My Road to Unbelief Part VI

My Road to Unbelief

Part VI: Moral Models

Model Theory is essentially what I used as a child to evaluate morality (although I obviously didn't know any model theory, and I was being extremely primitive). However, now I had the concrete idea of a Model, so I could construct them based on simple rules. I found the idea of morality to be vague at best. Now I could make it more concrete by comparing what we find in the model to what we refer to when we say "morality."

So let's look at some possible models:

God is the Moral Authority

The so-called morality that religious people claim to use. I call bullshit on this. There are obviously rules in the bible that we do not follow, but, more importantly, there are rules that we follow that are not in the bible. The idea that "sexism is bad" is nowhere in the bible, and yet people seem to use it. Hell, the entire idea of "equality" is not a biblical idea at all, and the bible far from suggests that people are "equal" in any way. Oh, and don't forget the whole 'slavery' business. (Even worse, consent is not actually in the bible, especially for women).

I'm also a little skeptical of the objectivity of this model. It's kind of a weird style of 'objective.' If the rule was "Hitler was the moral authority" I guess that would be objective, but it's based on a somebody's point of view. It's like partially subjective or something. I don't know. In this case, why would you necessarily take the viewpoint of God? Because he has power?

It's ironic I think that a lot of Christians claim that "Well if you aren't ruled by God then you're ruled by whomever has the power at the time," despite the fact that God is the best example of that.

Harm is bad.

This is a very simple model. It's good because it's pretty objective. Harm is not a really a subjective idea. It may seem pretty good at first, but there are issues. What about a tattoo? What about a piercing? What about BDSM? I don't think you can argue that this isn't harm or damage. It obviously is.

The Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you

The Golden Rule. I think most people are aware of the problem with the Golden Rule: Sadomasochism. A rapist may enjoy getting raped, for instance. However, there's an easy fix for this problem: just throw in Consent.

The Golden Rule + Consent Requirements

Now, I think this is a surprisingly good model. I don't actually know of a direct counterexample to this (although I'm sure there is one). I think the main problem is that it just doesn't cover larger problems beyond people's personal lives. Obviously Consent Laws are a bit vague: You have things like "age of consent." You have ambiguities with permanent damage and assisted suicide. Permanent consequences lead to complications with rules of consent. Personally, I found this model to be pretty good, though. I do like the idea of Consent as being an integral part of morality, because where consent is ambiguous, the morality of actions seem ambiguous.

I would say that as a practical deontological model goes, this is one that most good people use in their daily lives. When we refer to morality, this seems to be pretty close to what we mean (with maybe some Enlightenment ideals thrown in).

The Advancement of Human Well-Being

I didn't come up with this. I heard the phrase actually from Sam Harris. I think this is the an almost-correct model. This seems to be nearly exactly what people refer to when they talk about "morality."

This is a consequentialist model. It's not based on rules (deontological), but based on consequences. If something has good consequences then it is good, and if something has bad consequences then it is bad. And if something has mixed consequences it is mixed. It seems a little arbitrary when you first think of it, but eventually you realize it works surprisingly well, even for "the ends justify the means" situations (after all, the 'means' is a consequence).

"Well-being" seems ambiguous. This is actually a good thing, because this leaves very easy ways for humans to be wrong. Humans will not have perfect information, and will not know precisely what is the best thing for human well-being. This makes it a knowledge game. We want to know as much about our world and as much about ourselves as possible so that we can better ourselves, others, and all of humanity. Knowledge is inherent to morality.

I don't think this model is perfect though. The main issue is the word "Human." What about animals? What about my cats? Animal cruelty certainly is somewhere in here. I'm not exactly sure how to include it though, but clearly our idea of "morality" does not confine well-being to just humans.

So this is how I applied Model Theory to moral ideas. However, that's not the only thing Model Theory is useful for...

Basic Model Theory

My Road to Unbelief

Interlude: Model Theory

Eventually I went to college. At this point I was still wavering between Deistic ideas and Atheistic ideas. I found out that many of the founding fathers were Deists (although most were Christians of various sects). If one could possibly prove that the universe is ordered in some way, I figured that would prove the existence of an almighty force, which would be labeled God. Hence Deism.

