Black swans and blue tarantulas: ‘Without’ and ‘despite’ are not the same

I am gonna sit back say nothing and watch the flame wars

 Then I guess I’ll start the flame war.

That’s the high point of my day.

No it wasn’t!

See, I came to the post fearing that someone had actually found a giant blue spider, and was relieved when I read that this was not so.

I had a really bad experience with a spider bite about 2 years ago and have been completely terrified of the things since. 

Oh, I’m aware that a non-blue version of that spider in the picture exists. I was just glad to hear that there isn’t yet another type of spider in the world to be terrified of. 

Rats, I was hoping the blue tarantula was radioactive, to provide the origin for a new superhero…

To believe in that which has not yet been proved or disproved leads us
to seek evidence, and to follow wherever it leads. And that’s a Good
Thing.

I’m confused. If the proposition hasn’t been proven or disproven, then why take a position that equates to it being proven or disproven? Belief amounts to taking a position on an issue. If not a rejection of the possibility of contrary evidence, then at least a willingness to reject the possibility. Fred’s point might be more accurate if we were talking about suspecting something to be true or false, because that’s not the same as committing to a belief.

But in personal relationships, I really only have my beliefs and some
anecdotal evidence that anyone actually thinks I’m worth spending time
with. The rest is belief.

Would you explain? That sounds like you’re talking about value propositions, where the concept of proof doesn’t apply.

The context for my point is that there are two types of propositions, ones of fact or purported fact and ones of value. The first type is descriptive and the second type is prescriptive. I use the word proof only for the former, and I don’t know what word I would choose for the latter. Whether a specific person is worth spending time with is ultimately a subjective matter of opinion.

The assertion that gods exist is a proposition of purported fact, and so is the assertion that gods don’t exist. This type of assertion is either accurate in inaccurate. Whether such gods deserve worship is a question of value.

Is it possible to have a proposition of fact for which there is no definite answer?

Yes. That was my point concerning the existence or non-existence of gods. I don’t have any evidence for either proposition, so while it doesn’t seem likely that such beings exist, my only real answer is “I don’t know.”

Not sure what you mean by a legitimate answer. There’s only one right answer, and I don’t know what it is.

It’s the best answer for me, but that’s a matter of personal opinion. By “right” answer I mean one that’s factually accurate. I don’t have the knowledge of the right answer for the question of whether gods exist, so to avoid being wrong I take no position. I take the same position on the name of the human who first harnessed fire, or the name of the 87th US President.

 Actually, it very likely IS radioactive.  If living organisms weren’t, then radiocarbon dating wouldn’t work.

It’s all a matter of degeree… :)

“To believe things without evidence,” isn’t necessarily wrong. Sometimes it’s necessarily necessary.

And this is where this atheist would respectfully disagree with you. At least, with the version of “belief” I understand you to be using here. It’s a semantically overloaded word.

Shower I’m OK with. Bed? Not so much.

Dumb question – why wouldn’t a belief formed despite a lack of evidence amount to speculation instead?

Wouldn’t necessarily say that, the Evolution Wars  definitely predate Bob Jones.  In fact his grandfather, T. H. Huxley was known as “Darwin’s Bulldog”.

I love tarantulas, and spiders in general. Sure, some are scary looking, but I think that many species are cute with their little eyes and fangs and whatnot. They’re like “hey dude, what’s up? Let’s chill, I’ve got 8 legs.”

I love spiders of all types, but, yeah, tarantulas are awesome. In every sense of the word.

This is an excellent post. 

Before leaping to another round of theist/atheist flame-wars

It’s not theist/atheist. It’s people who understand you can and even must believe things without proof/people who claim to think anyone who believes anything without proof is an idiot.

The reason the second group is “claim to think” is that they themselves do believe things without proof. They have no proof they won’t drop dead from an unknown heart condition right… now. They have no proof that someone won’t drop a nuclear weapon on our heads this instant. They have no proof that anyone loves them, as this is an absolutely impossible thing to prove. (Some people therefore claim there is no such thing as love, but that is a different, if overlapping, group of pitiable people.) No proof they won’t die in childbirth; no proof their spouses are faithful; no proof their children won’t die in traffic; no proof they won’t choke on a Crispix. 

And yet, the second group goes on living pretty well. They save for the future, they fall in love, they live their lives. The fact that it is impossible to prove a negative hasn’t penetrated their skulls, but they seem to do pretty okay anyway.

