On September 10, 2008 the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (European Center for Nuclear Research) is scheduled to reach another major milestone: the first injection of a proton beam into one channel of its enormous circular accelerator (27 kilometer circumference) astride the border between Switzerland and France near Geneva. Actual collisions of the two counter-circulating proton beams won’t occur until October 21.
The rather modestly named LHC, designed to shed light on some of the most fundamental questions about matter, including why matter has mass, is already one of the greatest technological achievements in history, just to have attained operability, no matter what discoveries it leads to. The matter-of-fact name was perhaps deliberately chosen so as not to raise comparisons with the ill-fated Superconducting Super Collider (SSC), whose name sounded a bit like an amusement park ride, and which was canceled by the US Congress in 1993 after billions of dollars had already been spent on it and cost overruns had made it a popular target; especially as a project in Texas started during a Republican administration. However, both in terms of the superconducting magnets required for its operation and the ultra high energy proton collisions it will produce, the LHC is by rights an SSC, albeit with only about a third the center-of-mass collision energy of what the one in the US was supposed to achieve.
The LHC project has not only managed to keep sufficient money coming in from various European governments to continue its construction over the last ten years; it has also been successfully dealing with a new threat to its operation, one which the SSC never had to contend with: the end-of-the-worlders. Although I wasn’t aware of it until a couple of months ago, there has been an effort going on for quite some time to halt, through legal intervention, the starting up of the LHC. This real-life drama resembles the movie scenario I imagined years ago and sketched in my post Dangerous Experiments, which I made before learning of the efforts to stop the LHC.
As the start of LHC experiments has drawn nearer, I’ve noticed an uptick in the number of people coming to this blog from Google searches related to the safety of the LHC, led here by links to an earlier post I made about it. It’s obvious that the stop-the-LHC campaign has succeeded in giving a good number of people the false idea that legions of alarmed “scientists” are trying to halt the LHC experiments. I hope this post will show just how farcical (and already routed) this army of (two) scientists opposed to the LHC is, thus helping to allay fears of an LHC-induced catastrophe.
The supposed danger of the LHC is based on the idea that high-energy collisions of the LHC proton beams might result in the production of microscopic black holes or hypothetical particles called strangelets and magnetic monopoles, which could, it is advanced, interact catastrophically with normal matter.
In contrast to my movie scenario, in this real-life drama the persons first raising the challenge to the experiment were not the ones who made the speculative calculations pointing to the possible production of the exotic objects (and who, it must be noted, saw no danger in them), but rather a couple of characters who had already tried unsuccessfully to halt the start of another accelerator experiment (Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory) some ten years ago, based on similar doomsday predictions, and who seem to specialize in imagining ways upcoming accelerator experiments might trigger massive destruction.
Since that other experiment whose safety they challenged has been running without the least hint of trouble for eight years, these would-be scientific Ralph Naders are, one would think, in danger of acquiring a reputation as “wolf-criers.” However, just because there wasn’t a wolf last time, doesn’t mean there is not one now, does it? Not logically, no. But let’s see some tracks or something.
Let it first be noted that there aren’t any particle physicists raising an alarm; not a one. The physics of microscopic black hole production is very speculative at this point and involves the existence of extra unobserved dimensions to the universe. While seeing them would thus be very exciting from the theoretical standpoint, the chance that any such objects would start gobbling up the world is nil, given that if such things can be produced in the LHC, they are being produced all the time by cosmic rays striking the Earth, and the Earth is still here. The same argument applies to all of the other potential exotic products. This is the CERN argument, but what of the scientists on the other side?
Since those making the original alarm cry (a “former nuclear safety officer” with an undergraduate biology degree, who sometimes claims to be a “nuclear physicist,” and a “science writer”) don’t really have sufficient credentials to impress many people on such issues, all of the recent anti-LHC propaganda has touted the concerns of two German scientists, who at least know how to write a paper full of equations.
Their doomsday predictions, however, are based on mutually exclusive scenarios, a point which the anti-LHC folks don’t mention, as it might make it seem they were saying “We’re not sure why it’s dangerous, but we’re just sure it is.” Though the anti-LHC web sites all refer to the “growing list” of scientists opposed to the tests, it pretty well comes down to a couple of men who have never worked in the relevant fields of physics; and the list of two shows no sign of growth.
