Frustration with games

This is not, let us be perfectly clear, the frustration that results from being extremely bad at games like Demon's Souls or Rayman (let us briefly pause to note the glory that is the Rayman intro) - I essentially have trouble with anything that isn't a straight-up RPG. But that's not the issue here.

The issue is that videogames are (drumroll...) sexist. Yes, we are all surprised. I mean, I actually am - in spite of my already existing knowledge that, in this culture, women don't count, it seems like I'm always getting blindsided by just how much they don't count.

So Assassin's Creed II, right? My roommate plays through it, I watch most of the game. Good fun if you wanna climb all over parts of Renaissance Italy and stab people in the face/throat/groin/back in rather brutal ways. Pretty scenery. Fun gameplay. Characterization and plot are shit.

So, ignoring the present day framing story (which we don't care about and which doesn't really add anything to the game except for occasional incoherent ramblings about conspiracy theories - of course, the main antagonists of the game are the Templars - which build slowly up to a big reveal over the course of the game, which is - spoilers! - that aliens did it! which was obvious a third of the way through the game), let's examine the game's treatment of women. And yes, I know that women's role in society was rather constrained in Renaissance Italy, but the gamemakers' commitment to historical accuracy doesn't really extend beyond what can easily be shoehorned into their Assassins-versus-Templars conspiratorial rhetoric. It does not, for instance, prevent your in-game pal Leonardo da Vinci from making anachronistic and therefore at the time literally unthinkable speculations about the existence of gravity - fine, whatever, he's a super genius, still not how that works, but whatever - or from subscribing to the idea that people thought the Earth was flat pre-Columbus, which they really, really didn't.

But okay I'm getting off topic: yes, patriarchal society at that time in that place, but that does not excuse anything, as we shall see.

So aside from random female passers-by, the only women in this game who matter at all are:

1) your mother, who has no role in the story other than to introduce you to da Vinci, and then promptly gets all of the words beaten and possibly raped out of her and is therefore totally mute for the rest of the game, and also you have to protect her in an escort mission;

2) your sister, who has no role in the story other than to ask you to beat up a cheaty boyfriend and then is nothing but a glorified menu screen for the rest of the game, and also you have to protect her in an escort mission;

2b) other women who want you to beat up a cheaty husband, for money, because that is how you solve problems apparently;

3) two of the only three women who manage to get anywhere above woman-you-have-to-protect-and/or-fuck rung on the ladder of female characters, who actually teach you useful infiltration techniques and whatnot, and who both run brothels, because apparently the way to be both female and not-someone-to-rescue in this game is to literally be a prostitute;

4) an apparently competent and, naturally, sexually attractive thief who gets shot in the leg with an arrow the precise instant she attempts something dangerous, and whom you have to rescue and escort to safety, after which you have to physically carry her. Note that, when you are carrying her, there is no danger, you've already reached safety, and there is no point at all to this exercise, other than having you physically carry a sexually attractive woman who could have been not-a-sexist-object-lesson in another game. Also then the rest of your encounters with her are just flirty banter which is so painfully bad;

5) okay this one pisses me off. Sometimes in this game you'll come across some optional events where there's this thief who's all, hey, I'm fast, bet you can't beat my time on this parkour course I've mapped out for you, and then you're like, fuck you buddy I am a self-insert cardboard-cutout quote-unquote "badass" and therefore it is intolerable that anyone could be better at a thing than me, and then you run over some buildings and it's fun and you get some money at the end. Good times. So then you arrive at this particular race and instead of the usual thief guy it's a woman giving you a mission. This piqued my interest because, other than this, the only random-NPCs-who-give-you-missions who aren't men are women who have decided that you almost killing their husband is the best way to fix their marital problems. So, cool, a woman who can run around quickly and competently! Except, no, there's no indication that she's done this course (it's a horse race this time) - the time you're trying to beat is that of a guy who was trying to impress her. She's unimpressed and tells him that any random passer-by could beat his time, that random passer-by is you, she tells you to go race, and you say, "What's in it for me?" Which is, if I recall, a question you ask of no other mission-assigner, you just do the mission and then you get money. And her response? "Private riding lessons," nudge nudge, wink wink, and oh my GOD could you have picked a more painfully bad euphemism. So you do the race. And then she fucks you. Pushes you down into the hay and straddles you and the screen fades to black.

WHY.

Because, apparently, women exist in this game either to be protected or to be fucked by you the male douchebag protagonist.

6) yeah we're not done yet. Caterina Sforza. Go read that wikipedia article. Ask yourself, how could you conceivably have Caterina "Il Tigre" Sforza, Caterina "I'm going to ride through riots while seven months pregnant in order to occupy a fortress" Sforza, Caterina "Good for you you've taken my children hostage I can just fucking make more" Sforza, in your game, as a major character, and still not have any non-sexist portrayals of women. That's a damn good question, and they didn't completely spay her because that would have been pretty much impossible.

