The Rule of Cool is, I believe, actually a TV trope, it applies to video games as well. The variant I’m thinking of is when all inconsistencies between game play and the story are waved away as game play being more important than consistency with the story.

Now, in fairness, games must be unrealistic in order to be games. If a game was perfectly realistic, it would be a simulator, not a game. And people would mostly only do them to train for doing the real version. Thus wounds must heal in seconds or minutes, not weeks or months. Thus is should take minutes to build a hut, not days. And so on; there are a lot of things which need to be cheated in order to have a game and not a simulator. This I grant.

Having granted that, it’s important to point out that it does not follow that no thought should go into how one cheats reality in order to make a game. This is not true, of course, of pure games, such as tic-tac-toe or tetris. But in games that have a story, it is extremely important to consider how the gameplay fits in with the story. Recently I’ve been playing ARK: Survival Evolved, so I’ll draw my examples from there. The one thing that you need to know about ARK is that it’s a survival-type game (i.e. you gather resources and craft tools, structures, etc) with dinosaurs. An the dinosaur models are gorgeous.

Of course, the first problem is that ARK isn’t really a survival game. It’s a team assault game where the weapons are gathered in a semi-survivalist sort of way. I say semi-survivalist because after a certain point all of the resources are gathered by heavy machines. It just so happens that the heavy machines are dinosaurs, but aside from having a setting where they can aimlessly wander around and having a breeding mechanic, they are designed just like heavy machines would be. There are heavy trucks (brontosauri), light trucks (diplodocuses), tanks (rexes), armored assault vehicles (allosauruses), and so on. There are even spy helicopters (pteranodons), attack helicopters (tapejaras) and cargo helicopters (quetzals). You might think that flying reptiles would be more like planes, but they’re all slow, very maneuverable, and extremely good at hovering. The more heavily laden they are, the slower they move. It makes sense as a game mechanic but makes absolutely no physical sense. If a slow moving animal flapped very slowly, it would fall like a rock.

And the problem is that this takes you right out of the story. When flying reptiles are actually swimming through the air in entirely impossible ways, the beauty of the models loses most of its effect. The same is true of the walk-cycles which don’t adapt to the ground, but I think for different reasons.

Granted, walk cycles which don’t use physics to adjust the skeleton in natural ways for locomotion will never look entirely right, but I think that we’d forgive scripted walk cycles far more if the dinosaur which was walking imperfectly was actually moving with a purpose. But in ARK they aren’t. Or rather, they almost never are. On occasion a predator does run at another dinosaur to attack it. But under normal circumstances the dinosaurs simply wander around completely aimlessly. The herbivores do not eat, nor do the walk towards plants. They are simply on a random walk. And I think that the fact that their movements are completely pointless make you far more likely to notice that they’re not walking correctly.

And this problem carries over to appreciating the models for another reason. It’s great that the triceratops looks almost exactly how you’d picture it, but it’s hard to notice that when they’re not behaving at all like how you’d expect. They’re a herd animal. You should see them in groups and they should move around with some relationship to the others in the herd. That they don’t just breaks the illusion even more.

And of course everything has terrible eyesight in ARK. Predators don’t notice prey until they’re within about 50 yards. Prey doesn’t notice predators until the predators have  actually bitten them. No creature in ARK has a nose.

Of course, none of these are likely to be overly noticeable if you’re playing in team-versus-team since you have to be on constant lookout for other teams who will try to kill you if you’re alone.

I should note that the dinosaur taming also suffers from the idea of gameplay-over-story. With exceptions, dinosaur taming is accomplished by using tranquilizers to knock a dinosaur unconscious, then feed it its favorite foods while it’s unconscious. Once it’s eaten enough it then instantly forms a lifelong bond to you where it is willing to go on suicide missions on your command. Granted you have to cheat taming an animal somehow for this to be a game and not as simulator, but this is extremely stupid. Worse, as you are shooting the dinosaur with tranquilizer-soaked crossbow bolts in order to knock it out, once it’s torpor falls below a certain point it realizes that you are trying to tranquilize it and runs away at its top speed. This is very stupid because tranquilizers make animals slower, not faster, but it also makes taming dinosaurs frustrating. There’s also no way to vary the amount of tranquilizer being delivered per shot, so larger, higher level dinosaurs require very large numbers of shots to tranquilize. That’s tedious, not fun. (This is another case where the game is made for multi-player, because using one of the many multi-person dinosaur mounts makes chasing after dinosaurs much easier since one person drives the dinosaur while the other person shoots. It’s also the case that, for example, four people can deliver 4x as many tranquilizing shots so chasing may not even be necessary for teams.)

