I did.

Palmistry (also known as Chiromancy) is the reading of people’s hands to discover their fortune and personality type.  This is not limited the lines on the palm, but the shape of the hand and its proportions including length of fingers, natural lumps or “mounts” on the palm and the colour and condition of the nails and skin.

I got interested in this in my early teens after observing a fellow holidaymaker informally read people’s hands for entertainment at a social gathering. I got a few books on the subject and read the hands of my friends, most of whom were intrigued. Some Christian friends made sanctimonious remarks, but I responded that the Bible has a (admittedly vague) reference to people’s hands in Job 37:7

He sealeth up the hand of every man; that all men may know his work.  - KJV

Actually, now I look at it again, that is really vague and says nothing about the legitimacy or not of reading hands. There are more direct references in many other cultures and religions.

I don’t think I was an especially convincing palmist. Although I certainly believed in the validity of what I was saying I was naturally hesitant and guarded in my pronouncements on people’s hands. Perhaps with time I could’ve unintentionally learnt cold reading. However, as with most teenage fads, I slowly lost interest in palmistry as I grew up.

Some modern palmists play down the future prediction aspect of hand reading, perhaps because it sounds too stereotyped, easy to say and difficult to verify until years later, when any failed predictions will likely be forgotten. However, a quick survey of palmist’s websites shows almost all are involved in some other method of fortune or personality divination. Amelie Appleby is a palmist who also practices crystal ball and tarot card readings. Philena Bruce also offers a wide variety of psychic services including readings of photographs and healing through sound. Unfortunately, none offer any independent research showing the efficacy of their claims.

However, I discovered with excitement that one hand reading website does include a discussion of the Forer Effect. Ken Lagerstrom of HumanHand.com writes:

The Forer Effect (also called the Barnum Effect or Subjective Validation Effect) refers to the tendency to accept vague or general statements as being very personal and accurate. The Forer Effect is a serious consideration in hand analysis, for both the professional and client. Psychologist Bertram R. Forer ran a series of tests in which he gave people a personality profile and asked them to rate its accuracy. Forer actually gave each person the exact same profile…

The test subjects rated these supposedly individual profiles as 85% accurate! With a vague enough profile that is mostly positive, most people will believe at least part of it truly relates to them.

Positivity is clearly important for the clients of psychic readers. Amelie Appleby, perhaps unwittingly, acknowledges this need:

…Amelie’s intuitive palm, tarot and crystal ball readings are positive and upbeat, full of enthusiasm and integrity, good humour and great fun.

Certainly people paying money are more likely to be pleased with a reading that predicts meeting a tall dark handsome stranger (although they’re probably smart enough not to use those exact words) than one divining a life of miserable solitude. Crucially, I think people are also more likely to believe things they find comforting.

Sadly, despite a promising looking article, Ken Lagerstrom ends up resorting to ad-hominem attacks:

In my experience, the real hard-core skeptics are just as fanatical (and biased, judgemental, self-certain, etc.) as the more extreme religious zealots. It’s just a different “faith”.

To call skepticism a faith is to broaden the definition of faith to become meaningless. A hard-core skeptic (or at least a serious one) is willing to assess the evidence and reach a tentative conclusion. Some skeptics get sick of hearing anecdotal evidence presented as if it were absolute proof. That might make them cynical about vague pseudo-science claims after a while. That’s not the same as being a zealot.

Then he presents a flawed analogy:

If you go to your doctor and hear him say “You need to examine your habits with diet and exercise, because you are damaging your health with your present body weight.”, does that physician’s diagnosis get dismissed along with the entire field of orthodox medicine?

No, you’d test his claim. Excessive weight may affect many people, but you can measure the person’s BMI and compare it to the healthy band. All conventional medical advice is in a constant state of being formally tested and reviewed. This is a good thing; it leads to better understanding and treatments.

It might not be as simple to test a hand reading, but some fair experiments could be devised and carried out on a statistically significant number of people. Specific predictions could be recorded and compared in later years to reality and their chance of occurring. Importantly the subjects should be blind to the predictions made. For example, telling someone they’ll make a journey to the Far East could influence their decision and is statistically fairly likely for certain demographics. Recording as part of the experiment that they’ll find a new job in early 2009 with a French company would be more significant if it occurred. Similarly personality predictions could be carefully controlled (perhaps so only the hands are seen) and compared to psychological assessments and surveys made beforehand.

The problem was, I began really searching for statistical proof that all palmistry was nothing more than superstitious garbage for the weak-minded.

That certainly was the problem. Ken Lagerstrom was trying to prove a negative. No matter how many charlatans employing the Forer Effect, cold reading or other psychological techniques (whether deliberately or not) he uncovered, he would always be wondering if the next one might be genuine. It’s like trying to prove the non-existence of a celestial teapot orbiting the sun. Proving its existence is theoretically possible (simply by finding one), but proving it’s non-existence can never be done. At what point would you stop searching?

