On Aquinas and the Cosmological Argument

In debating religion, I've run across a claim that has been made recently that the cosmological argument is the strongest argument out there for the existence of god.  And not just any cosmological argument, the one put forward in Thomas Aquinas' First Way, part of his Quinquae viae.  This may come as a surprise to those of you who thought that the cosmological argument had long since been soundly refuted.  But, as I've been told, none of the refutations, not a single one, have ever dealt with the real argument that Aquinas made.  Apparently, the way it's been interpreted for the past eight centuries is wrong.  Ed Feser makes this claim, but I'm afraid I don't currently have access to his book on Aquinas.  I intend to get to it in time, because I'm told it's very important.  In the meantime, this blog has been presented to me as an example of how the argument is supposed to work.  I've thought about it a good bit, and have decided to devote a little time to refuting it.

To sum up, here's the quick and simple version of the argument:

1. Some things are being actualized
2. Whatever is being actualized is being actualized by something else
3. An essentially ordered chain cannot be infinitely long
4. Therefore, there is something of pure actuality

Let's go ahead and take a look at the argument in detail.  In the first two sections of the post, we simply get a history lesson, describing the problem of change presented by Parmenides, and the division of things that exist into actual and potential by Aristotle.  It's simple, clear, and to the point, and I have no quibbles with how it begins.  I may not agree with the way the Greeks set it out, but it does its job at framing the space in which the argument is being made.

Regarding point III, however, we come to my first objection.  The distinction is made between an accidentally ordered series and an essentially ordered series.  An accidentally ordered series is one in which the causes of the events in the series need not currently exist; in an essentially ordered series, the causes must exist in the present with the effects.  But is this a meaningful distinction?  The fact that we live in a universe where there is time makes the distinction between an accidentally ordered series and an essentially ordered series questionable. Let's start by defining the present, something that we can do today in terms far more accurate than Aquinas could in the 13th century.  What we call "the present" can be divided into tinier and tinier slivers of seconds, down to (theoretically) Planck time. The Planck time is the time required for light, in a vacuum, to travel one Planck Length, which is really short: 1.616199(97)x 10⁻³⁵ meters.  This makes the Planck time roughly 10⁻⁴³ seconds.  And, critically, for events taking less than Planck time, no change can be detected; that's part of the definition of Planck time. For events taking more than Planck time, the information that the event has occurred can propagate no faster than the speed of light, and thus cannot actually cause any change until at least some time has passed. All causes, by our current understanding of the laws of physics, must be in the past;  10⁻⁴³ seconds in the past may not seem like a lot, but it is the past. In "the present", i.e. any given instant in which the Planck time has not elapsed, nothing is changing. Change is always measured over time.  But the concept of an essentially ordered series depends on things changing in the present; if I push on an object, so the idea goes, the force that I am exerting on the object in the present is causing the change that moves the object.  In reality, that's not how the world works; the force I exerted an instant ago is carried across the distance between my hand and the object at no faster than the finite speed of light and affects the object, and the force I'm exerting at this instant hasn't gotten there yet, because even if I'm only the Planck length away, the information that I'm exerting force cannot have yet traveled the distance.  It appears that all series must be accidentally ordered series, and since this is admitted to not be proof of a god, the argument falls flat before we even finish the definitions.  That's a pretty good refutation, I think.  But I can do better than that.

Let's look at the three premises in the simplified argument above.