A mechanic where you feed the awake dinosaur until it likes you would have been much better. This does actually exist with a few dinosaurs, but even here this has been screwed up so that it isn’t too easy, by which I really mean, too fun. There’s a dolphin-like marine reptile which likes to come up to survivors (what the players are called) and nuzzle them. You can give them meat and this tames them, except that once they realize you’re trying to tame them, they run away. This makes no sense, and is no fun. Apparently the most important game mechanic is that the player must struggle for everything.

Ultimately, ARK is an absolutely beautiful games which isn’t very much fun to play in single player mode because its central theme is being a tribal warfare simulator where it takes hundreds of hours to build up assets that get destroyed in a few minutes during a raid. The later stages of the games are even fought with automatic weapons and heavy artillery; the dinosaur seem almost out of place among auto-turrets and C4 bombs.

But the upshot is that the game really doesn’t work as a single player game. It really looks like it should work as a single player game. There should be an enormous amount to do all on one’s own. But it’s mostly ruined by inattention to the story. It’s not possible to suspend one’s disbelief long enough to enjoy it. Which is a great pity because the dinosaur models are gorgeous.

At least, so says this biologist. Basically, the idea is that instead of being a splinter off of raptors (hawks and eagles) which specialized for speed, falcons are actually a splinter off of parrots who specialized for speed and meat eating.

The article goes on at length about how shocking this is, but having been very into studying falconry in my youth and having once had a pet parrot (well, a cockatiel, but it’s in the parrot family), I’m actually not very surprised. Eagles (mostly) look kind of like large hawks, but falcons just don’t look much like hawks at all. They actually look more like short-tailed parrots. This is especially true of their wing shape. Falcons have long, narrow wings where the flight feathers stick together forming a (mostly) solid surface. Hawk’s and eagle’s flight feathers stick out independently, looking almost like outstretched fingers. Parrot’s wings look extremely similar to falcon’s wings, with the flight feathers touching each other.

Granted, looks aren’t dispositive, which is the point of the original article. I just think it’s worth noting that it goes out of its way to emphasize the ways that falcons look like hawks but not how they look dissimilar.

And it should be noted that the results of convergent evolution are, in the end, convergence. That falcons are more closely related to parrots than to hawks means very little; you can train hawks and falcons for falconry (hunting), but you can’t train parrots to hunt. Falcons don’t talk like parrots do, and you interact with them much more like hawks than like parrots. Hawks, eagles, and falcons are all fairly solitary creatures.

So while it’s fascinating trivial that falcons are more closely related to parrots than to hawks, it’s not actually useful information. You still shouldn’t name your gyrfalcon polly, or offer it a cracker.

I was recently reading about John Denver. Probably my favorite song of his is Thank God I’m a Country Boy (which described, to some degree, the life I aspired to as a child, not the one I had):

I was also extremely fond of Christmas for Cowboys:

Anyway, he had a somewhat tumultuous life and died in a plane crash where we was piloting an experimental plane that he was flying. He was also somewhat politically active, championing environmental concerns, being against the NRA, backing Jimmy Carter, and so on. Still, this was from the time when celebrities didn’t—or weren’t allowed to—mix their politics into their art by way of expressing venomous hatred for fans who disagreed. And without the internet, one didn’t tend to run into their off-duty political rants nearly as often. Ah, the good old days. But it brings up a very interesting point: John Denver meant something very different to a ten year old me than he meant to himself.

In one sense that’s obvious. To me he was primarily his music while to him he was primarily a man. But in another sense, it does bring in a fascinating point about God’s governance of the universe.  As I’ve written about, You Rarely Know What Good You Do. Electronic reproduction, which brings out lives into contact with people we’ll never meet, makes this even more obvious. I don’t know whether John Denver was a humble man, but I do know that his song Thank God I’m a Country Boy did help to teach a very young me about humility. I don’t know if he even thought of that song as being about humility. He may well have thought of it as being about not being suckered in by the promises of city life and/or living within your means. But even if he did, it still taught me lessons about humility.

I’ve never understood when people get hung about what their “identity” is. How on earth do they know? First, they’re a work in progress. Second, they don’t know most of what they do. How on earth are they supposed to know what their “identity” is. For the most part our identity is out of our control, anyway. How we relate to others is dominated by the world, not by us. Which means that it’s almost entirely under God’s direction, not ours, even in the limited sense in which our choices are not God’s direction of the world. (Which is a useful sense, even if not the truest sense.)

