There’s a bit of a flap going on in some of your better-known online Atheist hangouts, over an article written by Steve Zara and put up on the Dawkins website. In short, he argues that there is absolutely no evidence that can prove the existence of God.

No, really.

Zara has the seed of an idea, believe it or not, but it’s buried beneath paragraphs of the most whiny, self-righteous tripe I’ve had the misfortune to read in a while. There are other serious flaws in his piece too; for example, all of his arguments against God use the Abrahamic conception as a starting point, except for a brief historical discussion of Greco-Roman mythology. You see this sometimes with the Atheist community, it has to be admitted; not just an unfamiliarity with other religious perspectives, but an unwillingness or inability to consider them. It’s an odd form of mental straightjacket, actually; when your average, Western Atheist like Zara states he doesn’t believe in ‘God’, he’s simply ruled out the Abrahamic God in his own mind, and considered the matter settled.

Which is not to say that there’s any evidence for the other religious perspectives either. It’s just that, when making an argument against the existence of something like God, you can’t simply address the singular, narrow religious perspective of a minority of humans alive today, discuss it, and consider the matter thoroughly covered somehow. You’re not addressing the topic, you’re addressing an instance, discussing only Lady Gaga when you mean to talk about music. It’s also not an argument that’s going to hold much water with the vast majority of the human audience, who don’t believe in that Abrahamic God, and never have.

Zara makes this same mistake, the assumption that his personal definition of a concept is absolute and, well, definitive, over and over again. For example, here’s his paragraph on the supernatural:

It’s worth a brief diversion into the idea of the supernatural. What exactly is it? The answer is that it is about fear. The world we see around us is full of pain and tragedy. It’s just not fair. So, for some, it seems only reasonable that there is a realm of justice, a place where wishes can come true; where we need not die permanently. The supernatural is not a place, or a state: it is a desire. This leads some to set up a false dichotomy between the natural and supernatural, between the heartless, unfeeling and cruel world of atoms and the void, and the place where morality is as real as words carved on stone and God loves things into existence.

I’m so glad that I now know, with absolute certainty and for all time, what the word ‘supernatural’ means, and that all about ‘fear’. Here I thought that a reasonable argument for supernatural might simply be ‘beyond the natural world’. We should fire the staff at the OED at once, and replace them with Steve Zara, for he has all the answers. *rolls eyes*

Zara’s piece concludes thusly:

The theists can’t win. They can’t talk about evidence when they base their beliefs on faith. They can’t describe us as flawed beings and yet claim that we can get to truth through revelation. (Incidentally, when the Pope decides to be infallible, how can he be sure of the infallibilty of that decision? But I digress).

Theists hide God beyond rules and logic in the supernatural, and then claim that we can get to God through the rules and logic of theology. We are supposed to use logic to demonstrate the illogical.

…

I propose a new strident atheism. No playing the games of theists. No concessions. No talk of evidence that can change minds, when their beliefs are deliberately placed beyond logic, beyond evidence. Let’s not get taken in by the fraud of religion. Let’s not play their shell-game.

Do you see the flaw here, and the core of a useful idea? Let’s hit the flaw first.

Zara (and Myers acting in agreement) makes a fatal mistake here: he extends the concept of there being no evidence of this particular conception of God’s existence that could conform to the rules we humans live and function by, as empiricists and material beings, to the idea that there can be no evidence at all for God’s existence.

That’s a big leap, and unsupportable.

Zara is right to point out that, if you posit a being that is beyond logic and understanding, you can’t reasonably use logic and understanding to arrive at knowledge of said being. He’s right to point out that you can’t use tools of the natural sciences to study the supernatural, something that is defined, at a minimum, as being beyond the rules and order of the natural world.

But it’s a fallacy to assume that, just because the tools of one world can’t be used to understand something, that such understanding is impossible.

The classic literary example is that of Flatland. For two-dimensional creatures, what can the third dimension really mean? At best, an abstract understanding. Could they truly even conceive of it, in their world? Could they actually imagine, picture such a place, in their minds? Can a human being actually form a mental picture of a five, ten, seventy-three-dimensional form, and truly grasp it? What would happen if you could take a peek into such a realm?

