On doubt

[nameandnature]

I'm talking about doubt in a few places at the moment. The feeds of my comments don't cover stuff outside LJ (I was using CoComment, but decided that was too risky), so here's where the action is:

Over at Hermant the Friendly Atheist's place, top Christian evangelist Lee Strobel turns the tables on us, and invites other Christian authors to ask atheists hard questions about atheism. You can see my responses over there. Greta Christina has some good thoughts on the questions.

The most interesting questions were Plantinga's stuff on whether having brains which evolved means we can't trust them, and Mike Licona's question: what would make you doubt your atheism?

Lily the Peaceful Atheist (by the way, what's with all these atheists being nice and fluffy? I want to be a fundamentalist atheist rationalist neo-humanistic secular militant like my hero, Richard Dawkins) talks about doubting atheism in a two part posting (part 1, part 2). She's not impressed with Strobel and friends, but rather, talks about the "emotional doubts" of the ex-Christian: the fear of death, and the feelings evoked by Christian music. I understand those sorts of feelings, having had them myself. Still, I'm enough of a scientist (and enough of an evangelical) to want facts rather than emotion.

I said that I ought to be able to doubt atheism, and also other long held beliefs. The problem with saying "I want to doubt" is that it's a noble statement, but if that's all it is, it's useless. As gjm11 says, half the problem is knowing what to doubt. With that in mind, I thought I'd ask you lot:

What should I doubt?
This doesn't have to be religion/atheism, of course, although you're welcome to suggest that if you like (<evil grin>).

Here's a list of stuff I think about religion, philosophy, science and politics, so you can tell me where you think I could be wrong. Anonymous comments are allowed edited: but please sign yourself with some kind of nickname so I can tell you apart from other anonymous commenters.

Religion/philosophy: The sort of god that I used to believe in almost certainly doesn't exist. Jesus probably existed, but God's not saying much these days, so who cares? Non-evangelical sorts of god are too vague to bother with. Philosophically, I am a tentative materialist, and an interventionist moral relativist.

Science: global warming is real and caused by humans, but I don't know what I personally should do about it. I don't fly much because it's dull and the security theatre is frustrating ("Time to spare, go by air" © my Dad), but I do drive to work. David Mackay's book made me think we should build more nuclear power stations. Homeopathy works by the placebo effect. The MMR vaccine doesn't cause autism. Ben Goldacre is god.

Politically, I'm left wing in that I'm in favour of a social safety net, the NHS, and so on. That said, New Labour have become high-handed and irrational wrt ID cards and other civil liberties issues, and on that basis I won't shed too many tears when they lose the next election. Capitalism seems to be the least bad way of organising stuff. The Communists and whatnot I see in blogland seem to relish the moment when they'll take power and hang the oppressors: like Christians talking about hell, the fact that this will never happen doesn't make it any more morally acceptable. I am not a cultural relativist in the usual sense of that phrase.

I think the US-influenced identity politics that seems so popular here on LiveJournal is often bulshytt, and more interested in piety than achieving its stated goals (see also). As a white, male etc. etc., getting into discussions about it is like stepping on the third rail: unless I'm talking to someone I already know to be rational, it's not worth the trouble. That said, I think certain classes of people have systematic advantages over others, but sometimes the concept of privilege is misused in the same way that the opposition misuses evolutionary psychology. Men and women are different at the biological level and this influences brains, but popular reporting of this stuff never talks about standard deviations and whatnot.

So, fire away :-)

Comments

[ex-robhu.livejournal.com]

Nuclear fission is not "renewable" in that it relies on the finite availability of fissionable materials. The real question is how long would the fuel we have last if we had a nuclear solution (by nuclear solution I mean let's imagine for simplicity that the whole world is nuclear powered). The question really has two significant components to it:

1. How much fuel is there? (we can get it in different ways with different levels of cost and difficulty and futureness)
2. How do we use the fuel? (we can use it in different ways, recycle it, etc)

The back of an envelope calculations, based on the assumption that we only have access to uranium that is already mined or can be reasonably easily (and cheaply mined) look like this:

1. Current fuel cycle (LWR, once-through): 827,000 TWh (5.9 years)
2. Recycling fuel cycle (Pu only, one recycle): 930,000 TWh (6.64 years)
3. Light water and fast reactor mixed with recycling: 1,240,000 TWh (8.85 years)
4. Pure fast reactor fuel cycle with recycling: 26,000,000 TWh (185.71 years)
5. Advanced thorium/uranium fuel cycle with recycling: 43,200,000 TWh (308.57 years)

So essentially (assuming we don't manage to easily get uranium out of the sea all of a sudden or something), using existing technology we would need to persuade the world to use pure fast reactors with recycling, and then we'd have about 200 years to come up with something better (e.g. nuclear fusion). This is all very feasible and implementable now with existing technology. The problems that exist are essentially political, not technical (which is not to say they're not real problems).

More information over here (http://robhu.livejournal.com/613237.html?nc=6).