I'll admit it... I live under a rock. It took me until yesterday to hear about all the crazy stories of animal mass-deaths to have happened in the last week or so. Apparently on New Years day, there were several hundred to several thousand birds to die all at once. Then a few days later, it happened again in Louisiana (birds AND fish), and then again in Sweden. Since then, I've heard a lot of buzz about it being a sign of the end-times, or some crazy conspiracy. Apparently, it's taken on the name, "Aflockolypse".
So what does it mean? Why are we suddenly being inundated with mass animal death? Why is this happening now? And what in the world does this have to do with Atheism vs Theism?
While I'm not a biologist, I can't answer, "Why" these animals are dying off en-mass. I'm sure there are perfectly valid reasons. But I can answer the other above questions.
What does this all mean? Well, it doesn't mean anything. Nature doesn't work that way. There is no message in something like this. This doesn't mean that God thinks we're too sinful or anything like that. If anything, the lessons we learn from something like this are more localized to the answers of, "What is causing a large amount of species to die prematurely?" and "Is there a way to prevent it in the future/should humans even try to prevent it?"
Why is this happening now? And what does this have to do in this blog? My answer to both of those is: confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is a tendency for people to favor information that confirms their preconceptions or hypothesis regardless of whether the information is true.
We had one sensational news story that happened to take place on New Years day. Since it's a time that people think of a "rebirth" of the year, something sensational happening on that day gets more notice. People assume it has something to do with this special day, and they take note. When a similar, just as sensational story comes out soon after, people will correlate the two (or more) stories. Add in a conspiracy theory or two, and every time a mass species death occurs, you get confirmation bias that these events must be related.
At this time, there is no reason to believe that any of these recent mass deaths are related at all. In fact, there is no reason to believe that this is anything but commonplace in nature. Mass animal deaths happen all the time, and they just don't make the news. In fact, here is a map of mass bird and fish deaths in the past few weeks alone, all over the world. As you can see, this is not an uncommon occurrence. It happens all the time.
This is very similar to the story of, "The Bermuda Triangle". Where people take note of plane and shipwrecks that happen in this specific area of the Atlantic Ocean, and completely dismiss the equal amount of plane and shipwrecks that happens elsewhere in the world.
How does this relate to theism and/or religion? The most glaring parallel I can make is through the idea of prayer/spells/asking your god for something however outrageous and possibly sometimes getting it. People pray all the time. They certainly don't always get what they want. But when they do get what they pray for, it's taken as a sign of god's acceptance. When they don't get what they want, it's taken as a sign of god's "mysterious ways" or some sort of lesson, and the event is generally forgotten.
In reality, there have been numerous studies on prayer. They have varied results at best. But the one result they all show is that prayer seems to have no more success than that of chance.
To take an answered prayer as proof of god's existence is to be using confirmation bias to prove your belief. You could just as easily flip it around and say that every unanswered prayer is proof that god does not exist.
What other parallels can one take from the lessons of confirmation bias? Earlier in this blog, we debated the validity of prophecy. We argued Christian semantics back and forth about whether or not prophecy was or wasn't fulfilled. But we skipped over the myriad prophecies that were never fulfilled. These non-fulfillments are just as important in validating the truth behind a given religion. They give a much broader view of how close to chance a prophet (or prophets) actually is. One or two accurate predictions is impressive unless there are several hundred other predictions that aren't accurate at all. Then we see how close to chance a prediction actually is.
Confirmation bias is a very sneaky rationale. People from all sides fall for it. It runs rampant in Homeopathy, a prior i skepticism, religion, atheism, spirituality, and science. If we're going to know the truth, we have to understand how it happens, and we have to be willing to see it when it happens. Most importantly, we have to acknowledge when it's happening to ourselves.
-Mike
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