Speaker 1: Hi, were you just surfing around the internet looking for
Speaker 1: something interesting to watch? I'm sorry you got us the nonprofits,
Speaker 1: but we do have a really funny article we want
Speaker 1: to discuss today, and the great Eli's Black is going
Speaker 1: to lead us into it. So tell us, Eli, what
Speaker 1: you got for us?
Speaker 2: Well, this article is less of an article and more
Speaker 2: of like a PowerPoint presentation of ten things the author
Speaker 2: just doesn't understand. James Dolan makes several obviously false claims
Speaker 2: throughout his little book report here, such as sentimentality is
Speaker 2: far better explained by spirituality, and that science can't explain
Speaker 2: why humans share moral values. And I could go on,
Speaker 2: but it would take more time to explain all of
Speaker 2: the bad ideas that he has than it takes to
Speaker 2: Terry took him apart. This story is from Savvy Dime
Speaker 2: by James Dormant on August nineteenth, twenty twenty four.
Speaker 1: Pretty much some of it all over there. There are
Speaker 1: like ten segments here. What was the name of the
Speaker 1: article again? I got to remember it's ten mysteries that
Speaker 1: ten things sciences can't explain and attribute to God, And
Speaker 1: I thought, you know, that's a really misleading title in
Speaker 1: and of itself. Because I did not see any one
Speaker 1: scientist mentioned throughout this article contributing any of this bullshit
Speaker 1: to God. So John hunted, what did you think?
Speaker 3: What was your oh man, of this craziness?
Speaker 4: It was pretty stupid, actually, I mean, I'm kind of
Speaker 4: a little bit of a science nerd, but this was
Speaker 4: pretty hilarious. I recommend it for a late night I
Speaker 4: need to laugh. The day was really hard kind of reading.
Speaker 4: You know, either that or you know, you can watch
Speaker 4: Saturday Night Live or something. But I just think that
Speaker 4: it's it's really hilarious. And I'm going to go through
Speaker 4: just the first few of them here and see if
Speaker 4: I will attempt to be regimated and in my treatment
Speaker 4: of this statement. So let's see how it goes. I'm
Speaker 4: not hopeful the origin of the universe. Science can't explain
Speaker 4: the origin of the euro Versa. We know pretty much
Speaker 4: all we can ever know about the up to a
Speaker 4: plank time or two after the inflation started, which means
Speaker 4: that it was before there was pretty much time. So
Speaker 4: since you can't test, examine, or even really prove anything
Speaker 4: that is outside of time and space, time, there's nothing
Speaker 4: to prove. It's a ridiculous proposition and so it's not
Speaker 4: that we don't know what happened before, because we can't,
Speaker 4: but we do know what happened all the way to
Speaker 4: a couple billions of a second afterwards, so and how
Speaker 4: it evolved from that. So I'm just saying that that's
Speaker 4: you know, I suggest explanations. I'm not a cosmologist, so
Speaker 4: I expect I suggest that you read explanations by cosmologists
Speaker 4: or Sean Carroll, or not the biologist Sean Carroll, but
Speaker 4: Sean Carol. The physicist Stephen Hawking actually has a couple
Speaker 4: of books out that aren't bad. Carl Sagan, perhaps Neil
Speaker 4: de grasse Tyson. You know, there are a lot of
Speaker 4: people who are really good at this. However, you can
Speaker 4: also watch podcasts that will teach you an awful lot
Speaker 4: about it, you know. So you know, I can recommend some.
Speaker 4: If you want to email me, I'll send you my
Speaker 4: favorite list. So anybody else have comments on this one?
Speaker 3: Oh, I thought it was.
Speaker 1: You know, they don't never, they don't ever actually talk
Speaker 1: about any of the science in it, you know, like, oh,
Speaker 1: science can't explain your origin in the universe, and yet
Speaker 1: we have like twenty different explanations for it. And their explanation,
Speaker 1: God did it. I mean, go ahead and I prove
Speaker 1: that one, you know, because we can't prove plank time say,
Speaker 1: but they are, but they're in this Well, God did it,
Speaker 1: So will prove that to me.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 1: It always seems like these people are in the same
Speaker 1: place we are, but they just don't even realize it.
Speaker 1: So anybody else want to talk about that?
Speaker 4: You know?