And John Denver is a good example of this. He was someone important to me but he never knew that I existed and consequently had no idea who he was to me.

Life must be lived in faith, since it sure as hell can’t be lived in present knowledge of what we’re doing.

Somehow in America we switched to predominantly saying “merry Christmas” instead of “happy Christmas”. I haven’t had time to look up when, but I’m curious when it happened since it can’t have been that long ago. The final line of Twas The Night Before Christmas is:

And I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight, “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

That poem was published in 1823. And yes, I know the original title was A Visit From St. Nicholas. Anyway, I prefer the original (and what’s still said in England, as I understand it) because “happy” is one of the translations of the Greek “makarios”. The other translation being, “blessed”. It’s the primary attribute described in the beatitudes in the sermon on the mount. Both are good, but happy just encompasses more than merry.

May you have a very happy Christmas.

This is a response to two posts by Mr. John C. Wright: The Fine Tuning Argument Needs More Fine Tuning and Argument from Design is Well Designed. While I think that Mr. Wright’s criticism of the argument in itself is correct, I think that he misses the context of why it is a useful argument none the less. (It shakes the poorly-founded confidence on which a belief in materialism is typically based.) As usual, you can also watch it on YouTube:

I recently got a chance to take some pictures around my yard. They’re not great, but some of them are a little interesting, I think. The gallery is here:

http://www.chrislansdown.com/photos/2017-12-07-Around_The_Yard/

And here are a few pictures from it:

This is sort-of a followup to Social Media is Doomed. If we take as given that social media is in the phase where its push-based notification system is creaking under the weight of its large userbase and stressing users as a result, if one does not simply abandon all social media, how is one to deal with this and stay sane?

I am not at present giving a definitive answer for two reasons:

1. I do not have sufficient time
2. I’m not completely sure yet

But I would like to sketch out some techniques I’ve found to work. They’re not rules, just heuristics.

Be Very Picky about Who you Follow

This is probably the most important thing. If people post too many things which would require you to come to terms with them in order to get along, don’t follow them. On social media where being friends and seeing updates are not the same thing, then by all means be friends with anyone you know but be careful to turn off status updates (or whatever the push notifications are called) as soon as you can tell that they’re not thinking of their status updates as public. It’s way better than losing friends.

Turn Off Phone Notifications

Everyone’s social media app loves to buzz you every time you have the slightest interaction with anyone, since they desperately want your eyes looking at the advertisements they show you. Just turn off the notifications for everything but direct messages and check on occasion. The number of times anything bad will happen because you didn’t catch somebody’s status update in a timely manner can be counted on no hands, for most people.

Don’t Use the Default Interface

The default interface of most social media is designed with one goal in mind: to get you to watch as much advertising as the social media company can manipulate you into watching. There are probably some exceptions, but however it is that the social media company makes money off of you, that’s what they want to trick you into doing, as often as they can. And they may not even realize that they’re training you through stress reactions and pavlovian training to do what they want; they probably only measure their success at making money, not what effect these things have on you. In the end, it doesn’t matter whether they mean well. You can do just as much damage by not realizing how to measure how much damage you’re doing. Protect yourself from everyone, not merely intentional villains. Most every social media platform has some alternative way of interacting with it that doesn’t get nearly as much attention. Tweetdeck for Twitter is the obvious example, but there are others. Maybe read Facebook via email that automatically goes into a folder. Whatever the platform offers that isn’t the standard, use that if at all possible.

I’ve put up some photographs of a fascinating black and yellow spider I found in my yard:

http://www.chrislansdown.com/photos/2017-12-01-Black_and_Yellow_Spider/

Here’s a sample:

I recently made this joke on Twitter:

There are of course plenty of non-corporeal entities which atheists ordinarily believe in, but many of them they have some alternative explanation for. Logical propositions are just expectations, as are mathematics, mathematical structures, etc. But they do tend to believe in the existence of agreements between people which are not easily reducible simply to expected behaviors.

In my tweet I chose one of the bigger agreements between people, the United States government, but really any sort of agreement will suffice, even something as simple as an agreement to borrow a shovel and return it when its use is finished. I like the example of the US government, though, since it exists not only through time but even through generations; it existed among people who are now dead and exists now among people who were not alive at its creation.

But clearly the United States government is not made up of any particular matter; there is no physical experiment one can device which would detect it. It has no weight, nor color, nor smell, nor sound. We know about it only through testimony and by its actions. And it only acts in the physical world through people.