But they sure as hell tried. Your first encounter with her is brief and she is played entirely for sex. Your major encounter with her, much later in the game, is when her children are taken hostage and she lets fly with an (admittedly excellent) string of profanities culminating in the legendary and possibly ahistorical, "so what? Look right here, I've got the instrument to make more" exchange. Which is solid, until she turns away from the enemies and tearfully begs you to go rescue her children, which you do. Then you become unconscious because plot happens and she nurses you back to health and that's all we see of Caterina Sforza. Still, though, you can't completely dilute her, right? Some of it still comes through, right? Well, of course, which I guess is why the game decides to label her, in its educational historical database, as a "lunatic warrior woman", just in case you might be getting any crazy ideas that maybe there's more to gender relations than "men protect women". Also? All of the above is just DLC, meaning that if we count only the core game, we don't even have sammich!Sforza to populate our extremely short list of female characters.

So the moral is clear! If you are a woman, you're allowed to be a mother, or a sister, or a wife, or a fuckable, or a damsel-in-distress. You want to be a fighter? Well okay, if you want to be called a lunatic. You want to be a thief? Fuck you, here's an arrow through your leg to remind you of your place.

I mean, okay, there's a couple of female characters in the present day framing story, one of whom has no personality whatsoever beyond "hacker chick", and the other of whom actually punches people into unconsciousness!...and is only really characterized at all as "designated love interest for present-day main character in upcoming sequels". Well okay, so there's no depth of characterization whatsoever in this game, but "all our characters are flat!" isn't really much of a defense.

Oh also there's the woman very early in the game, whom you romance, using quick-time events. Forgot about her.

Yeah, so, that.

Was going to also talk about similar issues with Persona 4, but this is probably enough for the night. Short version: Persona 4 honestly tries to deal with issues of non-heterosexuality, and even non-cisgenderism, and is a fantastic game that I love a great deal - all of which makes its failures that much more frustrating.

On a positive note, however! Portal and Portal II are both really, really excellent games, and refreshingly Not Sexist. They're not trying to make any sort of feminist statement, it's just that all two characters in the first game, and half of the characters in the second game, are female (or at least female-ish AI), including, of course, the protagonist, and after the entire history of videogames worth of either exclusively or default male protagonists (except for Samus; if you bring up Lara Croft as a counter-example I will track you down and ram Susan B. Anthony silver dollars down your throat until you jangle sufficiently while I am throttling you), it is really, really nice to see an exclusively female protagonist.

Now if we could just get non-silent female protagonists, we'd be making progress (and ditto that thing with the silver dollars if you bring up Metroid: Other M).

Final note: I got my roommate to go through a quick scan of his 150- to 200-game library. There were six games that he could think of that had 1) clear protagonists who were 2) non-silent and 3) female. Half of those we dismissed as being way too fanservicey *cough* Bayonetta *cough*, which leaves us with a nice one-in-fifty ratio there. Even leaving out games that don't have clear talky protagonists, that don't look good.

The perfect pill

For my writer urges and my short attention span!

Have tumblr now, it is here, it will be more frequently updated.

Not that I've abandoned this blog at all! No, actually, I think I have one-to-several blogposts in the relatively imminent future.

William Lane Craig, "Richard Dawkins on Arguments for God", Part IV, the Ontological Argument

So I'm skipping Part III, the Teleological Argument for now, because it's a little more complex to deal with, and focusing on Part IV, the Ontological Argument, because it's fun and easy!

So the Ontological Argument was either first or most famously formulated by St. Anselm of Canterbury way back in like the 13th century or something, and his formulation goes something like this:

God is that than which no greater can be thought.

Let us suppose that God does not exist.

Then we have a contradiction by definition, since we can think something greater than our idea of God, i.e. that+existence.

Therefore, God must exist.

It's sort of the Xeno's paradoxes of arguments for God, in that it is charmingly, obviously wrong, but deciphering exactly how is kind of difficult. The first attempts at refuting this argument got all mixed up with questions like, did it imply that the best island possible must exist in reality and shit like that, but most people confronted with it sort of just went, "Huh?" and moved on with their lives. Kant said some stuff about it which as near as I can figure was about how you just can't fucking do that, deriving actual existence from purely theoretical exercises. I didn't accept this argument even when I was a christian, because it's a form of argument that could only possibly be valid in this particular case, so the question of whether or not it is a valid form of argument is logically equivalent to the question of God's existence and we're right back where we started.