Speaker 3: One thing that I wanted to point out as one
Speaker 3: of the ones that they pointed out was the meaning
Speaker 3: of life? How science can't explain that? And I thought, yeah,
Speaker 3: you know, And the truth is is that when it
Speaker 3: comes down to it, I love that question because it
Speaker 3: gives me an opportunity to remind people that, yes, okay,
Speaker 3: so you have a definition that you think you got
Speaker 3: from a book that God told you of what life means,
Speaker 3: and you're trying to muddle through this and you think
Speaker 3: that these pre applied values mean something. Well, for me,
Speaker 3: getting out of religion and recognizing that it wasn't true
Speaker 3: allowed me to throw away that really terrible manual that's
Speaker 3: beaten into you potentially as a child, and to be
Speaker 3: able to apply your own values. And so rather than
Speaker 3: this is a negative, yes, it's great. I don't have
Speaker 3: to listen to what some books says everything should be
Speaker 3: because I can apply those myself to the life around me.
Speaker 3: So when I look at this, I'm like, Yeah, what
Speaker 3: you're talking about is a win. No, I don't have
Speaker 3: a universal price code that everything applies to everyone, But
Speaker 3: that's a freedom that's not being bondage. Being bondage is
Speaker 3: being tied into a book that tells you what you
Speaker 3: have to think. And one other one I found very
Speaker 3: interesting is the human connection one. You know, they talked
Speaker 3: about it, and what they're talking about very poorly, is
Speaker 3: essentially empathy and altruistic behavior. You know, we see this
Speaker 3: type of behavior in many animals, you know, rats. We
Speaker 3: even have rats demonstrating putting themselves at risk to help
Speaker 3: other rats in danger. So this is not something exclusive
Speaker 3: and this is not something just exclusive the primates. This
Speaker 3: is something we find throughout the animal kingdom. So to
Speaker 3: treat this as if this is a human connection, no,
Speaker 3: this is a social connection that they're talking.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you can prove why people are nice, man, I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: it must be gone, you know, and.
Speaker 4: We've got actual tons of biological evidence about why that developed.
Speaker 4: And you know, but it's it's way too long and
Speaker 4: involved a discussion to get into in this show at
Speaker 4: the moment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I don't. I think I'd rather talk about
Speaker 1: how this how this article is representing science, rather than
Speaker 1: try to refute some of the idiocy within it. And like,
Speaker 1: like half of the subjects that they met they touched
Speaker 1: on that science can't answer are philosophical ones. There are
Speaker 1: not anything science could even do experiments on, like like
Speaker 1: the meaning of life, miracles was one of them. Well,
Speaker 1: first you got to prove miracles actually happened before we
Speaker 1: can start decide whether they're real or not, because we
Speaker 1: haven't proved the miracle yet. So I mean, it was
Speaker 1: just like this whole list of things that it was
Speaker 1: obviously a slanted article from the beginning, and I thought
Speaker 1: that what it was doing badly was representing science in
Speaker 1: a very very bad light. What do you think about that,
Speaker 1: do you? Elie?
Speaker 2: Well, I was about to give him some credit because
Speaker 2: he does say, and this is the slide called when
Speaker 2: science meets faith. He does say science is fundamentally the
Speaker 2: pursuit of answers just because science cannot explain something yet.
Speaker 2: And this is where he starts to go off the rails.
Speaker 2: That doesn't mean that scientists relent and accept something as
Speaker 2: inexplicable as an explicable. Now, that is true, but he
Speaker 2: goes on to.
Speaker 1: The next sentence.
Speaker 2: Yeah, by the time, by the same token, the fact
Speaker 2: that science cannot explain something cannot be taken or no, sorry,
Speaker 2: can be taken as proof that the explanation lies beyond
Speaker 2: the realm of science and exists in the spiritual And
Speaker 2: that is bullshit, because that's not proof of anything other
Speaker 2: than we don't have the answer yet. Not having the
Speaker 2: answer is proof that we don't have the answer.
Speaker 5: And that's it.
Speaker 2: And it's really just evidence that we don't have the answer.
Speaker 2: It's not even proof if you want to get technical
Speaker 2: about it.
Speaker 1: Yeah, but I want me give an example of that.
Speaker 1: Right in seventeen forty six, you couldn't say there wasn't
Speaker 1: there had to be a God because we hadn't invented
Speaker 1: light yet Man made light. And that's exactly what this
Speaker 1: is saying, Right, science hasn't done something yet, so obviously,
Speaker 1: right God.
Speaker 5: So that's proof that it can't. Right, that is what
Speaker 5: he says.