In theory, if the principles that many atheists put forth were actually their principles, they would have to deny that the United States government exists, or at the very least claim that there’s no evidence for it.

But of course it’s not very hard to show that “their principles” are not in fact their principles. The much harder question is: so what are their principles?

That’s an excellent question I’m still trying to figure out the answer to.

I was recently talking with my friend Andrew Stratelates of the Escaping Atheism Project about the odd topic of people who believe in both subjective morality and self-improvement. In my experience the most common approach to reconciling these two is along the lines of “I subjectively want to do things that I subjectively want to call self-improvement”. The Distributist made a good video about a thought experiment in which one is offered a pill which would instantly wipe out all traces of impulses to conventional morality, enabling one to live out a hedonistic life with far more success because of one’s ability to manipulate and use others without guilt. I strongly recommend it:

His basic point is that when one considers the idea, one knows that it is wrong, even though one’s theory holds that there should be no reason not to and perhaps even a good reason to do it. I recommend watching it.

That said, there is still the easy response that the person doesn’t want to because part of instinctive (arbitrary, groundless) moral impulses are to retain them. And this is, ultimately, unanswerable. If one is claiming that one wills something, not that it is true, this is unanswerable. One can debate truth, but one can’t debate will. (Which is why you can kill a man in self defense but not because he has a persuasive argument.)

And the whole thing would be utterly unremarkable except for the oddity that the people who are taking this easy out of disclaiming rationality in favor of pure will also claim to be the most rational people around. I’m not going to get into why—in part because I’m still working on the psychology of the thing and have no answers I’m yet confident enough to give—but I do want to note this oddity. The people who most often talk about being rational and being unwilling to be as irrational as their opponents also (when pressed) explicitly disclaim being rational on most every human subject. It’s ironic, but also quite interesting.

In the course of a small conversation I had with Mr. John C. Wright in the comments of one of his blog posts, I said that if moral agents persisted across time, they must necessarily be outside of time and therefore conjoined to time by something outside of both and one is then just a little bit of thinking-things-through from God. His reply contained this very interesting question which I’d like to answer at length:

If the Ohio river is inside time, and flowing, and the water changes from moment to moment, in what way is it wrong or illogical of me to call it by the same name “the Ohio river” on Wednesday as I had done on Tuesday?

(I should note, if anyone is unfamiliar with Mr. Wright and his work, that he is a Catholic ex-atheist and is discussing the idea of atheistic ethics in the grand Catholic tradition of taking ideas seriously regardless of which “team” they might benefit because nothing is more important than the truth. Christians are in the pleasant position of not needing to fear the truth, because Jesus Christ is the truth. And the way and the life, but that does not directly bear on the moment.)

Unfortunately the only way to begin to address this question is by asking another question, and one so basic as to make most readers understandably grown: when we say “the Ohio River”, what, specifically, are we talking about? I know, I know, but hear me out. I promise I’ll keep it short.

When we say, “the Ohio River”, we are in truth referring to the form of a river which is instantiated in a particular place, for a duration of time. If we want to talk about the matter of the Ohio River, we must use far more cumbersome language, such as “the present riverbed of the Ohio River” or “The water flowing at this moment through the Ohio River”. Now, I think that the only reasonable position with regard to forms is Scholastic Realism, which is a sort of hybrid between Platonic realism and Aristotelian realism; scholastic realism holds that individual forms participate in the ideal of their form which exists in the mind of God, and it is from that participation that we can refer to two things by the same name and actually mean something by it. However, we need not go down the path of scholastic realism for the present purpose because the Ohio River is not a moral agent.

Before I get to the obvious objection to scholastic realism, let me address the Aristotelian objection to scholastic realism. Which is that the form of the Ohio River exists within time because it is subject to change. The Ohio river came into being and will probably go out of being; it grows and shrinks and occasionally has changed course. But the problem is that something is needed outside of the particular form in order for this to be the same form, rather than one form giving birth to another form and dying in childbirth. Why is it one Ohio River rather than many Ohio Rivers, in the way that wood gives birth to fire but is not fire? Aristotelian realism isn’t wrong, it is merely incomplete. (Which is why Saint Thomas could baptize it.) And so we return to the obvious objection, which was raised during the Endarkenment (more commonly called “the Enlightenment”).