Anyway, Anselm's formulation is not the one Craig references here; rather, he's using Alvin Plantinga's formulation, which goes like this:

1) It is possible that a maximally great being exists.

2) If it is possible that a maximally great being exists, then a maximally great being exists in some possible world.

3) If a maximally great being exists in some possible world, then it exists in every possible world.

4) If a maximally great being exists every possible world, then it exists in the actual world.

5) If a maximally great being exists in the actual world, then a maximally great being exists.

6) Therefore, a maximally great being exists.

First off, let me just note that it is not at all clear to me that this whole possible world business is all that different from the world ensemble Dawkins postulates to answer the teleological argument, for which Craig ridicules him, but that's not the main point here. The point is that Craig insists that, "In order for the ontological argument to fail, the concept of a maximally great being must be incoherent, like the concept of a married bachelor." Setting aside the issue of whether that's actually true, what is demonstrably false is his further insistence that "the concept of a maximally great being doesn't seem even remotely incoherent." Observe.

Let's assume that the concept of a maximally great being is coherent. Let us represent this entity by n. Now let us posit an entity n + 1, which has all of the characteristics of n, and the additional characteristic, "can take n in a fight" (or "is greater than n", but I like my formulation best). It should be obvious that n + 1 is just as coherent as n - if you're not super comfortable with the idea of something being "more omnipotent", then you clearly haven't been watching enough anime. (I realize this seems like a flippant point, but it's not. The inability to conceive of something "more omnipotent" is actually a failure of the imagination. Or, if you're still not convinced, replace "can take n in a fight" with "is capable of making a better universe than n" because if you candidly think that this is the best of all possible worlds, well, congratulations, you're a white straight cisgendered christian male in the wealthiest one percent of the United States of America, and fuck you.) Point being, using the same inductive reasoning that the ontological argument (or at least Anselm's formulation of it) uses to derive God, I can derive the existence of a better God. This, of course, contradicts the idea that n is maximally great, therefore we have a proof by contradiction that the concept of a maximally great being is in fact incoherent, therefore the ontological argument holds no water.

Hey, privilege, what's up

So I'm in Arkansas (lest we forget) and have been, of late, subjected to what seems an endless stream of sexism and homophobia via my voyeuristic over-the-shoulder observation of my roommates' facebook feeds (my roommates themselves are stand-up folks, but many of their facebook friends are not.) So after a particularly nauseating instance in which my roommate dared to post a status implying that calling something "gay" in a derogatory sense was maybe, y'know, homophobic, and was subsequently dogpiled by three or four people vehemently protesting to the contrary, I felt that I needed to write a thing. So I did. Here it is.

To those who think using the words "gay" or "faggot" in a derogatory sense isn't homophobic: hey guess what you're wrong.

Look, I am as aware as anyone, more aware than you are, of the fact that language changes, that words come to have different meanings over time, that language is dynamic and that people who obsess over grammar at the expense of communication are stupid, but let's just take a moment and examine the facts:

Fact 1: The words "gay" and "faggot" come to have derogatory senses only because of the social (and legal!) stigmata associated with homosexuality.

Fact 2: The words "gay" and "faggot" continue to be used, right now, in this country, in a derogatory sense by the people who are responsible for the continuation of these stigmata, i.e., homophobes.

Fact 3: The stigmata associated with homosexuality have real consequences, right now, in this country, from widespread social disapproval, to greatly increased difficulty if not impossibility of adoption, to not being allowed to be with your dying lover, to being continually tormented to the point where you commit suicide. People die because of homophobia, right now, in the United States of America.

I am not making the argument that calling someone a faggot is morally equivalent to killing them. That would be a stupid argument, and it would be stupid to think I am making it. What I am saying is that homophobia is a serious issue, right now, in this country, and it is facile to suggest that derogatory uses of the word "gay" are A-okay because the word's meaning has changed. It hasn't.

To use "gay" or "faggot" in a derogatory sense, is to associate negativity with homosexuality. This is how language works: words mean things. They don't stop meaning things just because you don't mean them (or claim not to mean them). When you say, "that's so gay," or "what a faggot," what you are communicating, whether you intend to or not, is that gays are less: less worthy of respect, less entitled to rights, less human. That is what people will hear, and that is not their fault, because that is what you have communicated.

But okay, maybe using "gay" and "faggot" as slurs, repeatedly, doesn't make you homophobic. (Maybe using "nigger" or "kike" or "spic" doesn't make you racist.) Maybe you have gay friends. (Maybe you just used the same argument Sarah Palin did. Congratulations.) Maybe you don't think people should burn in hell for eternity just because they're gay. (You probably also don't think the Holocaust was a good thing. You don't get a cookie for that either. I'm not impressed by very very basic human decency.) Here's the real reason that you, specifically, are a homophobe:

Your immediate, knee-jerk reaction when someone brings up that your use of "gay" to mean "bad" is homophobic, is not to listen, or to examine yourself for any unrecognized homophobia, or to just stop using two words with hundreds if not thousands of substitutes which, by contrast, do not communicate that certain classes of people are subhuman - no, your immediate reaction is to justify how you are not at fault, and how the fault lies with the people who might be hurt by your thoughtless language.