CERN physicists and others have answered the arguments of the alarmists in a way that I find totally convincing. However, how can a non-scientist decide which scientists to believe? If the science is so clear why isn’t there unanimity? The first point I want to make is that, given the many thousands of scientists in the world, it is possible to round up a couple for almost any crazy idea. I recently came across a chemistry professor’s academic web page devoted entirely to the idea that the WTC towers had been destroyed by planted explosives rather than the airplanes full of jet fuel that slammed into them. And of course, who can forget the Berkeley professor who actively promotes the idea that the diseases and death brought on by AIDS has nothing to do with the AIDS virus (mere coincidence, unproven), but are instead due to drugs, including the very ones used to treat AIDS.
Still, given that there is a difference of opinion on such an important matter (even if it’s two without proven expertise against everybody with it); and given that the vast majority of us lack the training, education, and experience to judge the matter directly ourselves, it seems to me that an examination of the credentials, and to some extent the personalities, of the alarm sounders is warranted. The final decision for me is based on the categorical and definitive nature of the rejection of the alarmists’ claimed results by true experts in the relevant fields, but for those with less trust in expert authority a consideration of these other factors may carry some weight.
I can’t claim to know the motivation of these scientific opponents of the LHC, but the fact that the two “real scientists” turned up to oppose the LHC basically at the last minute, only as it was ramping up for its start, and after the efforts to stop it had already gotten lots of media attention, cannot help but raise the suspicion that the desire for celebrity, whether consciously acknowledged or not, played an important role in their decision to make some quick (and half-baked, as it turns out) calculations that support the idea that the LHC experiments are extremely dangerous and to go public with them as part of a legal action trying to stop the LHC.
The chance to be in the limelight (possibly even to be mentioned on this blog!) by becoming an important figure in a controversy that is already getting a lot of media attention has to be a major temptation to some. I imagine that each of the anti-LHC scientist pair (though their results are in conflict) believes his own results are correct or at least might be correct. Neither has said he was “sure” his calculations and speculations were correct, just that they could be right, so that the LHC should not start on schedule. They’re covered, right? Let us briefly consider their credentials and histories, neither of which inspire confidence.
An anti-LHC website, in referring to one of the eleventh-hour alarmists, includes the phrase “German Astrophysicist Dr. Rainer Plaga concludes in his August 10, 2008 paper…,” which sounds pretty impressive. This online “paper,” however, turns out to be a “preprint” with the notation at the bottom of the first page “submitted to Elsevier,” which is not very enlightening to me, as Elsevier is a very large publishing house with many scientific journals and academic science books on its lists. In any case, it is not at this point a peer-reviewed publication, nor is it likely ever to be one. Plaga once worked at the Max-Planck-Institut für Physik in Munich, but now appears to be at the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) in Bonn, presumably no longer engaged in astrophysics, except perhaps on his own time.
Plaga’s personal web page (rplaga.tripod.com) bears this motto (from Karl Popper): “If you think you finally solved a problem, everything is lost.” This could be interpreted in various ways, I suppose, but given some of the other items on his page, I think it may refer to Plaga’s own propensity to advance theoretical results that he later has to retract after errors have been detected.
He chronicles one such evolution on the subject of neutrino theory. Just to quote a few phrases there: “Even though the issue discussed below seemed ‘very clear’ to me in 2002, it was not.” He had already told of his initial mistakes on the same topic:
“At that time I was absolutely sure I understood this issue quite well. In spite of this after posing me some questions she said: ‘You know what Rainer, I feel you do not really understand this deeply.’ I became a bit angry: ‘No, *you* are too dumb to understand.’ A few days later I came back to her and said: ‘I am sorry: you were right, I did not understand it at all.’”
And further:
”In 1996 I wrote a manuscript about this issue that came to the conclusion that neutrinos are Weyl particles… This paper was wrong. In 2001 after countless further discussions I submitted a correction.”
Plaga displays an admirable ability to acknowledge and correct past mistakes; however that does not seem to have had any effect on his willingness to advance new results with the utmost confidence, even when, or perhaps especially when, he encounters great skepticism or outright rejection from experts in the field.