That doesn’t mean we have to believe all extraordinary claims by default. Rather, the skeptic should tentatively disbelieve something out of the ordinary until appropriate evidence is presented. The burden of proof is most definitely on the psychics making the claims, all the more so if they are charging money for their services.

In the UK at least, new regulations have made this clear and on one website I noticed that, below her many testimonials, at the bottom of the page in small print, Philena Bruce has included this message.

This service is intended for entertainment purposes.
This is a scientific experiment, the results of which cannot be guaranteed.

I wonder if such regulations will make a difference to the wishful-thinking punters considering paying for a psychic reading, but it is a step in the right direction. Just to be clear I’d have no problem with these businesses if they could provide evidence that their psychic claims are true - to a standard similar to that required of other products. If they can’t, then every consumer should ask themselves why that is.

[BPSDB]

I was tagged recently by Lynet, so I thought I’d share a few details of my beliefs and how they’ve changed.

Can you remember the day that you officially became an atheist?

No, it was a gradual progression. I became bored and frustrated with the lack of answers from the church youth group I attended and drifted out of it, still probably more agnostic than atheist.

Do you remember the day you officially became an agnostic?

I suspect I was always a bit agnostic, although there was a time I would’ve certainly described myself as a Christian. I could possibly have been described as a social Christian.

How about the last time you spoke or prayed to God with actual thought that someone was listening?

Probably in my early teens, mostly motivated by personal anxiety. When I was younger I remember praying every day. I never got any answers but I certainly thought someone was listening.

Did anger towards God or religion help cause you to be an atheist or agnostic?

I don’t think I was exactly angry at God, but I was frustrated and fed up with vague religious lectures. I was also appalled and perplexed by the injustice of divine judgement.

Were you agnostic towards ghosts, even after you became an atheist?

Only recently have I become properly sceptical about ghosts, when I was previously agnostic about them. This attitude didn’t seem to change at the same time as my religious beliefs. I guess I hadn’t got around to questioning those ideas properly. If people mentioned ghostly experiences I wouldn’t be sure what to think. I suppose I found ghosts exciting and liked to entertain some belief in them for that reason. These days I’d have no hesitation is saying, “Show me the evidence” and “No a smudge or speck on a photo is not evidence”.

Do you want to be wrong?

Partly.

On the one hand, I’m pretty glad that the world isn’t being watched over by a deity who allows great tragedies to occur without lifting a finger or judges people for making an honest mistake regarding their beliefs.

On the other hand, I would certainly like to live forever. The common ideas of heaven are quite weird and nonsensical and often sound like the kind of blissful tedium that would make a sane person long for oblivion, but I think a lot of people would like to live forever. I guess that’s the biggest part of religion’s marketing hype.

Almost every philosopher and belief-pundit has had a crack at the question of whether humans have free will. It is a pretty wide-spread belief, among both theists and atheists alike. There’s a huge quantity of dense text on the subject spanning several centuries. This post however, will be accessible and fun. Simply picture your most groovy, over-enthusiastic schoolteacher and you’ll get the idea.

For any religion with a judgement theme free will is a particularly thorny issue. It’s hardly fair to judge non-free beings according to some rules they were unable to obey. However, with an omnipotent, omniscient being in the frame, how can free will be preserved? If a god made you and everything around you and knows exactly what you’re going to do - how can you do anything else without making him wrong? As far as I can tell, The Bible is strangely lacking a direct discussion of free will; some would say it even denies free will entirely. However, later theologians realised the problems and tried to patch up the holes. The Catholic Encyclopaedia acknowledges the issues in its article on free will.

But God possesses an infallible knowledge of man’s future actions. How is this prevision possible, if man’s acts are not necessary? [...] Further, God’s omnipotent providence exercises a complete and perfect control over all events that happen, or will happen, in the universe. How is this secured without infringement of man’s freedom?

The article goes into some history, but their case for free will finishes up with an “Ethical argument” and a “Psychological argument”. The ethical argument states that since moral ideas about justice and responsibility are near-universally accepted, free will must be real. I think this merely argues for the near-universal belief in free will, not free will itself.

Similarly, the psychological argument does not prove what it claims:

Consciousness testifies to our moral freedom. We feel ourselves to be free when exercising certain acts. We judge afterwards that we acted freely in those acts.

This only demonstrates the perception or illusion of free will. We’re no closer to showing whether humans truly have free will.

Meanwhile, Buddhism is pretty vague on free-will, citing the interconnectedness of all things and giving the implication that humans are partly free.

