An atheist I am not, for this would mean having faith in the
non-existence of some deity or deities.

An atheist I am not, for this would mean having faith in the
non-existence of some deity or deities.

existence of any particular god or gods. As a physicist, I keep my
belief systems within the error bars of inductive experience. I use
Occam's razor. I think that it is more likely that infinities of
universes exist, some too tough to spawn life, some just right for life
to self organize and evolve, than the notion that we are the flawed,
free willed spawn of some perfect, omniscient god-a concept which
should already be doubly illogical for those brave enough to risk their
immortal souls by using some small portion of their brain.

I would be greatly surprised if I tossed a rock skywards and it stayed
the course, because my expectation is for it to cut-and-run, and fall
back towards the Earth. But who knows? Physical "law" is based on
inductive logic, and induction cannot guarantee the future. When we
repeat an experiment over and over, and see the same general behavior
again and again, we gain confidence in the future repeatability of our
experience, but we should never extrapolate our finitely gained
confidence with absolute faith. If you push a long, stiff wire upwards
more and more over your head, it typically reaches a tipping point and
bends over under its own weight-as our global climate might soon do
under our weight. Physical constants which we may not yet have
detected, and which might drive our inductively produced physical laws,
may be evolving, and may suddenly lead to a tipping point of whole new,
unexpected and unprecedented behaviors. Stephen Hawking himself
wonders, "whether it is possible to formulate a single theory of the
universe in a finite number of statements." Who knows? We should
therefore be humble to a point, but we should also be arrogant enough
to press on, say, with looking for cures to cancer based on past
research and experience. A childhood leukemia was a death sentence in
1956, and unless prayer has become far more effective in modern
nations, cure rates are now quite high in 2006 due to modern medicine.

Well done science is in great part about building expectations
inductively. The word expectation in science means "mean." In
principle, there is a mean (expected) human height, but most humans are
of average height, an average being a range of heights to the left and
right of the mean. But because our rulers are imperfect, and can never
be made perfect-rulers also typically expand when hot and contract
when cold-and because our eyes aren't perfect, and so on, we can
never truly know with perfection what the actual human mean height is
at any given moment, even if we could somehow sample every human being
at the same moment in time-another physical impossibility. Thus,
just as with the ubiquitous sampled political poll, a range of error,
which we can estimate, is inherent in the value for mean human height.

Because of this inherent error, well done science is also about
continually looking for cracks in well done science. We are still
testing relativity and quantum mechanics, and will continue to do so,
not because we expect a radical change necessarily, but rather a
continual refinement of our testable hypotheses. Sorry creation
science-if you have no testable hypothesis, you're not really a
science.

Almost by definition, faith equals NO DOUBT and conversely. Faith also
defines a belief system with no error bars. A faith based belief
system can be as pernicious to science as to morality because it too
readily admits illogical, nonsensical foundations. Immanuel Kant
believed that without religion, or at least faith in a god, morality
and civilization could not survive for long. I doubt this. Rather, it
seems more likely that religion and organized faith in some god,
coupled with today's energy and resource crises, and nuclear weapons
proliferation in the hands of Muslim radicals, may end civilization, if
not humanity out right. North Korea's Dear Leader wants oil and food
for his nation in which Buddhism, Confucianism and some Christianity is
practiced. Muslim radicals want us to meet Allah in a mushroom cloud
so that He can sort us out.