Uh-oh. Now I’m reading a sad story about the treatment of Plaga’s theory of cosmic ray origins. Here we see Plaga raising the notion of fraud and conspiracy to uphold the prevailing theory he has challenged (technical details not important for this discussion):
“Since the work of Plaga and Dar mentioned below, not a single novel approach to the problem of the origin of low-energy cosmic rays (a problem of the century!) has been published. This seems almost surrealistic to me. In 2002 a paper by Enomoto et al. appeared in Nature … This paper is at the very verge of fraud, because its claims are in direct contradiction with facts given in the papers quoted by the authors. My manuscript from June 2002 pointing this out was refused by Nature, thus avoiding to inform its readership of a complete failure of its editorial procedures. Coresponsible for this desperate attempt to fabricate evidence in favour of the prevailing wisdom was [name omitted by this blogger as irrelevant]…”
Farther down, a passage makes one wonder if Plaga may not have become persona non grata in his research community, or at least to the editors of Nature. He writes (technical details again not important):
“The fact that this strong polarization was predicted in a paper from 1994 by G.Shaviv and A.Dar was not mentioned in the discovery paper by Nature. A Communications arising submitted by me in July 2003 to set the record straight was refused by Nature via an automatic junk mail delivered to me. A polite request for a brief statement explaining the rationale for avoiding to correct a seriously imbalanced report was never answered.”
I invite the interested reader to investigate more of Dr. Plaga’s web site. There he publishes the harshly critical comments about a paper he submitted (again on cosmic ray origins) made by scientists chosen to judge its fitness for publication. Plaga presents these peer review criticisms as allowing “interesting insight into the psychology of average researchers when faced with new ideas.” But the reviewers fault him, not for attempting to overthrow prevailing theory, but for doing it in a thoroughly inadequate way. The key fact is that Plaga sees himself as a superior intellect, whose theories are rejected because they are too revolutionary for ordinary minds. This history may be taken into account when looking at his latest attempt to make a name for himself.
Rather than casting doubt on the very existence of Hawking radiation as a means of rapidly evaporating microscopic black holes, which has been the main alarmist approach, Plaga asserts that everyone has greatly underestimated its danger. Plaga speculates that the Hawking radiation from a microscopic black hole is suppressed until a certain mass has been attained, at which point the amount of energy released in Hawking radiation may equal that of a large thermonuclear bomb, thus endangering at least the vicinity of CERN if not all of Europe and the world. I am very optimistic that Dr. Plaga will once again, and happily I think this time, have to acknowledge that he has made another error, once the LHC has run safely for a year or so. Or perhaps much sooner.
Plaga’s current “reviewers” (Giddings and Mangano of UC Santa Barbara and CERN, respectively) have already spoken, and they have detected a glaring error in his work on LHC dangers. Even assuming Plaga were right about the delayed onset of Hawking radiation, he overestimates it by a factor of 1023! That’s getting into Avagadro number territory.
I can’t help feeling a little bad for Plaga, but one has to recognize one’s limitations. Maybe Plaga’s humiliation, an unavoidable secondary effect of CERN’s need to publicly respond to his claims, through having the Giddings and Mangana analysis of his paper posted online will serve as a cautionary tale for those who feel tempted to jump into a controversy without sufficient thought or expertise. Perhaps Plaga will withdraw his objections. Whether or not he does, I expect we shall continue to see references to Plaga’s work, as though it remained fully worthy of respect and cause for grave concern, on the anti-LHC websites.
What about the other supposed big scientific gun of LHC alarmism? The “LHC Facts” blog describes him thusly: “To date, Dr. Otto E. Rössler is the most notable scientist to have the courage to speak out about the potential dangers of running the CERN Large Hadron Collider.”
“To date?” What are they waiting for? Isn’t it getting late? “Courage?” Is there something that these hypothetical scientists who share Rössler’s view fear even more than the end of the world? Or could it be that every last scientist wanting to wave a red flag has already surfaced?
Rössler turns out to be quite a strange fellow. He is an MD who stayed in academia, moved into biochemistry, and then made a name in the relatively new field of chaos theory. He seems to think of himself as a visionary, having founded a new field of physics called “endophysics,” which is supposed to take into account the observer’s inner state. Or something like that. Have you heard of it? Neither had I.
