Skeptical Sunday: The Power Balance Scam

If you go to a gym, martial arts studio, basketball court, or some other place of athletic activity, you’ve probably seen people either wearing or selling little rubber wristbands that look much like LIVESTRONG or other such bands. With the difference that these wristbands have a circular patch on them, on which — you’ll find, if you ask about it — there is a hologram.

So…how does the hologram work?

Skeptical Sunday: Refuting “Materialism”(?)

Here’s another SS post that I began back at the beginning of the year and which subsequently lay fallow until now. A young man named Ethan posted this comment on my post about the YouTube apologist murder-suicide:

Hello, Mr. Dorkman. I recently happened upon the RvD videos on Youtube and they are very nicely done. Through a chain of events, I found your blog.

I am a Christian, and as such disagree with this. I think you might be interested in my blog post on Materialism. Feel free to check it out and any other parts of the blog if you so desire. Nice to have met you. The link is below:

http://edsnotofthisworld.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/materialism-and-the-reality-of-god/

Take care,
Ethan Stech

As you’ll see, I commented on his post at the time and intended to post a response here…and then didn’t. I started writing one but never got the chance to finish.

So here’s me finishing. We have to grant that the original post is over seven months old at this point, and written by quite a young man. It may no longer represent his level of rhetorical skill or, in fact, his actual opinions. But I promised a response and here it is.

Skeptical Sunday: Lucky to be Alive

I had intended, with the conclusion of my work on PIRANHA 3D, to take more time to write on the blog and work on personal projects. But I concluded my final day (or to be precise, an all-nighter graveyard shift) on the project with a trip to the hospital for terrible stomach pain. Though I might have tried to ride out the pain usually, I had just signed up for health insurance the month before and was covered for the first time in four years, and I decided I might as well make use of it. I was diagnosed with gastritis and sent home with a prescription for a powerful antacid and some generic Vicodin for the pain.

About a week later — having been told to stay away from spicy or acidic food for the next few weeks — I was drinking a milkshake when I was hit with such a sudden and intense pain in my abdomen that I thought my appendix might have ruptured. I called an ambulance and was whisked to the hospital and examined.

Brian, my roommate, had his gallbladder out 3 or 4 years ago after a protracted series of gallstone attacks that took some time to be identified. When I let him know I was in the hospital and described my experience to him, he advised me to insist upon an ultrasound exam to check for gallstones, as this is not standard procedure and, if I had gallstones, it would take some time for them to diagnose it via the normal process.

After some hemming and hawing — I don’t know why they were so hesitant — the hospital staff gave me an ultrasound and discovered that I did, in fact, have gallstones. Unlike kidney stones, you can’t simply let gallstones pass out of your body; if they pass out of the gallbladder, they can either block the bile duct or get into the pancreas, causing even worse trouble. And they can’t be broken up by ultrasound like kidney stones, either. The only option is surgery.

Skeptical Sunday: Dear Atheist…

Hey guys.

I’m drowning in work right now (no pun intended. I know you don’t know why that’s a pun but after I’m done with the gig, I’ll tell you and then you will) but I want to get something new on the blog. I really want to do more posts on writing, but also want to get Skeptical Sundays up and running again.

So here’s a post I wrote toward the beginning of the year and then didn’t post, for some reason. I think I was saving it for a rainy day. So I’ll put this up for now, and continue on with our regularly intermittent programming.

* * *

I saw a link regarding an “open letter” to atheists posted on a Christian forum. You can find the original here.

Since it was addressed simply to “Atheist,” it seemed to be as much for me as anyone else, so I thought I may as well answer it, just for fun.

Skeptical Sunday: Word Salad

Like most people of my generation, I know the most reliable, unbiased and hard-hitting sources of news on television are the Daily Show and Colbert Report.

I don’t want to get into TDS or Colbert particularly in this post, but there was something interesting that happened on Tuesday. During a segment on the Catholic Church holding a summit about the possibility of alien life, Colbert had a priest on to discuss the matter and — well, you can just watch the interview.

(Currently embedding isn’t allowed, so I’ll just have to link you to the clip and update in the future if I remember. The interview starts at 2:45:)

View the segment.

The part that interested me most was this little excerpt (from 3:45) of what the guy said:

But we also read in the beginning of the gospel of John, ‘In the Beginning was the Word,’ and the Word, of course, is a second person — this is what we’re celebrating at Christmas — this could be a Word that exists even before the Earth existed, before anything existed.

Now, if you’re a Christian (or a former one), you likely followed what he just said. I went to four years of Catholic high school myself, I got it. But look at it objectively for a moment and you realize something striking: this is actually total gibberish.