In the Twilight Zone episode “Little Girl Lost”, two human beings get to see into such a higher-dimensional space, and they can’t make any meaning of it. It’s not that their eyes don’t work, or that light doesn’t travel in such a space; they do, and it does. It’s that their minds, fashioned in our four dimensional world, cannot comprehend, are not accessible to, knowledge from a higher dimensional number. So they’re blind while seeing perfectly well.

Is that what would actually happen? I don’t know, and what’s more, you don’t either; that’s rather the point.

Zara’s right that logic can’t meaningfully consider illogical evidence. He’s wrong that such evidence is automatically invalid. If the Great Old Ones actually exist, in terrifying alien spaces beyond human understanding, where the rules of our physical universe not only don’t apply but cannot apply, then the fact that you can’t describe them using geometry and physics doesn’t mean they don’t exist. It just means that discussing C’thulhu in terms of gravity is absurd. On the other hand, to C’thulhu, gravity itself is absurd, and by the way, you’re very tasty.

*crunch*

So yes, you can’t have a meaningful argument using empirical tools on an anti-empirical subject like religion, and yes, it’s pointless to argue over such evidence with theologians. That doesn’t mean you can be justified in making a blanket statement like ‘there is no evidence that you can give to prove God exists’. You might not be able to make use of that evidence, understand it, even process it, any more than a Flatlander could use a pop-up book, but that doesn’t preclude the existence of either the pop-up book or evidence for God. You’re confusing ‘evidence’ with ‘evidence I am equipped and capable of understanding in the systems of knowledge that are accessible to me’.

Unfortunately, Myers jumps on this bandwagon:

So yes, I agree. There is no valid god hypothesis, so there can be no god evidence, so let’s stop pretending the believers have a shot at persuading us.

Jerry Coyne took him to task, proposing a particular, outlandishly implausible example of an event that would make a reasonable person conclude there might be something to this God thing, and Myers tried to respond, but didn’t do a terribly great job.

Coyne crafted an argument where it would require a greater leap of faith to disbelieve the evidence of God than to do otherwise, and Myers’ response seems to be… awfully.. dogmatic.

Much of his counterargument boils down to the fact that Coyne’s example isn’t really like any of the religions around today, which misses the point entirely; the argument isn’t whether a particular God exists, but whether there could be, anywhere, any sort of evidence that would lead you to believe in ANY God.

Myers and Zara say, with absolute faith and conviction, that there is not. No matter what you, or anyone else, or anything else, or any possible experience or evidence says, they will not change their iron-clad beliefs. It’s not just that the evidence needed to convince them is inconceivable at the moment; they categorically and for all time deny that it could ever be.

That, my friends, is faith in a nutshell. Faith, taking a particular form, is also known as religion.

Congratulations, PZ: you just found religion. Enjoy.

Whether people like the Balloon Juice crew like it or not, the dam seems to be completely breaking today on the mortgauge/foreclosure fraud mess, leading more or less inevitably to a complete lock-down.

First, we now have all 50 states on board with a gigantic joint investigation of the foreclosure fraud aspect of this crisis:

WASHINGTON – Officials in 50 states and the District of Columbia have launched a joint investigation into allegations that mortgage companies mishandled documents and broke laws in foreclosing on hundreds of thousands of homeowners.

The states’ attorneys general and bank regulators will examine whether mortgage company employees made false statements or prepared documents improperly.

Alabama initially did not sign on to the investigation. It reversed course after the joint statement was released.

Haha, I knew it would be some Deep South backwater that held out the longest; my personal gut instinct said Mississippi. I was close!

This quote from the Ohio AG who’s been spearheading this push provides excellent ammuntion against those who think we should prioritize keeping the mortgage market ‘functional’:

“What we have seen are not mere technicalities,” said Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray. “This is about the private property rights of homeowners facing foreclosure and the integrity of our court system, which cannot enter judgments based on fraudulent evidence.”

Precisely. The rule of law has to take priority here, or else, well, everything falls apart.

Moving on, today JP Morgan abandoned MERS, the electronic system banks utilize to avoid actually recording mortgage transactions in accordance with local law.

That’s one down!

Finally, Felix Salmon has been doing some spelunking, and found that the entire mortgage bond market was more or less a sham, and that investors are going to be looking to dump much if not *all* of it back on the banks:

You thought the foreclosure mess was bad? You’re right about that. But it gets so much worse once you start adding in a whole bunch of parallel messes in the world of mortgage bonds. For instance, as Tracy Alloway says, mortgage-bond documentation generally says that if more than a minuscule proportion of notes in a mortgage pool weren’t properly transferred, then the trustee for the bondholders can force the investment bank who put the deal together to repurchase the mortgages. And it’s looking very much as though none of the notes were properly transferred.