The obvious objection to saying that the Ohio River, as a single thing, participates in the idea of Riverhood within God’s mind is simply to deny that the Ohio River is really one thing, but is instead a collection of things so similar that we give them all the same name. In this view of the name “the Ohio River” does not describe a thing in itself but rather a relation to us. “The Ohio River” thus means, “all that matter which is related to us in the manner of the water currently in the riverbed located as you’d find it on a map labeled ‘Ohio River’.” More colloquially, whatever water happens to be in a particular set of places going in particular directions. As with all forms of reductionism, it is unanswerable in itself except by negation. If a man says that there is no chair, only a collection of atoms in a particular arrangement he finds it convenient to call “chair,” there is nothing one can do to help him, except possibly giving him a vigorous beating with the object in question. No one is a sincere reductionist.

But it doesn’t matter, for the Ohio River is not a moral agent. If the Ohio River does something destructive, such as flooding a man’s house and property, no one holds that justice demands that vengeance be exacted upon the river. And in the case of one who holds the functional view of the river, he holds that it is not even possible to exact vengeance upon the river, for the water which did him harm is long gone.

This is not the case with moral agents. If a man killed my brother yesterday, I claim the right to kill him today because it is the same man who killed my brother. If I told people, “I claim the right to kill this man because he reminds me of the man who killed my brother” they would laugh at me or restrain me, depending on how serious they thought I was. And if they asked me, “But is he the same man?” and I replied, “I call him by the same name as I called the man who killed my brother.” they would grow angry with me. “Is he the same man or not?” they might reasonably demand of me. And if my final answer is, “He is not the same man but I am accustomed to treating him as the same man”  it may well end with my fellow villagers striking me down. And if I were to say, “He isn’t but for convenience I will say that he is,” it would be to the shame of my fellow men if they did not strike me down.

Morality requires identity across time to be meaningful. There may be no such identity, but if so there is no such thing as morality. This is why, to uphold morality, is to uphold identity across time. And once a man believes in actual identity across time, it is just a short hop, skip, and jump to believing in God.

Which is probably why pagan philosophers so often did believe in God.

If you hang out in the right parts of the internet, and especially if you’re a Christian who ever talks about atheism, you’ll encounter a variety of atheists lecturing you about:

• Atheism just means a lack of belief in God, despite acting as if God doesn’t exist
• Atheism is a free-floating proposition with no consequences or presuppositions
• Theism is irrational
• Despite possibly being true
• There’s no evidence for God
• No religion has even a shred of evidence for it
• Evidence can’t exist for religion
• Logic!

And so on. Many of these people seem to be simply repeating things they’ve heard from more charismatic people. But among the atheists one meets, there’s a subset who is astonishingly angry. They’re extremely aggressive, and at the same time generally very poorly educated and uninterested in thinking. By and large, they do nothing but make extremely confident assertions and accuse you of logical fallacies in your response. Even if you didn’t make any sort of argument at all but just asked a question. And very curiously, they get almost frothing-at-the-mouth angry if you simply make contradictory assertions to their assertions.

One possibility for some of them is that they are cult recruiters. Many of their qualities are exactly the approaches of cult recruiters when interacting with skeptics in front of potential recruits. (The key is to realize that attacking the skeptic is showing off for the potential recruit, who in this case would be a non-cult-member atheist looking on.) I’m only at the stage of wondering about this possibility; the behavior seems to line up fairly well, but that’s circumstantial evidence at best. All sorts of things are compatible with all sorts of theories; compatibility is very weak evidence.

Another interesting possibility is demonic possession. Some of these sorts of atheists may be cooperating with demons for the purpose of sewing discord and disorder, and whatever the man may think the object is, demons are concerned with souls. To try to make Christians angry and wrathful would be a victory for a demon. Peace is the right ordering of the world according to God’s will; sin is, therefore, disorder. Demons like to scatter out and separate.

And again, actions merely being consistent with a theory is extremely weak evidence. I’m not trying to oversell this; while demonic possession is real it seems to be uncommon and so skepticism at any given possession is not the same thing as skepticism of possession in general. But the nice thing here is that erring on the side of caution is practical. At least it seems to me that the best thing to do after interacting with an anonymous demoniac online would be to keep the knowledge of God’s dominion over the world close to one’s heart, to keep in mind that Christ has defeated death and overcome the world, and to pray for the demoniac. That is also a very good strategy if it’s merely an angry unthinking blasphemer one is dealing with.

(Part of a series of ongoing thoughts about cults. See Online Cults and A Few More Thoughts About Online Cults.) I suspect that the fundamental problem with defining a cult is that a cult is, essentially, a parody of legitimate religion. This gets complicated because not all legitimate religions are correct; Christianity is correct and legitimate religions are correct only insofar as they agree with Christianity. But they can still be legitimate religion—as opposed to a parody of a religion—where they are wrong. And now I need to explain what the heck I mean by this.

