Classic Crommunist: Why science is better than religion

Office Christmas party, Skeptics in the Pub, and ordinary December blahs have conspired to rob me of the energy necessary to turn the random thoughts/news items of the day into 1000 coherent words. While I recuperate, please enjoy this classic post, written at a time when 99% of you weren’t readers yet.

There is a very stupid argument out there in the world of arguments. It goes something like this:

You have to believe in science, just like you have to believe in religion. Therefore, science is just another kind of religion.

On the surface, that appears to be a logical premise. It even managed to find its way into an episode of one of my favourite shows. However, that’s due to an unfortunate accident in the English language whereby “believe” has two meanings. I’m not going to go through the entire argument here, except to give a specific example. The statement “I believe in myself” means that you have confidence that you will be able to perform a task based on self-knowledge. It does not (or at least not usually) mean “I have faith that I exist as an entity” although Descartes would probably have a few things to say about that. At any rate, the word “believe” when it comes to reliance on facts and observation is quite distinct from “believe” when it comes to large, unfathomable concepts. I’ll let PZ Myers and xkcd talk about that for now, and perhaps come back to it later.

However, it doesn’t matter. Let’s, for the sake of argument, allow this line of reasoning. Let’s suspend logic in this particular case and grant that you have to believe in science in the same way you have to believe in religion (or God, or faeries, or gremlins, or whatever you believe in). Even if we make this concession, science is still far better than religion for one very important reason: [Read more…]

Blowing away the smokescreen

Apologists for religion, when confronted with the ugliness that has been justified by adherence to scripture, will often retreat into a stance that goes something like “people will always do harmful things, regardless of their religion.” The argument, I suppose, is that human beings will find ways to commit atrocious acts, and that criticizing religion is therefore a red herring argument. “After all,” they’ll say “the kind of people who would do evil in the name of religion will still do evil even if you atheists do away with faith altogether!”

First of all, anyone who has ever made this statement has just admitted to losing the argument. Religion is chock full of morality claims, and by admitting that people who follow religion are not more moral than those who do not, you’ve admitted that your particular religious philosophy is entirely orthogonal to being a good person. It would be just as valid for me to say “don’t do bad things” and call that a moral system. Considering the number of people who use the argument from morality as what they think is a “slam dunk” proof of a deity, this kind of “well people will be bad regardless of religion” statement should be particularly troubling.

Some atheists are willing, however, to cede this point. In a world without religion, they say, people would probably do bad things at roughly the same rate. Some people are just opportunistic, or unthinking, or cruel, and will find some other way of justifying their actions even in the absence of a god to blame it on. This argument has bothered me for a while, and I have finally figured out why.

[Read more…]

History debunks myths about Occupy

One of the things that has struck me most about the opposition to the Occupy movement is the ease with which people approach repeating the trite truisms about the occupiers. No matter how many professionals stand up in support of the protest, everyone reaches for the “unemployed bums” canard. Regardless of the number of specific problems highlighted by protests at each site, nobody seems to have any problem expressing their bewilderment at the lack of a cohesive message. Despite the amount of energy and time put into making the occupied sites more than just an urban camping trip, people throw around the term “lazy” like rice at a wedding.

The other aspect that particularly fascinates me is the tin ear for the lessons of history that these criticisms showcase. Every revolutionary protest movement looks like this, even the ones that we would otherwise support. It doesn’t take an encyclopedic knowledge of history to see the parallels between the occupation of public space and the non-violent resistance of Indians to British rule. Nor does one have to have a degree in the humanities to see the attempted demonization of Occupy’s “hippies” echoing the same condemnations from a generation ago in the person of the actual hippies of the Vietnam resistance movement.

But even if one isn’t well-attuned to those particular stories, it’s hard for me to look at the Occupiers and not see links to the civil rights movement of African-Americans in the mid-20th century. Now this is not to say that the problems of centuries of racism and the fight for human decency is on equivalent footing to corruption in financial and political institutions (which have become two sides of the same ill-gained coin); however, it is worth noting that many of the common bromides hurled at the Occupy movement are shown to be quite hollow by even a cursory examination of history. [Read more…]

I won’t “agree to disagree”

Last Sunday my friend “Sharon” came over to play some music. She is, in addition to being an excellent singer, a law student who is about to complete her studies. Resultantly, I enjoy her company because she is exceptionally witty, enjoys discussing things in depth, and knows her way around the finer points of a good argument. We hadn’t talked in a while, so before we started playing music we sat down to chat for a bit, and as I was telling her what was going on in my life, I mentioned this blog. She interrupted the conversation to ask what my definition of atheism was.