Recently, at the age of sixty-eight, Rössler, despite having no particle physics or blackhole physics credentials, announced that he had found important new results, alarmingly relevant to the destructive potential of microscopic black holes in LHC proton-proton collisions. Rössler variously estimates the likelihood of such blackhole production by LHC as being from 10% to 50% though he appears to have pulled these numbers out of a hat.
What’s more, he has calculated that any stable, electrically neutral, microscopic black hole created in the collider (which, according to his theory, they all would in fact be) would destroy the earth in a mere four years (or rather well before that since the four years is for the Earth to have become the size of a marble) instead of the millions of years, which other “doomsday” predictors have estimated. This is due to two results he claims to have obtained: no Hawking radiation at all and a nonlinear growth (just a hunch of his, it seems) of the black holes, so that they become “planet eaters” in a short time. Even without external discrediting, it’s obviously impossible that both Plaga and Rössler could be right.
According to the English text on another web site I encountered, which includes a video interview in German, which I unfortunately don’t speak, Rössler has a solution to the LHC danger. Move the LHC to the Moon! It would only cost about three times as much as to do it on Earth, according to his calculations.
OK, this makes it pretty clear the guy does not have a firm grasp on reality. I’m sure he is a nice man, and he looks very kindly in the video, but, as I viewed his smiling face, this thought came into my mind: “I wonder what the German word is for wacky tabacky.”
Rössler says he has submitted his LHC-alarm paper “simultaneously to Science, Nature and Z. Naturforsch. to get the best criticism of the world, with the publishing rights going to the one who accepts first.” These being three of the most prestigious scientific journals in the world, Rössler is either making a joke within a paper supposedly written to stop the destruction of the world or demonstrating further divorcement from reality.
Can he seriously be thinking any journal at all would publish a paper that dissolves into a “street ballad” (which contains mysterious references to his being barred from his classroom and carried away by plainclothes police) and then goes on to talk about taking ten billion dollars from CERN to fund something called Lampsacus referred to in the ballad? I wasn’t sufficiently motivated to try to figure out exactly what Lampsacus is, but online searching revealed it to be some kind of internet community (I think) that Rössler has proposed. Here are a couple of quotes from Rössler on the Lampsacus web page. “So far, of course, Lampsacus does not exist and has no money….This is the most crazy homepage ever written.” Lots of craziness here for sure. Having absorbed that information, I can’t help wondering if his entry into the controversy may not have been a ploy by Rössler to publicize, if not finance, his pet imaginary project.
Back in the real world, a couple of real experts in the field of general relativity, at CERN’s request, have already examined Rössler’s work (the “scholarly” version with the mathematical details, not the one with the smiley faces and Lampsacus street ballad) and noted fundamental errors of understanding, essentially branding it the work of a novice who hasn’t mastered the basics of the theory. They say that he is trying to revive the flattened road-kill of an old conjecture, long since disproved by incontestable experimental evidence. I believe them: this is science. Since Rössler’s whole argument rests on an already disproved conjecture (which even he acknowledges must be erroneous!), I am willing to bet the planet on the falsity of his alarm cry. I don’t believe that the laws of the universe are capricious: once disproved, disproved for good. Beyond that, Rössler even committed further errors in attempting to apply the bad idea.
So, it is clear that CERN has had to devote quite a lot of time, money, and effort in answering safety questions raised by incompetent people. What is the proper way to respond to situations like these? Should physicists be required to go through the details of every claim someone without previous standing in the field comes up with in order to proceed with a new experiment at the frontier of knowledge?
I know from experience, and I imagine most physicists will know what I’m talking about, that there are many crackpots in the world who think they have found holes in Einstein’s work etc. and who are always eager to show their findings to any real physicist they encounter. Now, Plaga and Rössler obviously have a greater command of mathematics than the algebra-challenged dreamers I’ve encountered, but the same psychological phenomenon, the desire to do something great and overturn the existing scientific order, seems to extend to some scientists.
I think CERN has taken the right approach. However much a waste of time it may seem, the safety issues have to be addressed for maintaining public confidence, but also, I think, as a model for future behavior. Perhaps some experiment in the future really will be deemed too risky, as we start delving deeper into the structure of space-time and possibly hidden dimensions. Should even a small subset of actual researchers in a relevant field believe there to be a danger, then caution, diligence, and delay would be in order.
