The Geeky Atheist

As a follow up to my debate summary, I wanted to go into a few topics that I don't think Michael Shermer highlighted enough. The lines for questions filled up too quickly for me to have a chance at asking a question of the Reasons to Believe folks, so I'm left to simply post my rebuttals here on my blog.

The first thing I want to accuse them of doing is picking and choosing. They do this on many levels. The most obvious is "quote mining" where they take quotes that when taken out of context highlight the nearly opposite effect of the original text. This is a common tactic, but not the tactic I'm wanting to talk about today.

Today it's all about picking and choosing verses from the bible. This is something every Christian does without knowing it. For nearly any statement, one can find verses to agree with or disagree with the statement.

The main assertion of Hugh Ross during his presentation is that the bible is a cosmological book. He points out the bible supporting these cosmological truths:

• Singularity in the beginning: Genesis 1:1, 2:3, 2:4, Psalm 148:5, Isaiah 40:26, 42:5, 45:18, John 1:3, Col. 1:15-17, Hebrews 11:3. This statement asserts that the bible agrees with the "big bang" model.
• The universe is expanding: Job 9:8, Isaiah 40:22, 42:5, 44:24, 45:12, 48:13, 51:13, Zechariah 12:1, Psalm 104:2, Jeremiah 51:15, 10:12. Interesting thing to note is that unlike the previous slide, this slide had no particular order. While potentially just a coincidence, perhaps he's wanting to draw attention away from the fact that over half of those verses are from the same book.

Now what Hugh Ross didn't go into is how he decided those particular verses were the truth. For example:

• The Sun revolves around the Earth: Joshua 10:12-13, Psalms 19:4-6, Ecclesiastes 1:5
• The Earth is fixed in place: 1 Chronicles 16:30, Psalms 93:1, Psalms 96:10, 2 Samuel 22:16, Psalms 18:15, Psalms 102:25, Proverbs 8:27-29, Isaiah 48:13, John 17:24, Psalms 104:5, Isaiah 24:18
• Similarly, the Earth is set up on pillars: Job 9:6, 1 Samuel 2:8, Job 38:4-6
• The Earth is flat: Job 28:24, Psalms 19:4-6, Daniel 4:10-11, Matthew 4:8, Isaiah 40:22, Psalms 136:6, Isaiah 44:24
• The Earth is finite (you can't walk around it to get back to your starting spot): Psalms 103:12, Deuteronomy 28:64, Deuteronomy 33:17, 1 Samuel 2:10, Job 28:24, Job 38:13, Psalms 19:4-6, Psalms 22:27, Psalms 46:9, Psalms 48:10, Psalms 59:13, Psalms 61:2, Psalms 65:5, Isaiah 41:9, Jeremiah 51:16, Daniel 4:10-11, Mark 13:27
• The Earth has edges and corners: Job 26:10, Job 37:3, Proverbs 8:27-29, Isaiah 11:12, Isaiah 40:22, Isaiah 41:9, Ezekiel 7:2, Revelation 7:1, Revelation 20:8

And I could go on and on, but I won't because in the search for a good list of these verses, I found a great article highlighting in more detail than I would ever want to do here. It shows the verses supporting a few other cosmological falsehoods as well.

Now here's the question for the Reasons to Believe folks: what was it that allowed you to dismiss all of these verses as metaphor instead of being literal while being able to take the verses for your arguments and take them literally?

I know the answer: Science. The Bible didn't predict that the universe was expanding, and it didn't predict that there was a big bang. If it did, then it also predicted all of the other cosmological themes listed above.

The bible is not a cosmological book. It clearly shows the themes of ancient cosmology, and not of our modern understanding of the universe.

Last night the Center for Inquiry co-sponsored a debate "Was Darwin Wrong?" with Michael Shermer. My wife and I attended, and I video taped a decent portion of it, but unfortunately it was too long for my battery. I'm working on getting in contact with another person so that I can hopefully splice our videos together and get a larger chunk up to YouTube in the near future.

I'd like to highlight a few observations from the evening.