Regarding “Climategate”

Seriously. These emails, even if they did indicate some kind of conspiracy, wouldn’t change the fact that the ice caps are melting and water levels rising. We’re treating this as a political and rhetorical issue when it’s actually quite a practical one: we need to do something soon, and it needs to work fast, or we’re all going to die. It’s as simple as that.

Skeptical Sunday: A Glorious Dawn

I’ve watched this many times now, and each time I’m overwhelmed with awe at the magnitude of the universe, and how we, through the power of our collective intelligence, might experience it in yet more incredible ways. This video has literally moved me to tears more than once. It sums up Carl Sagan’s passion for scientific knowledge and possibility, providing us with both a promise — “we will, one day, venture to the stars” — and a warning — “if we do not destroy ourselves.”

Without a single appeal to the supernatural or divine, a three-and-a-half minute rationalist meditation that, if you let it, will nonetheless give you a vibrant sense of the numinous.

Skeptical Sunday: A Universe From Nothing

A common claim made by theists of all stripes is that everything can’t have come from nothing, therefore God made it. In its purest form this is called the Cosmological Argument for God. It goes something like this:

-Everything has a cause.
-Nothing can cause itself.
-The causal chain cannot go back forever.
-Therefore there is a First Cause that is itself uncaused and started the causal chain.

The Cosmological Argument has some serious problems, namely that its conclusion directly contradicts its premise. (Everything has a cause >< There is something that does not have a cause.) It’s essentially a case of special pleading. “Everything has to follow the rules except this one thing which doesn’t and that’s God.”

Some apologists have tried to get around this by making the alternate version known as the Kalam Cosmological Argument, which goes like this:

-Whatever begins to exist had a cause.
-The Universe began to exist.
-Therefore the Universe had a cause.

They’ll argue these premises at great length (and when we get to Chapter 5 of CFAC we’ll find William Lane Craig doing exactly that), but ultimately the argument still boils down to a case of special pleading. It asserts two sets of items: things that have a beginning, and things that do not have a beginning. The set “things that do not have a beginning” holds exactly one item: God. So despite the rhetorical hand-waving that they can fill pages/hours going over, the Kalam argument is “Everything but God began to exist,” i.e. “Everything has to follow the rules except this one thing that doesn’t.” Special pleading.

Still, the argument seems potent. It’s absurd to think that something could have come from nothing, right?

…Right?

This video comes from a series of science lectures presented as part of the Atheist Alliance International convention that took place in Burbank, CA a couple of weeks ago (I wish I could have gone, but I couldn’t afford the registration this year. Next year I hope to attend this and The Amazing Meeting). Lawrence Krauss argues that, based on what we know about the universe and the laws of physics, the universe not only could have begun from nothing, but that if there had ever been “nothing,” it would have inevitably had to become “something.”

It’s a pretty dense lecture and it’s a full hour of info, I recommend it for background listening while working on other computer-based tasks.

Skeptical Sunday: Putting Faith in its Place

YouTube user QualiaSoup has produced a number of fantastic videos, which clearly explain — with entertaining visual aids — the scientific method and the skeptical perspective. I’ve previously posted his treatise on the concept of open-mindedness.

He’s been away, but he returned this week with a fantastic video titled “Putting Faith in its Place.” It actually answers a number of questions that come up on this blog about the subject, from the proper application of faith to “why do you need to prove God doesn’t exist?” It also addresses an overall issue with Case for a Creator.

I highly recommend taking the time to watch all his videos. They are well-thought-out, easy to follow, and will clarify a lot of questions you may have about reality-based worldviews.

Enjoy.

Skeptical Sunday: Less Than a Speck

No time for a big long post today, so a couple of YouTube videos showing essentially the same thing: the comparative sizes of objects in space.

I like this first one because it’s animated and so you get a sense of relative scale that doesn’t require too much imagination.

This second one is not animated, just a simple slideshow in which the previous slide’s contents shift up to the left-hand corner for scale reference with the new objects. This one requires a little bit more work on the part of the viewer to keep our relative scale in mind, and at a certain point even the broadest imagination will probably fail to fully comprehend (mine certainly does — what’s smaller than “infinitesimal?”).

But what I like about this one is that it’s updated for 2009 with new findings (the one I’d seen before was the 2008 version), and he goes beyond the largest known star and starts comparing nebulae and galaxies.

Religious folk occasionally say that a “materialist” viewpoint leaves no room for a sense of awe and wonder. This, to me, betrays a serious lack of imagination, and understanding. Religious or not, I think the sight of VY Canis Majoris compared to our planet would take any thoughtful person’s breath away. Speaking for myself, it’s dizzying.

Both videos are available in YouTube HD — click through to the actual YouTube pages if you want to blow your mind just a little more.