• Premise 1: Some things are changing. This is fine, subject to the point I elucidated above.
• Premise 2: Whatever is changing (whatever is a mix of potential & actual) is being changed by something else. This is the key point of contention, as it is in many modern refutations of the cosmological argument. It hinges, as many things do, on the fact that we've found out a lot since Aquinas' day.  This premise isn't necessarily true, but that doesn't mean it isn't true in practice; it could have turned out to be the case, even if not logically necessary. However, the observation of uncaused phenomena in modern science does mean that it isn't true. Radioactive decay is a great example, and the most familiar that I can name.  An unstable isotope of an element doesn't look unstable; it appears perfectly fine, acting just like any other atom, right up until the very instant that it decays.  There are no precursor events, no warning signs that decay is about to occur; on the level of individual atoms, whether the atom decays at any given moment is a matter of probability, and is one of the processes that appear to be truly stochastic.  We can say that, over a given period of time, about half of the atoms of a chunk of radioactive material will have decayed, but we can't say a thing about any given atom.  Nothing actually causes the decay to happen; there are necessary conditions, but no causal event.  Aquinas couldn't have known this in the 13th century, so he can't be blamed. But we should probably move on now that the universe has shown this premise to be false.  I could stop here, too, but let's keep going
• Premise 3: This chain cannot be infinitely long, because it is an essentially ordered series. Again, the question of whether the concept of an essentially ordered series makes sense comes into play. But even if we grant it, the unstated assumption is that there must be only one terminus to all chains. This point is addressed further on, though, and I'll come back to it. But it also ignores the possibility of cycles. If we have an essentially ordered series, where A is causing B, and B is causing C, and so on, what stops Z from causing A? If we have, say, a wheel of atoms, and one is moving (from an external push in the past, outside our EOS for this wheel), then it pushes the one ahead of it, which pushes the one ahead of it, and so on, but the one behind the first is then pushing the first. The chain may not have an infinite number of members, but it isn't clear that this means it needs to terminate in a pure actuality.

So, we've got serious problems in two of the three premises, with the second being the most problematic.  The argument appears to be just as unsound as we'd expected.  But I can still do better than that.  The post then goes on to the attributes of "pure actuality". Even if we grant that we can get there from the argument, the attributes noted are either questionable or applicable to something that we would not call god. Of note is the property of unity.  As the post says, "The only way to tell the difference between two things is if one thing has an attribute that another lacks." But that doesn't mean there couldn't be an infinite number of indistinguishable ends to the chains. And it doesn't mean that a pure actuality would necessarily have all attributes; there could be things that it might not be possible for it to be, in which case it couldn't potentially be those things, and would remain pure actuality.  It also includes an odd Thomistic concept of "good"; goodness in the Thomist view is synonymous with existence.  This is a concept that really doesn't seem to make sense; the pen sitting on my desk is good, but if I need a pen and don't have it, I'm suffering from evil? This seems to be a matter of equivocation more than reason.

But I have one more point to make, one that I think is particularly devastating.  A common claim for the cosmological argument is that it provides a "first step", a way to get not to the full concept of god (although the traits noted here for pure actuality are pretty close), but to an acceptance that a god of some sort exists.  But let's look at some of these traits, and see whether they describe a god or...something else:

• Incorporeal: we can imagine a lot of things that are not matter or energy.  Ideas, for example, or mathematical constructs, or the laws of physics...
• Simple: Well, many things are simple, even more simple than matter and energy.  Like the equation that describes matter and energy (E = mc²) or the Feynman path integral describing the likelihood that a particle will follow a given path through space...
• Unity: Basically, something that is the same everywhere, where you don't have multiples, but rather a single unified description...
• Eternal, Immutable: The same not only everywhere, but everywhen, constant at all points in time from the beginning of the universe (or even before) onward...
• Impassable: Cannot be made to change, beyond the ability of anything to alter, like some sort of fixed natural law...
• Omnipotent: The source of all change in the universe, and the source of all change that could possibly occur, the ultimate explanation for everything that occurs...

I'll be honest with you, I don't see god in that.  "Conscious", "personal", those aren't implied.  What do I see coming from these traits that pure actuality must have?  A limited set of necessary properties of the universe (as Lawrence Krauss and some other physicists argue for) would be incorporeal, simple, eternal, unity, immutable, impassable, and (at least by the given definition of "the source of all change in the universe, and the source of any change that could ever logically occur") omnipotent. Thanks to the Pauli exclusion principle, noting that no two particles can ever be in exactly the quantum state simultaneously, and thus any change in, say, the energy state of an electron caused by rubbing your hands together might then affect every other electron in the universe (a really weird conclusion supported by some physicists like Brian Cox, but disputed by others), it could even be said that this basic set of principles is omniscient, probably in a more direct way than the roundabout "ground of all being, doesn't have knowledge but is knowledge" sense described. Since the definition of "good" being used is the weird Thomistic way of equating goodness with existence, then the Thomist would even have to conclude that the laws of physics, since they quite evidently exist, are indeed good. I wouldn't say so, but then, I think that's a wonky definition of good.

