore they must have been designed – because you can think of no better explanation – is lazy and intellectually dishonest. It is akin to those who once argued that witches must exist because the world is clearly designed by magic.

Sorry theists, but arguing a faith-based assertion appears to leave your arguments open to lack of evidence or deep reasoning. If you want to proselytise and debate people, then at least have good reasoning behind your arguments.

Below is one example of a ‘discussion’ that I shared earlier this year with some theists who bore academic religious qualifications, and yet appeared unable to think outside of very narrow mindset parameters. I include their comments here (somewhat modified for ethical reasons though the content/intent remains unchanged) because the moderator of the discussion thread appeared to become annoyed with me and suddenly deleted the whole thread – although luckily, I had backed up samples of these discussions.

This portion of the conversation centered around the book ‘God is Not Great’, written by Christopher Hitchens. GA.

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From Thomas* (*not real name):

Hitchens was very intelligent, but he ignored the obvious evidence of God before his eyes. Looking around, you can see evidence that all furniture, buildings and things were made/designed by a mind. More obviously, all the living things/systems that you can observe (plants, animals, man) are infinitely more complex than these lesser objects – and so if all the lesser things were designed by a mind, the greater systems (living things) must have also required a mind to design them. This Mind we call God. When I read Hitchens’ book as an example of fine literature, I sought to understand the mind of its creator. To think what I read was chance lettering would have been insanely [sic]. I advise you to do the same when looking at the world around you, seek the grand designer. May the good Lord bless your research as you seek the truth.

Response by Geoff:

With respect, what a load of non sequitur baloney. If you propose that increasingly complex things always require a creator, then who created your creator? Was your god created? Who is your god’s god? Was he also in turn created? And does this mean that there is a long ladder of deities, each one complex enough to create everything else further down the ladder? And does your god worship his god, or is he an atheist?

If you want to argue that your god does not need a creator because he is god, then you present a case of special pleading to cover the inherent fatal flaw in your own argument.

You suggest that evidence of some intelligent designer is before our very eyes – if it was that obvious, everyone would see it and believe, in which case faith would be obsolete (faith only exists to prop up a lack of evidence).

It’s time to stop lazy, superstitious thinking – cherry picking false analogies that appear to confirm your own pre-determined ‘facts’ – and to start thinking logically and critically. Physical and biological complexity are explainable through the processes of natural laws: physics, cosmology, biology, etc. If you argue that complexity debunks natural laws, then you don’t understand science.

In using fine literature as an analogy to suggest that the Universe must have been designed by an intelligent designer, you ignore the reality that 99.99999999999999999999999% (repeating decimal) of the Universe is hostile, dangerous and lethal to life as we know it. Your intelligent designer must be lazy, incompetent, incredibly wasteful and negligent, or malicious. Furthermore, your inference that planet Earth is somehow just right for us actually inverts the reality: life evolved on Earth to fit its physical parameters, not the other way around. Another purveyor of fine literature, Doug Adams, wrote the analogy of an intelligent rainwater puddle sitting in a pothole and thinking to itself that the pothole must have been intelligently designed because it was just right for the puddle.

You imply that your imaginary god is the only thing that enables your reading of Hitchens’ book to differentiate between intelligent communication or chance lettering. I submit that science and natural laws are the only thing that differentiate my reading of your writing between the same parameters.

May the ultimate reality of science bless your research and temper your worship of the god of the gaps.

From George* (*not real name):

Like Hitchens, your god is science. You have an arrogant mind to dismiss God. If you truly believe that your ancestors were apes, it’s no wonder that you have tried to rationalize God away. One day, you will stand before God. Are you ready to face your creator?

Response by Geoff:

@George, you are a great ape. Get a Grade 8 science education.

Maybe also do some middle-school debating and learn about false equivalence, straw manning, and other fallacies. Science is a methodology that is predicated upon evidence and rational conclusions; whereas religion is a mindset that is based upon wishful thinking (faith) and ignores its own lack of evidence. The two approaches are not equal, and science is not a religion that requires a deity. Science does not require worship nor veneration; it revels in scepticism and exploration. Your superstitious claim to have ultimate answers is not equal to my attempt at open questioning. We are not the same. Please stop playing the game: “I know I am, but what are you?”

As for your theological threat, I quake no more pondering your imaginary god’s wrath than you do worrying about Zeus or Thor or Quetzelcoatl or Allah or Vishnu or Ra.