The second group also includes a very large number of theists and New Agers, who keep trying to prove there is something supernatural in the world, and it is precisely this supernatural thing that they happen to believe in, and they have tons of evidence, but anyone who believes in that other supernatural thing is an idiot.

I hope you realize that “proof” and “evidence” are not the same thing.

I should say that it’s perfectly rational go forward with a hypothesis in the absence of evidence, but a hypothesis does not amount to a belief.
Also, it’s important to distinguish between not believing that something exists and believing that it in fact does not. If you were to posit an island populated by only and all the characters from the My Little Pony animated series, I would require some evidence before I believed that such an island exists. There isn’t any evidence that would allow one to conclude that such an island does not exist — it’s fine for me to proceed on the hypothesis that it does not, but I don’t think I would say I believed it didn’t, just that I didn’t believe that it did.

Re: It doesn’t make sense to speak of believing things with evidence. If we have evidence for the belief, then there’s little point in merely calling it belief. The evidence is what makes it knowledge.

I disagree with this.  For example, suppose that it has been shown:
1)  On the 11th of the month, coworkers Tom and Harry got into a loud shouting match.
2)  On the 14th of the month, Tom and Harry got into another loud shouting match.
3)  On the 16th of the month, Tom and Harry got into a third loud shouting match; bystanders had to pull them apart.
4)  On the 19th, Tom is murdered in his office.

I’d call these statements evidence that Harry murdered Tom, though I wouldn’t classify it as knowledge that Harry murdered Tom.

And I never said it was conclusive or irrefutable.  The whole point was that it was evidence that was far from conclusive.  But it is evidence.

I wouldn’t expect police to be able to get a conviction on such evidence.  I’d certainly expect them to be able a court order to fingerprint Harry, and possibly get a search warrant on that evidence.

 I may be the only person in the US who never formed an opinion as to
O.J. Simpson’s guilt or innocence. I wasn’t on the jury and I
deliberately avoided following the trial, because I detest that type of
media spectacle.

Not the only… but I have friends who are lawyers. Learning from them about evidence and what they do made being on a jury fun though.

I didn’t watch on tv either, mostly because I prefer my news over the radio–NPR preferably.

What? Any month where the 11th’s a Monday, nobody in that scenario is working on a weekend.

…oh. Apparently I cannot numbers today.

Believing in things contrary to evidence is obviously far worse than believing in things despite a lack of evidence.

Absolutely agreed. Both that it’s true, and that it’s obvious.

To believe in that which has not yet been proved or disproved leads us to seek evidence, and to follow wherever it leads. And that’s a Good Thing.

Agreed that, when it happens, it’s a Good Thing.

But believing in that which has not yet been proved or disproved does not necessarily lead us to seek evidence. Sometimes, for example, it leads us to complacently ignore evidence, or to give up opportunities to pursue evidence.

As for the rest of this… mostly, it strikes me as a semantic distinction. Do I “know” something, or “believe” it, or “confidently believe” it, or “expect” it, or etc? I don’t quite see why it matters. If I want to speak precisely, I do best to assert a confidence interval… maybe I’m 95% confident that the Earth is ~4.5 billion years old, or 99.99% confident, or whatever it is.

Ultimately, the important question is what thresholds of confidence I require to justify various actions with respect to a belief, and whether those thresholds are met by the evidence I’m aware of.

 My understanding is that they walked on the tentacled side. But they’re still way strange critters.

Re: There is no way to prove the existence of god (Christian or otherwise), so having such a belief requires faith.

Well, there’s no way to prove the existence of the deist version of God, but the Judeo-Christian version interacts concretely enough with the world to be provable.  If one area had all firstborns dying overnight (excepting firstborns of one particular race), I’d consider that fairly strong evidence.

 “Judeo-Christian” is a pretty transparent attempt from Christians to make us forget the long history of Christian antisemitism.

Recognizing the circular nature of the argument is valid as a reason not to believe in that god. It’s even more valid if a believer points to the text as supposed proof of the god’s existence. But it doesn’t conclusively disprove the god’s existence.

 And I don’t know why that would constitute moving the goalposts. The word proof doesn’t appear to have a valid meaning outside an empirical context.