Congratulations, Thomists.  If you accept the cosmological argument, as presented in Aquinas' First Way, as a valid argument, it would be perfectly reasonable for you to conclude that the "first cause" is not god, but a limited, simple set of logically necessary laws of physics.  If you happen to be interested in what those logically necessary laws of physics might be, I recommend A Universe From Nothing by Lawrence Krauss or The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow.  Both argue quite nicely that the universe did not need a god to get it started, or to keep it running currently, but rather that the laws of physics alone suffice.

Edit: Updated my brief diversion on the Pauli exclusion principle.  The science isn't quite as conclusive as I'd originally presented it.

Isn't This Enough?

A couple of things have recently hit my radar that just make my jaw drop.  I've seen this picture several times in the past, and it underscores for me just a tiny piece of the scale of things:

You start to realize the incredible range in which things exist in our universe; when you then think that VY Canis Majoris is one star of the 400 billion or so stars in the Milky Way, and that the Milky Way is one of over 80 billion galaxies in the observable universe, you can't help but sit in awe of the immensity of the cosmos.  But I just recently ran across the second iteration of The Scale of the Universe.

You can, with a single slider, move along the orders of magnitude in our universe.  It begins on the 1-meter ring, a familiar scale for humans; we're approximately 1.7 meters tall, give or take.  A slight zoom to the right takes you to the size of a house, a slight zoom to the left to the size of a penny.  The limits of that zoom, the minuscule movement of the slider required to span what is, to us, such a wide range, is just the beginning of the experience.  Moving to the right, you slide past the LHC, the Grand Canyon, and out to the scale of the Galilean moons almost without noticing it.  To see that the Oort cloud, the grand extent of our solar system, is so large that not even the largest of stars is visible any longer is a testament to the power of gravity.  At the top end, the scale of the entire universe, one has a sense as of peering down from a great height, a strange mix of fear and joy.  And that is only half the journey.  Moving to the left, down the decimal points, the smallest object visible to the human eye is met only a tiny fraction of the way along, next to a human egg, a human hair, and the thickness of a sheet of paper.  It is amazing to me, as a computer scientist, that the transistor gates that make up our computers are too small to be resolved with an optical microscope, and only barely larger than a molecule of DNA.  And then, perhaps most telling of all, we pass hydrogen atoms, then the lonely gamma rays, then nuclei, a few scattered subatomic particles, quarks and neutrinos floating almost entirely alone, and then nothing for order of magnitude after order of magnitude.  The smallest things we know are so much smaller than their nearest neighbors that good portions of the slider are simply empty. It is astonishing to me, and the presentation is awe-inspiring to say the least.

There is, however, more than one vastness in our cosmos.  The immensity of time is brought home by an ambitious and beautiful project called ChronoZoom.  For a great write-up on the project, check out Ars Technica's coverage.  Cataloging nearly 14 billion years of history, you can zoom again to numerous scales.  Peppered along the way are "bubbles" that contain additional information about important features of the epoch at which you're looking.  Videos are embedded in the bubbles, and can tell you about the origins of the universe, of stars, of life, of agriculture, and so on.  It is rather graphically impressive to see that the history of the universe was 2/3 over before the Earth even formed.  We, of course, occupy a tiny sliver at the far right, a fraction of a fraction of the UI of this amazing site.  The range of topics covered goes from the vast reaches of the distant past to the advances made by Microsoft (which is a tiny sliver of the tiny sliver that is recorded human history, which is a tiny sliver of the lifetime of our species...).  Intended to be a growing, open-source way for people to experience "Big History", the site is only in its earliest stages.  Already, it is an impressive feat of technology (using HTML5 as I've not seen it used before), a triumph of mathematics (to get the smooth flow along the epochs working right), and a truly visionary look at history and time.  "We envision a world where scientists, researchers, students, and teachers collaborate through ChronoZoom to share information via data, tours, and insight," the ChronoZoom team writes. "Imagine a world where the leading academics publish their findings to the world in a manner that can easily be accessed and compared to other data. We will be focusing on community development of features, capabilities, and content."  I wish them well in their efforts, because they've already accomplished something amazing.

I Don't Even Know What To Say

A recent post on Reddit in the r/DebateAChristian subreddit asked this question:

"Of all the arguments you've heard, which is the one that keeps cropping back up in your mind as a potential problem for your beliefs?"