Speaker 2: And so the other one, and as you mentioned, a
Speaker 2: lot of these are philosophical questions, not scientific ones. And
Speaker 2: we did talk about like human connection and apathy, and
Speaker 2: one of them was morality, and that's really not even
Speaker 2: all that long of an explanation to get into. We
Speaker 2: learned that if we cooperate with other people, we have
Speaker 2: a better chance of surviving, and if we act like
Speaker 2: a dick, people don't want to cooperate with us, and
Speaker 2: we don't have as good a chance of surviving. That's
Speaker 2: what social animals are. And we don't just see morality
Speaker 2: in humans like you said earlier, Infidel, and.
Speaker 5: Not just in rats.
Speaker 2: Ants that get infected with like a disease or a
Speaker 2: poison or something that will spread to the other rest
Speaker 2: of the colonies, they will volunteer themselves for euth in
Speaker 2: asia so they don't infect the rest of the colony.
Speaker 2: That's moral behavior and insects or I don't know the
Speaker 2: ants counts insects, I'm pretty sure, but yeah, so some
Speaker 2: of the some some bugs surprise me sometimes. But the
Speaker 2: point being these there are perfectly logical scientific explanations for it,
Speaker 2: as we've already established, and they really don't take very
Speaker 2: much time at all. For It's like anybody who who
Speaker 2: starts to learn about these things. These are some of
Speaker 2: the first things you learn.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it was, it was. It kind of surprised me
Speaker 1: when I started looking at all of the ten things, right,
Speaker 1: and one of them was the teleological argument everything fits perfect.
Speaker 1: We have the perfectly designed world. Science can't explain that,
Speaker 1: you know, it was yeah, well yeah, can you know?
Speaker 1: Showing that it's not a perfectly designed world. If it was,
Speaker 1: then the pit of the avocado wouldn't be so big, right.
Speaker 4: But I I have another argument for that, which I
Speaker 4: like to tell people about the Goldilocks universe. It's a
Speaker 4: form of the watchmaker argument, but it's a little different.
Speaker 4: The rub is that the chances of all that coming
Speaker 4: together has a probability of one. In other words, it's
Speaker 4: a certainty. After all, it happened. We know that, right. Therefore,
Speaker 4: it's not improbable at all because it actually happened. That
Speaker 4: means it's not only probable it happened. So any combination
Speaker 4: of those forces maybe could have had intelligent life appear
Speaker 4: as the rules would be different, and we don't understand
Speaker 4: how they would be different. It's very complex, but we
Speaker 4: only have one example. So we have one sample our universe, right,
Speaker 4: and that tells us nothing about what it would be
Speaker 4: like to have any one of the four major forces. Well,
Speaker 4: actually I call it three forces, and a gravity isn't
Speaker 4: a force, so anyway, yeah, so anyway, that's it, you know,
Speaker 4: I just you know, it's just the probability is one.
Speaker 4: Get over it. You're in the one universe. If you
Speaker 4: want to.
Speaker 2: Think about it that way, I would say that it's
Speaker 2: not quite one. But because as you said, we only
Speaker 2: have one example, we don't know how many times a
Speaker 2: universe has attempted to or successfully begun or ended existing,
Speaker 2: So we don't We would need to know the full
Speaker 2: amount to know what sample size we have. The point
Speaker 2: of the matter is that it doesn't matter because it
Speaker 2: did happen, just like you said, So if it happened
Speaker 2: any other way, we don't know whether that life couldn't
Speaker 2: have existed in any other instantiation of the universe, or
Speaker 2: that it could have, And we may never have answers
Speaker 2: like that because that may not even make sense.
Speaker 5: We don't really know that.
Speaker 4: I don't think the question makes sense actually exactly.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we don't at the point where we know if
Speaker 2: that question does make sense. So the probability of the
Speaker 2: universe happening is kind of a point to even I
Speaker 2: think discussed because here it is, let's just.
Speaker 5: Talk about how it did.
Speaker 1: Yeah exactly, I know I could see it down Infidel
Speaker 1: down there chomping, wanting to talk about one another.
Speaker 3: One had these ten things. What do you have of
Speaker 3: cour us? Well, actually I wanted to build a little
Speaker 3: bit on that odds. You know, we talked about what
Speaker 3: are the odds of something happening? Because oftentimes we'll hear
Speaker 3: that when Christians are talking about something that has to
Speaker 3: be a miracle, because what are the odds of this happening?
Speaker 3: And I was reminded of a book that I read
Speaker 3: as a teenager, and I picked it up almost offhandedly,
Speaker 3: and it was about nine people who survived a Roshima
Speaker 3: and then Nagasaki. These people survived the nuclear bomb atomic bomb,
Speaker 3: went to Nagasaki and then survived another one. Now, your
Speaker 3: odds are pretty bad all about, and you know, and
Speaker 3: I went to started to break down how do we
Speaker 3: even break down those odds? You know, you have logistics,
Speaker 3: you have or are you well enough to make the trip?