As a mathematics major I took a course in Set Theory and Model Theory, and to understand my arguments one needs a basic understanding of how Model Theory works. I found Model Theory to be one of the most effective tools to answering these kinds of questions.

In order to make statements, you have to start with initial assumptions about how things work. We call these initial assumptions Axioms. Once the Axioms are in place, they define your Model. Everything in the entire model can be derived from the initial Axioms. Usual mathematics that we are used to can be entirely derived from the Zermelo-Frankel Axioms. Just to get an idea of how basic the axioms are, I suggest you check them out (you can ignore all the complicated notation): ZF-Model Axioms. For instance, one axiom says that "the empty set exists" and another says that "two sets are equal if they contain the same elements."

These Axioms completely define the ZF-model. The model is unchanging, regardless of whether we discover more theorems and ideas inside of it. Those ideas were always in the model, we just hadn't discovered them yet. Often we want Calculus so we need the Axiom of Choice, which grants us the more powerful ZFC-model. The models have some important differences. For instance, in ZF there is no way to find an 'immeasurable set,' but in ZFC we can do it easily. It's not that immeasurable sets in ZF don't exist, it's just that they cannot be found in the model.

Now we can construct whatever Axioms we want, and create whatever model we want. Then prove things within those models. So in many ways we can essentially choose which model we are looking at. The models themselves are entirely objective, based on axioms, but the choice of model is subjective. It is not, as you will notice, arbitrary.

When considering models, there are some things one should be aware of. One is the Principle of Explosion. Essentially it states that if you allow for one statement to be both true and false in your model, all statements are rendered both true and false and your Model is trivial. In other words, contradictions and inconsistencies destroy the model.

The second and third major rules are Godel's Incompleteness Theorems. The first incompleteness theorem essentially says that within all models there are statements that cannot be proved (or disproved). You cannot have a single model that answers every question. The second incompleteness theorem says that it is impossible to prove the consistency of a model from within the model itself. So don't bother trying.

Anyway, using Models, I found that you make very powerful arguments about theology and morality. Simply construct some axioms and compare the models that are generated by them.

My Road to Unbelief Part V

My Road to Unbelief

Part V:Emotions and Logic

You may notice that my reasons so far for rejecting theistic ideas comes out of highly emotional responses. I'm not really talking in terms of evidence or proof. My reasons are concerned more with whether I want God to exist, rather than whether it is true.

There is some misunderstanding I believe that emotions and logic are somehow diametrically opposed. I have never understood this. Emotions have very clear causes and effects, and they have very sensible logic to them. The main issue is that certain emotional states cause people to be delirious and illogical.

As I discussed briefly in Part II, the logical grounding for most religious arguments is shaky. The best answers to a lot of theistic claims is "It does not follow" or "I don't know." For instance, the Watchmaker Argument. It basically goes like this: if you were to find a random watch, you would see that it has a clear intention and you could deduce from the watch that there is a watchmaker somewhere. Similarly, the universe must have such a designer.

However, there is no reason why this would necessarily work for everything. Take a child. If I were to find a random child, it would not imply a child-maker. It would imply parents. Parents may create a child, but they don't design a child by any normal definition of the word. And we can see how the logic falls apart: Design does not imply a designer. And you can use similar arguments to realize that creation does not imply a creator (You just make the same argument with natural phenomenon like lightning). It could. That's possible. But it does not follow.

I have always been interested in logic and mathematics. What can be invariably deduced from other statements? But I have found that simple logic isn't very useful in these discussions because it is so limited. There's not a lot statements you can definitively make. Saying "it does not follow" gets frustrating and begs the question "well what does follow?!" One needs much stronger concepts, like Occam's Razor, Model Theory, and eventually Bayesian Reasoning to use logic for these discussions.

My Road to Unbelief Part IV

My Road to Unbelief

Part IV: Revulsion

The answer was no. Never. Absolutely not.