In fact, time and again history has shown that under a moral philosophy
of NO DOUBT entire hordes of religiously motivated people of faith have
maimed and butchered children, burned witches, lynched blacks, killed
homosexuals, oppressed women, burned books, imprisoned scholars,
pillaged, plundered and razed entire civilizations, and slowly
eviscerated other peoples. And these religiously motivated people
committed, and continue to commit these crimes and atrocities against
humanity without a doubt in their minds for they were and are following
the will of their god, NO DOUBT. This is not to say that people of
faith based organized religion don't do some "good" work some of
the time. I'm sure that some nominal fraction of organized church
monies, for example, goes into cancer research and other good causes,
but what fraction? Half? I doubt it. Grand expensive churches, and
other expenses Jesus would have approved of, like money to "values"
pandering politicians and their political action committees can be
murder on their cash flows. But why do these people of good faith do
this "good" work to begin with? Is it out of the goodness of their
own hearts, or for the reward of life after death for Christians, or a
harem for Islamic suicide bombers? The religious, it can be argued, do
"good" work more to save their own skins than the skins of those
they wish to "save", like the American natives. Any claimed
sincerity on a religious person's part is innately questionable,
which leads me to propose an alternative, science based morality and
social contract for the future sake of humanity.

Imagine a hypothetical world where people shunned NO DOUBT faith
whatsoever, and instead searched for demonstrable, defendable,
repeatable facts with good science practice and sound logic. Instead
of trying to "help" each other out by trying to "save" each
other with ropes and bullets, these people might try to get along
without stealing, cheating or killing because it's good for a
secular, democratic civilization of laws, and such a civilization
(producing modern leukemia treatments) is good for them. I would not
expect perfection given our innate competitiveness and sometimes
lawless tendencies, but I would expect a reduced misery and a reduced
chance of self-destruction. After all, a herd mentality requires a
threshold number of similarly minded instigators, and if there are less
such instigators, there is a reduced likelihood to herd. Who do you
see as more likely to cause trouble, a group of like-minded fanatics
with a NO DOUBT belief system, or a tough looking group of rowdy
doubting Thomases?

Of course, since I am advocating a scientific, doubt based morality
over religious, NO DOUBT based moralities, some people will point out
the dark ways of some science and scientists. Science brought us the
A-bomb, and then the H-bomb. Since then, we have not had a third world
war, but thanks to the internet and other technologies, more people are
rising up the economic rungs worldwide, and gamma knives kill brain
tumors. We still do, however, constantly suffer too many regional
religious conflicts-witness our conflict against Islamic fanatics
replete with beautiful beheadings in the name of Allah. On the
personal level, certainly there have been, and there still are evil
scientists absolutely convinced of their nefarious theories who get
tempted to play gods. But there also have been, and there still are
evil priests and popes who like to play god. These points, picking out
individuals from a population, are not the point. Scientists do not
make the scientific method any more than religious leaders make up
religion. By the way, history records that fifty-nine A-bomb scientists
signed a petition to President Truman asking him to demonstrate the
bomb's power to the Japanese on a remote island. In the end, given the
stiffening Japanese resistance as American forces neared Japan, the
historical record leads me to conclude that many more American and
Japanese lives were spared with the use of Fat Man and Little Boy than
would otherwise have been.

Ultimately, a non-religious humanity following a doubt-based morality
is not guaranteed survival. A humongous comet may yet squash us like
the bugs we are-splat! We humans, because we are innately
competitive, and have difficulties with basic morality (e.g., we kill,
steal, cheat, often in the name of some god) may yet treat ourselves to
nuclear winter or death by advanced viral weapons. Given our history,
it seems arguably less likely that such a end might happen to us if we
gave up NO DOUBT.

As for our personal salvation, if and until we figure out how to cure
aging and disease, and perhaps transform ourselves into more advanced
types of indefinitely long lived beings, we die, and our lives will
have had no meaning other than, perhaps, the quality of our children we
raised, and what we contributed to the betterment of humanity while we
lived. Eventually, though, as Marcus Aurelius noted, even this
personal meaning to our lives would fade into time immemorial. I'm
pretty sure of one thing. If there is a Christian-like god out there,
a god who blames our flaws on us, not He, the Creator, and is so petty
that It needs my worship else It sends me to Hell,

credentials to the house of detention. I've got some friends in
there-friends who died in foxholes.

Sincerely,

Alex Alaniz, Ph.D.
Author of Beyond Future Shock

An atheist I am not, for this would mean having faith in the
non-existence of some deity or deities.