More secular philosophers have argued in terms of determinism - the idea that events in the universe are in theory predictable, given enough information - and whether this scuppers free will. Hard determinists, such as Baron d’Holbach took the view that since the universe was deterministic, no one could be free from that determinism. Determinism is far from certain, but I don’t think it is the real issue. Surely random events beyond a person’s control would be no more helpful to free will than deterministic ones?

I think Arthur Schopenhauer (He of the surprised hair, right) got a little warmer when he said,

“A man can surely do what he wants to do. But he cannot determine what he wants.”

But this week’s Bridging Schisms “I wish I’d written that” prize* goes to Galen Strawson, who explains in simple terms why the idea of free will is nonsensical. It is best summarised with the title of his interview in The Believer (which I highly recommend) - “You cannot make yourself the way you are”.

Galen Strawson argues that to be responsible for one’s actions, one must also be responsible for one’s mental state. You might think in some cases it’s possible to get yourself into a particular frame of mind, to beat an addiction or get some work done, but this must be the result of some previous mental state, which in turn was brought about by yet another previous state and so on. As you can’t will yourself out of nothing, Strawson argues, free will does not exist.

This is a somewhat unusual viewpoint - the majority of people seem to believe in some kind of free will, both religious and non-religious writers have said as much - but I think it makes sense.

Professor Strawson is the first to admit that the lack of free will has some unsettling consequences for “ultimate responsibility”, which he carefully differentiates from everyday moral responsibility. We cannot be ultimately responsible for the way we are nor therefore, for the choices we make as a result of the way we are. That might sound worrying - how can we hold people responsible for their actions if they have no ultimate responsibility? Isn’t it necessary that a civilised society holds people responsible for their actions? I don’t think we should abandon an idea because we do not like the apparent consequences of it. We should abandon ideas only if they are incorrect.

In practice however, I don’t think the lack of free will or ultimate responsibility has huge implications for society and justice. There are still good reasons for laws and punishments. For a start, laws can influence the choices people make because of the penalties they would incur. Whether or not people are truly free, discouraging them from committing violent acts is a good thing. If there’s any change in attitude that the lack of free will might bring about, it could be in shifting our focus from punishment of offenders to protection of would-be victims. Throwing a serial-killer in prison still looks like a good option because it could prevent further murders.

So it is reasonable to hold individuals morally responsible as a good way to influence behaviour and to improve society. The lack of free will or ultimate responsibility doesn’t mean you have an excuse for neglecting your homework - no matter how groovy your teacher!

* - the prize is a link to his website.

I noticed recently that a friend’s online profile showed “Ignostic” to describe his religious beliefs. I hadn’t heard of this before, so I asked him about it. Joe responded that he’d not done much reading into the subject, but it seemed to sum up his objections to religion.

Put simply, my main reason for taking the ignostic position is that defining what it is you are blathering on about is simply a matter of intellectual honesty…It’s all very well to use words [...] in a loose manner in which the listener can get the gist of what you are saying…

I suppose I like the socratian nature of it though: the idea to ask the question “What do you mean by God?” rather than to proscribe an answer to it.

Which is pretty much the informal definition of Ignosticism. It turns out that “ignostic” is a somewhat new term and Wikipedia marks it as a neologism - not yet in common usage or dictionaries.

As far as Wikiedia is concerned, Ignosticism is the same as Igtheism. I have heard of igtheism before - a local humanist explained it as, “Ignorance of existence of god(s), so we might as well act as if they don’t exist.”

The question is, do we need these new terms? The beliefs held by Ignostics and Igtheists seem to be adequately covered by the varieties of atheism and agnosticism. Even within those flavours of belief there is some overlap.

For example, Apathetic Agnosticism states that the existence of a supreme being is both unknown and unknowable and that any such being does not appear to take enough interest in the world to intervene and is therefore irrelevant. This is quite similar to strong agnosticism, or the humourously characterized “militant agnosticism” - “I don’t know and neither do you!”

All of this isn’t very far from the position of most atheists - that of weak atheism. My take on weak atheism is,

“Due to lack of evidence, I don’t believe that there are any gods. I think it is possible that such evidence may exist, but it seems very unlikely.”

Atheism is often misunderstood to mean “Strong atheism” - “There are definitely no gods”. A strong atheist couldn’t actually search everywhere inside and outside the universe to eliminate the possibility of all possible kinds of gods. So almost all atheists are, in practice weak atheists. An atheist may say, “There is no God”, but they will be talking about a specific kind of God and most will also tell you that they’d be willing to change their beliefs if given appropriate evidence.

So if you’re a igtheistic agnostic weak atheist ignostic, what should you write in the tiny box on survey forms? To those who ask you, what response should you give without sounding like a geeky bookworm?

I think it depends on your situation and what you’re trying to achieve.