If humans didn’t exist to form beliefs, gods would still either exist or they wouldn’t. I’m not interested in the reasons why some people believe in gods, why some believe they don’t exist, and why others hold no belief either way, because that’s a private matter and none of my business. That’s also true for the relevance of those beliefs in those people’s lives. Wanting proof of the dueling propositions has nothing to do with questioning people’s beliefs, because the scrutiny is directed at the propositions themselves, to determine if one or the other qualifies as objective knowledge.

)()*^*)&^!

That’s it, I’m going to start physically putting HTML line break tags into my every post.

My point about “objective knowledge” is that facts exist whether or not anyone recognizes them as facts, and that they would exist even if there were no humans to try to prove or disprove them.

And my reference to “conclusive proof” wasn’t intended as an absolute. I was really trying to make a distinction between lack of belief in gods and belief in the non-existence of gods – the latter involves a degree of certainty.  I’ve encountered too many anti-theists who play a gotcha game that assumes that the lack of evidence for gods settles the matter. I see a vital distinction between saying that godly existence is  extremely unlikely and saying that it’s impossible. The first one refuses to rule out the possibility of gods, however remote the possibility.

The post to which I was replying said that the God of the Christian
Bible was proactive enough in the world to provide proof of his
existence.

And while I agree, I caution against treating the Bible’s claims as either proof or disproof of gods in general. I’ve seen people on both sides make that mistake.

if there were objective proof of God’s existence, what would be the point of faith?

Those Christians seem to imply that faith is required or necessary. If their god exists whether or not people believe in its existence, I don’t know what difference human belief would make for that god.

This whole argument is a non-starter.  How often does anyone take up a belief without evidence? Never.  Just because you don’t believe their evidence is valid, does not mean it doesn’t exist.  Or, at least, that the perception of it exists.

Yes, the is the whole subjective-experience thing, or sometimes called the spiritual-experience.  People with religious belief DO HAVE evidence for them… the evidence is unverifiable, and thus may be wrong or right, just like the belief itself.  But it does not make the person who holds it irrational.

Thus the issue is more correctly framed as a discussion of what forms of evidence should be acceptable- objective, testable evidence as used by science? Or personal, subjective evidence as well?  The answer seems clear to me -by definition, subjective evidence cannot be used to convince or compel other people, but may be valid or not according to the individual- but arguing that someone has taken up a belief with a lack of evidence is disingenuous.  What you are saying is that they don’t have evidence that *you approve of*.

The point about believing things that are CONTRARY to evidence stands firmly though.  On this kind of subject, such as the age of the Earth, Evolution’s connection to morality, whether Dinosaurs and humans lived together, and other specious creationist arguments, the verdict is very clearly -and provably-  not in their favor.

Trying to avoid causing further flame (my bad about the last thread, I was just really fucking P.O.’d by that fucking Psalm) just provide a calm counterpoint

Actually, Water_Bear, this post makes me even more inclined to agree with you: it really does feel like anti-atheist week.

OK, now that I don’t have a meeting to get to I can reread this with a little better comprehension. 

It doesn’t make sense to speak of believing things with evidence. If we have evidence for the belief, then there’s little point in merely calling it belief. The evidence is what makes it knowledge.