An atheist I am not, for this would mean having faith in the
non-existence of some deity or deities. Nor do I have faith in the
existence of any particular god or gods. As a physicist, I keep my
belief systems within the error bars of inductive experience. I use
Occam's razor. I think that it is more likely that infinities of
universes exist, some too tough to spawn life, some just right for life
to self organize and evolve, than the notion that we are the flawed,
free willed spawn of some perfect, omniscient god-a concept which
should already be doubly illogical for those brave enough to risk their
immortal souls by using some small portion of their brain.

I would be greatly surprised if I tossed a rock skywards and it stayed
the course, because my expectation is for it to cut-and-run, and fall
back towards the Earth. But who knows? Physical "law" is based on
inductive logic, and induction cannot guarantee the future. When we
repeat an experiment over and over, and see the same general behavior
again and again, we gain confidence in the future repeatability of our
experience, but we should never extrapolate our finitely gained
confidence with absolute faith. If you push a long, stiff wire upwards
more and more over your head, it typically reaches a tipping point and
bends over under its own weight-as our global climate might soon do
under our weight. Physical constants which we may not yet have
detected, and which might drive our inductively produced physical laws,
may be evolving, and may suddenly lead to a tipping point of whole new,
unexpected and unprecedented behaviors. Stephen Hawking himself
wonders, "whether it is possible to formulate a single theory of the
universe in a finite number of statements." Who knows? We should
therefore be humble to a point, but we should also be arrogant enough
to press on, say, with looking for cures to cancer based on past
research and experience. A childhood leukemia was a death sentence in
1956, and unless prayer has become far more effective in modern
nations, cure rates are now quite high in 2006 due to modern medicine.

Well done science is in great part about building expectations
inductively. The word expectation in science means "mean." In
principle, there is a mean (expected) human height, but most humans are
of average height, an average being a range of heights to the left and
right of the mean. But because our rulers are imperfect, and can never
be made perfect-rulers also typically expand when hot and contract
when cold-and because our eyes aren't perfect, and so on, we can
never truly know with perfection what the actual human mean height is
at any given moment, even if we could somehow sample every human being
at the same moment in time-another physical impossibility. Thus,
just as with the ubiquitous sampled political poll, a range of error,
which we can estimate, is inherent in the value for mean human height.
Because of this inherent error, well done science is also about
continually looking for cracks in well done science. We are still
testing relativity and quantum mechanics, and will continue to do so,
not because we expect a radical change necessarily, but rather a
continual refinement of our testable hypotheses. Sorry creation
science-if you have no testable hypothesis, you're not really a
science.

Almost by definition, faith equals NO DOUBT and conversely. Faith also
defines a belief system with no error bars. A faith based belief
system can be as pernicious to science as to morality because it too
readily admits illogical, nonsensical foundations. Immanuel Kant
believed that without religion, or at least faith in a god, morality
and civilization could not survive for long. I doubt this. Rather, it
seems more likely that religion and organized faith in some god,
coupled with today's energy and resource crises, and nuclear weapons
proliferation in the hands of Muslim radicals, may end civilization, if
not humanity out right. North Korea's Dear Leader wants oil and food
for his nation in which Buddhism, Confucianism and some Christianity is
practiced. Muslim radicals want us to meet Allah in a mushroom cloud
so that He can sort us out.

In fact, time and again history has shown that under a moral philosophy
of NO DOUBT entire hordes of religiously motivated people of faith have
maimed and butchered children, burned witches, lynched blacks, killed
homosexuals, oppressed women, burned books, imprisoned scholars,
pillaged, plundered and razed entire civilizations, and slowly
eviscerated other peoples. And these religiously motivated people
committed, and continue to commit these crimes and atrocities against
humanity without a doubt in their minds for they were and are following
the will of their god, NO DOUBT. This is not to say that people of
faith based organized religion don't do some "good" work some of
the time. I'm sure that some nominal fraction of organized church
monies, for example, goes into cancer research and other good causes,
but what fraction? Half? I doubt it. Grand expensive churches, and
other expenses Jesus would have approved of, like money to "values"
pandering politicians and their political action committees can be
murder on their cash flows. But why do these people of good faith do
this "good" work to begin with? Is it out of the goodness of their
own hearts, or for the reward of life after death for Christians, or a
harem for Islamic suicide bombers? The religious, it can be argued, do
"good" work more to save their own skins than the skins of those
they wish to "save", like the American natives. Any claimed
sincerity on a religious person's part is innately questionable,
which leads me to propose an alternative, science based morality and
social contract for the future sake of humanity.