• This wasn't a debate. Hugh Ross and Fazale Rana from Reasons to Believe were given 25 minutes each (and they took a total of one hour and 15 minutes combined) to give presentations that weren't debated. Shermer was only given 30 minutes, and he went over by a few minutes. After this, they fielded questions from each other for about 15-20 minutes, but there wasn't much back and forth. Finally, the audience was allowed to ask questions for another 20 minutes.
• While the title of the event made you think that evolution would be up for debate, it wasn't really. Ross dedicated his entire presentation to how the bible is a cosmologically accurate book. Rana did better to bring up the subject matter, but not very much.
• Shermer did excellent considering the format. He was well prepared, and essentially pointed out all of the flaws in Ross' original powerpoint. Unfortunately with his time limited, he didn't really get to dive into all of the arguments.
• The on-stage debate section was worthless. There wasn't much accomplished, and the moderator didn't do any moderating.
• One audience question asked what they thought of being able to derive Pi from Genesis 1:1. Even the Reasons to Believe folks dismissed it.
• Another audience question was out of left field in claiming that we haven't actually discovered black holes and that there never was a singularity.
• My favorite part was Shermer asking the Reasons to Believe people, "If your model was disproven, would you give up Jesus as your savior?" The crowd yelled, "No!". Update: As Rik pointed out, Shermer then replied, "There you go. That proves my point, this has nothing to do with science." Additionally, later on Shermer had Ross agreeing that if his testable model was disproved, he would give up his faith in Jesus.

All in all it was entertaining, and given how it was stacked, I think that Shermer did excellent. As for the original subject matter, it wasn't really discussed. Afterwards while we made our way to see Shermer, I overheard him taking ill-informed evolutionary questions and taking the time to explain it step by step.

The best part is that another person we know from our Threadgills ACA meetups had a shirt on that he had told us about this past Sunday. He had designed a shirt that listed on the front major transitional fossils that had been found. Shermer noticed the shirt while answering a question about what transitional fossils have been found, and pointed to this guy's shirt and said, "They're right there."

Were people's minds changed tonight? No, I highly doubt it. That's the hardest thing to do in debates. If anyone might rethink anything, it might be that one person who had a one-on-one Q&A afterwards that I overheard. He seemed actually intellectually interested in the questions he was asking, and it might make him go research a bit more.

Over the weekend, I saw numerous reports of swine flu mixed with the word pandemic. Obviously this would make anyone concerned -- a pandemic is not a fun thing. There are a few elements to this story, but let me lead in with this article from Geeks are Sexy:

So what's the take away message from all of this? Can we do anything about this? Well as individuals it's wise to go through the same sanitary practices as we might during flu season. Also, traveling to places which have reported cases probably isn't a great idea. Governments and regulatory bodies like the CDC and the WHO are in an "all hands on deck" kind of status right now. As the outbreaks continue (they are expected to grow for at least the time being), these groups will be tracking any reported cases and trying to treat those infected.

As a young microbiologist, I'd say that for the moment we shouldn't worry too much. There are people who have spent their whole lives preparing for just these kinds of events and they're currently working very hard to provide the public with the best information and advice.

This is the best, most sane article I've seen about this "pandemic." It goes into more about the flu and what's special about swine flu (and avian flu for that matter).

On the other point, the rest of the outrage is over a large portion of the republican party griping about money in the stimulus package for two things: volcano monitoring and pandemic preparedness. While I do think that these were programs that were more worth funding than some of the other things they were griping about, it's not a, "republicans did it" thing. Let's look at a few other facts to consider.

The CDC recommends the use of oseltamivir or zanamivir for the treatment and/or prevention of swine flu viruses.

In 2005 George W. Bush said the federal government would spend $1 billion to buy enough of antiviral drugs Tamiflu and Relenza to treat 50 million people. However, the plan also calls on states -- with some unspecified federal subsidies -- to buy enough to cover an additional 31 million people. That could cost hard-pressed state governments hundreds of millions of dollars.

Tamiflu is the marketed name for oseltamivir, and Relenza is the marketed name for zanamivir.

With this, it would appear that the sole reason we have a stockpile of these drugs that are going to potentially prove very useful in the coming month or two is because of a republican president.

I hope that this doesn't go pandemic. With reported cases literally 45 miles from me, it's certainly a bit too close to home. But after reading up on the subject, I think we're still a little too far away from pandemic levels to be giving into panic. As the other article recommended, wash your hands more frequently and be a little more cautious, and most likely you'll be fine.

I had a great week in our nation's capital, but unfortunately by, "slow updates," it turned out that I meant, "no updates." One of the problems the first week for this blog was that I was encountering links that I didn't really have much to add to, but still wanted to post them.

I've decided to solve part of this problem by doing "Video Sunday" posts. These posts will have a few videos posted that I found interesting and relevant. I usually find a few every week, and I'll save them up for a single post each week.

Here are the videos I ran across this week:

• Why We Believe in Gods: Psychiatrist Andy Thomson gives an hour-long lecture describing the reasons why we believe in gods. It's a very interesting discussion about why our mind works the way it does regarding religion.