Here's the moral of the story, the central point I'm trying to get across: if you are some combination of white, male, straight, cisgendered, or Christian, when dealing with people who are some combination of not those things, about those things where you are in the majority or privileged class, your first response must always be, without exception, to shut the fuck up and listen, because you have no idea whatsoever what it is like to be them, what they think, how they feel - whereas everyone knows what Christian white straight cisgendered males think and how they feel because we have entire media networks devoted to delivering us this information. Shut the fuck up and listen, because you have lived all your life in a bubble of privilege, and you aren't even aware that it exists, because no one has ever given you hateful looks because you are holding hands with someone you love, and you don't have a one in three chance of going to prison because your skin is too dark, and you don't have a one in four chance of being raped because you don't have a penis, and your father has never thanked God out loud before dinner that the rest of the family isn't like you. Shut the fuck up and listen - stay shut up and continue to listen. Ask questions to clarify, if you need help understanding - and you do need help understanding. Let no one accuse me of anti-intellectualism; there is a time for rigorous intellectual discourse and argument, but that time is not now, because you have a serious case of straight (or white or male or cisgendered or Christian) privilege, and the only cure is to shut the fuck up and listen, because until you learn how to do that, you will continue to be a homophobe (or a racist or a sexist or a genderist or a creedist), and I will continue to call you what you are: Bigot.

William Lane Craig, “Richard Dawkins on Arguments for God,” Part II: The Moral Argument

Oh my god the moral argument. In its worst forms, this looks like the “Atheists cannot be moral! None of you are safe!” sort of fearmongering, or worse still, “But Hitler was an atheist!” which, as some people can attest, is absolutely the fastest way to get me to lose any intellectual respect I might have had for you. (It is fallacious, blatantly false, and excruciatingly common. That’s why.) To his credit, William Lane Craig is not here engaged in fearmongering. It is still the moral argument, however, which means it is among the more infuriatingly idiotic weapons in the unreflective apologist’s arsenal.

Here’s Craig’s formulation of the Moral Argument:

1) If God does not exist, objective moral values and duties do not exist.

2) Objective moral values and duties do exist.

3) Therefore, God exists.

Craig goes on to say that most people – including Dawkins – would agree with the first two premises, cites Dawkins a few times to prove his point, and moves on to the teleological argument, all within two pages. We, however, will spend a little more time on it, as I have a lot to say on the subject.

Let us examine the word “objective”: what, precisely, does Craig mean by it? In 1), he evidently means something along the lines of “absolute, universal, set in stone”, and I’ll grant that God may well be necessary for that kind of objectivity in a moral code. In 2), he must mean something more along the lines of “not merely a matter of personal or cultural preference”, and in this case, I would readily concur – but notice what an enormous gap there is between the two usages. (Lest I be accused of twisting Craig’s words, I should reiterate that Craig’s entire defense of his two premises is that most people believe them (which is a perfectly legitimate defense), and all I have done is determined for what values of “objective” this is true. It’s just algebra.)

I’m about to delve into some pretty involved discussionn about the nature of objectivity and morality, and we’re about to leave Craig far, far behind, so let’s just deal with him quickly so we can get to the interesting stuff: Craig’s argument, as we have just seen, hinges on an equivocation not much more subtle than

1) Split-pea soup is better than nothing.

2) Nothing is better than a really terrific cheeseburger.

3) Therefore, split-pea soup is better than a really terrific cheeseburger.

He boasts that his argument is “logically airtight”, too, which I find just fantastically amusing.

So much for that.

My go-to example of things that fall between “absolute and universal” and “a matter of personal or cultural preference” is actually morality, which would here be a little bit circular, so we will talk instead about music. I think most people would agree upon reflection that the quality of a particular piece of music isn’t an absolute or universal thing – try having a 6^th-century Norseman listen to Madonna, or better yet, try getting an alien species to comprehend any human music, even assuming the relevant physiology exists! But I also think that most people would agree upon reflection that there is something more to it than mere personal taste. Personal taste enters into it, yes, but I think most of us are cognizant of some music which we do not personally like, but do not consider to be bad (The Grateful Dead, The Sex Pistols, or The Strokes are the examples which come most readily to my mind) – or that we keep listening to despite the fact that there’s probably not much of value there (for instance, I am right now listening to “Boom Boom Pow” by the Black-Eyed Peas). The fact is, we all want to be able to say that, yes, Led Zeppelin is in fact better than Aerosmith, or that The Joshua Tree is a far superior album to How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb, or that the dreck churned out each year by the CCM industry is in fact dreck.