Speaker 3: You know, all these other things because you're surviving in
Speaker 3: an atomic you know situation that nobody knows what's going on,
Speaker 3: and when you start thinking about things like this, the
Speaker 3: odds are pretty long. But once again, just like our universe,
Speaker 3: it did happen, and so one in a million things,
Speaker 3: one in ten million things happened every day. So just
Speaker 3: because something's a long shot to give it a veneer
Speaker 3: of a miracle, it's just so odd to me. Because
Speaker 3: also you mentioned the Goldilocks universe. I'm sure that more
Speaker 3: than a few of us are familiar with Douglas Adams
Speaker 3: with the puddle, and everything just seems so finally, this
Speaker 3: whole is just perfectly tuned for me. This to exists
Speaker 3: inside this puddle, and it completely ignores that everything around
Speaker 3: it is bred for this world. So yes, they tried
Speaker 3: to tie in God to pretty much everything on here.
Speaker 3: And the truth is the way they did it was saying, oh,
Speaker 3: science doesn't have an exclamation, so therefore God did it.
Speaker 4: And besides, science is not a thing, so you can't
Speaker 4: talk about it like it's a thing. It's a method,
Speaker 4: you know, So they need to educate themselves a little
Speaker 4: bit too.
Speaker 1: Also, the body of work that's been discovered through that
Speaker 1: method too, so it's not just the method, but it's
Speaker 1: also what we've been able to discover from it from
Speaker 1: that method. So I think that's important to remember.
Speaker 2: But that and to your point, Infidel, kind of like
Speaker 2: you said, one in a million things happen so often,
Speaker 2: and kellyus is something that you and I talked about
Speaker 2: during the back cross. If a thing happens to you
Speaker 2: once every second, a million seconds is like eleven.
Speaker 5: And a half days. Pretty So I just did the math.
Speaker 5: I just did. I just looked it up.
Speaker 1: Actually it was what it was. It was thirty four days.
Speaker 1: If you're awake and alert for eight hours a day.
Speaker 2: Okay, yeah, so if you're awake for being awake for
Speaker 2: a million seconds, is being awake? Is thirty four days
Speaker 2: worth of time? One in a million things happens every
Speaker 2: thirty four days.
Speaker 1: That it's I agree it. People will bring in perfectly
Speaker 1: round balls into rocks into my store all the time
Speaker 1: and I think they found a cannonball, and I have
Speaker 1: to explain to them that we don't ever have rocks
Speaker 1: been used as cannon balls in North America ever, you know,
Speaker 1: And they always want to know how it got so
Speaker 1: perfectly around, and that's what I always said, Well, what
Speaker 1: do you think the chances of that happening one in
Speaker 1: a million. Yeah, probably about that. Okay, Now think how
Speaker 1: many rocks are in the twenty mile radius of the store.
Speaker 1: Probably ten million. There's still nine more out there, go
Speaker 1: look for.
Speaker 2: I like that make a wish.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, that would be something.
Speaker 1: So again, like, one of the things that really bothered
Speaker 1: me was the choice of topics that this person decided
Speaker 1: science couldn't explain because he picked so many topics that
Speaker 1: again the science, there's no way science can explain them
Speaker 1: because they aren't topics of anything physical. It was mostly,
Speaker 1: like I said, philosophical things that we have that we've
Speaker 1: been arguing about for millennia and still haven't found the
Speaker 1: answer to.
Speaker 4: So yeah, and they strong and they even made they
Speaker 4: made a lot of errors in this, you know, just
Speaker 4: the whole the whole idea that because you know, uh,
Speaker 4: science states that everything in existence must be conserved, so
Speaker 4: our souls. Did you see that one life after death?
Speaker 4: I'm like, I just like science doesn't say that at all.
Speaker 4: Nowhere to science.
Speaker 1: They were talking about energy.
Speaker 4: You know, you can't you can't just you can't destroy
Speaker 4: energy or information.
Speaker 1: I do hear that from TS a lot that that well,
Speaker 1: your soul has to go somewhere because the energy can't
Speaker 1: be destroyed. And now it's like no, but you know,
Speaker 1: there are batteries and the earth is a battery, big
Speaker 1: battery too. So when you die, the energy that once
Speaker 1: was used to move your body around is now disappointed
Speaker 1: and dissipated through the soil where it's picked up by
Speaker 1: the plants for more energy. See, our energy isn't destroyed,
Speaker 1: It just moves on, and people don't you.