The response from one user was perhaps the saddest thing I've ever read (emphasis mine):

"None. Before I was saved, there were many, but afterward, I couldn't disbelieve if I wanted to. The hardest thing to believe was that my very ability to reason was flawed. Once I got over that, the rest was very, very easy.I still have doubts, but they are doubts like "Am I sure that I am saved?" or "Am I certain that is what the Bible is saying there?" Also, there are times when, due to my skeptical past delving too far into philosophy, that I begin to doubt all existence as a whole, but I find even the nature of existence as less tangible and true than I do my faith."

I really don't know what to say to this.  People are being taught this, apparently.  They are being told that they cannot think.  That their ability to reason, to make sense of the world, is simply wrong.  And of course, once you abandon any trust in your ability to reason, once rationality and critical thought are left behind, everything else is ridiculously easy to swallow.  You'll believe anything you're told once you've been convinced that you can't even make a reasonable objection.  And this walls your mind off from any debate, any discussion; the things you've been told are right cannot be challenged, and nothing will shake your faith because, obviously, nobody else can reason either.

How did we come to this?  How did fideism become so powerful?  The only advantage that we have, the only thing that makes humans the most successful mammals on the planet, is our ability to think.  That there are people who give that up, who willingly subjugate themselves to people who do their thinking for them, is depressing and frightening.  This right here?  This is why I fight against religion.  No, not everyone believes this kind of thing.  Not all religious people abandon reason.  But this mind virus, this cancer of thought, this deep wound inflicted on the human psyche, is empowered by religion.  It is the environment of faith that allows this disease to flourish.  And it has evolved a powerful, nigh-unbeatable resistance to the only weapons we can use against it: skeptical inquiry, rational thought, and evidence-based reasoning.  I don't really know what to do.  Anything I can say to this person will simply sluice off, like water off a duck.  What do you do when religion ends the conversation before it can start?

How I Know What I Know, Part I: Worldviews

A while back, a friend of mine suggested that I look into the idea of a "worldview".  I've since done so, and have seen the term used with increasing frequency in religious discussions.  Put broadly, a worldview is the set of all things that a person accepts as true; it acts as a lens through which new information is filtered.  The concept, originally put forward as Weltanschauung, is central to German philosophy; however, it has become fairly popular with the religious, as it allows them to put forward their religion as something other than a set of testable hypotheses.  I've found this growing trend to be particularly troublesome for a couple of reasons.

First, there's a tendency for people to consider their worldview to somehow be sacred, and this is not so.  Yes, I get the point; you're not arguing for the claims of your religion, you're arguing from them, because you simply assume them to be true.  But this does not mean your worldview is not subject to being questioned; it just lets me tell you that you're making really stupid assumptions.  The trouble, of course, is that someone who has decided to classify their beliefs as a worldview, and also decided that this puts their beliefs somehow above being questioned, will not be swayed by facts or reasoning.  Many people who use the "worldview defense" in this way are simply closing their minds to dispute; they have decided that they are right by fiat, and nothing can prove them wrong.  It is a fancy way of admitting to willful ignorance, and I think it's ridiculous.  This puts me on the side of the philosophical realists.  Just because someone makes certain assumptions about the way the world works, that doesn't mean that their assumptions cannot be questioned, because they could be incorrect assumptions.

Which leads me into my second point.  The other way in which the "worldview defense" is used is to point out that I, too, have a worldview that is based on assumptions.  Since everyone is assuming something, the claim is made that all such assumptions are equally valid, and thus the religious assumption that god exists is something I can't argue against.  After all, there are things that I believe that I can't prove or disprove, so that makes their beliefs just as good as mine.  Hogwash.  I readily admit that I make certain assumptions about the way the world works, but mine are very limited.  Just because some assumptions are necessary, and just because everyone makes assumptions to build their worldview, that doesn't mean that we can just assume whatever we want.  The assumptions being defended by religious people when they make this claim of "well, it's my worldview" are not reasonable assumptions to make.

So, what assumptions are reasonable?  This is the meat of this post; I am going to begin to describe my own personal philosophy, as I have been giving it significant thought as of late, and that must rest on the foundation that one might consider my worldview.  What do I assume to be true about the world, and do the assumptions I make invalidate any of the arguments I make against religion?  Let's dive into that.