Besides, if there were a Judgement Day, I would love the opportunity to castigate a god who (according to your Bible) endorses slavery, the subjugation of women, the murder of adulterers and LGBT people, and for whom people with eyeglasses or disability or tattoos are unfit to be in his presence. What a disgusting, stone age monster.

But on Judgement Day, perhaps you can ask him why he invented COVID, Black Plague, childhood cancer, smallpox, HIV/AIDS, earthquakes, the 2004 Asian tsunami, botfly and Cancrum Oris. Not to mention his genocide of the world in the Noah’s Ark story. Some perfect designer he turned out to be. I could never worship a deity who has killed more people than Hitler and Atilla the Hun combined. Cheers.

©2023 Geoff Allshorn

We Are The World

“It seems to me that the natural world is the greatest source of excitement; the greatest source of visual beauty; the greatest source of intellectual interest. It is the greatest source of so much in life that makes life worth living.” – Sir David Attenborough.

Image by r1g00 from Pixabay

Dear Jasmine,

Today, we commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of World Environment Day.

I know that many young people, including you and your friends, are greatly concerned about the future of this planet – particularly as that is where you will spend the rest of your lives. I understand that some 80 per cent of young people over 16 years of age are very concerned about climate change, and that many, like you, have been moved to personal activism, frustrated or outraged at the neglect of the issue from older people, corporations and governments.

Yes, Earth is home to ourselves and millions of other species, and while – like a beached whale that writhes and shudders a silent scream – segments of our home world are collapsing and dying under the weight of our populations and our possessions, and I hope that ways can be found to motivate more people towards enacting long-term change.

Yes, we should get angry and do something to stop the pending catastrophe. But on World Environment Day, it may be helpful to consider nuance as well as clear-cut black-and-white.

Many people are thoughtless or lazy – but we are all constructed in a way that makes us inclined to relate most closely to the micro rather than the macro. When approaching a jigsaw-sized problem, we tend to get enlightenment and understanding (and emotional connection) more readily from the individual jigsaw pieces rather than the big picture. In the real world, we can see one photo – of a crying baby in a famine, a Ugandan family killed in an unseasonably large mudslide, or a mother polar bear and her cub struggling to survive amidst the melting of Arctic ice – and such a photo can convey more emotional meaning and personal connection to us than all of the world’s websites and scientific lectures about climate catastrophe.

So I hope that your generation – and the older adults that you are trying to educate – come to see possibly the most important reason why it is important to save the Earth: because of its beauty.

Scientifically, it is beautiful. Our planet is a shelter from cosmic dangers, built from stardust and gas, meticulously crafted according to the natural laws of cosmology and stellar evolution and gravity. It is a natural laboratory sculpted by weather and geology, gravity and tidal forces, wherein chemistry and rock and water and wind and life intermix to form a glorious testament to the power of eclectic abiogenesis and evolution.

Biologically, it is beautiful. It is a cathedral in which a chorus of life chirps and tweets, bleats and barks. A choir of diverse voices is dressed in a patchwork quilt of colours and camouflages. Combined, they form a rich tapestry that has (so far, at least) been found nowhere else in the Universe.

Therein lies its arguably greatest ethical value: philosophically, it is beautiful because it is unique and indescribably precious. In a Universe that is so big that our mammalian minds cannot truly comprehend, our small planet Earth is the only known place where life exists, and multiplies in rich diversity.

Hosted this year by Côte d’Ivoire and supported by the Netherland, World Environment Day 2023 encourages us to beat plastic pollution. I hope this succeeds – but that they don’t stop there.

It is encouraging to see your generation taking a stand – and we can understand that this is a form of evolution. Survival of the fittest indeed – those best suited to adapt (and respond) to change will indeed survive the longest. But I also see a form of social evolution underway: your parents’ generation was raised in a culture that proclaimed Greed is Good; your generation proclaims that Green is Good.

Perhaps we should all be mindful of an early recollection in my own life:

In an old photo album belonging to my parents, one photo features me as a babe in arms, being held by my mother in the front garden of our home. With a mix of determination and curiosity on my face, I am reaching up to touch the leaf of an overhanging tree – using my infantile senses to timidly explore the touch, texture, shape and colour of this alien item in my young world.

Let us all rediscover anew this sense of awe and potential to be found in the world around us. Let us cherish our home, and do whatever we must, in order to preserve and conserve it for future generations.

Love from your Uncle.

©2023 Geoff Allshorn

We Are All Spiderman

Finding Meaning in Modern Mythology: From Sherlock to Spiderman; from The Rocket to Star Wars.