Imagine a hypothetical world where people shunned NO DOUBT faith
whatsoever, and instead searched for demonstrable, defendable,
repeatable facts with good science practice and sound logic. Instead
of trying to "help" each other out by trying to "save" each
other with ropes and bullets, these people might try to get along
without stealing, cheating or killing because it's good for a
secular, democratic civilization of laws, and such a civilization
(producing modern leukemia treatments) is good for them. I would not
expect perfection given our innate competitiveness and sometimes
lawless tendencies, but I would expect a reduced misery and a reduced
chance of self-destruction. After all, a herd mentality requires a
threshold number of similarly minded instigators, and if there are less
such instigators, there is a reduced likelihood to herd. Who do you
see as more likely to cause trouble, a group of like-minded fanatics
with a NO DOUBT belief system, or a tough looking group of rowdy
doubting Thomases?

Of course, since I am advocating a scientific, doubt based morality
over religious, NO DOUBT based moralities, some people will point out
the dark ways of some science and scientists. Science brought us the
A-bomb, and then the H-bomb. Since then, we have not had a third world
war, but thanks to the internet and other technologies, more people are
rising up the economic rungs worldwide, and gamma knives kill brain
tumors. We still do, however, constantly suffer too many regional
religious conflicts-witness our conflict against Islamic fanatics
replete with beautiful beheadings in the name of Allah. On the
personal level, certainly there have been, and there still are evil
scientists absolutely convinced of their nefarious theories who get
tempted to play gods. But there also have been, and there still are
evil priests and popes who like to play god. These points, picking out
individuals from a population, are not the point. Scientists do not
make the scientific method any more than religious leaders make up
religion. By the way, history records that fifty-nine A-bomb scientists
signed a petition to President Truman asking him to demonstrate the
bomb's power to the Japanese on a remote island. In the end, given the
stiffening Japanese resistance as American forces neared Japan, the
historical record leads me to conclude that many more American and
Japanese lives were spared with the use of Fat Man and Little Boy than
would otherwise have been.

Ultimately, a non-religious humanity following a doubt-based morality
is not guaranteed survival. A humongous comet may yet squash us like
the bugs we are-splat! We humans, because we are innately
competitive, and have difficulties with basic morality (e.g., we kill,
steal, cheat, often in the name of some god) may yet treat ourselves to
nuclear winter or death by advanced viral weapons. Given our history,
it seems arguably less likely that such a end might happen to us if we
gave up NO DOUBT.

As for our personal salvation, if and until we figure out how to cure
aging and disease, and perhaps transform ourselves into more advanced
types of indefinitely long lived beings, we die, and our lives will
have had no meaning other than, perhaps, the quality of our children we
raised, and what we contributed to the betterment of humanity while we
lived. Eventually, though, as Marcus Aurelius noted, even this
personal meaning to our lives would fade into time immemorial. I'm
pretty sure of one thing. If there is a Christian-like god out there,
a god who blames our flaws on us, not He, the Creator, and is so petty
that It needs my worship else It sends me to Hell, well then, send my
credentials to the house of detention. I've got some friends in
there-friends who died in foxholes.

An atheist I am not, for this would mean having faith in the
non-existence of some deity or deities. Nor do I have faith in the
existence of any particular god or gods. As a physicist, I keep my
belief systems within the error bars of inductive experience. I use
Occam's razor. I think that it is more likely that infinities of
universes exist, some too tough to spawn life, some just right for life
to self organize and evolve, than the notion that we are the flawed,
free willed spawn of some perfect, omniscient god-a concept which
should already be doubly illogical for those brave enough to risk their
immortal souls by using some small portion of their brain.