My way of looking at the world is very strongly based in evidence.  However, I must admit that there are things that cannot be shown to be true with evidence, hence the necessity of assumptions.  But the question of what assumptions I need to make is a very important one.  I think that we can successfully justify everything with only three assumptions, which is a pretty strong ratio of assumptions to explanations. To begin with, one must discard all beliefs; start from a blank slate, and try to reconstruct the knowledge that I had before.  And since we have nothing on which to build, we have to start with assumptions.  I think, however, that these are things that are universal; everyone assumes that these things are true, because if they didn't, they couldn't function as a human being.  The first two assumptions are necessary to have any knowledge at all; not using them ends any epistemological discussion before it begins.

• Contemplating the existence of my mind justifies my belief in the existence of my mind; "I think, therefore I am."
• At least some of my sensory perceptions are accurate.

Arguing against these assumptions is difficult; do you not think that you exist? Do you never trust a single bit of sensory input? Such radical skepticism is pretty worthless, and I don't think anyone who really followed it would even be capable of engaging in a discussion anyway.  The first assumption is fairly weak, but unavoidable.  Simply stating "I think, therefore I am" assumes that there is an "I" to think.  The second assumption is much stronger, in part because it is not a blanket assumption.  I am not assuming that my senses are always accurate; indeed, I'm well aware that my senses can be fooled.  I've misheard things, seen things that weren't really there, confused one physical sensation for another, etc.  But overall, my senses report a consistent external reality, and assuming that they do sometimes report this reality accurately has not led to any irreconcilable contradictions over the past 20+ years of my use of that assumption.  It is strictly not something that I can prove (how would I do so without appealing to sensory input?), but it is a strong assumption because if it were wrong, I would be very likely to have experienced something that seriously shook my faith in it.  A third assumption is needed to describe how we gain knowledge:

• Physical evidence is a valid means of justifying beliefs.

This assumption builds on the second, and thus works with it to form a strong foundation for the rest of my belief system, or worldview.  Again, I think everyone makes use of this assumption.  I believe, for instance, that I am typing on a keyboard.  My senses are providing me with physical evidence that the keyboard exists, and that physical evidence justifies my belief.  While this could, in theory, be argued against, I don't know of anyone who will honestly do so; how could they?  Do they not believe in things for which they have physical evidence, such as the existence of a pen sitting on their desk?  These three assumptions are the only ones that I make, or at least I ideally try to make only these assumptions.  The assumptions themselves are, I think, rather uncontroversial; it is the claim that they are the only assumptions necessary where many people, not all of them religious but most of them, disagree with me.  From this simple foundation, I think we can make an evidence-based argument for anything, including the thesis that evidence is the only valid means of justifying beliefs.  This is the central thesis of evidentialist foundationalism.  I highly recommend the following two videos for a remarkably lucid explanation of evidentialism, and a response to some common criticisms of it.  They are from a user on YouTube known as Evid3nc3; his entire series on his deconversion from Christianity is of incredibly high quality.

I'm going to stop here for now, but I intend to go a bit further in a following post.  There are numerous other positions that I hold, numerous other things that I believe in.  But they all stem from this basis.  This is a worldview that does make sense, that makes only reasonable assumptions.  It is open to comment and criticism, and because the number of assumptions being made are so very few, it has the beautiful characteristic of admitting that I could be wrong about almost anything.  You can, of course, disagree with me; my worldview is no more sacred than any other.  I just happen to think that I can defend it on its own merits, rather than using its worldview status as a defense.

Bullshit from the White House, Take Two

Well, we secularists have gotten another response from the White House regarding a petition.  We asked that churches be removed from automatic tax exemption, and be required to apply for non-profit status like secular organizations.  This seems like a reasonable request.  And now, Joshua DuBois, the White House "god guy" has given us a response.

Thank you for signing this petition regarding the tax-exempt status of houses of worship.

The separation of church and state outlined in the First Amendment to the United States Constitution is an important founding principle of our Nation. Our Nation's Bill of Rights not only guarantees that the government cannot establish an official religion, but also guarantees citizens the right to practice the religion of their choosing or no religion at all. Internal Revenue Code section 501(c), which addresses tax exempt organizations (including religious organizations), and the Internal Revenue Service's (IRS) "Tax Guide for Churches and Religious Organizations," reflect these principles.

