All evidence in the end is circumstantial. I can’t disprove God, but I can prove that under our current understanding of the laws of physics omniscience is impossible. And omniscience seems to be the primary characteristic of any of the various Gods people believe in, even the new agey “universal consciousness” types who get away from the Bearded Man.

Based on the minimum amount of time you need to move data across the Planck length, at the speed of light, there’s a limit to the computational power of the universe that’s about 10-to-the-power-of-120 bits (actually 10^120 operations on 10^90 bits of data). Anything needing more data can’t be computed in the fifteen billion years or so that the universe has existed so far. Calculating the location of every atom in the universe would require more than 10^120. Ergo, omniscience is impossible even for a computing organism the size and age of the universe. (More here: http://www.boldizar.com/blog/2010/11/accidental-proof-that-god-does-not-exist/#more-526)

I do understand that our knowledge of physics is limited – which is what makes my disproof circumstantial — but it’s a knowledge that the smartest people in the world are doing their best to destroy (and thus improve). I don’t feel I have to disprove God. All I have to do is examine the mechanism by which science works – scepticism, attack, self-interest, ego, relativism – and the mechanism by which religion works – faith, agreement, doctrine, totality, fiat — and draw a logical conclusion of which mechanism is likely to be self-correcting and which is likely to hold on to error. Just as I trust an adversarial legal system to come to more “correct” conclusions than, say, the Spanish Inquisition approach, so I trust science to come to more correct ontological conclusions. And unless God is redefined away into meaninglessness as a concept independent from just saying “Universe,” then there is a clash between the scientific and religious approaches. Since I understand the mechanism of science (though not necessarily E=MC2, etc.) and trust it with my life every time I go to the doctor, this creates heavy circumstantial proof that in a clash of conclusions between science on the one hand and religion on the other, I side with science. And to unpack what religion means to an atheist, it’s really just someone saying “there’s a consciousness in the sky that wants us to worship it and the proof is in this old book, and you should believe what the book says because the book says it.”

If I’m playing pure defence, then sure anything can be deconstructed, including science. But if I’m looking at both with the same level of scrutiny, there’s no contest. As with a jury convicting based on circumstantial evidence, I’d say I’m certain “beyond a reasonable doubt” that there is no God. That doesn’t have to be 100% in order to call myself an atheist.

Histrionic wild speculation? How so?

I made exactly one error, and that was in the image, the map I used in the earliest version of this blog post. Blog writing is very different from magazine and newspaper writing. Because it’s all about speed, and perhaps even more importantly, because you can constantly revise, the procedure for blog writing is to get something out and then to clean it up. For a magazine article you have days, not hours, and you can’t make any changes, so you do all your fact checking first. (Note the category name I use for blog posts that aren’t reprints from real articles: “Unthoughtful blog post”)

I did exactly this. I checked that Australian Radiation Services was a real company dealing with radiation safety, it was, and so I used the image, wrote the post, and then went back to double check because the rad count never made sense. On the first pass I had bracketed this problem because I thought the map was illustrating dispersal, and as a visual it was extremely striking and immediate and useful and, thus, yes, porn like.

But I did not “believe everything I read on the internet.” I double-checked. It turned out their logo had been hijacked, so I took the image down from its above-the-fold position and, in case anyone had read the earlier version, kept a small copy in the article with the caption “Hoax Map”.

As for the rest of the article, I include the hedge “If there is a full meltdown” twice. I specify that currently the partial meltdowns — what are we at now, two explosions, four partially melting reactors in three separate nuclear plants (Fukushima One, Fukushima Two, and Onagawa)? — are at a level 4 on the INES scale, while Three Mile Island was a 5 and Chernobyl a 7.

As for implications that it’s better to be skeptical of government pronouncements regarding these meltdowns than not, that’s in the context of a recommendation to spend $18 on some table-salt-level-benign potassium iodide pills now (and no, I don’t sell them!) and at least minimize one type of radiation risk.

It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to realize governments deal with population safety, not individual safety, and so they will always weigh the risk of harm from panic against the risk of harm from whatever the initial threat is. Nobody knows what the long-term harm from a meltdown on the other side of the Pacific could be, how or when it would manifest, etc., whereas there’s clearly a public interest in minimizing panic.

And there’s another rational reason the Japanese government might avoid admitting to a full meltdown for as long as possible. If one of the reactors has a full meltdown, then the entire area basically becomes a death zone. Any employee asked to continue working on the other reactors is being asked to sacrifice himself, but if they stop, then the other reactors would also have full meltdowns. From the New York Times today: “If an incident were to happen at one reactor that released high amounts radiation, the whole area would become unapproachable,” said Katsuhiko Ishibashi, a nuclear safety expert formerly at the Research Center for Urban Safety and Security at Kobe University. “Then the other reactors would have to be abandoned, and left to run their disastrous course.”

In recommending potassium iodide, I’m also doing a cost-benefit analysis. The cost is $18 plus injestion of a substance that’s routinely given to pregnant women to help the fetus’ brain development. The benefit is a significant reduction in risk from radio-iodine emitted by the meltdown. A risk that is particularly focused on small children. I have a five-year old boy, and so, yes, I am happy to find a way to decrease that risk. But the article itself, the text, not one of the six photos that I mistakenly included (but did not discuss in the text), the article itself is hardly histrionic. It’s coldly rational — mostly just info on potassium iodide and background on what happens in a meltdown — precisely because one can be a far better protector of one’s kid when one is rational and informed.

http://www.australian-radiation-services.com.au

Your entire article is histrionic wild speculation.

Disaster porn.

Obviously, the amount of radiation coming to North America would be some function of the amount of radiation released at the melting reactors. Sorry for perpetuating a hoax (the map) — with blog posts, unlike real articles, the fact checking sometimes lags behind the actual writing. The info about potassium iodide is independent of the accuracy of the map.