The difficulty is that we start with visceral reactions: I like this music, I don’t like that music, I don’t know why. We do not start with a coherent rational framework that we can coldly evaluate every piece of music with. That comes later, if at all, after a whole lot of listening and reacting, when we begin to piece together commonalities in the good stuff, or in the bad stuff, to figure out what makes something good or bad and why. Even after that, in my experience, music remains mostly a visceral thing, but once we have some model of what makes music good, we can support or modify our visceral reactions with that model – and vice versa. It’s a complex two-way process.

Morality works, in my experience, much the same way: we have certain a prioris, the conclusions of models that do not yet exist – murder is wrong, stealing is wrong, breaking promises is wrong, and so forth – and we have to reverse-engineer models from those conclusions, which leads to moral frameworks like utilitarianism or Kantianism or virtue ethics or what-have-you: again, a complex two-way process in which we confirm our models by how it deals with particular cases, and modify our response to particular cases as our models indicate.

(It is difficult for me, in the abstract, to state the criteria that separate those instances in which we alter our models based on our visceral reactions to particular cases, from those instances in which we modify our reactions to particular cases based on the input from our models – in either music or morality. This is a subject for further inquiry.)

So that’s more or less my model for how we arrive at morality. Note that it is a descriptive model, which applies in my experience both to religious and irreligious people (unless you’re of the incredibly rare variety of religious person who actually just follows every rule in their holy book of choice, which is stupid).

As for how we get the a prioris (murder is wrong, etc.), that is very easily explained in terms of the evolution of a social animal. Morality is an evolutionary advantage – it allows us to cooperate with each other without fear that the other will break their promise or our skulls.

On to a different but related subject: the moral argument is often presented in the form, “How can you, as an atheist, be moral?” This is a stupid question. Here are all of the possible reasons for behaving morally, no matter what your belief system: 1) because you fear the consequences if you don’t behave morally (hell, jail, ostracization) or desire the rewards if you do (heaven, social approval, warm fuzzy feelings), or 2) because you choose to, “because it’s the right thing to do”, which is ultimately tautological. Any set of reasons for moral behavior can be broken down into some combination of those two reasons. Therefore the claim that theists have more of a reason to behave morally than atheists causes me to look at you askance, because the only difference between theists and atheists on this score is that theists have a bigger carrot and stick. Guys, behaving morally because of the carrot-and-stick is not good enough. We can train animals to do that. The guy who will backstab you in a heartbeat if he thinks it will benefit him and he can get away with it is not moral, and the only difference I can see between that guy and the theist who asks this question is that the theist doesn’t ever think he would get away with it. Which makes the purely selfish theist better for society than the purely selfish atheist (at least in theory), but the person who chooses, whatever their stance on the existence of God, to be moral because, well, they choose to be moral, is a far better person than either of the above.

It is true that there are circumstances in which I would make the choice not to behave morally. They are highly improbable, and all involve people I happen to care about more than I care about society or morality. I would only point out that this is equally true for at least the christian, if you want to take the story of Abraham and Isaac at all seriously.

Review: God is Great, God is Good

So I am home in Arkansas and it turns out that when you post on your public blog that you are an atheist you can be pretty sure that your grandparents will read it. So a while back I had lunch with my grandfather and we spent it talking about my atheism. His arguments, if I recall correctly, were "What do you think of the scientific principle that something cannot come from nothing," which is a) not scientific but rather philosophic, and b) actually directly contradicted by scientific evidence; "Evolution cannot explain love or morality," which is just false; and "If you are right, we will neither of us ever know it, but if I am right, you lose," which is of course Pascal's Wager, which is a) not a particularly valid reason for believing anything, b) based on a false dichotomy - if the only choices were between christianity and atheism, sure, but they aren't - you also have islam and buddhism and hinduism and scientology and raelianism and shinto and wicca and so forth and so on, and you have to pick the right one out of hundreds if not thousands of belief systems or you lose, and c) based on the assumption that neither being christian nor atheist has any relevant impact on the quality of this life, which is questionable at best. In fact, my grandfather went on to say that he thought there was no life better than that lived by christian principles, which I think is only a compelling line of reasoning if you have basically no experience with godless people in this country. But to my grandfather's credit, he politely listened to me explain all (or at least most) of the above, and it seemed to make sense to him. See I don't get my family at all - they are very intelligent and even open-minded to a point but this has never prevented them from being creationists or using Pascal's Wager as an argument. Anyway then my grandfather handed me a book called God is Great, God is Good which is a selection of essays by various Christians, pretty much explicitly targeted at what is called the "New Atheists" - Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and so forth. So I'm going to go through this book and review it, but first I should make my position vis-a-vis the "New Atheists" clear.