I would be greatly surprised if I tossed a rock skywards and it stayed
the course, because my expectation is for it to cut-and-run, and fall
back towards the Earth. But who knows? Physical "law" is based on
inductive logic, and induction cannot guarantee the future. When we
repeat an experiment over and over, and see the same general behavior
again and again, we gain confidence in the future repeatability of our
experience, but we should never extrapolate our finitely gained
confidence with absolute faith. If you push a long, stiff wire upwards
more and more over your head, it typically reaches a tipping point and
bends over under its own weight-as our global climate might soon do
under our weight. Physical constants which we may not yet have
detected, and which might drive our inductively produced physical laws,
may be evolving, and may suddenly lead to a tipping point of whole new,
unexpected and unprecedented behaviors. Stephen Hawking himself
wonders, "whether it is possible to formulate a single theory of the
universe in a finite number of statements." Who knows? We should
therefore be humble to a point, but we should also be arrogant enough
to press on, say, with looking for cures to cancer based on past
research and experience. A childhood leukemia was a death sentence in
1956, and unless prayer has become far more effective in modern
nations, cure rates are now quite high in 2006 due to modern medicine.

Well done science is in great part about building expectations
inductively. The word expectation in science means "mean." In
principle, there is a mean (expected) human height, but most humans are
of average height, an average being a range of heights to the left and
right of the mean. But because our rulers are imperfect, and can never
be made perfect-rulers also typically expand when hot and contract
when cold-and because our eyes aren't perfect, and so on, we can
never truly know with perfection what the actual human mean height is
at any given moment, even if we could somehow sample every human being
at the same moment in time-another physical impossibility. Thus,
just as with the ubiquitous sampled political poll, a range of error,
which we can estimate, is inherent in the value for mean human height.
Because of this inherent error, well done science is also about
continually looking for cracks in well done science. We are still
testing relativity and quantum mechanics, and will continue to do so,
not because we expect a radical change necessarily, but rather a
continual refinement of our testable hypotheses. Sorry creation
science-if you have no testable hypothesis, you're not really a
science.

Almost by definition, faith equals NO DOUBT and conversely. Faith also
defines a belief system with no error bars. A faith based belief
system can be as pernicious to science as to morality because it too
readily admits illogical, nonsensical foundations. Immanuel Kant
believed that without religion, or at least faith in a god, morality
and civilization could not survive for long. I doubt this. Rather, it
seems more likely that religion and organized faith in some god,
coupled with today's energy and resource crises, and nuclear weapons
proliferation in the hands of Muslim radicals, may end civilization, if
not humanity out right. North Korea's Dear Leader wants oil and food
for his nation in which Buddhism, Confucianism and some Christianity is
practiced. Muslim radicals want us to meet Allah in a mushroom cloud
so that He can sort us out.

In fact, time and again history has shown that under a moral philosophy
of NO DOUBT entire hordes of religiously motivated people of faith have
maimed and butchered children, burned witches, lynched blacks, killed
homosexuals, oppressed women, burned books, imprisoned scholars,
pillaged, plundered and razed entire civilizations, and slowly
eviscerated other peoples. And these religiously motivated people
committed, and continue to commit these crimes and atrocities against
humanity without a doubt in their minds for they were and are following
the will of their god, NO DOUBT. This is not to say that people of
faith based organized religion don't do some "good" work some of
the time. I'm sure that some nominal fraction of organized church
monies, for example, goes into cancer research and other good causes,
but what fraction? Half? I doubt it. Grand expensive churches, and
other expenses Jesus would have approved of, like money to "values"
pandering politicians and their political action committees can be
murder on their cash flows. But why do these people of good faith do
this "good" work to begin with? Is it out of the goodness of their
own hearts, or for the reward of life after death for Christians, or a
harem for Islamic suicide bombers? The religious, it can be argued, do
"good" work more to save their own skins than the skins of those
they wish to "save", like the American natives. Any claimed
sincerity on a religious person's part is innately questionable,
which leads me to propose an alternative, science based morality and
social contract for the future sake of humanity.

