Baba Brinkman doing his thing...

I’m going to start this post by saying I’ve never cared much for rap music. I suppose I could use the excuse that I’m a an over 40 year-old, white, raised-on-a-farm Albertan Canadian, but I know others in that same demographic who love rap so, so much for that excuse.

Uber-Skeptic Desiree Schell

Last week, Baba Brinkman was on my favorite Skeptical podcast – Skeptically Speaking with Desiree Schell and now, suddenly, I really like rap music. Well, I really like Baba Brinkman’s rap music, anyway.

So that leads me to think that my disconnect with rap has been because what the rapper’s where saying didn’t resonate with me.

Well, what Baba Brinkman has to say resonates with me.

What does Brinkman rap about? Rationality! Freethinking! Science! Evolution! And Darwin baby! DARWIN!

Baba Brinkman is getting the word out about these things in a new manner, and to a new audience. For those who don’t ‘get’ things like the theory of evolution, his songs are terrific consciousness raising experiences and, for those of us who do ‘get it’, they are powerful anthems.

You can find Baba Brinkman:

• on his website
• on CBC Radio 3 were you can listen to him online (my favorite one is ’Natural Selection’) and, from there, buy his music on iTunes.
• on his Skeptically Speaking interview
• and on youtube where you’ll find a good selection of videos including the one you see embedded below – the Rationalist anthem “Off That”.

In my Does Religious Faith Instill Hatred & Distrust of Science post I mentioned confirmation bias – a person’s tendency to recognize evidence that supports their position, while ignoring and/or downplaying that which opposes their position.

According to the Dunning–Kruger effect, some poor unfortunates suffer from something far more severe.

Apparently, they are dumb + they are prone to confirmation bias + they have an inability to recognize their dumbness + they ironically think that they are the opposite of dumb, and that smart people are the dumb ones.

Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch!

But lately, the disagreements have baffled and troubled me as I’ve put pieces of the puzzle together to realize how amazingly anti-science he is. Examples:

1. Climate Warming: He continually quotes out of date research and the ramblings of “scientists” with iffy (at best) credentials who claim that climate warming is a hoax.
2. Evolution: I am not exaggerating much when I say he sounds like a Ray Comfort clone. “Evolution is not a science because it’s not repeatable or observable” and “Evolution takes faith” have escaped his lips on more than one occasion.

And, in addition to those two specific examples, I’ve also heard him call science “scientism” and say that  “science is a religion”.

However, because the conversations have been widely spread apart (months at times), and because he is elusive about his beliefs, I was never able to make sense of him …until recently.

I was listening to an episode of The Skeptics Guide to the Universe when one of the hosts made the statement that, when science conflicts with a person’s ideologies, that person will often reject the science. Then, he went on to say that the most prevalent cases of these rejections flow from conflicts between science and religion.

Suddenly, two years of discussions with my friend came into clear focus…

1. He has conservative leanings.
2. He’s a climate warming denier.
3. He’s anti-evolution.
4. He’s made statements about people and even countries being punished by God for their wrongdoings.

All of these things paint a picture that we tend to ascribe to conservative Christians. Here are two of the consistencies expanded a bit to help illustrate the point I’m making:

1. Global Warming: It’s very common for conservative Christians to deny that we humans are having any appreciable effect on the planet’s temperature. This comes partly from the biblically inspired belief that it would be arrogant to think humans could have that much of an impact on God’s creation. It also comes from the connection to the end-times prophecy that – even if we were impacting the earth’s temperature, it is just part of God’s plan to bring on the rapture. In other words, bring on the destruction of the earth – because the worthy won’t be here to live on it anyway. This sort of thinking is exactly why non-believers feared George Bush being at the helm of the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.
2. Evolution: Most of the world’s Christians have no issue with the theory of evolution via Natural Selection (e.g. Catholics & Anglicans are a-ok with it). Indeed, there are other religions (e.g. Hinduism) that also accept it as the explanation for the diversity of life on earth. Not so with the conservative Christian crowd. For them, evolution – especially human evolution – is an attack on the belief that God created man in his image. Humans did not come into exist by a “chance” sequence of events over billions of years – we are here according to divine plan. Humans are not simply the most intelligent of millions of species – we were created to preside over the earth and everything within it. To conservatives, evolution undermines faith – plain and simple.

The bottom line is that science opposes the conservative Christian world view – and that of my friend’s – in multiple and significant ways.

When this happens, a serious case of cognitive dissonance tends to set in. The two opposing ideas of science and religion simply cannot occupy the same space so the brain attempts to solve the problem. Unfortunately, science often loses to faith because the latter is such a hugely emotional thing (it’s tough for a scientific explanation to compete with the promise of eternal life).

One of the tricks the mind plays on itself to support its emotional choice is confirmation bias – it finds support for its viewpoint, while ignoring or downplaying contrary information. Remember my colleague’s reliance on outdated information and unqualified climate science “experts”? Yup, a perfect example.

Like millions of other conservative Christians, my friend has solved his dissonance by rejecting science.

