Agnostics, New Cars and Personal Bests

This blog is going to be a aggregation of several completely unrelated things. Firstly, I have bought a new used car, woo hoo! After almost a year without I have finally caved in to the convenience. Actually, Asia and I really wanted to explore some of Victoria and it is extremely hard to do without a car. Also, now that my running is really picking up again, having a car is almost a neccesity for getting to and from training/events and still allowing some time for a social life. The car is a wind red 2001 Nissan Pulsar, my Dad I know will be extremely happy with this choice. Given my last car was a Nissan and it proved extremely reliable, in the end this was the deciding factor. Hopefully this one is just as reliable.

I ran my first 10 km race in over a year on Sunday. I came in at just over a personal best at 42:30. Actually it might be a P.B if only by 5 seconds, although I have a feeling a 10 km race at the start of 06 was a 42:15, although I could be wrong. I was actually intending to run a half mara but due to a combination of factors such as piss poor preparation, a mean as cold followed by a shocking flu and a general Sunday morning laziness, I decided to run the 10 km instead. I think it was a good decision in the end and I am happy with the time as I felt like I had a little bit left in the tank at the end. My short term to medium goal for the 10 km is to crack 40 mins which I think I can do reasonably soon if a few factors go my way.

On to more serious matters. I have recently be personally confronted by the agnostic viewpoint that goes something like this:

I can't understand why anything exists at all therefore there must be a God or God like being who made everything

Agnosticism as defined by dictionary.com is:

1. The doctrine that certainty about first principles or absolute truth is unattainable and that only perceptual phenomena are objects of exact knowledge.
2. The belief that there can be no proof either that God exists or that God does not exist.

I am certainly Agnostic in the sense of the first definition - this is a fundamental tenet if you believe in science. However, the second definition, while at first glance it might seem like a reasonable viewpoint it doesn't really get to the heart of the matter - there is a complete lack of evidence for a personal God. This in itself is 'evidence' for no God. While definition 2 is strictly true, we can be damn sure, 99.9% sure there is no personal God, based on the lack of available evidence.

The question of existence itself (why are we here) is a fair one and physicists struggle with it everyday, but logically it actually makes it less likely that there is a God, rather than more likely. The question of existence is not a justification for agnosticism (in the previously defined sense) about a heavenly deity. If you consider that the universe is extremely complex, much more so than any human or even the human race can comprehend then you posit that there must be a God - it is logically consistent to say that this God must be even more complex than the universe itself, since to create it God must necessarily be able to understand it. The universe exists, we know this (although there is still a possibility that it is just our imagination) - why believe in something even more extraordinarily complex than the universe, especially when there is zero evidence for its existence - this is just anti science.

A good analogy is the purple spaghetti monster. I can not disprove the existence of the purple spaghetti monster since there is nothing that will ever disprove the small chance that he might exist, therefore I am agnostic about him. However, as there is no evidence for him, I can say that I am 99.9% sure that he doesn't exist. God is just like this, except that there are churches and billions of people who believe in him. If I started the church of the purple spaghetti monster, would you join? Most likely I would be laughed at universally by almost everyone on the planet.

The beauty of the scientific method is that we can never prove anything beyond a small doubt, this is why science advances and why I don't believe in God because religious people can never be proved wrong - they have dogmatic faith and if evidence contradicts their viewpoint they just say you must have more faith or you don't have enough faith. Faith is bullshit, for want a better word. Give me evidence and I will worship what it shows...

Sorry for the double rant, but 50/50 agnosticism bugs me.

Finding my way in the demon haunted world

Well it has been a while since I had a 'philosophical' post, so here we are. Some of you who read my blog from time to time (I don't really think there are that many), might be a tad confused with some of my apparent contradictions. Well, here is the deal - so am I. You see I'm really still deciding on my views across a number of issues. However, I have had an epihany of late, one that I kind of already knew in my heart but hadn't really formalised. It's rather obvious to me now and I hope that most of the rest of the world comes to this realisation at some stage as well. You see I have stumbled upon reason once again, I lost it for a while but now I have found it again.

Reason is the language of science, the language of evidence and the only 'reason' we have a modern advanced society that is not static but always improving and learning new things about itself and the world we live in. Reason advances mankind as surely as the sun rises in the morning - but hey this is all heresay and speak easy from me. Don't believe what I say, find out for yourself.

One of the best things about reason is that if you have an idea about something, the way something works, why something behaves a certain way etc etc, you can always say what will prove you wrong and what will change your mind. You see, reason is simply the best way we have of deciding what is truth or fact and what is myth or bullshit. If you have an idea about something, you simply way up the evidence and let the facts speak for themselves. This is why for example I am an Atheist. There is no evidence for a personal 'God' in the sky. But I can tell you exactly what would change my mind. If God were to come down from 'heaven' tomorrow and announce his presence to world, I would become a believer, assuming of course that it could be proven that it was God and not some elaborate hoax, but you get my drift.

People who 'believe' in reason never speak in absolutes like fundamentalists, there is always some doubt but often you can say how much doubt. New evidence comes along all the time and one must constantly evaluate their beliefs to see if they are still true. Some people may find this slightly disconcerting that we can never be absolutely sure about anything - but many things that hold true often present such overwhelming evidence that they may as well be absolutely true. Some examples for such things are evolution, the earth is approximatley spherical, the earth orbits the sun, the sun is powered by nuclear fusion, antibiotics kill bacteria (and not viruses as somehow many people still believe) and the chemical formula for water is H20. Of course I could go on and on. I find the whole concept of reason and truth seeking so invigorating you might even call it a 'spirtual' experience. I love it when some belief that I cherish gets proven wrong - usually becuase the real answer is more enlightning, perhaps filling a previous gap in knowledge.

So I profess to have turned a new leaf on this blog and in my personal opinions from now on. I will try not to have an opinion on something unless I have looked at the evidence and the facts and become somewhat knowledable on the subject. "Trust the experts" is damn good advice in my opinion.

I have never formed for myself a satisfactory political philosophy, mostly because people on both sides of the traditional political spectrum routinely expouse bullshit and anti-truths in the name of vote grabbing for an easily misled public. However, recently I have stumbled upon libertaranism as a political philosophy and to me it seems to fit with my new found trust in reason. To a layman, essentially a libertarian philosophy combines the best parts of traditional right and left wing politics. Some people say that libertarians are left wing morally and right wing economically. This doesn't really tell you much does it. Well okay so this includes protection of the free market, which means reducing as much as possible both corporate and social welfare, reducing taxes, protection of individual property rights etc. Some of the 'moral' ideas libertarians support include - euthanasia (assisted suicide), abortion, gay rights, women's rights, drug legilisation (all drugs, not just marijuana), freedom of speech and libertarians generally anti-war (except in self defence). The idea is that 'less government is more' and that people make better decisions for themselves than the government. I am trying this political philosophy on and so far I like it, I will let you know if I change my mind...