• What Would Jesus Not Do?: I really like this guy's videos, and I'm sure I'll be posting some more of his videos. This animation postulates a discussion between angels and Yahweh before his visit to earth. It's long, but quite good.

• Sam Harris makes a joke and a point: A humorous exchange during a debate at the American Jewish University. Both hilarious, and a very good point.

• Open-mindedness: This is another person I recently discovered. This video talks about how we atheists are often called, "closed-minded," shows why this is not the case, and also shows why it's more likely that the person accusing the other person of being closed-minded is likely to be closed-minded themselves.

This concludes the first video Sunday. I know some of these videos are a bit older, but I wanted to start out with a bang of some great videos.

I'm out of town on a business trip, visiting the wonderful capital of the United States. I didn't accomplish my enqueuing of wonderful posts for the week, so I'm firing from the hip and most likely won't be able to provide daily updates this week.

But rest assured, I'll get one or two out, and if you're not already following me on Twitter, I'll be posting some periodic updates there as well.

I live in Texas, and I've been hearing a lot about Rick Perry's talk of seceding. I find it absolutely absurd.

One of the interesting parts of Texas joining the union is that it negotiated the ability to secede. Some places I've read say that this right has been changed into the ability to split into four states. But I'll cut to the chase:

Texas won't be seceding. No one can be that stupid. Rick Perry is just using it to rile up his base. Sadly a lot of voters in Texas just simply don't realize how bad the idea of seceding is.

Sometimes I wish I didn't live here in Texas. The Austin area is pretty sane, with a good atheist community. But for every sane person in Austin, there seems to be two or three that are just ridiculous.

Last June I found myself driving back and forth between the Austin area and Eureka Springs, AR to support my wife's opera career. In my conquest to better understand the bible, I decided to check out Misquoting Jesus.

Bart Ehrman, the author, is a New Testament scholar who introduces the world of textual criticism to us laymen. Textual criticism is the science of examining multiple copies of the same text and attempting to determine what the original text most likely read. His book goes into a lot of detail over different types of errors and intentional changes one runs into when looking through the New Testament manuscripts.

First he takes a look into why we have so many New Testament manuscripts. Early Christian history was driven by the congregation members, who were often poor and illiterate by todays standards. As such professional scribes were rarely used, and more educated congregation members were given the task of copying the manuscripts. Remember that this is in the days before the printing press and that every book was hand-copied, letter by letter.

Inevitably, mistakes are made. In fact, no one has counted how many mistakes there are, but Ehrman makes this comparison: there are more differences between manuscripts of the new testament than there are words in the new testament. He is also quick to point out that the vast majority of errors are unintentional -- misspellings, parablepsis (occasioned by homoioteleuton), etc. However, he dedicates the rest of his book to showing how intentional changes made it into the bible we have today.

It should be noted that textual criticism is not an exact science. There are many debates, and I feel that Ehrman does a good job highlighting where his opinion is opinion and not accepted knowledge. In reading criticisms of his book, they're often about parts where he specifically points out that there is debate before he renders his opinion, which is labeled as opinion.

The major point that this book shows is that the doctrine of biblical inerrancy that many churches subscribe to is flat out wrong. There is no way to determine the inerrancy of the originals, because we simply don't have the originals. While you can consider it a faith issue to claim it's inerrant in its original form, it doesn't hold up to scientific scrutiny.

An interesting factoid is that when originally reading this book, I was still a Christian. After reading the book, I didn't actually realize the implications immediately, and instead felt that my faith had been strengthened because this breathed life into the bible. Only months later when I was evaluating the rest of my faith did this knowledge affect my faith in any way.

For those interested in learning more about the bible's history and what textual critics encounter when digging through the New Testament manuscripts, this is a great read, and I highly recommend it.

Over the past few months, the problem of users' videos being flagged and removed without any clear reason why has become more prevalent. I feel that there is a fair amount of anecdotal evidence pointing to malicious behavior to flag videos. Only YouTube would know for sure.

Assuming that it is malicious users that are the problem, let me further speculate what the problem is:

• Flagging a video has a benefit of removing videos with opposing views of your own.
• Flagging a video incorrectly has no consequences.
• Flagging a video can be done by any user, not just users who have earned the privilege.

Thus, I feel like YouTube needs to enact consequences for improperly flagging videos. If a video is removed and it was later found that the video did not violate the YouTube terms of service, all accounts that flagged the video should have their account locked for a period commensurate with how many times this has happened. For example, a first time offender maybe only gets their account locked for 3 days, while a third time offender may get a month penalty.