This is total bullshit. I’m sorry Fred but it is. One piece of evidence does not knowledge make. By reading “evidence” as “sufficient evidence” here, you’re committing the very error you decry later in the post. Huxley’s statement as written reads to me more like “The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without any evidence.”While it’s still true that believing against evidence is worse, I think the fact that you recognize theism in Huxley’s statement is a little revealing.Then there’s the issue of the semantic overloading of “belief”. Belief that my car is still in the parking garage is very different from belief in world peace – and depending on the person in question, the belief in the supernatural may fit in either of those categories or another entirely.I assume my car is still in the parking garage, because that’s where I left it and I have no reason to suspect someone moved it. Evidence and lack of counter-evidence.I trust my family loves me, because they tell me so, because they act like it, and because it’s not unreasonable that family should love me. Evidence and lack of counter-evidence.I trust that Antarctica exists, because I’ve seen pictures, and because I have no reason to suspect the people who have told me of Antarctica are lying, mistaken, and/or doctoring pictures. Evidence and lack of counter-evidence.I trust when my boyfriend tells me he’s had a bad day, because humans are genetically predisposed to tell the truth* if they wouldn’t gain anything by lying, I have no reason to suspect that he would gain anything by lying, and having a bad day is an entirely reasonable thing to exist. Evidence and lack of counter-evidence.I assume that the beverage in my cup is coffee, because it tasted like coffee the last time I took a sip of it, and I have no reason to believe that my tongue is faulty. Evidence and lack of counter-evidence.I trust that the colorblindness tests I fail really do make some sort of numbers or shapes or something, even though I can’t make heads or tails of them, because I have no reason to believe that people are lying to me, and because the scientific explanations I’ve read of colorblindness seem reasonable and consistent with my own experiences. (I include this as an example where what I believe contradicts my lived experience, e.g. what level of evidence is required to override what I see with my own two eyes.) Evidence, and sufficient counter-evidence to override it.Someone may hope for world peace, or think it’s a good cause, or even think it’s possible. Hope isn’t really a proposition which can have evidence for or against, it’s a statement of what you value and desire. Thinking it’s a good cause, skipping the analysis of what makes something “good” and just going with a strict utilitarian definition, evidence does point to world peace being a good thing because it would remove all the suffering of war, though of course this is potentially falsifiable if it turns out that, say, an Ancient Alien god of war will get pissed at us and destroy the human race if we stop fighting. Thinking it’s possible, well, the person who “believes in world peace” in that way would have a heck of a time convincing me, but presumably if their belief is correct there’s evidence behind that belief.Religious belief seems to me usually to be the “trust” kind. It’s definitely not the “hope” kind, because “believing in” religious things is generally a statement that you think they exist, and no matter how deeply someone might believe in world peace, I don’t think they’d go so far as to say that world peace exists. You** trust that religious thing X exists either because you have interacted with it, or because someone told you about it and you don’t think they were mistaken or lying. Which, fair enough, there’s no evidence otherwise.But trusting in the existence of gods? In souls? In the extension of consciousness beyond the death and decay of the brain?What would it even mean for something to exist without mass (or at least energy equivalent to/interchangeable with mass)? And if something did exist without mass or photons, how would it interact with matter? And it’s a person, somehow? What would it mean to be a person without matter? To have desires or intentions without a brain to generate them or photons to conduct them? The words are placed together in syntactically correct sentences but semantically, “person with no mass” is like “magenta disrespect”:  it’s words on completely different planes of meaning mashed together, which your brain tries to reconcile into a concept even though the phrase is nonsense, because dammit the phrases are syntactically correct and our language centers desperately need syntactically correct phrases to mean things.If something is semantically nonsense, that’s damn good evidence that it doesn’t exist. God isn’t a black swan or a blue tarantula. God is a gaseous swan, a blue hunger. Poetic, potentially inspiring, and ultimately the product of our brains’ inability to accept that some things have no meaning.* This is a necessary prerequisite to the evolution of communication in any species. If communication were not default-truthful, there would be no reason to listen to the individuals using it, and it would cease to be communication.**If anyone has a better way of explaining what it means to you personally to “believe” in religious thing X and you’d like me to address it, please let me know; I’m basing this only upon my own previous experiences as a religious believer.

Trying again. Sorry if the line breaks still don’t occur, but as an anonymous user there’s no “Preview” or “Edit” function…

OK, now that I don’t have a meeting to get to I can reread this with a little better comprehension.

It doesn’t make sense to speak of believing things with evidence. If we have evidence for the belief, then there’s little point in merely calling it belief. The evidence is what makes it knowledge.

