Here are my answers to fellow aussie Efrique, who has recently been blogging about Harold Camping.
How about you? Do you program much?
Why are you an atheist?
What kind of scientist are you?I'm a physicist.
What type of programing do you do?I guess I've been able to program since I was small, when I learnt by looking over my dad's shoulder. I do mostly scientific computing for work, I used to be a software developer (mostly making GUIs and databases), and for fun I sometimes make phone apps, and recently dabbling in some image and sound processing. I also love compilers, especially to do with static analysis, but I don't have enough time to do all I'd like!
How about you? Do you program much?
Why are you a Christian?Because Christianity makes the most sense to me, and the most sense of the world we see.
Why are you an atheist?
If you' d been born in Pakistan or Tibet , wouldn't you almost certainly have been Moslem or Buddhist instead?Yes, most likely. However, given a level playing field I would like to think that I would become Christian again. I notice that according to your blog we live in a country which has some 60%-70% unbelief, so I don't simply mirror the society which I grew up in. If you had been born in India wouldn't you most likely be Hindu, not atheist?
What is it you want to say to atheists?I would like to start a conversation with you.
My comments are too long. I have split them.
ReplyDeletePart 1:
> Here are my answers to fellow aussie Efrique
I see you tracked down my blog
> who has recently been blogging about Harold Camping.
or not-so-recently. My last post got eaten by the dreaded bX-elves, and I haven't gone back to try again.
> > What kind of scientist are you?
> I'm a physicist.
I'm a statistician myself, but if you have read enough of my blog you probably already saw that somewhere.
> > What type of programing do you do?
> I guess I've been able to program since I was small, when I learnt by looking over my dad's shoulder. I do mostly scientific computing for work, I used to be a software developer (mostly making GUIs and databases), and for fun I sometimes make phone apps, and recently dabbling in some image and sound processing. I also love compilers, especially to do with static analysis, but I don't have enough time to do all I'd like!
> How about you? Do you program much?
Not so much these days. I worked as a programmer in the early and mid 80s, and did some casual work after that. Mostly related to statistical agorithms. One of my majors was computing, but I'd been working as a programmer for a long while before then.
I wrote my first program in... 1975 I think, give or take a year. My earliest programs were written for programmable calculators. The first desktop PC I wrote a program for would have been on a Vic20 in, oh, 1978 I think.
These days when I write any code at all, it's almost always to code up some algorithm I've been thinking about into R. I wrote some today actually - to investigate the possibility of a new algorithm I came up with this week to deal with a particular issue at work.
> > Why are you a Christian?
> Because Christianity makes the most sense to me
Most sense compared to what? Have you really done a comparison?
Have you put effort into studying other religions?
Or into whether you can make sense of the world with no religion?
If you have not seriously investigated these (by that I mean taken the trouble to put aside your present way of thinking, since the paradigms are incommensurable), in what sense is this an honest comparison? (Is it merely confirmation bias? How could you know?)
> and the most sense of the world we see.
Really? Christianity says next to nothing about most of the world we see. What it does say often doesn't fit (indeed, if you ask almost any substantive question of r/Christianity - a relatively thoughtful group of Christians - you will get almost as many different answers as you get responses - if everybody arrives at different answers, in what sense is that 'making sense of the world'? It sounds more like making stuff up. How could you tell the difference?)
> Why are you an atheist?
That sort of has the question backward. It's like asking me why I refrain from believing in unicorns.
It's the position of a skeptic. The default position for any extraordinary claim is to withhold belief until there's a clear reason to do otherwise (such as some evidence).
You must be taking this position in almost as many situations as I do. It certainly couldn't be an unfamiliar one for a successful scientist.
So, I refrain from believing in the various god-claims because there's no evidence for any of the thousands of extraordinary claims for the existence of a supernatural creator. Certainly nothing even vaguely commensurate with the claim.
If you have some evidence, I'd like to know about it.
[continued in Part 2]
Comments Part 2:
ReplyDelete> > If you' d been born in Pakistan or Tibet , wouldn't you almost certainly have been Moslem or Buddhist instead?
> Yes, most likely. However, given a level playing field I would like to think that I would become Christian again.
What you'd like to think is not the same thing as what's actually true. Do you have a stronger basis for it than liking to think so?
(Do you often believe things because you'd like them to be true? Is what you'd like to be true a good basis on which to decide what is true?)
> I notice that according to your blog we live in a country which has some 60%-70% unbelief, so I don't simply mirror the society which I grew up in.
Depends on how you measure it I guess. The figure there is specifically the proportion answering no to "Is religion an important part of your daily life?" - I have at least 4 or 5 figures in different places measuring different things. I use those figures specifically because more countries are present in the Gallup data than for any other I have found.
[The proportion who in the census say their religion is some form of Christianity is still well above half. (1901 census 97% Christian, 2001 census about 68% Christian, 2006 it was 64%)]
I am guessing your parents aren't 60%-70% unbelievers. The point about mentioning those other countries was to reflect a likely change in parental belief you'd be raised with without bringing up your parents specifically (it gets rather murky to get into particulars). Of course it's possible you're a later convert, I'm just going with the likely course of things.
I will note that we still have weekly religious classes in government primary school and the early years of secondary school. We now have chaplains in primary schools paid for by our taxes (yes, my taxes pay for a chaplain to proselytize to my children, any time they're vulnerable enough to need help). So it's hardly surprising that even in a society with a fair number of people who don't regard that religion is important, some end up being successfully proselytized.
> If you had been born in India wouldn't you most likely be Hindu, not atheist?
Quite possibly. Certainly I would be far more likely to have been Hindu as a child than the Christian I was.
I was a theist for quite a few years before I was an atheist, so quite possibly the same would have happened.
I know numerous atheists of Indian origin, some I have met in person, a few via the Internet, so it seems like it's probably no harder, *ceteris paribus* to become skeptical of Hinduism than of Christianity, even if one is a believer in it originally.
> > What is it you want to say to atheists?
> I would like to start a conversation with you.
You said that part already. The conversation started in my previous response! Presumably you invited conversation because you have something further to say after the point at which conversation starts.
Have at me! You're unlikely to offend me. (If you really try hard and work at being obtuse or dishonest, you could probably manage it, but I see no hint of anything like that, and I've been in r/atheism for a couple of years, so I have a fairly thick skin. The worst that's likely to happen is that I get bored or busy or something.)
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