The irony for the conservative faithful, is that they live in a society that is utterly dependent on science for virtually every aspect of the the lifestyle we’re accustomed to in 21st century North America. I imagine this irony is not entirely lost on them, and it must be difficult to keep the cognitive dissonance at bay. After all, they would find their views in opposition not only with secularists, but also with most other Christians.

I’m not interested in destroying anyone’s faith but, as a humanist, I also do not want anyone to suffer. Therefore, if you are a person who’s troubled by the collision between your faith and science, my advice to you is this…

You don’t necessarily have to abandon your belief in God to accept what science has to offer. All you have to do is adjust your faith. Not every Christian believes every word of their faith so why should you? It’s worth mentioning that there are many varieties of Christian faith that do not clash violently with science. It’s also worth mentioning that the Christian faith has been evolving for over 2000 years, so any adjustment you might make to your faith would be done in good company.

TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with the annual TED Conference in Long Beach, California, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK, TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Program, the new TEDx community program, this year’s TEDIndia Conference and the annual TED Prize.

The jewel on the TED website is undoubtedly their collection of videos. Again, I’ll let TED speak for itself:

The annual conferences in Long Beach and Oxford bring together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). On TED.com, we make the best talks and performances from TED and partners available to the world, for free. More than 450 TEDTalks are now available, with more added each week. All of the talks feature closed captions in English, and many feature subtitles in various languages. These videos are released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.

Under those broad categories of Technology, entertainment and design, TED covers a lot of ground – especially for the scientifically inclined, or those simply looking for some inspiration. Suffice to say, I am in complete agreement with Renshia – TED is an amazing place. One of the best the web has to offer. The fact that their videos are free to view or download (in many formats including mp3 and high-resolution video) is a testament to the power of the web as a learning tool.

With that, I’ll leave you with one of my favorite TED videos. Enjoy!

Before getting into the backward logic of the latter demand, let’s look at some examples of evidence:

1. Fingerprints and hair samples (DNA) are evidence for a person being placed at a crime scene.
2. Fossils are evidence that extinct species of animals once existed.
3. A photo of my wife and I kissing is evidence that we love one another.
4. Observing the speed of different items falling (in a frictionless vacuum) is evidence that gravity has the same pull on items of different mass.

Sometimes, the evidence is convincing and easy to find. Other times, it is weak and difficult to come by (for Galileo’s gravity experiment, we need a frictionless environment). In science, when evidence is weak, we continue to push until we have more and more of it – until we have a degree of confidence that our theory is correct.

What all evidence has in common is that it demonstrates something about the physical properties of the world we live in (i.e. that everything is made of matter). Therefore, evidence must take physical form. It may be visual. It may be auditory. It may be something we can touch or measure in some physical way because, where there’s matter, there’s generally a way to measure it. The point is, evidence is more substantial that a thought that exists in our minds.

The claims of religion operate on two levels. At the macro level, we have the claim that God exists while, on the micro level, we have the claim that the Bible is true, and that Jesus existed.

What evidence do we have that supports those claims? Well, the Bible claims that there is a God. Outside of that, he seems to exist only in the minds of people since there has not, in our time, been any documented, verifiable, observable, physical proof that he’s around.

With respect to the Bible, where’s the evidence in support of its claims? I think to answer this question, it’s helpful to separate the claims into two areas:

1. Its claims about the origins of the universe and life.
2. Its claims about history – specifically, about Jesus’ existence.

With regard to claim #1, virtually everything we know about the origins of the universe (e.g. that it’s 14 billion years old) come into direct conflict with what’s said in the Bible (6000 years?). Most importantly, the knowledge we have is supported by copious amount of evidence. In contrast, the Bible’s evidence is that the Bible says so. A key concept used in the scientific method is this: When a theory is shown to have massive amounts of evidence that conflicts with a theory with no evidence, the latter theory is very likely implausible. This IS evidence for the non-existence of God – or, at least, for the god that is written about in the Bible. It’s also evidence that the Bible is deeply flawed. Given that, I think its prudent that we ask ourselves, “Why should we trust the Bible?”. I see no reason we should.

Aside: Even the claim that god loves us is bogus. Where, outside a thought in your brain can one find evidence for the love of an invisible man in the sky?

With regard to claim #2, again, the Bible runs up against a method similar to science. Historians test in specific ways when they evaluate claims about what happened in the past. Unfortunately, the Bible doesn’t do well when these tests are applied. Without getting too deeply into the historicity of the Bible, one of the best examples of this test is that Jesus is not mentioned anywhere in Roman records of the time. You’d think, someone of that importance would have been mentioned somewhere by the Romans – wouldn’t you?

Aside #2: I recommend reading anything by Bart Ehrman (you can also find some excellent videos of him debating believers on YouTube).

All this means that there is little if any reliable evidence showing the Bible to be worth the paper it is written on. And if this is so, what does it say about the claims about Jesus, or his father?

All this aside, the claim that we must prove the non-existence of god is ludicrous. It’s a claim that was adeptly brushed aside by Bertrand Russel when he conceptualized his “celestial teapot”:

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I really can’t put a finer point on it than that. Besides, it’s late and I’m tired.