To summarize where matters stand with regards to LHC’s safety: really only a couple of men who are capable of putting their objections to the LHC experiments forward in a form that roughly follows that of a standard scientific presentation have done so; and their calculations and arguments have been judged slap-down wrong on very basic grounds with which no one with expertise in the relevant fields could quarrel.
A couple of gnats have flown into a bug zapper. And this is the best that the opposition to LHC has been able to come up with. All of the other potential dangerous scenarios anyone has been able to dream up, however implausible, have also been shown not to be of concern because of the failure to observe such effects already in nature as a result of naturally occurring cosmic ray events. The CERN page on LHC safety (http://public.web.cern.ch/Public/en/LHC/Safety-en.html) has all the debunking papers online for pdf download or viewing.
Having done the research to write this piece, I’m now less tolerant of this whole anti-LHC stunt than I was before. Of course, it is reassuring to see just how empty the arguments for the catastrophe scenarios are. But mixed with that is the frustration of recognizing that a couple of cynical publicity seekers (or possibly fortune seekers) along with a couple of incompetent scientists (one of them very eccentric, to put it mildly) with a desire to be in the limelight have been able to cause so much trouble for CERN, and consequently the advancement of science. Now I’m seeing stories of physicists involved in the LHC getting death threats, which is a natural result of the dishonest fear-mongering tactics of the anti-LHC group. I hope the security of CERN is really good.
Once again, hats off to CERN for remaining calm in the face of provocation, even as the opposition continues to trumpet thoroughly annihilated arguments against the LHC. As an American, I’d like to congratulate the European science community and governments for being able to bring the LHC to completion after we here in the USA were unable to sustain our effort on the SSC. Everyone who seeks to know more about how this beautiful universe works must be grateful. Best of luck to all involved!
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Conversations in the Clubhouse of Truly Smart People
Monday, August 11th, 2008The title of this post alludes to the first few paragraphs of another I made recently (July 21, 2008): “On the Breaking of Bad Habits Acquired in One’s Youth: Smoking and Atheism.” Briefly put, I there compared becoming an atheist during my high school years to joining an imaginary elite society I’d glimpsed through reading Bertrand Russell and other such thinkers: The Club of Truly Smart People.
Now, back in those ancient days of my youth, there was no internet (no personal computers even) to provide access to and communication with the whole world. Living as I did in Dallas County, Texas, I really had no contact with other atheists or agnostics, known to me as such, until I went away to college. Well, I had at least one friend whom I think I had pretty well convinced of the irrationality of religion (God forgive me), but there was certainly no organized and open community of atheists. It was partly the ideal and semi-underground quality of membership in the imaginary club that gave it so much prestige in my mind. I should add that I did not wish for this to be a permanent condition. I looked forward to meeting others who shared my views and hoped that I would live to see progress toward the dispelling of the religious superstition that somehow still lived on in peoples’ minds.
I viewed religion and racial prejudice and discrimination in pretty much the same way, and even as being closely tied together, since I knew so many people who believed both in God and racial segregation, which was manifestly unjust in practice. This was pre-Civil-Rights-Law Texas, which was an apartheid society with oppressive government-enforced separation of races, basically an insane world view that it’s hard even to conceive of now.
As so often happens, I’m seeing things more clearly as I write about them. That connection in my mind between racism and religion was no doubt one of the factors that pushed religion into the category of being too unacceptably backward for further consideration. At the same time, I would have acknowledged that my personal rejection of racism was mainly based on the clear teachings of Christianity. I might note that my inability to come up with a satisfactory non-religious source for ethics and morality remained a problem for me until my conversion.
These times are very different. Partly, I’m sure, as a defensive response to Biblical literalists’ efforts to force inclusion of “Creation Science” in school textbooks and the perceived growth of the “Religious Right” as a political force, something of an antireligious movement has come into being that goes well beyond defense of science teaching or support for legal abortion. The number of atheistic and antireligious books appearing in recent years certainly far exceeds anything I’ve seen in decades past. Of course the internet and the blog phenomenon have made it easy for like-minded people to communicate and congregate virtually online, and atheists have taken advantage of the opportunity.