This is total bullshit. I’m sorry Fred but it is. One piece of evidence does not knowledge make. By reading “evidence” as “sufficient evidence” here, you’re committing the very error you decry later in the post. Huxley’s statement as written reads to me more like “The deepest sin against the human mind is to believe things without any evidence.”While it’s still true that believing against evidence is worse, I think the fact that you recognize theism in Huxley’s statement is a little revealing.Then there’s the semantic overloading of “belief”. Belief that my car is still in the parking garage is very different from belief in world peace – and depending on the person in question, the belief in the supernatural may fit in either of those categories or another entirely.I assume my car is still in the parking garage, because that’s where I left it and I have no reason to suspect someone moved it. Evidence and lack of counter-evidence.I trust that Antarctica exists, because I’ve seen pictures, and because I have no reason to suspect the people who have told me of Antarctica are lying, mistaken, and/or doctoring pictures. Evidence and lack of counter-evidence.I trust when my boyfriend tells me he’s had a bad day, because humans are genetically predisposed to tell the truth* if they wouldn’t gain anything by lying, I have no reason to suspect that he would gain anything by lying, and having a bad day is an entirely reasonable thing to exist. Evidence and lack of counter-evidence.I assume that the beverage in my cup is coffee, because it tasted like coffee the last time I took a sip of it, and I have no reason to believe that my tongue is faulty. I trust that the colorblindness tests I fail really do make some sort of numbers or shapes or something, even though I can’t make heads or tails of them, because I have no reason to believe that people are lying to me, and because the scientific explanations I’ve read of colorblindness seem reasonable and consistent with my own experiences. (I include this as an example where what I believe contradicts my lived experience, e.g. what level of evidence is required to override what I see with my own two eyes.)Someone may hope for world peace, or think it’s a good cause, or even think it’s possible. Hope isn’t really a proposition which can have evidence for or against, it’s a statement of what you value and desire. Thinking it’s a good cause, skipping the analysis of what makes something “good” and just going with a strict utilitarian definition, evidence does point to world peace being a good thing because it would remove all the suffering of war, though of course this is potentially falsifiable if it turns out that, say, an Ancient Alien god of war will get pissed at us and destroy the human race if we stop fighting. Thinking it’s possible, well, the person who “believes in world peace” in that way would have a heck of a time convincing me, but presumably if their belief is correct there’s evidence behind that belief.Religious belief seems to me usually to be the “trust” kind. It’s definitely not the “hope” kind, because “believing in” religious things is generally a statement that you think they exist, and no matter how deeply someone might believe in world peace, I don’t think they’d go so far as to say that world peace exists. You** trust that religious thing X exists either because you have interacted with it, or because someone told you about it and you don’t think they were mistaken or lying. Which, fair enough, there’s no evidence otherwise.But trusting in the existence of gods? In souls? In the extension of consciousness beyond the death and decay of the brain?What would it even mean to exist, without mass (or at least energy equivalent to/interchangeable with mass)? Just thinking about that makes my brain hurt. And if something did exist without mass or photons, how would it interact with matter? There’s no evidence that matter can be interacted with by anything other than matter and photons. And it’s a person, somehow? What would it mean to be a person without matter? To have desires or intentions without a brain to generate them or photons to conduct them? These words are placed together in syntactically correct sentences but semantically, “person with no mass” is like “magenta disrespect”:  it’s words on completely different planes of meaning mashed together, which your brain tries to reconcile into a concept even though the phrase is nonsense, because dammit the phrases are syntactically correct and our language centers desperately need syntactically correct phrases to mean things.If something is semantically nonsense, that’s damn good evidence that it doesn’t exist. God isn’t a black swan or a blue tarantula. God is a gaseous swan, a blue hunger. Poetic, potentially inspiring, and ultimately the imaginary product of our brains’ inability to accept meaninglessness.* This is a necessary prerequisite to the evolution of communication in any species. If communication were not default-truthful, there would be no reason to listen to the individuals using it, and it would cease to be communication.**If anyone has a better way of explaining what it means to you personally to “believe” in religious thing X and you’d like me to address it, please let me know; I’m basing this only upon my own previous experiences as a religious believer.

@Ruby_Tea:disqus Oh my gosh really?! That’s amazing, you’re the first one I’ve met! (Besides myself of course).
@b95bc3fd3debafca54c81f3a5ada15dd:disqus  Yes, my bachelor’s in linguistics is showing in this post!

I generally like this post an awful lot, but with one big reservation.  I don’t think non-cognitivism about gods is promising.  Arguably it works for God, given omnipotence and so forth, but a spirit being isn’t at all inconceivable.  Materialism is conceivably wrong.  Stories about ghosts and psychics aren’t incomprehensible, even if they stipulate that any imaginable mechanical detector wouldn’t directly show anything odd going on.  I agree that we have no evidence of the sort we would expect to have if there was some interesting failure of materialism to be true, but such evidence is conceivable.

Because they’re evil and they hate you.

FWIW, the standard meaning of “believe” in the epistemology literature is, more-or-less, “thinks is true”, with perhaps some caveats about likelihoods and mindfulness and so forth.  The starting point for a lot of epistemology is the notion that knowledge is justified and true belief (although a great deal of the historical work in the field is about picking this apart and suggesting more accurate-to-use definitions that still capture basically the same idea).  So there’s a lot of overlap between belief and knowledge; hopefully most of our beliefs are knowledge.