In particular, the IRS Guide provides for an automatic exemption for churches and other houses of worship that meet the statutory requirements of section 501(c)(3). These requirements include, among others, that the organization be "organized and operated" exclusively for certain purposes (including religious and charitable purposes), that no part of net earnings inure to the benefit of any private individual or shareholder, and that the entity not involve itself in political campaigns.

Houses of worship, however, need not rely on the automatic exemption. As the IRS Guide observes, some houses of worship may consider it beneficial to obtain IRS recognition of their tax-exempt status: "such recognition assures church leaders, members, and contributors that the church is recognized as exempt and qualifies for related tax benefits. For example, contributors to a church that has been recognized as tax exempt would know that their contributions generally are tax-deductible." Accordingly, the IRS Guide states that, "[a]lthough there is no requirement to do so," houses of worship that seek recognition of their tax-exempt status may apply for a determination by the IRS.

The Administration recognizes that houses of worship--churches, synagogues, temples, mosques, and other institutions--are integral to their communities and often serve as community centers for charity and social service. And the Administration is committed to strengthening government interaction with faith-based organizations to the benefit of their communities, consistent with First Amendment protections.

When the President launched the White House Office of Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships,the White House noted:

As the priorities of this Office are carried out, it will be done in a way that upholds the Constitution--by ensuring that both existing programs and new proposals are consistent with American laws and values. The separation of church and state is a principle President Obama supports firmly--not only because it protects our democracy, but also because it protects the plurality of America's religious and civic life.

The President's Advisory Council for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships provided recommendations to the Administration on improving government partnerships with faith-based groups. Many of these recommendations have been acted upon, and all are under review by the Administration. You can find the Council's report here.

The President will continue to uphold the constitutional guarantee of separation of church and state in supporting faith-based and secular organizations alike in their efforts to do the most good for individuals and families in need.

It's a history lesson, which of course we already knew all about.  And then it's a statement of the administration's current position, which we already knew all about.  It links to a report from the President's Advisory Council for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships, which was released in March 2010, so it was already available to us.  And then...nothing.  As usual, the Pentecostal minister used his experience in both preaching and politics to spend a good number of words telling us nothing.  So, basically, this was the exchange:

Secularists: "Please change this silly tax exemption!"

White House: "Here's some history you already knew, and a summary of what our current position is. We're not changing anything."

More bullshit, just like the last time.  I notice there's no response yet to the petition to take the petitions seriously.  Although I think it's pretty clear that the response to that one is also going to be "fuck you guys."

Update:  There's been yet another response!  Again from DuBois, this time to a petition on the national motto.  Much like Bullshit 1.0, Bullshit 2.5 is a nice "fuck you" pointing out that apparently, separation of church and state is very important, it just doesn't mean that government and religion need to be separate.  Wait, what?  And in the vein of 2.0, we get a nice little history lesson to pad the response a bit, so it looks more like the administration actually cares what we have to say.  Can we get someone else to write these up?  Someone who isn't so obviously opposed to atheism and secularism?

Fun Calculations From The Bible

I think I'm going to make this a standing, occasionally updated post.  In the past, I've been accused of taking the Bible too literally.  So here, I'm going to go ahead and set the bar as high as I can, so that when the accusation comes again, I can point here and say "look, it could be worse."  We all know that math wasn't really the strong suit of most of the authors of the Bible.  Clearly, they often just made up some numbers that they thought sounded right.  Now, I'm not going to spend my time looking at whether 623 or 628 children of Bebai returned from Babylon; no, I'm going to see if I can find the truly ridiculous numbers.

If you ever doubted that Revelation was John on acid, I'm about to prove it to you.  Revelation 14:17-20 is about a winepress.  Except it isn't pressing grapes, really.

¹⁷ Another angel came out of the temple in heaven, and he too had a sharp sickle. ¹⁸ Still another angel, who had charge of the fire, came from the altar and called in a loud voice to him who had the sharp sickle, “Take your sharp sickle and gather the clusters of grapes from the earth’s vine, because its grapes are ripe.” ¹⁹ The angel swung his sickle on the earth, gathered its grapes and threw them into the great winepress of God’s wrath. ²⁰ They were trampled in the winepress outside the city, and blood flowed out of the press, rising as high as the horses’ bridles for a distance of 1,600 stadia.