If you’re talking to a group of bigoted fundamentalists who see atheists as the worst kind of sinners and a scourge to society you may wish to say “agnostic” for a quiet life, or dodge the question entirely. On the other hand, if these people already know you as a decent, moral person, then admitting your are an atheist might force them to reconsider their prejudices. Obviously it depends on how deeply those opinions are ingrained and how well they know you. Certainly prejudices have never been reduced by separating people with different views or lifestyles.

Going for a term like “Ignostic” that most people are unfamiliar with carries less baggage and potential for prejudice. It might also require an explanation allowing your to discuss your beliefs in more detail.

Personally, I tend to answer “humanist”. I know humanism has more to do with lifestyle than belief or disbelief in any deity, but I like that it is a simple and practical answer that tells you more about me than my scepticism about deities.

Religious conversion stories often seem to be emotional affairs. I think many religious groups exploit this (whether deliberately or not), using stirring music, intense group attention and other techniques to provoke an emotional reaction. This probably helps to convert people, causing them to cry, faint or be otherwise emotionally overwhelmed with the feeling that something really special has happened.

There are sometimes also emotional reasons why people people de-convert as well as convert, although they are not generally cunningly choreographed*. Certainly many of us who end up as atheists also go on to read up on theology and the many atheistic arguments against religion - particularly those who are online reading and writing blogs. However, I think in many cases, the thing which triggers the journey into critical thinking is emotional, or at least, not a rational argument in itself.

When I was a Christian, the main argument that had always bothered me was the injustice of divine judgement - Someone makes the world and everything in it, then gets His knickers in a twist when some of it (specifically the human bit) doesn’t turn out as He wanted. I managed to mostly ignore this problem while attending church as a teenager, until I went on a youth group holiday. The sheer quantity of preaching I was subjected to during this time bored, puzzled and frustrated me. I didn’t get any satisfactory answers, but I could no longer ignore the problem, so I drifted out of the church group in frustration.

I don’t think my reasons were especially carefully considered or rational - I only discovered proper atheist arguments later - it was frustration and boredom that made me leave. I wonder if the first step believers make is often something which in itself isn’t a damning logical argument against theism? Perhaps some fellow believers being unfriendly or cruel? An obvious lie told by their religious leader? Wanting to lie in bed on Sunday mornings? A personal disagreement with another believer on a non-religious matter? A close friend who believes something different? Or, as in my case, resenting boring lectures.

There are some great arguments against theism, but these are not amongst them. If a fellow Christian you know well deliberately ignores you when you happen to pass in the street that doesn’t make the existence of a god any less likely - they might just be having a bad day. Even if a religious leader is dishonest, he could still put this down to man’s inherent sinfulness. Sure, church hypocrisy doesn’t look good, and it even features at number 5 on Kieran Bennett’s list of reasons why people de-convert. The Church ought to practice what they preach, but if they fail to do so, it doesn’t necessarily mean they are completely wrong about God.

While none of these reasons are very rational, I think they might give people the nudge they need to reconsider their beliefs, hopefully with a view to what is rational. There are some examples of this in the comments by former believers on Greta Christina’s post asking what changed people’s minds about religion. For example, kc said:

Slowly I became more frustrated by my own questions, and more angry about hypocrisy and intolerance in my own church. That led me away from Catholicism.

A slightly different example is when events in a person’s life force particular atheist arguments into the foreground. Heather replied:

It wasn’t an argument that persuaded me away from my faith, it was a series of emotional experiences. One of the primary benefits of religion espoused by believers and non-believers is comfort.[...] But I hit a time of extreme distress, and I prayed and turned searchingly to my faith and found… nothing. No comfort, no warm fuzzies. I felt my pain exactly as it would feel were there no caring deity there to help me with my suffering. That was the crack in the ice that led to me to look at the situation through the lens of reason.

In a guest-post on de-Conversion explaining why she de-converted, DeeVee writes:

Watching my religious mother and both aunts die of cancer, while begging Jesus/god to save them, and he did not.  Not only that but I also worked in the pediatric ward of a cancer hospital in Houston and watched entire churches praying for god to save babies from cancer, and he did not.

The “Problem of Evil” was always there and a lot of religious people have probably heard it or even pondered it themselves. But when things are going well such worries can be put to the back of a believer’s mind. When personal tragedy affects a person, the problem of evil becomes large and unavoidable.

It seems anything from a subtle change in attitude to fellow believers to a major emotional upheaval can create a crack of doubt into which critical thinking and reasoned arguments can be inserted. This seems more likely if the believer is already aware of these arguments.

Well reasoned arguments against the veracity of religious belief are great for making a point or explaining atheist beliefs. However, we shouldn’t underestimate the part that non-rational factors play in changing people’s beliefs - in either direction.

(* Given the examples above, to choreograph the kind of emotional reaction that might lead someone to reject their religious belief would be an extremely vicious act.)