But that’s not even the biggest potential problem facing the investment banks who put these deals together. It also turns out that there’s a pretty strong case that they lied to the investors in many if not most of these deals.

Essentially what Salmon found was that the banks that put together bonds made out of mortgages they bought in large groups knew that many of the mortgages were absolutely worthless, because they checked; they hired an outside firm to evaluate them. In one sample from Citi, in fact, over 40% turned out rotten.

The bank’s response to this was priceless; they’d ditch the ones from the random sample that they knew were bad (the samples ranged from 5% to 35% in size, apparently), then, knowing full well that many of the mortgages in the unsampled portion had to be bad as well (that’s how random samples work, you extrapolate from the sample to the larger population), they didn’t put the stop to the deal – they just got a lower price on the pool of bad mortgages, and resold them as bonds to investors.

Without telling them that they had gotten inside information that many of the mortgages were utter crap.

Sure, they’d weeded out *some*, but not all, or even most. And sometimes they used some pretty enormous sample sizes, relative to the population I mean. 35%? Wow.

Ok, so they knew with a pretty damn high level of confidence that many of the remaining, untested mortgages were crap. They bought the good ones, along with the unsampled ones they knew had a lot of duds, at a discount, sold them at a premium, and didn’t disclose to the investors the truth about the overall quality.

I’d sue over that; how about you?

So here’s the current scenario:

-Many, perhaps most, potentially nearly all foreclosures being done by the major banks violate the law, thanks to shoddy recordkeeping.
-All 50 states, plus the District of Columbia, consider this problem to be rampant and endemic, and are investigating. Potentially all foreclosures done in quite a while will have to be re-evaluated, even redone.
-In response, JP Morgan has abandoned MERS, the electronic system used to avoid processing the paperwork properly.
-Of the mortgages not in foreclosure, potentially all of the ones sold during the boom were sold fraudulently, and their current ‘owners’ will be looking to divest themselves of them via lawsuit

Yeah. Moratorium here we come, like it or not.

Marcy’s got some great points in her critique of John Cole’s response to my post, with an additional detail I hadn’t considered: that one reason to deal with this at a national level, potentially with a moratorium, is that the banksters are going to inevitably come by when their institutions collapse due to lawsuits and demand another bailout:

This may well be catastrophic whether or not there’s a moratorium on foreclosures until such time as people start admitting what’s going on.

If that’s true (and as I said, I don’t really know, but that seems to be the obvious implication of all the fraud that was going on), then the question is, which catastrophe is going to be least bad for the American people? And which catastrophe best preserves the rule of law and property–the bedrocks of our country? Do we enter this catastrophe on the banksters’ terms, or on more equalized terms?

She also neatly addresses Cole’s plaintive cry for authority in dealing with this problem by mentioning Alan Grayson’s idea, which I had read about but forgotten, actually:

And then there’s the issue of the President’s authority to do something about this. As DDay suggested, there’s the possibility that the regulators (Office of Thrift Supervision or Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, for example) would impose a moratorium. Or, as Alan Grayson has requested, the government could (and probably should) declare this a systemic risk, which gives them the authority under Dodd-Frank to do what they need to do to protect our system. That doesn’t make it legally or (especially) politically easy to declare a moratorium (as the deepwater drilling Obama imposed makes clear). But once you regard this as an issue that may affect securitized mortgages more generally (and not just some foreclosures), then the claim that this may be systemic seems fair.

Yes, I’d say that Bank of America going belly-up constitutes systemic risk, not to mention a more-than-likely outcome of this debacle, at least, if we decide to look at their obligations honestly, unlike during TARP/the stress tests/etc. Witness how they have to provide, in essence, their own title insurance now. Insuring.. against themselves… to try and keep themselves in business.

Honestly, who’s going to fall for that?

The debate is thus less about whether a collapse is going to happen and more about how to steer it to crush the fewest people. Call me crazy, but I put our odds of getting through this as slightly better if a single national authority does the talking rather than 50 disparate state governments.

Democrats claimed that Fin-Reg would protect the system from another collapse; here’s their chance to cough up some proof.