A legitimate religion offers several things to a person:

• Something greater than themselves to exist in relation to
• Meaning
• Purpose
• Peace

These are related things, in that peace comes from living in a proper relationship to the ordering of the universe, which means in a proper relationship to that which is greater than oneself. Meaning and purpose are related, since purpose comes from meaning; meaning is intrinsic to reality but comes from religion in the sense of “is learned about from religion”, which consists of knowing how one’s life fits into a greater whole.

And of course these are the things which a cult offers. What makes the cult a parody is that the thing greater than themselves is typically just another thing in the world which itself needs justification—the cult itself. Sometimes it is a sort of esoteric knowledge, but always a kind of esoteric knowledge about which no thinking is possible, and therefore the only real concern is, once again, the cult. And there are some cases where the esoteric knowledge might legitimately be something one can think about, but it comes with the provision that the one revealing the knowledge is the most important man who ever lived. As such the man and not the knowledge is the focus of the cult. That last type is, I suspect, the sort of cult which actually lasts and becomes something of a real religion—once the man is dead. Though the degree to which that happens probably varies; and worshiping a man is worse than worshiping even a god, which is much worse than worshiping God. And such a cult will probably be plagued with the difficulty of keeping its later religious adherents from learning about its origins; that will probably trap it in cult-like behavior since there’s no way to escape from a bad founding.

Similarly the purpose a cult offers is a parody in that it all relates to the cult itself, and not to any greater good. The expressions will vary, but cults are often quite destructive of family ties, for example; they tend to discourage any sort of involvement with outsiders beyond proselytizing.

And relatedly, the peace that a cult offers is a parody because it consists of unthinkingly accepting the teachings and practices of the cult, that is, the meaning and purpose which a cult gives. This acceptance without understanding is essentially reducing a man from a rational animal to an irrational animal; it is the peace of giving up being a man and instead being a horse. That brings relief from the troubles of being a man, but not by rightly ordering one’s life but instead by simply refusing to live most of one’s life.

And all this is what makes it so difficult to distinguish a cult from a legitimate religion. Counterfeits are, of their nature, hard to spot. That superficial similarity is where the counterfeit gets all its power from, so there is both a motivation and an evolutionary selective pressure on cults to be superficially similar to legitimate religions. In short, distinguishing unrelated things tends to be easy but spotting fakes is much, much harder.

Out of pity for some atheists who regularly show up in the comments to my videos, I’m working on a response video about the rest of Logicked’s video about my conversation with Rob from Deflating Atheism. If you’re not familiar, in that conversation, this exchange happened:

Me: “There are a lot of interesting things to say about atheism precisely because at the end of the day one values atheists. They’re human beings. They’re worthwhile. And therefore their lives actually matter.”

Rob: “Which is very easy to lose sight of when you’re in a position like I am and you’re constantly debating them and you see them almost as cockroaches that need to be stamped out. [I laughed.] Quite honestly, no, I mean, I feel like I’m a bad Christian because I feel no agape love for these people. I consider them pests. Quite honestly.”

Which Logicked took to be about genocide. Literally. Here’s a tweet he posted:

Hey @ctlansdown nice job chuckling at the genocidal sentiment. Genocide is funny lol atheists are subhuman filth who must be destroyed

And I eventually made this reply in which I explained in excruciating detail how Rob wasn’t joking about genocide:

So as I said, I’m taking pity on some atheists in my comments section and making a video about the rest of his video, which frankly was only marginally better and that only if you are counting the stupidity to be slightly hidden.

And here’s the problem I’m facing: it is really hard to explain something to a dimwit. If a man is merely unintelligent it’s not so bad if he respects you because he will tell you when he doesn’t understand and ask for clarification. But if that’s not the case he will assume everyplace he doesn’t understand you is your fault and it’s because you’re stupid. That would be the end of the problem if I was trying to address Logicked, but I’m not. Among other things, he has a financial interest in not understanding me (he makes $2200/video on patreon).

But if somebody thinks that Logicked’s rather stupid response wasn’t stupid, it means that they were taken in by his self-serving oversimplifications. And the problem when trying to help such a person out (assuming that they really are asking in good faith what I make of his response) is that his simple narratives will be massively tempting in the face of a more complex explanation I can give.