A few months ago, Sharon and I went out with some of her other friends to a bar, and she and I ended up getting in a very drunken debate over whether or not it was possible to know something to be true or not. My argument was that while absolute, unchanging truth may not be achievable, we could rely pretty well on provisional truth gleaned from examining evidence, and that while scientific truths were by definition mutable, it does not mean that some day all of science will be thrown out. [Read more…]

Counting down from infinity

I had an… interesting visit from what I assume was a creationist about a week ago. I like it when theists show up here. It gives me a chance to practice diplomacy as opposed to my usual unrestrained polemic, which I like to alternate with dismissive mockery when the occasion requires. At first he showed up in the comments of a post that had absolutely nothing to do with anything, so I redirected him to a more appropriate post.

When I was offered the chance to “go first” (a really really bad idea) as to why I thought there were no gods, I expressed my conclusion that, given the available evidence, I could not see anything in the universe that looked like design only explainable through an intelligent agent. Since any theistic belief is predicated on supernatural intervention, I can’t accept any of the downstream conclusions of theism.

I also asked him to agree to abide by some simple rules: don’t skip off when your arguments are refuted, don’t expect me to accept scripture as a reliable source of information, and finally don’t use articles of faith in place of reasoned argument. He agreed to abide by those rules (and I have the folks at The Atheist Experience to thank for that list), which was probably another tactical mistake for him, but he does get kudos from me for being plucky. [Read more…]

Crommunist joins a cult (part II)

In which our hero continues his narration of attending a workshop for a self-help program. Read Part 1.

What if everything you ever wanted… came in a ROCKET CAN? Okay, so this presentation wasn’t quite as entertaining as Powerthirst, but it amused me for the span of an evening. When we left off, the audience had just broken off into smaller groups to chat with the coaches.

What would you give?

The group discussion came back to the same central question that Mr. Vicente had kept posing, broken down into three (extremely leading) subquestions: 1) what would you like to achieve, 2) what would that accomplish for you, and 3) how much would you give up to achieve it? I call these leading questions because they prime you to accept that there is something on offer than can accomplish the transition from 1 to 2, in exchange for 3. [Read more…]

Skepticism in action: Crommunist joins a cult

Some times I have fun adventures. This is a story of one of them.

I have a friend (who I will call Valerie for the sake of clarity) who, although we get along quite well, I find to be a bit credulous. I’m sure if you asked her, she’d tell you that, although we get along well, she finds me simplistic and reductive and closed off to possibilities beyond what can be seen and heard. This is an unfair characterization, but rooted in a larger ignorance of skepticism that we are slowly resolving through good-natured chats whenever we get together.

Because I’m, well… me, Valerie calls from time to time to ask my opinion on various matters. Not because she thinks I’m particularly brilliant, but because I am in real life more or less how I am online – full of opinions. She also knows that, as a skeptic, I am quite adept at poking holes in things. It was in this spirit that she invited me to attend an open house at the life-coaching workshop she had been attending for a while. She thought that maybe I would learn something new, or that (more likely), I would sit like a curmudgeon and get into a fight with the speaker. I promised her that I would be open minded (which was a bit of a cheat, because she and I have very different definitions for that term).

And so it was that I found myself attending a workshop for the Executive Success Program, led by none other than director and film-maker Mark Vicente. Yes… that Mark Vicente.

Now I very rarely walk into a meeting like that without knowing anything about the speaker or the product being flogged, because part of my definition of being open minded is understanding what critics have said. Let’s just say that I almost changed my mind about going: [Read more…]

Why are you hitting yourself? Part 8: extra credit questions

This is part 8 of an ongoing discussion of a paper by Jost, Banaji and Nosek discussing System Justification Theory. Read Part 1. Read Part 2. Read Part 3. Read Part 4. Read Part 5. Read Part 6. Read Part 7.