That's a lot of blood.  How much blood?  Let's find out!  One stades, in Rome at the time, is about 0.92 furlongs; a furlong is an eighth of a modern mile.  So 1600 stadia was 200 Roman miles, but it works out to 183.93 modern miles.  I'm going to interpret here, and say that when the blood flowed out for a distance of 1600 stadia, that means the distance the blood went out from the winepress John saw, i.e. that they're talking about the radius of the lake of blood.  So we've got the radius of our cylinder (approximating here, of course, that the lake is circular and the depth is constant throughout); now we need the height in order to calculate the volume.  Unfortunately, "as high as the horses' bridles" isn't an accurate measurement, but the bridle of a horse is typically between four and six feet from the ground.  Call it 5 feet for simplicity.

So, we've got the height of our cylinder in feet.  The radius, in feet so our units match, is 183.93 * 5280 = 971,150.4 feet.  Now, we go ask a European high school student what the formula is for the volume of a cylinder, and we find out that it is pi * the radius squared * the height.  So, pi * 971150.4^2 * 5 = 1.481470008 x 10^13 cubic feet.  There are 28.3168466 liters in a cubic foot, giving us 4.195055897 x 10^14 liters of blood.

Now, let's turn this into people.  I think we can safely assume that the winepress is only squeezing out blood; it is after all a divine winepress, so it should be able to discriminate.  The human body contains approximately 5 liters of blood, so we can divide our total volume of blood by 5, and get 83,901,117,930,000 crushed grapes people required in order to create this lake of blood.  This is about 11,800 times the current population of the planet Earth, by the way.  Yes, I know John was totally tripping balls when he wrote this.  Yes, I'm sure the number 1600 was just some fancy symbolic thing.  But I think we can safely say that John hallucinated a truly horrific amount of blood here.

It's a Wonderful Life

Over the next day or so, many people will be watching the classic Christmas film It's a Wonderful Life.  From the wiki: "Released in 1946, the film stars James Stewart as George Bailey, a man whose imminent suicide on Christmas Eve brings about the intervention of his guardian angel,Clarence Odbody (Henry Travers). Clarence shows George all the lives he has touched and the contributions he has made to his community."  I think it's important to remember just how much we touch the lives of others, that's true.  But as an atheist, I am often asked "if you don't think there's a divine purpose to your life, why don't you just kill yourself?"  The question is rather silly, and I'd like to take a little time to point out why.  Because it is a wonderful life.


To begin with, life itself, the living things that fill our planet so abundantly, is wonderful.  A recent video from the BBC brings several things together to show this: David Attenborough, some of the great footage from the BBC's nature documentaries, and a jazz classic.

We live in a world full of wonders, and far too many people miss out on just how amazing the presence of the 10 million or so species of life on Earth really is.  In terms of geological time, life appears to be ridiculously easy to make; after the Earth cooled and the Late Heavy Bombardment ended (it wouldn't be fair to count before that), and it was possible for living things to survive, life arose almost an eyeblink later.  Earth stopped being slammed by objects that would have sterilized the surface about 3.9 billion years ago, and the earliest fossils we have of microbe-like objects are 3.5 billion years old.  It took less than half a billion years, probably significantly less, for life to arise once conditions were right.  In fact, life may have arisen before the Late Heavy Bombardment; some scientists theorize that life may have survived deep in the oceans next to volcanic vents, or possibly arisen multiple times and just been wiped out over and over until things calmed down.  Regardless, from the simple replicators that existed on the early Earth, diversification and natural selection immediately began to fill the niches in which life could exist.  Nearly four billion years later, after the loss of 99% of the species that have ever lived, we come to the beautiful world we have today.  Through the transition to an oxygenated atmosphere, ice ages, global warming events, meteorite impacts, and countless other trials, life has persisted.  To believe that life as we know it today was simply "poofed" into existence is to miss out on a beautiful, sweeping story, one which I think Richard Dawkins rightly called The Greatest Show on Earth.


