Those rascals in Madison are up to mischief

And good for them! They’ve added a holiday display to the collection in the Wisconsin capitol.

FSM-Capitol

I especially like the message: “Think this is ridiculous? We agree! Religious ideas should not be promoted within the halls of government. Protect the separation of church and state, it protects us all.” That ultimately has to be the point of every atheist group who joins in these absurd exercises in flaunting religiosity — it’s that this is ridiculous, and we’re not going to be silent anymore.

You should congratulate a fine group of students for a job well done.

UWMadison_rascals

But Mr Craig…!

William Lane Craig has a piece on the Fox News website in which he claims to cut through all the slogans and refute all of the arguments of atheists to conclusively demonstrate the existence of his god. These must be real humdingers to wrap up the whole debate, so I read them…and now I have a few questions.

1.  God provides the best explanation of the origin of the universe.  Given the scientific evidence we have about our universe and its origins, and bolstered by arguments presented by philosophers for centuries, it is highly probable that the universe had an absolute beginning. Since the universe, like everything else, could not have merely popped into being without a cause, there must exist a transcendent reality beyond time and space that brought the universe into existence. This entity must therefore be enormously powerful. Only a transcendent, unembodied mind suitably fits that description.

But Mr Craig! Where’s the math? I know you don’t like any kind of evidence and are a being operating on pure logic, but you could at least provide the mathematical foundation for your assertion. You know your holy book just baldly states that a god did it, with no backing rationale, right? It makes for a very unsatisfactory explanation. There’s no meat to it.

And don’t you think it’s a bit of a leap to jump from a necessary first cause (which I don’t necessarily grant you) to the conclusion that it required an “unembodied mind”? Maybe it required an unembodied anus to poop out the universe, no brain needed.

2.  God provides the best explanation for the fine-tuning of the universe. Contemporary physics has established that the universe is fine-tuned for the existence of intelligent, interactive life.  That is to say, in order for intelligent, interactive life to exist, the fundamental constants and quantities of nature must fall into an incomprehensibly narrow life-permitting range.  There are three competing explanations of this remarkable fine-tuning: physical necessity, chance, or design. The first two are highly implausible, given the independence of the fundamental constants and quantities from nature’s laws and the desperate maneuvers needed to save the hypothesis of chance. That leaves design as the best explanation.

But Mr Craig! The universe isn’t finely tuned. The overwhelming bulk of it is inaccessible to us, and even on this one planet we inhabit, 70% is underwater, vast swathes are icy wastes or deserts, and those toasty warm damp tropics, which are otherwise paradisial, are heaven for parasites and diseases. You even admit this yourself when you say our nature requires an environment that falls within an “incomprehensibly narrow life-permitting range”. Do think that range is everywhere?

Also, without other universes to compare, you can’t claim that ours has optimal parameters. Don’t you also claim the existence of a heaven which is perfect? Therefore, we can obviously see that the Earth is a much inferior place.

3.  God provides the best explanation of objective moral values and duties. Even atheists recognize that some things, for example, the Holocaust, are objectively evil. But if atheism is true, what basis is there for the objectivity of the moral values we affirm? Evolution? Social conditioning? These factors may at best produce in us the subjective feeling that there are objective moral values and duties, but they do nothing to provide a basis for them. If human evolution had taken a different path, a very different set of moral feelings might have evolved. By contrast, God Himself serves as the paradigm of goodness, and His commandments constitute our moral duties. Thus, theism provides a better explanation of objective moral values and duties.

But Mr Craig! Atheists do have an objective source for morality: ourselves. I can strive to create a society which provides a good moral framework that makes me happy, keeps my family safe and productive, builds communities and nations that work cooperatively, and just generally makes life better for my species over the long run. I don’t need a god to do that. And besides, your god doesn’t provide moral guidance to anyone.

And yes, people can have different objective moral values. For instance, a person could decide that the well-being of a broader spectrum of organisms than just one species is an important value, and dedicate themselves to maintaining life everywhere it exists. I can respect that. It doesn’t take a god to acquire that moral code, just an appreciation of beauty and a greater empathy.