What's the point of prayer when millions of prayers every day during the Holocaust were met with deafening silence? What's the point of having a divine protector that does not protect you when you most need it? What's the point of a divine protector of humanity if he does not protect humanity when humanity most needs it? One would have to believe that the protector allows suffering of such magnitude to happen. To me, that is a far scarier prospect than having no protector at all.

And consider the scope. Only counting the Jews of this particular genocide, the number is about 6,000,000. While only seven digits, that is far more than a human brain can comprehend. It's far more than Hitler can comprehend. If you think he understood the magnitude of his crimes then you give him too much credit. I could hopefully wrap my head around the idea of six hundred lives. Maybe if I strained myself I could comprehend six thousand. But six million? Far greater than the human mind can handle.

There is, however, someone who could presumably understand the magnitude of the crime. God. And apparently it isn't enough. Crimes far, far greater than human comprehension, and it isn't enough for God to step in.

Perhaps it was part of some divine plan. But then I ask, why would I ever want to follow such a plan? This is the most psychotic version of "the ends justify the means." The version that absolutely nobody would ever follow if it was presented to them. If that's part of the plan, then there is no way I would ever support such a plan. Psychotic.

Perhaps God has intentions for me but not my family. But not for the little eight-year-old girl who was turned into a lampshade. This argument makes me nauseous with the sheer arrogance of it. It isn't normal arrogance, but cosmic arrogance. The idea that your divine worth is somehow greater than others. My own body rejects such a answer. The reason I lived to be nine-years-old and she didn't is because of nothing more than Luck. The other possibility is just sickening.

No. From that day forth my empathy was an ever-present shield against ever believing in such a God. No longer would I ever want God to exist. If God didn't exist, I would be relieved, happy, and thankful. Thank God there is no God.

However, I wasn't actually an Atheist yet. For the next few years I would waver back and forth between Deism and Atheism (although I did not know the word Deism). Theism was forever dead to me.

My Road to Unbelief Part III

My Road to Unbelief

Part III: A Thought Experiment

One of the traditions of Judaism is a memorial day known as Krystalnacht, or "The Night of Broken Glass." It marks the day of a specific event in Nazi Germany where all the Jewish shops were raided and glass littered the streets. It's essentially a day of remembrance about the Holocaust. Not exactly a pleasant thing. In schul (like sunday school), we would talk about the Holocaust on this day. It often raised serious philosophical and religious questions, as you can imagine.

I've never actually read Maus (it's about a man telling his son about the days of the Holocaust, told in comic form where Jews are mice and Nazis are cats), but I heard that one of the interesting parts of it is that the father is now an Atheist because of the Holocaust. I found out that many Jews lost faith in God after the Holocaust. Some remained faithful, while others did not.

It raised a question in my mind: "Which would I be?" After all, in many ways you could see how something as terrible as the Holocaust could go either way. It could reaffirm your faith. Or it could destroy it. And so I posed myself to that Thought Experiment. It may be scary, but it's an exercise in Empathy. I find it rather depressing that other people don't try this sort of thing, and I find it absolutely ridiculous that Christians never seem to talk about genocides and what it means in terms of their religion.

I tried to put myself in that situation. Separated from my sister and mother (only to have my mother be raped and gassed and my sister to thrown into an oven), to have my father be shot randomly for some disobedience. My family murdered. Their deaths not heroic but pathetic. And then for me to survive. If I somehow survived, would I still worship the God that I prayed to for years to end the suffering? Would I pray to the Lord that allowed my family to perish for some reason only Gods-know-what?

The answer I came to was forceful, painful, and resolute:

Never. 

My Road to Unbelief Part II

My Road to Unbelief

Part II: A Childhood of Questions

I was a highly curious child, interested in questioning everything everywhere. I had a childhood friend (let's call him Charlie) who was also extraordinarily curious. Charlie was Christian, and as a child the two of us talked about various philosophical concepts and how to resolve them. Not that we knew what philosophy was. I was not really concerned about ideas of 'evidence' or proof. I cared more about the big picture of it all.