Worse, explaining how what Logicked said is irrelevant is not directly addressing it, i.e. it isn’t directly showing how it’s wrong, and so it will always feel like not addressing Logicked. But except for factual errors, it is impossible to directly address an argument. This comes from the fact that a fallacy doesn’t not guarantee that an argument is wrong. Consider the following argument, which is overly simplistic merely for the sake of making the illustration simple:

p → p
p
∴ p

Is that modus ponens or the fallacy of affirming the consequent? It’s both. But the conclusion follows from the premises, so it is a valid argument. That is the only requirement of a valid argument; the only requirement to be an invalid argument is that the conclusion does not follow from the premises. But the only way to show that is not to show that there exists a way in which the conclusion doesn’t follow (necessarily) from the premises, one must show that there is no way in which the conclusion follows (necessarily) from the premises. And the only practical way of doing that is to show how the premises can be true and the conclusion false. Which means ignoring the argument and showing the conclusion. Which means ignoring the argument.

In other words, a good counter-argument necessarily has a rhetorical weakness. When an audience is intelligent enough to remember both the original argument and the counter-argument and to relate the one to the other, this will not be a great weakness. Where the audience can’t hold these things in their head at the same time, they will always be left with the feeling that the original argument wasn’t addressed, and so may be valid after all.

My friend Max Kolbe has often described atheists, and especially prominent atheists on Twitter and YouTube, as cultists. I had always taken this as a metaphor, that is, as rhetoric. That is, that they had many of the qualities of member of a cult, such as an absurd degree of credulity, an astonishingly twisted and poor understanding of the outside world, and so on.

My problem was that, for whatever reason, I hadn’t realized which member of the cult he was saying that they are. For some reason I took him to be (rhetorically) saying that there was one giant cult and all of the atheists he was talking about were sycophantic followers in it. Obviously that wasn’t literally the case; they didn’t live on a giant compound and there was no leader for them all to have pledged allegiance to. And this sort of cult is always a cult of personality which requires a leader.

Then it finally hit me: he didn’t mean that these people were followers in one giant cult. He meant that they were each the leader of their own small cult. And that is way closer to literally true. It is, of course, possible to identify elements of a cult of personality in any popular figure because popular figures will have fans. Fans and sycophantic cult members do have some traits in common, and though I think that there are qualitative differences, it’s tempting to take the difference as being simply one of degree. But this is not what I mean here. First, the internet atheist’s relationship to his fans is one of revealing truth. Well, not exactly, since all the secrets of the universe he has to offer are that he doesn’t know any secrets of the universe, but this doesn’t seem to really bother the people involved. They still feel like somehow they have special knowledge.

They act like it, too. In a fair amount of talking that I’ve done with internet atheists, it doesn’t seem to occur to them that technically they are claiming to be ignorant. They invoke the words “atheism is a lack of belief” and “I haven’t seen any evidence” but then proceed in everything they say as if they said, “I know the truth: there is no God.” They like to talk about outsiders as deluded—which they are only in a position to say if they know the outsiders are wrong.

As we are moving from the era of YouTube ads to the era of patreon, we’re seeing more direct support of the leader from his followers, so I expect the cult-like aspects to intensify, but even in the ad-driven era, people will lead cults for affirmation even where they can’t get money out of it. And affirmation one clearly saw a lot of. And of course cults need to get to a certain level of success before the group sex with the leader begins; many would-be cults probably fizzle out before then. That they are not ultimately successful does not change the nature of the group dynamic. (Though of course that fact can be exploited to smear things which are in fact not cults.)

I’m also reminded of the gnostic heresy, in the second century. The gnostics were not a unified, hierarchical group, but rather a sort of network of cults where membership could be somewhat fluid. Cult members would be disciples of one or another gnostic leader, but the fringe members might learn from multiple teachers, though of course only the public knowledge, not the private knowledge taught to the trusted insiders. That structure seems very parallel to modern popular internet atheists, who work together to some degree and generally profess the same core principles. And you see similar dynamics where the existence of such an alliance is useful; it’s much easier to gain groupies from someone else’s group than from the general population, and the total population confers status by association on even the less popular members, but at the same time there will be vying for status and infighting, all of which we’ve certainly seen among internet atheists.

I’ve seen all sorts of numerous accusations about how I’m trying to prove “the God of the Gaps“.  (For those who don’t know the God of the Gaps is roughly the idea that you can identify God in those parts of nature which don’t work, i.e. in the gaps in our scientific knowledge.) I find this accusation hurled at me especially often if I’m discussing anything involving wonder at the natural world.  It’s often followed by assurances that atheists have a sense of wonder, though one is forced to wonder what it might consist of in the face of the unshakable conviction that we understand everything.