I am not a New Atheist. I have never read any of Dawkins or Hitchens, though I probably should. I follow two New Atheist blogs: Pharyngula, by PZ Myers, and Daylight Atheism, by Ebonmuse. And I recommend both of these, particularly Daylight Atheism, and I agree with their positions on issues nine times out of ten, but I am not a New Atheist. What I am, first and foremost, is an Existentialist - which means that Camus, Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Dostoevsky are the people I agree with far more often - and you may have noticed that half of those people are christian. If you read Camus' The Plague (and you really should), it presents several characters, each with their own way of coping with the world. One of these characters is a Jesuit priest named Father Paneloux, and at the crux of the novel, he and almost all of the other important characters watch the effects of an experimental serum administered to a child afflicted with bubonic plague. The only effect the serum has is to drag the child's death throes out almost interminably, and afterward, one of the characters asks Father Paneloux essentially, How can you believe in God if this is what He does? Paneloux takes a long time to reach an answer, and when he does, it is that God is unknowable, that his ways are not ours, and rather than use this, as it is almost always used in my experience, to simply dismiss the problem of evil and to retreat into a fantasy divorced from reality (easy enough to do when you're middle-class and white in the First World), Paneloux instead comes to the apparently horrific conclusion that one's will must be in accord with God's, and that if God's will is to slowly torture a child to death, then we too must try to will that. Ultimately, the conclusion Paneloux reaches is that it is illogical for a priest to call in a doctor. Needless to say, this conclusion kills him when he too succumbs to plague. (I can't really do Paneloux or Camus justice here - you really must read the novel.) But the point is that this way of coping with the world is nowhere condemned in Camus' novel. It's portrayed, rather, as a meaningful and valid existential choice. It's not the one I choose, but the point is that I can have respect for and even approve of the religious choice.

Now, do I think most religious people in the United States or in the world have made that choice? Hell no. They live in denial. They make excuses for God. Do I think that religion, at least as practiced in the United States, is bad for society? God, yes. (Anyone who wants me to have even an iota of respect for their beliefs, why don't you stop lying to children about how evolution is false, and more importantly, how about you stop denying people I love equal rights? Seems reasonable enough to me.)

Where I differ from the New Atheists is this: they take truth to be the primary (and almost the only) criterion for beliefs, although to their credit they realize that they cannot be talking about absolute truth, but only whether beliefs are more or less true than other beliefs. This I cannot do - it is imperative, true, to ruthlessly confront oneself with reality as much as possible, to really plumb the depths of the absurdity of one's beliefs. But if, after that, one chooses to continue to believe the absurd (and I do not think there are truly non-absurd options available) then this, I think, is making one's existential choice, and that is good. But anyway, this apologetics book I have here: let's go through it.

1) William Lane Craig, "Richard Dawkins on Arguments for God"

Bit of a disadvantage here, never having actually read Dawkins, but I'm more concerned with Craig's arguments than I am in his reading of Dawkins anyway, so onward. Okay, first we have the Cosmological Argument, which Craig formulates as follows:

1) Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

2) The universe began to exist.

3) Therefore, the universe has a cause.

Note that the word "begin" is doing a lot of lifting for Craig. Had he left it out, and said instead, "Everything that exists has a cause," then it could be of course objected that this would require that God have a cause, and that cause would need a cause, and so forth into an infinite regress which Craig so deplores. However, it is unclear that the statement, "Everything that begins to exist has a cause," is any more true than the statement, "Everything that exists has a cause." It is, technically, a weaker claim, but as we have absolutely no experience of anything that exists without, at some point, having begun to exist, we are forced to conclude that, as far as we can tell, the statements have equivalent truth value. But one of them allows Craig's argument, and one spirals it into an infinite regress! To prefer one statement over the other is nothing more than special pleading - everything that exists has a cause, except God. It doesn't apply to him.

Further, I don't think that premise 1 is even true. My understanding of quantum physics has it that, for instance, particle-antiparticle pairs spontaneously form and annihilate in vacuum. Whether that amounts under any circumstances to the spontaneous creation of a universe, I don't know. But it does cast doubt on Craig's argument.