The Meaning of Life

I remember trying to settle the question of "What is the meaning of life?" and coming up with several answers, all of which made very little sense. I remember feeling very smart when Charlie and I came up with the idea of 'nothing' but even that felt hollow and fake. After running it through in my head, it really felt like I didn't understand the question at all. What did I mean by 'Life has no meaning'? It certainly sounds profound, but I wasn't sure what I was saying. What did people actually mean by "What is the meaning of life?" It's a question you hear a lot. I also did not see how throwing God into the equation made the question any clearer.

Morality without God

With Charlie being a Christian and me being a Jew, it was of course going to happen that we were going to discuss things like this. As we were both very secular, we eventually came into the question "can you have morality without God?" I thought the obvious answer was yes. In fact, when he suggested that it might not be true, I balked. Clearly there were infinite (or at least a lot of) possibilities of morality, judging by how some Christians did bad things and some did good things and they all disagreed constantly and killed each other over it.

Why would lack of God lead to lack of morality? As a child, I felt it was jumping to conclusions. People ask "well then where does morality come from?" but that's not a fair question. How could one suggest that it was impossible for morality to exist without God without considering all the vast possibilities of moralities? Just because I don't know doesn't mean it doesn't exist, after all.

Heaven & Hell

Jews don't believe in Heaven and Hell. We have kind of a vague view of Heaven, but there's almost no emphasis on the afterlife. Christians, of course, talk about the afterlife all the damn time. So eventually I heard about this idea of good people going to heaven and bad people going to hell from Charlie. When I considered this as an outside observer, I found the whole idea to be incredibly childish. Yes, I was a child, and I found it childish.

How could real adults believe that people could be sorted into good people and bad people? Regardless of criterion (I never found out until later that the major criterion is believing in Jesus), I found that people just don't seem to work like that. We aren't bad and we aren't good. We just do good things and bad things. Sure, it makes sense for Gandhi and Hitler, but those are obviously extreme examples. And even if I didn't like some of the other kids in my class, I found it hard to believe that they would be sorted into hell. It just didn't work with my personal experience. I found this to be strong spot of pride that I was Jewish and not Christian. I never believed in such silly ideas.

Now, when I say that I found that childish, I mean that very literally. I found it to be a child's morality. Good people and Bad people, easily sortable by some sort of vague quantifiable analysis. Then there is Purgatory. To me, the very idea of Purgatory just reinforces how ridiculous it is to be sorting people like this at all. Adding a third 'medium' category doesn't solve the problem at all! It's so silly. I was convinced that belief in Heaven and Hell is something that people just grew out of. Surely no adults could possibly believe such silliness.

People may find this view arrogant or offensive. I don't know why. I'm just being honest. And I don't see how we could possibly have a real conversation about it unless we're going to be honest about it. Although, I will say that I was absolutely shocked to find out as a teenager that grown adults believed in Heaven and Hell as well.

As you can see, even from an early age, I found the major shields of faith to be on shaky ground. However, I certainly saw no reasons not to believe in God, either. That would come later.

My Road to Unbelief Part I

My Road to Unbelief

Part I: Introduction

Hi, I'm DoubleReed.  I stream starcraft, compose music, and work in cybersecurity.  I figure a blog would be a great way to put my thoughts to paper so that ideas are less in my head.  This blog will be a place for me to talk about random crap, because that's what blogs are for.

As a start, I figured I would talk about my road to becoming an atheist. However, all stories need a proper setting, so this will also serve to introduce myself.  I grew up in a rich, white suburb of America that has some of the best public schools in the country. It is highly liberal, and I was one of its many Ashkenazi Jews.

My Jewish congregation is Conservative (as opposed to Reform which is less religious and Orthodox which is more religious). So you could say it's the middle, but the fact is that really Conservative and Reform are not that different from one another.

I have one sister and one brother who are awesome. I have a wonderful mother and a wonderful father who is a Mathematics professor. Religion was never a significant part of our household, although of course we followed the traditions that were fun and family-oriented. We are a secular family, through and through. So I'm sorry to say that I will not have dramatic stories about my family, as they are all very accepting and apathetic about the ideas of religion.

So this is where I started: lucky, wealthy, and happy. This is the setting of my unbelief.