Having summed up my lengthy exploration of System Justification Theory, I teased you this morning with the question that you’ve likely been asking youself from the beginning: now that we know about system justification, what can we do to correct for it? Are we doomed to keep making the same mistakes, or can we overcome our terrible mammal brains and become better critical thinkers?

In order to answer this question, I must first re-iterate a point that I’ve been making for almost as long as this blog has been in existence: we can overcome cognitive biases by becoming more aware of them. Just like we, as skeptics, have learned to recognize faulty arguments like straw men and fallacies like appeal to authority, we can also learn to recognize when we (or others) base their arguments on streotypes instead of evidence. System justification lives on stereotype – confronting those will go a long way on its own to reduce the amount of system justifying we do.

There is also something important to be learned from Part 6, which is that system justification is directly connected to the level of inequality present in a society. As we reduce gaps between groups – be they through legislative policies like pay equity or through changing the social stigma associated with being in the minority – we reduce our tendency to ‘explain away’ disparities as being part of the natural order of things. By engineering societies that are more fundamentally equal, we simultaneously rob fuel from the system justifying machine.

Finally, and perhaps most crucially (or just my preferred method), we can reduce system justification by talking about it. The more people are aware that they have a tendency to do this kind of backfilling, the more likely they are to notice themselves doing it in the future. Successes in my own ongoing struggle to become less misogynistic suggests to me that awareness (and acceptance) of the fact that we all have cognitive demons operating below the level of conscious awareness will help us police our own attitudes better. We may never become perfect at it, but we can certainly become better.

Now, I would be a really crummy scientist if I didn’t use this opportunity to raise some research questions of my own that this paper did not address. [Read more…]

“Atheist church”: one week later

So last week I posted a Monday “think piece” in which I examined the arguments against and for a community for humanists, and explained why I thought it was not a bad idea. I followed it up with a spitballed example of what I thought one could look like. My basic position, boiled down to a couple of sentences is that I think there is a positive role that a humanist organization modeled after a church can play, particularly for those who find home and community in the church environment (but may not agree with all the positions stated there). I don’t think that all components of church, including ritual, are necessarily harmful, and that we should try to take as much good as we could, while leaving behind the bad.

This issue got more responses than just about anything I’ve ever blogged about, and I’m taking this opportunity to go over them and summarize. [Read more…]

I don’t believe in ‘agnostics’

As someone who believes strongly in his opinions, and who doesn’t shy away from debate, I often find myself having heated discussions with friends. They’re not always about atheism (in fact they rarely are), but they often end up back at the same point: “look, you believe that, but other people disagree – I think there’s truth on both sides.” They seem to think this is some kind of profoundly meaningful truth that I, in my zeal, couldn’t possibly comprehend. “Here I am,” they say “happily ensconced in my island of neutrality, not dirtying myself by having an opinion on something.”

I’m not a big fan of theists as a group, but I have a great deal of respect for honest ones who are at least willing to expose their beliefs to scrutiny and will drop a bad argument once it’s been exposed as fallacious. There’s precious few of those around, but when I find them I go out of my way to express my appreciation. I hold those kinds of people in much higher esteem than I do self-proclaimed “agnostics” who are just soooo over the whole religion question. Indeed, there are few people I have more contempt for than someone who archly sits on the sidelines, piping up only long enough to shit on people on both sides for being so crass as to believe in something being true or not.

First, I would be remiss if I didn’t clear up an important issue of semantics. Atheism is a response to a claim: that there is a god. If you are going to classify yourself with respect to the god question, simply ask yourself “do I believe in a supernatural entity responsible for the creation of the universe that involves itself in human affairs?” If the answer is anything besides “yes”, then you are an atheist. If your answer is “I believe that there is some kind of superior intelligence out there responsible for the universe, but not one as defined in any religious tradition” then you might describe yourself as a deist, provided you also believe that this ‘intelligence’ doesn’t interact with humans in a meaningful way. Deism is incredibly lazy, but whatever I don’t care. [Read more…]