And then, there is our species.  We humans have survived many of the same trials that all life has had to face, and our intelligence and ingenuity have seen us through.  Its likely we've suffered two major population bottlenecks, in which the population could have been reduced to about 50,000 people, or 15,000 people, or even as low as 2,000.  What caused these catastrophes is not entirely known; it could have been a global warming event, or whatever happened to the environment after the eruption of a supervolcano.  But we lived, we moved to warmer or cooler latitudes as needed, we left our ancient home on the African savannah and spread across the globe.  People who were functionally identical to you and me survived an ice age; our species overcame numerous other competing species, such as the Neanderthals, to become the only surviving hominids.  And look at the things we've managed to accomplish.  From a genetic standpoint, we are little more than singing, dancing, mostly hairless apes.  And yet, we've peered back to a moment in time a few million years after the Big Bang.  We've discovered the basic particles and forces that make up everything we see, and figured out that most of the universe, about 99% of the universe, is made of stuff we can't see.  We've gone from rubbing two sticks together to smashing protons into each other at close to the speed of light.  We have flung ourselves and our machines into interplanetary space, sent our robot emissaries to dozens of worlds, and created two spacecraft that are on their way to the stars.  Just this past week, we've found evidence of worlds that may be much like our own, although they're too hot for life, orbiting a star 950 light years away.  The things we've accomplished are truly extraordinary, and they seem to just keep getting better.


Of course, the discoveries we've made about life on Earth tell us that we're newcomers on the scene, that we are merely one species of the 10 million or so on the planet, and that those 10 million are a mere 1% of the species that have ever lived.  Our discoveries about the universe have shown us that not only is our species not the center of everything on Earth, but Earth isn't the center of the Solar System.  Our sun is just another star among 400 billion in our galaxy, tucked away in the boondocks of one of the spiral arms, nowhere near the center of the galaxy.  Our galaxy is one of 100 billion galaxies, and it isn't exceptional in its placement in the universe, or in size, or in shape, or anything.  And all of those galaxies, everything in the universe that we can see, despite its immensity, constitutes about a 1% bit of "pollution" in a universe that is about 30% dark matter and 70% dark energy.  Wipe out not just us, but everything we can see in the universe, and the universe would remain virtually unchanged.  This is not a universe made for us; this is not a universe that cares about us.  This is a universe that wouldn't even notice if our entire species were gone, much less any one member of it.  With that in mind, is there no point to living?  Are the critics of atheism right?


No.  They are not.

Just because we are tiny, that doesn't mean we aren't special.  Just because we are not important to the cosmos, that doesn't mean we aren't important to each other.  Without a "grand plan" into which we fit, we are not without purpose; we simply have only the meaning and purpose that we put into our lives.  We are free to pursue our own goals, to do what we find valuable.  Our species is young, but we show great promise.  If we do not destroy ourselves, we will inevitably venture to the stars, and in so doing avoid the destruction of our planet (which is certain no matter what we do, given enough time; we need to preserve our environment as long as we can, but the sun will destroy us one day).  The universe can probably support life for another 30 billion years; we can do a lot of good in that amount of time.  And if the cosmos doesn't care, so what?  We care.  We are not simply "in" the cosmos, we are part of the cosmos.  We are the universe, and we are a self-aware, intelligent, thinking, feeling part of it.  


During the holidays, we often feel somehow more connected to other people, more aware of the wants and needs of others, their joys and pains.  We do touch each others' lives in very deep, meaningful ways.  We are a species that cares not just about ourselves, and not just about our close relatives, but about the whole species.  We're the first to recognize that we are a species.  We also care about other species, and about our planet, and indeed about the universe.  Very importantly, we are more than our biology; with our ability to change ourselves, to be conscious and aware and intelligent, we have built a society unlike anything else on our planet.  Not only do we have a society, we're getting better at having a society; no matter what anyone might tell you, the truth is that violence has declined, and our empathy, our reason, the "better angels of our nature" are winning out.  But it only works if we keep trying, if we continue to fight for a better world, a decent world, a world where all people can live in freedom and harmony.  In Luke 17:21, it is said "behold, the kingdom of god is within you."  We have the power to bring about great goodness for each other, for everyone; that potential is within us all.  That is what I have to live for, that is why I care, that is why I don't simply give up and die or submit.  And so, with the love of humanity in my thoughts today, I wish you a Merry Christmas and a joyous holiday season.