Speaker 4: Can, you can transform energy into other things. The matter
Speaker 4: itself is just a different form of energy.
Speaker 1: And it doesn't have to go somewhere right away. Like
Speaker 1: I said, like there is a giant battery. Our energy
Speaker 1: is stored within the earth until the plants needed, and
Speaker 1: then stored within the plants until the animals that eat
Speaker 1: the plants needed, and then stored in those animals until them.
Speaker 3: So I've got to say that I found the article
Speaker 3: quite interesting in the fact that they were able to
Speaker 3: write so much and say so little, because at the
Speaker 3: end of the day, you know, they made all these
Speaker 3: claims and all these grandiose gestures, but truthfully, at the
Speaker 3: end of the day, it was like, yeah, I don't
Speaker 3: understand something so God did it. And that really boiled
Speaker 3: down to because, as Kelly said, a lot of these
Speaker 3: issues aren't things that there's a way for them to
Speaker 3: be addressed through science. Science has no methodology to address
Speaker 3: some of these because they're well, frankly just pretty much
Speaker 3: pulled out of somebody's ass. So when you have something
Speaker 3: like that, yeah, science can't answer it. You know, science
Speaker 3: can't answer a lot of things because you're not asking
Speaker 3: a question that science is designed to answer. And the
Speaker 3: truth is that science is more about, as Kelly, you
Speaker 3: mentioned the gathering of knowledge and that process in which
Speaker 3: knowledge is gathered, and but it's not about making truth claims.
Speaker 3: The I don't think science is ever going to say
Speaker 3: the absolute way that this is and throw something out there,
Speaker 3: because if science makes a claim, it's going to be
Speaker 3: had to be pretty certain of it. That's why we
Speaker 3: call it the theory of gravity. You know, we don't
Speaker 3: call it the rule. But let's go and see on
Speaker 3: the top of a building unless the out consistent that
Speaker 3: this is. And that's pretty much what they're doing here,
Speaker 3: just smoking smoking ashes, just trying to distract its smoking mirrors.
Speaker 4: I would say add one thing though, a few of
Speaker 4: these questions can be answered by science, it's just not
Speaker 4: the typical three sciences. There are a couple of these
Speaker 4: questions that can be answered by sociology, maybe three or four,
Speaker 4: And there's psychology answers to a lot of these sorts
Speaker 4: of you know, questions like why and also why you
Speaker 4: ask these questions, So, you know, sociology anthropology can also
Speaker 4: explain how we get to that position to where we
Speaker 4: need to know what is consciousness. Well, there's a lot
Speaker 4: of ways to approach that. Consciousness is an emergent property
Speaker 4: of very complex organic systems at the moment. Eventually we'll
Speaker 4: see if we can make a machine, but that's all
Speaker 4: that is. And any organism with a sufficiently complex brain
Speaker 4: is going to have a consciousness. So we know that,
Speaker 4: and we can show that in the history and development
Speaker 4: of intelligence throughout the human species as well as great apes,
Speaker 4: and then going to other species as well. Pigs are
Speaker 4: known to be extremely intelligent. They're more intelligent than dogs.
Speaker 4: Dogs are way more intelligent than a lot of other animals.
Speaker 4: So these things, consciousness, intelligence, they've all been pretty much
Speaker 4: sussed out for the basics. So read a book, take
Speaker 4: a class.
Speaker 2: You know, I wonder if if this is one of
Speaker 2: those things where, like, you know, how, if you want
Speaker 2: to get the right answer to something, all you got
Speaker 2: to do is post the wrong answer online and somebody
Speaker 2: will correct you faster than if you ask the question.
Speaker 2: But what drives algorithms and gets views is comments. So
Speaker 2: what this guy is doing is like, I'm going to
Speaker 2: say a bunch of wrong shit all at once, and
Speaker 2: I'm going to.
Speaker 5: Get so many fucking comments.
Speaker 3: Man point.
Speaker 5: Maybe that's what this is me.
Speaker 1: It could be, it could be. You know, we just
Speaker 1: had the back Crewise. All four of us were at
Speaker 1: the ACA Back Cruise. It's an annual event. We had
Speaker 1: a lot of fun, and the ACA does a lot
Speaker 1: of other cool events besides the back Cruiser. You can
Speaker 1: find out what some of those events are by going
Speaker 1: to Atheist Typingcommunity dot org.
Speaker 3: Visit the website there.