I recently did a little web surfing through atheist-oriented websites. Although my club analogy for smokers and atheists was fanciful, atheism as a sort of club (atheists strongly object to its being called a religion) actually makes a good deal of sense these days, at least for those who publicly define themselves as atheists and join together to promote and defend their views. It’s worth noting that the people that frequent atheist blogs and web sites are probably no more typical of atheists than the regulars on the Sons of Sam Horn web site are of average Red Sox fans, to take an example close to my home. From what I’ve observed, online atheists probably would agree that their society of non-believers does amount to The Club of Truly Smart People. Let this not be taken to mean that there are not, for example, Christian circles that view themselves as The Club of the Truly Saved People.
One thing I discovered in my surfing is that the atheists’ club now has an official emblem, a red letter A (get it?) that bloggers can post on their web pages to indicate their club membership. The show-the-A push is part of a campaign, evidently led by Richard Dawkins (a quote of whose I critiqued in my previous post), to have atheists “come out” as such. Dawkins apparently sees a commercial opportunity in atheism, since he has a web site that sells not only his books but tee shirts bearing the atheist logo and worn in the ads by nice-looking female models. I know it’s just me, but I was reminded of the cover of my old paperback copy of 1984 which featured a woman with an Anti-Sex League tee shirt.
One of the atheist blogs I encountered was called The Friendly Atheist. Its then most recent post asked readers to respond to the question “What Christian Arguments Could Use a Good, Short Answers?” This was taken by most of the commenters to call for humorous responses. Perhaps it was the blog’s name that invited me to post in the comments section the following off-topic entry:
July 22, 2008 at 9:29 am
Since this is the “Friendly” Atheist site, I dare to write here as a former atheist, current friendly theist. I’d just like to remind everyone that the question of God’s existence is really the most important one we have to answer, since it determines whether or not we find purpose in the universe. There is not really a competition between atheists and theists. There are arguments for God that involve no references to scripture of any kind. I invite you to read my post On the Breaking of Bad Habits Acquired in One’s Youth: Smoking and Atheism for something about my personal experience.
I can see now that this was a bit like coming into the club house and telling the club members to stop horsing around and get serious about leaving the club to join its big rival. I wouldn’t have done it on a normal day, but I was still in the frame of mind in which the writing of my piece had left me.
The deed was done. How would they respond? I had already seen that someone had taken issue with one of the suggested anti-Christian retorts by defending (in a less than optimal way) the historicity of Jesus. He had been challenged and even ridiculed for his assertion by several commenters, but hadn’t really been abused, so I assumed that forays into the blog comment section by theists (assuming that commenter was one) were not forbidden, and were perhaps even welcome if only as a way of sharpening arguments and displaying them before other blog readers.
The full back and forth that went on between me and the other commenters can be found at friendlyatheist.com. Although their screen names (presumably identical to their actual names in some cases) can be seen there, and the comment section of a blog is in the nature of a public forum, I still feel more comfortable quoting commenters with the designation Commenter A etc. since they didn’t envision their comments appearing here.
The first response that I got (from Commenter A of course) explicitly welcomed me, then followed with
I am wondering if you’re going to keep posting here, or if you’re doing a one-or-two-off post. (I tend to get deep into conversations with new posters who have provocative questions… then they leave!)
There followed several paragraphs, mainly attacking the notion that purpose in the universe was a meaningful idea and pointing out unsupported assumptions (in the view of Commenter A) that I had made relating to the idea of purpose. He closed with
I won’t join a church full of people who are sure until I’m sure as well.
Have you evidence?
It was only as the discussion went on that I came to realize (I’m pretty sure that I’m right) that Commenter A was not just being confrontational, which is how it had seemed, but was genuinely if naively hoping to obtain such convincing evidence. His machinegunner’s approach to firing off questions and rebuttals to supposed arguments made it pretty clear why earlier theists had left before he was satisfied though.
Commenter B came on to say that she(?) had read my “blog/essay” but still had a question:
…what made you become a theist? was it because your previous ‘worldview’ (as an atheist) carried with it “the burden of purposeless mortality”? is that the main reason?
I ask because, although your blog post/essay is quite lengthy, you never really seem to touch on the specifics of what led to your ‘conversion’.