How does New York City connect to modern-day Laos or to a galaxy far, far away? They are all the settings for movies that portray different aspects of modern humanity’s quest for significance in a post-religious era. They demonstrate that humanism, not heroism, provides the inspiration for modern mythologies.

I’m old enough to remember when Spiderman was some vaguely adult-aged superhero, running around to the tune: “Spiderman, Spiderman, does whatever a spider can”. Gone are those days. Now, he is a modern-day affluent teenaged American dude, imparting his white saviour complex upon the denizens of Europe while simultaneously worrying about whether or not to pack his Spiderman cozzie in his suitcase for his trip to Italy.

It is this human duality that contextualises the movie, Spiderman: Far From Home (SFFH), and the underlying philosophy that can be found in this film (and I presume in the companion movies of the modern Spiderman series). In SFFH, teenaged Spidie spends as much time worrying about girls as he does fighting the super-villain. Meanwhile, his school friends protect his secret and appear almost equally able to confront many types of change that range from puberty to possible armageddon.

SFFH is not a superhero movie so much as a teenage drama set in a superhero universe, almost a bowdlerised version of Heartstopper. Its feel-good nature is reminiscent of the adolescent energy from the Back to the Future movies. But it extends the superhero empowerment to all teenagers: you are future citizens who can change the world, starting today.

This touches upon themes in another unrelated film, the charming Australian movie, The Rocket (2013), which is about a young Laotian boy (Ahlo) and his family as they struggle against the intergenerational after-effects of the Vietnam war and the lingering pollution of imperialism from both the USA and Australia. One character (“Uncle Purple”) lives as a Laotian version of a fanboy from US culture, and viewers are left to decide for themselves whether such cultural influence is beautiful or ugly. The Australian imperialist influence comprises the capitalist exploitation of environment and the forced displacement of whole villages of disempowered people in the name of corporate profits. It seems no wonder Hollywood ignored this covert rewriting and cultural terraforming of themes from the first Star Wars movie, and that Laos banned it. But its ultimate climax testifies to the power of human nobility and triumph in the face of adversity.

Similarly, forget the bland villain plot in the Spiderman movie, which is dominated by special effects and vacuous scripting. In Spiderman, as in The Rocket, not all heroes wear a cape, but they all play their part in changing the world. Their message is that if their audiences want to implement positive change in their local community (fight climate change, promote science and STEM, or whatever) then it is up to them to take the lead.

Here we see that, possibly despite themselves, the creators of modern mythology have transcended their own craft. The trend for pop culture movies, initiated by the runaway success of the first Star Wars movie – wherein modern movies now often rely more heavily upon special effects than they do upon a coherent script – has evolved into something more. In trying to capture modern paying audiences, movie makers have been forced to resort to common human existential tropes, and in doing so, have transformed modern movie mythology from mindless capitalist consumerism into more thoughtful human inner reflection. Whereas traditional mythology focussed upon gods, demons, angels and other supernatural agency, modern mythology finds the same inspiration through the better angels within our own humanity.

And while some audience members today bewail the rebooting of Doctor Who or James Bond movies, the rewriting of Roald Dahl or Enid Blyton novels, or the reworking of traditional straight white male hero stereotypes to be more inclusive and diverse – “god save us from censorship and the cancelling of old, white people!” – the reality is that cultures have been rewriting and reinventing heroes since forever. Zeus became Jupiter, and Jesus became Superman, while Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer became Harry Potter and Ron Weasley, and the Famous Five became Scooby Doo. Romeo and Juliet were copies of pre-Shakesperean versions of themselves. The original story of Robin Hood and his domestic partner Little John evolved into a heterosexualised series of Sherwood Forest tales featuring heroic outlaws who were eventually rebooted as the space age Blake’s Seven. We can even document how medieval France became the setting for a cultural reboot of the Camelot mythology – transforming King Arthur’s court from rebellious, anti-imperialist, post-Roman, Saxon England into a more refined medieval setting that introduced modern understandings of chivalry, courtly romance and nobility.

Similarly, we can understand Spiderman to be a modern-day Beowolf reboot that puts the ‘human’ back into ‘superhuman’.

But even more than that: modern Hollywood reboots of ancient mythologies demonstrate that our common humanity and existential angst provide deeper meanings than modern mindless consumerism: go to watch a seemingly mindless movie, and come out inspired or transformed into being more than you were at the start of that movie. It’s a philosophy that encapsulates fan fiction and fandom such as that found in the world of Sherlock Holmes over a century ago – fans who were transformed by their culture, and who in turn appropriated, reshaped and transformed that culture.