But as others have noted, we use “believe” in speech differently.  I think this is largely because the philosophical distinction between believing and knowing is only apparent to an observer – under most theories, a rational person believes that he or she knows every particular thing he or she believes, because we think that, for each individual belief, that belief is both justified and true.  So in practice we use the phrase “I believe” as a hedge, to imply less certainty than “I know”, and also to say a variety of other things that don’t really have much to do with thinking that claims are true.  But in talking about other people we often come back to the philosophical distinction between believing and knowing.

 I’m not in fundamental physics, but in my own field (and probably every other science) there are lots of people who are proponents of particular explanations for poorly-understood phenomena.  And many of us will talk about what we “believe” is going on.  But we’re almost never using this to say that we’re almost certain that our view is the correct one; we’re mostly using it to say that this is our hunch, and maybe we think it’s 60% or 70% likely.  We’ll make $5 bets but not $1000 bets.  And above all we recognize that it’s not a settled question and there’s a real possibility that we will turn out to be wrong.

I also think it’s wrong to say that these scientists are believing things without evidence.  Hunches are a big part of science.  You can’t be doing cutting-edge research without having developed a sense for how accurate your scientific intuition is, which brings in a lot of implicit information that you may not be able to just write down.

And when someone does step over the line, and seems to be wildly off in their hunch – if someone is assigning substantial probability to something that other people think is ridiculous – they absolutely will be called a fool, by some and typically only in private conversations.  There are absolutely physicists who think that lots of other physicists are foolishly overconfident about certain theories.

You say that belief without evidence leads us to seek evidence, but that doesn’t seem to be what faith is about.  Seeking evidence for the existence of God is almost guaranteed to end in failure, and each test you try and fail narrows down the possibility space for what God might be.  It’s the “God of the Gaps” problem – if your God is hiding in the gaps between bits of evidence, then what happens when those gaps get filled in?  Faith needs to handle stuff that’s completely outside the purview of science, or science will eventually make it obsolete.

For religious reasons I wear a silver and jet spider on a chain around my neck, and every once in a while I will wonder why someone is looking at me and cringing….

I’m rather fond of spiders myself, but if I suspected someone of being a worshipper of Lolth, I might cringe, too.  What religion has a black and silver spider as a sacred symbol?

Ah.  Well, being mistaken by gamers for a fellow gamer with an excessive fascination with the fictional culture of the Drow is probably a lot less common, and less dangerous, than being mistaken by Christians for a witch.

It occurs to me that a spider might be associated with Kali, since she’s generally portrayed as having two legs and six arms.  That wouldn’t be very reassuring either, though, given the nature of some of her worshippers.

What happens when you KNOW something based on evidence – but then that evidence is later proven to be faulty? 

I think what Huxley objected to believe without any *reasons* backed in some way with evidence.  Hunchs are not based on nothing,  The person with a hunch has some reason for belief and some tentative evidence.  It may be too weak to support calling the hunch a hypothesis but it almost certainly does not exist in a knowledge vacuum.

As to belief in God, in Huxley’s time the most commonly used evidence in support of the existence of God was the Bible, which Huxley rightly did not consider as valid empirical-derived evidence.  Indirect support came from a variety of arguments that could be shown (to Huxley’s satisfaction) to be invalid.  Given this, it would be irrational in Huxley’s mind to believe in God.

Since Huxley’s time, physics has developed ideas of great strangeness in some of which a Creator could be inserted.  Many worlds concepts require belief in an infinite array of invisible universes without evidence.  One could replace many worlds with a single observable world in which Someone has a thumb on the scale.  Either model might be made to work for predictions, and it would be more of a matter of taste than empiricism as to which one you choose.

As good an example of believing things contrary to evidence as you are likely to see:

http://krishna.org/did-man-really-walk-on-the-moon/

I used to be associated with these guys.  That was thirty years ago.  I would have thought that by now they would have come to terms with the fact that their scripture’s description of the universe has more in common with Terry Pratchet’s Discworld novels than it does with the universe we live in.

A lot of intelligent people admire the Bhagavad Gita, but they might not be welcomed in today’s Hare Krishna movement.

 I went to college with a Krishna Creationist.  Amazingly smart guy, one of our class valedictorians.  I spent many futile but entertaining hours arguing with him over the  school network.  He’s my personal Exhibit A* that being smart doesn’t make anyone any less likely to believe crank things, it just makes them better at defending them.

* (To be honest, he’s Exhibit B.  _I’M_ Exhibit A.  :D )