Now, in my blog post, which Commenter B said she’d read, I had explicitly said that my personal story would have to wait for another time. I could have left it at that, but given Commenter B’s friendly, even complimentary, tone, combined with my posted comment having called forth a number of responses, I felt I probably owed them a brief account, which I provided. I don’t know if it was a good idea or not, as it evidently deflected some of them from considering the main message of my blog post, which was whether they were open to any sort of evidence for God’s existence, toward making a quick decision about whether this bare outline of my spiritual trajectory presented a convincing argument for theism.
The commenters at the Friendly Atheist blog were going to view things in terms of arguments in any case, as this excerpt from the response of Commenter C to my blog post illustrates:
You then go on to quote a few major modern atheists and discuss them. Badly, judging by the few segments I could bother to read. I was personally interested in your own spiritual journey (I already quit smoking a couple of years ago).
Don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t just the sheer massive length of the post that put me off. But your arguments, such as they are, mostly fit nicely into Daniel Florien’s hundreds of proofs. I commend them to you as a resource. You could have saved us both some time by simply annotating which ones you were using.
Well, let’s skip over the rather unfriendly tone; since I did after all step into the clubhouse uninvited. The part that is very typical is the reference to my “arguments” (“such as they were,” but there weren’t any!) and how there’s nothing new in them. Is Commenter C really looking for a novel argument after centuries of disputation? Perhaps, but I think he is mainly out to display his worthiness for continued membership in the Club of Truly Smart People by being able to categorize arguments for theism and refute them by mere reference.
At the same time, of course, this ability to label an argument and toss it into the already-refuted pile, also serves as a way to avoid actually considering any arguments for God’s existence, for there are not going to be any new ones. Commenter C was not alone in this; virtually all of the commenters classified arguments by name (when they didn’t suggest going to a list, as this one did.) And yet that “personally interested in your own spiritual journey” seems to be genuine, so perhaps there is another truly disappointed reader.
Commenter C closes by quoting two sentences from my blog post and commenting on them.
Final observation:
[Quoting my blog post] “Are you truly open to revelation? The best way to become open to it must be through prayer, but few are the atheists who would start from that point.”
I think I’ll let that stand as emblematic of your arguments.
I’m not sure what Commenter C thought I was arguing for in that passage or whether he understood the point I was making, which I think should have been clear from the context. Anyone that wants to can go to near the end of my blog post and find the relevant section, which was mainly devoted to asking the atheist reader to seriously consider what, if anything, would truly constitute evidence for God. The quoted passage about prayer and revelation was addressed only to anyone that might feel direct revelation to be the only satisfactory evidence. It was meant to point out the inherent contradiction in that approach since prayer (a plausible minimal condition—nothing said about a guarantee—for its success) was not something a convinced atheist would usually be open to. The whole point was to remove that approach from consideration.
Everyone that mentioned the passage about prayer took it to mean that I was recommending something I thought they wouldn’t accept, and therefore leaving them without a prayer, so to speak. My inability to get my point across (judging from the responses, anyway) was very frustrating, but probably had as much to do with their mind-set and expectations as my expository skill.
Commenter A returned to have his say on the same quote about prayer, which he probably had seen only as quoted out of context:
To put it short and snappy: I prayed. Nothing happened. I’ve tried it several times, in several ways described by believers as the way to get certain results. When they failed, others told me I did it wrong. Must I repeat this attempt with each and every ‘god’ and ‘conception of God’ believed in by thousands of generations of humanity?
Because if you excuse me, I’ve got some living to do before I die. I’ll leave the chasing of ghosts to the Ghostbusters.
I’d say that the experience of Commenter A points to the need for trying another approach, but I feel the disappointment; and his desire for knowledge of God is apparent. I also wonder if there were really “believers” that told him that a specific way of praying would lead to “certain results.” I’m not doubting his word, just hoping there was a misunderstanding.
It seemed to be a bit disconcerting to some of the current members of The Club to encounter a former member that had not only resigned from membership but had, so to speak, joined the rival club. They responded in various ways to this puzzling phenomenon.
Commenter D in particular questioned my veracity. He wasn’t at all sure that I really had ever been a member:
After looking into Lee Strobel and his “Half-Case For Christ”, I am pretty skeptical of people who claim to be former atheists.
Others (let’s start with Commenter E) thought the club was clearly better off without me, as I had never belonged in it in the first place, not having the guts for it:
You wanted comfort, and there was none, so you switched beliefs to one that comforted you. Okay, so you’re weak. I can understand that, but don’t use it as an argument for theism.