Modern-day activism does not involve attending lectures in a public library and then enjoying an oh-so-polite cuppa tea; it involves more than angrily marching down public streets while chanting slogans in support of some worthy cause or another. It is not exclusively donating to your favourite charity by painless monthly credit card payments if you want your life to represent more than tokenism. Activism is a way of life and it involves wholistic enactment of change. It hurts, it challenges, and it transforms its practitioners. Ahlo, Peter Parker and Rey Skywalker are role models for how to change the world: change begins with ourselves. Just ask their real-life superhero counterparts: Greta Thunberg, Malala Yousafzai or X González.

Thanks for the reminder, Spiderman.

©2023 Geoff Allshorn

Hey Boomer

To commemorate the anniversary of the Human Be-In (14 January 1967)

Image by David from Pixabay

Rarely a day seems to pass without some comment in a letters column or a social media thread where someone is complaining about the baby boomer generation, who are apparently all affluent, privileged, self-absorbed, and selfish.

It seems somewhat puzzling that ageist generalisations about baby boomers come from subsequent generations of adults who appear to largely abhor racism, sexism and homophobia. Why is this other form of discrimination acceptable?

As a tail-end baby boomer myself, I was born towards the end of the era and so I just made it into the generation, but many of these people – older girls and boys when I was a child but who seemed so grown up to me – ultimately became my mentors and heroes in my youth and adulthood. In response to ageist criticism of these people, I would like to say to my role models:

Hey boomer, thank you.

Image by Clker-Free-Vector-Images from Pixabay

Thank you for once being young and idealistic and full of dreams and naive hope.

Thank you for taking the world of Robert Menzies and Joseph McCarthy, and turning it into a world of Rosa Parks and Gough Whitlam.

Thank you for the hippies who turned the nuclear arms race into flower power and pacifism that stopped the Vietnam War.

Thank you for taking the empathy of Dr Spock, who raised your generation; and contributing to the modern-day mythology of Mr Spock, who encouraged us all to think more logically and rationally.

Thank you for questioning and challenging the establishment – everything from institutional Christianity to the Vietnam War draft – and inspiring a wave of independent thinkers.

Thank you for the civil rights movement which established the equality of people regardless of race or skin colour.

Thank you for ending racial segregation and apartheid.

Thank you for the 1967 referendum in Australia which recognised Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples as Australians.

Thank you for contributing to the space program and Moon landings, helping to create the biggest non-military scientific program in history which led to much of our modern-day science and technology.

Thank you for advancing the environmental movement and many animal liberation causes.

Thank you for the second-generation women’s lib movement.

Thank you for the gay liberation movement and its subsequent LGBT+/queer rights momentum.

Thank you for all your activism during the era of HIV/AIDS, when millions of people were dying in a double epidemic of AIDS and homophobic stigma – yet you cared for them, changed the world for them, and became heroes.

Thank you for starting the world-wide trend towards abolition of the death penalty.

Thank you for promoting women’s sexual autonomy via the pill, abortion, the right to say no, and granting women some power within marriage instead of treating them like the property of their husband.

Thank you for advancing many of the human rights that subsequent generations of adults enjoy, including their right to criticise you.

Thank you to those of you who, even in retirement, continue to lobby hard for human rights, equality, and uplifting the underdog: refugees, indigenous people, and others who are oppressed or disempowered.

For those of you who are still active and empowered and educated, and who keep your finger on the pulse of a younger world, I say please keep working hard to create an even better world for posterity. To those of you for whom the spirit may be willing but the flesh is becoming weak, I respectfully suggest it is time to graciously pass the mantle to a younger generation and enjoy a well-deserved rest. Those who follow will be grateful and capable in continuing the work of changing the world in newer ways of which perhaps we can only dream.

Thank you, boomers, for your lifetime of work. I’m not saying that you got everything right, but you did your best to make the world a better place for your having been in it. May subsequent generations learn from your example, agitate to change the world for the better, and enjoy their own well-deserved retirement after a lifetime of hard work and activism.

(These same young people in this video would now likely be in their seventies or eighties. Grandma and Grandpa were young once – boomers in their heyday enjoying being alive, carefree, and full of potential to change the world. Let’s see subsequent generations do the same.)

©2023 Geoff Allshorn