Next, I feel that YouTube should make flagging only be enabled for accounts that have met certain requirements. A few examples that might work:

• A user has watched more than X time of videos (assuming they have a way to measure this). This would help prevent an automated bot from signing up for a lot of fake accounts just to flag videos.
• A new account cannot flag a video within 24 hours. This would help prevent people from flagging via a manual effort. For example, if someone emailed or chatted you to flag a video and you didn't want to risk your main account, you would sign up for a new account only to find it didn't work. Within 24 hours you may have forgotten about it.

I'm sure there's many other creative ways to tell a real account from a bot-driven account. The people at Google are not dumb, and probably can come up with some great mechanisms to limit flagging to legitimate users.

Finally, I would implement a weight to a flagging. Rather than a rule, e.g. "50 flags for video removal," I would make a user who has flagged videos truthfully more than 5 times be worth 50 points, while new users or users who have flagged incorrectly before only worth 1 point. Now use this weighted score to trip the automatic removal of the video.

As a programmer myself, I don't think any of these are technically challenging to implement, and I think that they would help greatly reduce the problems YouTube has with malicious flagging.

As a medically obese person, I've struggled with weight loss. None of the diets really made sense, and even though I lost 45 pounds on Atkins, I never understood why, and it bugged me. There were theories, but I hadn't ever seen a strong study show why the diet actually does work for people.

My current hypothesis with one data point (myself) is that Atkins counting carbs wasn't right, and that "ketosis" wasn't the key, but rather it was all about keeping your blood sugar levels steady throughout the day. This happens to mirror Atkins quite well, but with the side effect that you look at glycemic load instead of net carbs.

Today I noticed a news report Factors Other Than Genes Could Cause Obesity, Insulin Study Shows. Reading through it, it shows a strong correlation with what my hypothesis was.

Findings indicate that the faster a cell processes insulin, the more fat it stores.

Other researchers have suggested that certain "fat genes" might be associated with excessive fat storage in cells. However, the Purdue researchers confirmed that these fat genes were expressed, or activated, in all of the cells, yet those cells varied drastically - from nearly zero in some cases to pervasive in others - in how much fat they stored.

Combine this with the existing knowledge of how we regulate insulin in the body: we reduce "simple" carbohydrates by limiting intake of high-glycemic foods.

As I've been starting back up my quest of removing high-glycemic foods partly for health and partly for weight loss, I'm happy to see studies coming out lining up with my suspicions about being healthy and losing weight.

This was a point I struggled with as I started becoming more skeptical of things, and more trusting of science and medicine. Where do you draw the line of what to be skeptical about? All along I knew that Atkins worked better for me than a specifically low-calorie diet did, and no one could explain why. If I were to trust established science which hadn't really researched this as much as you are to led to assume, why didn't it work for most people (referring to many studies referenced in Rethinking Thin and Good Calories, Bad Calories)?

Anecdotal evidence is some of the worst evidence, and so while I was trusting of my hunches, I'm glad to see scientists investigating this further.

Over the past few weeks I've been reading Why Evolution Is True by Jerry Coyne. In my original acceptance of evolution, I didn't really dig into the evidence for it initially. Rather, I saw my arguments against it being deconstructed as logical fallacy after logical fallacy via The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe Podcast. Seeing my arguments against evolution destroyed, I read Francis Collins' The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief. Being a Christian at the time, I wanted some input on what really changes if I decided to accept evolution.

Fast forward to a few weeks ago, where I listened to Coyne being interviewed about this book. He explained that there are many scientists who never encounter the true breadth of evidence behind evolution. Back in the early 1900s, the evidence was very crucial to accepting evolution as a fact. But as we got closer and closer to today, we've stopped teaching as much of the evidence because the scientific community largely accepts evolution as truth. This is where he felt he could contribute with his book.

His book is a step by step walk through the breadth of evidence that supports evolution, and he does it with such an eloquent voice. I'm not a scientist, but I didn't encounter a subject that I wasn't able to comprehend. Beyond comprehension, it was truly an entertaining book. His love of biology is evidenced in his writing.

He starts off by explaining the six principles of evolution: gradualism, speciation, common ancestry, natural selection, and nonselective mechanisms of evolutionary change. The remainder of the book sets forth to back up each of these principles with the breadth of evidence found in, but not limited to, the fossil record, the biogeography of plants and animals, and molecular genomic data.

His book does a wonderful job of proving what he set out for in his title: evolution is true. This book is not an end-all-be-all book of evolution, but it's a great primer with lots of facts and examples, and is a great starter or refresher for anyone interested more in the evidence behind evolution.