But you know, I'm fine with the conclusion of the argument. The universe (as we know it, that is, from the Big Bang until now) has a cause. However, my understanding of cosmology (and I am admittedly a layman) is that the state of the universe just pre-Big Bang was a singularity, which means that no information about prior states of the universe was preserved. Far from confirming Craig's claim that the Big Bang represents creation ex nihilo, it seems to me that this makes his statement completely unjustified. The most we can say about the universe pre-Big Bang is that we can say nothing about it. Note, too, that as time and space and the laws of physics were created during the Big Bang, the universe prior to that may well have had no resemblance to our own in any intelligible respect - including entropy and causation itself. This makes Craig's subsequent argument mostly moot, but let's follow along anyway - he makes some rather awful mistakes which I feel I should point out.

Let's first examine Craig's misuse of Ockham's Razor, which he says states that one should not multiply causes beyond necessity. I believe that a more accurate rendition of the principle would be that one should not multiply entities beyond necessity. Sadly, Ockham's Razor is, though an incredibly useful rule of thumb, and indeed one of the most reliable heuristics we have, it is not absolute. And it certainly cannot be used to say that an eternal entity is more probable than an infinite regress of events. To speak of an eternal entity is to posit an entirely new, unknown species of entity. This is the kind of thing Ockham's Razor is designed to prevent. To try to simply count the entities involved and then to say the one with fewer entities wins is to entirely miss the point of Ockham's Razor. Further: if we were to follow Craig's argument to its logical conclusion, we would be forced to admit that the only universe that exists is one moment of our consciousness, with illusory memories and illusory knowledge of an illusory externality. This (since Craig fatuously has declared "mind" to be "startlingly simple" - perhaps he means merely "divine mind", but I am led to think otherwise) would be by far the simplest explanation for the universe, and the one with the fewest entities. Craig's misuse of Ockham's Razor has inadvertently but irresistibly led him to solipsism. I'm going to assert that solipsism is an unacceptable point of view and move on, if there aren't any objections.

Now Craig gets to the good stuff - the cause of the universe, he argues, must be personal, because it is timeless and immaterial, and there are only two things which possess these properties: mind, and abstract numbers. Leaving aside his extremely controversial and not-well-justified statement about the nature of numbers, we turn to his assertion that there exists this thing called 'mind' and that it is both timeless and immaterial. William: you do not get to posit things like that. What you are calling 'mind' is, first of all, inextricably bound to time. Your consciousness is dragged whether it will or no from one moment to the next. This is not timelessness. If you wish to reply that memory counts, first, no - there is an enormous and qualitative difference between memory and experience, and second, we have no memory of the future, which again doesn't look a lot like timelessness. As Lewis Carroll might put it, "It's a poor sort of timeless mind that only works one way." Second, positing that mind is immaterial flies in the face of all the scientific evidence which points to the identity of the human mind and the human brain - the case of Phineas Gage is the most obvious example, but the scientific literature is simply resplendent with these cases. The problem of consciousness - and it is a problem - is something I will discuss in a later essay - I merely wish to point out here how totally unjustified Craig's wild assertions are.

Craig has another argument for why the cause of the universe must be personal, and it is even worse. Given that the first cause of the universe is beginningless, and that the universe began to exist a finite amount of time ago, the cause of the universe must be personal, he says, for a non-personal cause would have created the universe infinitely long ago, and only a personal cause could choose to create the universe a finite amount of time ago. William: literally two paragraphs ago, you called the first cause of the universe "timeless". As in, "outside of time". Now you are using the word "beginningless" to suggest, instead of timelessness, merely an infinite past. Hey, William, pop quiz: when was the universe, including space and time, created? How about, "at the beginning of time"? There's no such thing as "before time" - the concept is incoherent. I'm going to assume good faith here, William, and merely conclude that you are an idiot. Is this the best Christendom can muster against the New Atheists? (Answer: no, it's not. Alvin Plantinga, for instance, does a much better job handling Dawkins at the end of this book. He's still wrong, but he's much less stupid, and much more of a gentleman, than is Craig. I know, of course, that the tone in this debate is vitriolic on both sides, and I'm (obviously) okay with that, but the only thing worse than an idiot is a smug idiot, and Craig couldn't be smugger if he had just been awarded top prize in the annual "You're Always Right" competition for the third year running and Dawkins was the guy who had to hand the trophy to him.)

I'm also pretty sure Craig is blatantly misreading Dawkins, but I don't have The God Delusion on hand, so this will have to remain an unwarranted aspersion (but if someone wants to compare p. 17 of GIGGIG to p. 77 of The God Delusion, you can see for yourself.)

More to follow.

Edit: Augh the font and line-spacing is all wrong I can't fix it. Does anyone know how because otherwise we are all stuck reading something with inconsistent formatting oh nooo.

Local Music!

Well so short update I am on leave from school and therefore back in Arkansas and it is, in general, boring as hell. On the other hand, I'm starting to edge into the local music scene and freelance music criticism, and have what is sort of kind of my first music criticism gig. Which is nice. Anyway I will post the details on that later; here are my thoughts on my introduction to the music of Fayetteville, Arkansas.