Anyway, I’ve been wondering where on earth the idea of the God of the Gaps came from, anyway. It feels like the sort of thing you might get from a Christian fundamentalist, though even they usually aren’t this obtuse. Oddly, Wikipedia isn’t much help. In the Origins of the Term section of the article on it, it says:

The concept, although not the exact wording, goes back to Henry Drummond, a 19th-century evangelist lecturer, from his Lowell Lectures on The Ascent of Man. He chastises those Christians who point to the things that science can not yet explain—”gaps which they will fill up with God”—and urges them to embrace all nature as God’s, as the work of “an immanent God, which is the God of Evolution, is infinitely grander than the occasional wonder-worker, who is the God of an old theology.”^[2][3]

In 1933, Ernest Barnes, the Bishop of Birmingham, used the phrase in a discussion of general relativity’s implication of a Big Bang:

Must we then postulate Divine intervention? Are we to bring in God to create the first current of Laplace’s nebula or to let off the cosmic firework of Lemaître’s imagination? I confess an unwillingness to bring God in this way upon the scene. The circumstances with thus seem to demand his presence are too remote and too obscure to afford me any true satisfaction. Men have thought to find God at the special creation of their own species, or active when mind or life first appeared on earth. They have made him God of the gaps in human knowledge. To me the God of the trigger is as little satisfying as the God of the gaps. It is because throughout the physical Universe I find thought and plan and power that behind it I see God as the creator.^[4]

During World War II the German theologian and martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer expressed the concept in similar terms in letters he wrote while in a Nazi prison.^[5] Bonhoeffer wrote, for example:

how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.

All of its citations are Christians who are saying that this is a stupid idea (there are more, I’ve cut for brevity). And of course it is; the God of the Gaps basically postulates that God is incompetent and didn’t make a creation which actually works and has to be constantly patched up. I’m really wondering why on earth atheists are so obsessed with it, since it’s something serious Christians criticize heartily.

There are a few explanations which spring to mind or were suggested by friends:

1. The atheists believe in a God of the Gaps, only they call it Science. (i.e. the mis-understanding of science commonly called scientism).
2. They really want Christians to propose an idea they can beat up by some method other than denying  that human reason can reach truth.
3. The sort of people who tend to become either atheists or fundamentalist Christians use this argument if they become fundamentalist Christians. As a result, non-fundamentalists never see it but atheists do since they’re almost the only people who regularly interact with fundies.

I’d be curious in hearing other explanations, if anyone has any to offer.

This was originally a blog post of mine, or if you want to see something moving while you listen, you can watch the video:

The Frank Friar released an interesting podcast today.

https://soundcloud.com/thefrankfriar/christ-the-pilgrim-in-our-lives-ep-22

He mentioned the difficulty he was having saying several masses which involve a lot of standing and walking, and that he didn’t want to appear weak by limping, but reminded himself that if this is carrying his cross and following Jesus, then he would do so. He called it his vanity—and certainly he knows himself, so I wouldn’t presume to say he’s wrong—but I can’t help but wonder if there’s at least an element of not wanting to let down the people who look up to priests to see the strength of Christ, which would not be vanity but a concern for the weakness of the congregation. Something to think about for those of us in the pews, anyway—do we sometimes let ourselves confuse the man with his office?

Be that as it may, it reminded me of my own minor struggle, which I mention not because it’s important but just because it’s a trivial and therefore potentially relatable example of the same sort of thing. Last night after the children were asleep (I have three young ones) I was getting ready to record a video when my almost-two-year-old started crying. So up I trudged from my office to see what was wrong, and she wouldn’t go back to sleep so I carried her around in the dark, her head resting on my shoulder, so she’d feel secure enough to go back to sleep (she declined the offer of a bedtime snack). And as I was thinking about how frustrating it was that I was about to record and instead here I was having to put her to sleep again, it occurred to me that at least I wasn’t partway through and so didn’t have any lost work, and then it occurred to me that in fact I didn’t have lost work because clearly at the moment caring for my daughter was the work God had for me to do.

It’s very easy to let ourselves forget that when we make plans they are guesses as to the work God has given us to do; it seems to me that part of how to live without anxiety is to remind ourselves as often as we can remember that our plans are nothing more than guesses, and when we receive more certain information as to what God has given us to do, it should not be cause for regret but cause for contentment, like when a parent turns on a night light for a child.

This does mean rather a large project of changing how we think of plans during the planning stages, of course. Something I learned in partner dancing (Lindy Hop) is that the problem usually starts several steps before you actually notice it.