Or (Commenter E again) sufficient breadth of intellect:
Dude, it’s clear to me that you never thought through your atheism. You were just young, arrogant, and ignorant. You are a narrow thinker; probably good for a work-a-day physicist, but not for someone tackling a subject like the existence of god.
Well, my being young and immature when I first became an atheist was one of the main points of my original blog post. As I lived, matured, and thought more, over decades, I finally was able to break free (with God’s help, I believe) from the mind-set that admits no possibility of the spiritual. But that hardly conveys all that went on, which I have pretty well committed to describing through this blog in more detail. Of course I have my own opinion about what constitutes narrow thinking—and arrogance, for that matter.
Commenter F expressed sentiments similar to the ones above on the inadequacy of my education and manliness to sustain my club membership:
…It just seems as though you were not an educated atheist back when you still were. I will wholeheartedly agree with you that the Universe is a wonderful place; I’ll even admit that I once thought as you do, and am still tempted to explain all this wonder by believing in something that I wish to be true, but is likely not. I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone knows yet, just how all this works as it does. We may never crack the code, but that’s no reason to start dreaming up gods to make us sleep better at night.…I say, use your brain like a man (sorry women). Some things are difficult to accept–so what, do we just avoid them and prefer comforting beliefs, shut our eyes and whistle past the graveyard?
The interesting thing about the excerpt from Commenter F just quoted is that it acknowledges that the absence of God is difficult to accept, that God’s existence is something to wish for. It was this implicit longing for God that I was trying to point out (in my blog post) in the writings of Weinberg and Dawkins. I believe this is a universal longing innate in all thinking creatures because we are creatures of God. This very longing is in itself a reason seriously to consider God’s existence. I say this knowing it is the kind of quantum-tunneling statement (metaphorically speaking) that escapes the classical confines of the proof-demanding atheist.
Commenter F speculated that it was a genetic defect that had caused me to drop out of the club:
You were bothered by a Universe with no purpose, and now you feel better. Same old things. Reading your words makes me consider again the idea that propensity to believe in religions may be genetic.
Commenter A seemed to become increasingly troubled by my continuing to respond to comments, though he was the one that had initially expressed the hope that I not leave after only a couple of posts.
Treat us like human beings here. Don’t come here to chortle “ho ho ho, I once thought as you did, ho ho ho” and tell us where we’ve got it all wrong.
I’m not sure what your goals here are. If they are conversation, you’re failing. If they are conversion, you’re failing. If they are to convince us that you’re a deep thinker, you’re failing.
So why are you here? Is it to make yourself feel superior by dangling some meat over the edge of the dinner table to see if the dogs jump?
It’s almost as though Commenter A thinks I am taunting him by withholding some secret key to enlightenment, or pretending to do so. The interested reader can go to the full comments to see how little my words justified this kind of response. I wish Commenter A well in his spiritual quest, though I don’t think I have much more to contribute to it at this point. However, I invite him or anyone else interested in a more private conversation to email me.
Having been rebuked several times by the “friendlies” over the length of my posts, I think I will not get into our dialog, for now at least. I assume the whole comment section is still available for those that are interested.
I don’t regret having had the conversation “in the clubhouse,” though I don’t plan to make a habit of it. I’ll let my readers judge how well the excerpts of comments I’ve quoted (and the full set) fit in with the notion of some atheists’ seeing themselves as constituting The Club of Truly Smart People. Though most commenters had trouble suppressing their scorn for this turncoat and some didn’t try, I don’t hold it against them. Comment sections do not bring out the best in people for a number of reasons.
I detect in some of the comments disappointment or even resentment that I had no new and irrefutable argument or scientific evidence for God’s existence. I can only repeat that I claim no new evidence, even as I urge everyone to examine seriously and deeply all the circumstantial evidence in this ultimate mystery. I totally reject the idea, expressed by a number of commenters, that we choose whether to believe in God. We do, however, choose whether to strive for an open mind and what kind of evidence to consider. I again recommend the Polkinghorne book Belief in God in an Age of Science
as a possible starting point.
I’m planning to take a break from metaphysical questions, but sometimes they are hard to escape, so we’ll see how it goes. That Michael Phelps can really swim, can’t he?
Tags: atheism, atheist blogs, blog comments, theism
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