Tyrannosaurus Chicken, Attack of the Chicken

Tyrannosaurus Chicken is a two-person folk/bluegrass band, which means that everyone plays everything, but generally speaking, Smilin' Bob Lewis is the one on the banjo with the gruff bluesman's voice, and Rachel Ammons is the one on the fiddle with the twangy voice. And as might be expected, their album Attack of the Chicken is pretty unpolished: the percussion (foot drums and hi-hats only) lags, and Ammons has absolutely no idea when to come in with the back-up vocals on one of the tracks. Of course, if you care that much about polish, then "two-person folk/bluegrass band" is probably not a descriptor that appeals to you. Tyrannosaurus Chicken has it where it counts: both of them are damn good at their favorite instruments, and the songs are a charming mix of bluesy sentiments - which, in my experience, are rare to hear from a female vocalist, and Ammons does a good job with them - and apocalyptic imagery.

A must for: people who put III as their favorite Zeppelin album (really? over Physical Graffiti? huh.)

For the rest of us: Hey, III was still a great album. Plus, they're named Tyrannosaurus Chicken. That is awesome.

Randall Shreve, The Entertainer

Ponderous, bloated, and self-indulgent, Randall Shreve's The Entertainer staggers onto the stage already inebriated, slumps at the piano, and attempts to bang out a song or two. He gets through them alright, but he has to slow them way down, and it's painful to watch. The music's devoid of energy, and pulls listlessly from stereotypical carnival music on the one hand, and the worst posturings of Muse and Radiohead on the other. The lyrics are narcissistic and can't decide if the conceit of the album is carnival or cabaret or Hollywood. If the album had a bright spot, it would be "Karma Girl", which is reminiscent of Radiohead in more than just the title. "You make color out of all my gray/ I can't repay that with a cheap cliché," Shreve sings, and apparently the conclusion he reaches is that if he could just get enough cheap clichés, they'll eventually add up to something worthwhile.

A must for: self-obsessed teenagers in tight pants and eyeliner, whom no one understands, and who think that Thom Yorke would be a better vocalist if he sounded just a bit whinier.

For the rest of us: Unremarkable in every way except its mediocrity. Pass.

Candy Lee, The Gate

My first experience with Candy Lee was opening the lyrics booklet for this album and saying, and I quote, "Jesus fucking Christ, what the fuck is this shit?" Then I actually listened to the album, and let me tell you, never has music this good been paired with lyrics this bad, and yes, the music and the lyrics are all from Lee. It sounds vaguely like Sixpence None the Richer, but Lee's voice is more given to rococo turns and Andrews Sisters-type harmonies. It's a voice which, impressively, can pull off lyrics like "What makes this reality/ Any different from a dream?/ Well, maybe the truth is/ That things aren't always what they seem," a gem from "Existential Dilemma". (Note: Existentialism and Solipsism are not the same thing.) The songs make extensive and good use of strings and winds, and are musically complex enough that I could almost overlook the lyrics if it weren't for the fact that - did I not mention this yet? - they're so damn preachy with their inane sentiment. I had to invent the word "sophomoralistic" just so I could adequately describe them. Still, for every failing of the lyrics, there's a corresponding triumph of the music. Very confusing.

A must for: people who are legitimately surprised by the fact that what the speaker of "Another Island" really needed all along was inner peace.

For the rest of us: I mean, the music's worth loving, and the lyrics are worth hating, so I'm gonna say that's a win all round.

Hardaway & The Commoners, Off the Record

Hardaway & The Commoners were introduced to me as "not the best hip-hop group, but certainly the best local one". Now, I know very little about hip-hop, and even less about local hip-hop, but I'm inclined to believe that claim. Off the Record bills itself as "certified organic hip-hop", a phrase whose meaning remains obscure through the radio static intro and minimalist lead-in track, until you hit "Automatic" where it becomes clear: this is fresh. The guitar/keyboard hooks are great, the saxophone solo is excellent, the lyrics are almost always interesting and tight, and by the time a digital voice informs us that the sounds we are listening to are "certified 100% organic. Live MCs, no gimmicks", we've pretty much already figured out what it means. Mostly, the album's laid back, with occasional bursts of manic energy. Highlights are "Automatic", the beat poem "21st & Forever" (which contains the lines "Mediocrity called, and asked us to turn down the music/ Because they keep a nine-to-five to stay alive"), the cool groove of "Tangible Thoughts", and "Leave It at That", which is one of the best examples of Off the Record's laid-back, minimalist attitude.

A must for: I dunno, people who really like good hip-hop? Ain't got snark for this one, it's good.

For the rest of us: I said it's good. Listen to it.