Imagine a hypothetical world where people shunned NO DOUBT faith
whatsoever, and instead searched for demonstrable, defendable,
repeatable facts with good science practice and sound logic. Instead
of trying to "help" each other out by trying to "save" each
other with ropes and bullets, these people might try to get along
without stealing, cheating or killing because it's good for a
secular, democratic civilization of laws, and such a civilization
(producing modern leukemia treatments) is good for them. I would not
expect perfection given our innate competitiveness and sometimes
lawless tendencies, but I would expect a reduced misery and a reduced
chance of self-destruction. After all, a herd mentality requires a
threshold number of similarly minded instigators, and if there are less
such instigators, there is a reduced likelihood to herd. Who do you
see as more likely to cause trouble, a group of like-minded fanatics
with a NO DOUBT belief system, or a tough looking group of rowdy
doubting Thomases?

Of course, since I am advocating a scientific, doubt based morality
over religious, NO DOUBT based moralities, some people will point out
the dark ways of some science and scientists. Science brought us the
A-bomb, and then the H-bomb. Since then, we have not had a third world
war, but thanks to the internet and other technologies, more people are
rising up the economic rungs worldwide, and gamma knives kill brain
tumors. We still do, however, constantly suffer too many regional
religious conflicts-witness our conflict against Islamic fanatics
replete with beautiful beheadings in the name of Allah. On the
personal level, certainly there have been, and there still are evil
scientists absolutely convinced of their nefarious theories who get
tempted to play gods. But there also have been, and there still are
evil priests and popes who like to play god. These points, picking out
individuals from a population, are not the point. Scientists do not
make the scientific method any more than religious leaders make up
religion. By the way, history records that fifty-nine A-bomb scientists
signed a petition to President Truman asking him to demonstrate the
bomb's power to the Japanese on a remote island. In the end, given the
stiffening Japanese resistance as American forces neared Japan, the
historical record leads me to conclude that many more American and
Japanese lives were spared with the use of Fat Man and Little Boy than
would otherwise have been.

Ultimately, a non-religious humanity following a doubt-based morality
is not guaranteed survival. A humongous comet may yet squash us like
the bugs we are-splat! We humans, because we are innately
competitive, and have difficulties with basic morality (e.g., we kill,
steal, cheat, often in the name of some god) may yet treat ourselves to
nuclear winter or death by advanced viral weapons. Given our history,
it seems arguably less likely that such a end might happen to us if we
gave up NO DOUBT.

As for our personal salvation, if and until we figure out how to cure
aging and disease, and perhaps transform ourselves into more advanced
types of indefinitely long lived beings, we die, and our lives will
have had no meaning other than, perhaps, the quality of our children we
raised, and what we contributed to the betterment of humanity while we
lived. Eventually, though, as Marcus Aurelius noted, even this
personal meaning to our lives would fade into time immemorial. I'm
pretty sure of one thing. If there is a Christian-like god out there,
a god who blames our flaws on us, not He, the Creator, and is so petty
that It needs my worship else It sends me to Hell, well then, send my
credentials to the house of detention. I've got some friends in
there-friends who died in foxholes.

Sincerely,

Alex Alaniz, Ph.D.
Author of Beyond Future Shock

An atheist I am not, for this would mean having faith in the
non-existence of>>>SLAP<<<

An atheist I am not, for this would mean having faith in the
non-existence of some deity or deities.

An atheist I am not, for this would mean having faith in the
non-existence of some deity or deities.

Nor do I have faith in the
existence of any particular god or gods.

An atheist I am not, for this would mean having faith in the
non-existence of some deity or deities.

An atheist I am not, for this would mean having faith in the
non-existence of some deity or deities.

An atheist I am not, for this would mean having faith in the
non-existence of some deity or deities.