4.  God provides the best explanation of the historical facts concerning Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.  Historians have reached something of consensus that the historical Jesus thought that in himself God’s Kingdom had broken into human history, and he carried out a ministry of miracle-working and exorcisms as evidence of that fact.  Moreover, most historical scholars agree that after his crucifixion Jesus’ tomb was discovered empty by a group of female disciples, that various individuals and groups saw appearances of Jesus alive after his death, and that the original disciples suddenly and sincerely came to believe in Jesus’ resurrection despite their every predisposition to the contrary. I can think of no better explanation of these facts than the one the original disciples gave:  God raised Jesus from the dead.

But Mr Craig! Does your god also provide the best explanation for how Mohammed flew to heaven on a winged horse, or how Odin lost his eye, the divinity embodied in every noodly appendage of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, how Breatharians can live without eating, or how the Amazing Randi did that really amazing card trick?

Does your god blind you to the possibility that there are better explanations? Say, that the entire story of the empty tomb was a legend invented well after the fact, or that if there were a tomb, a Roman surgeon had the body stolen for the purposes of his anatomical studies, or that a bear dragged the corpse away for a little snack? There are many simpler and explanations, and it seems to me to be a bit of a deficiency on your part that you can’t think of them.

5.  God can be personally known and experienced.  The proof of the pudding is in the tasting. Down through history Christians have found through Jesus a personal acquaintance with God that has transformed their lives.

But Mr Craig! Every god-believer claims that about their god, not just yours. Atheists do not deny that believers experience subjective psychological phenomena that can affect how they see the world. What we deny is that there is an objective, external super-being that is diddling their brains or making the moon orbit the Earth or making people healthy if they beg hard enough. You’re avoiding addressing the nature of the phenomenon that is “experienced”, which is ultimately the whole question, so your little essay completely misses the mark.

I guess I’m still an atheist.

It’s not disrespect, it’s a reminder of the trash atheists have to fight

Christopher Hitchens died two years ago today, so either obliviously (most likely) or with malice (not impossible), Salon has to run one of their New Atheist bashing pieces. It’s gotten ridiculously predictable. Their rule seems to be to find someone who simultaneously hates atheism, and doesn’t know a goddamn thing about it except for some fragmentary bits of third hand quotes they heard somewhere, and then let them babble.

This time, it’s Richard Rodriguez, illustrated with a photo of Richard Dawkins so that we might bother to read it. Come on, Salon, at least try: if the guy’s words are interesting enough to be worth an article, why are you splashing a photo of someone he dislikes front and center?

I could tell it was going to be awful from the first question.

So let’s start talking about “Darling” and we’ll get into some other things from there. You open and close this book with trips to the Middle Eastern desert taken after September 11. The social and physical aspects of the desert seem very important to you, for the origins of the three monotheistic religions. So I wonder if human history would have been different if the God of the Axial age had emerged not from theses parched deserts, but say, from a dark German forest or something.

Well, I think obviously we would have a different experience of nature. And maybe a different notion of what God expects from us; this is said as a believer, I should stress. It seems to me that a God who would reveal himself to Abraham in a place of such desolation is at least reminding us that our place on this Earth is temporary, and this is a place – a landscape – that reminds us of just how empty it is. The word desert comes from the notion of deserted; something was here and now it’s gone. What’s gone, of course, is the ocean; this was the bottom of the ocean. And this is a place of such rigor and difficulty that one stands in nature with an adversarial relationship.

So a softer, more sentimental God would have revealed himself on a lakeshore or in a forest. That would have been a very different experience. One of the things I’m asking of people, believers and unbelievers, is that we come to terms with place. The Semitic god has always been acknowledged to have broken through time. The eternal breakthrough of time at a specific moment. But we don’t talk about places much, partially because it is such a difficult thing to imagine that we are being called, by God, in a place of death.

Why do you assume that there is a god to appear? Maybe instead you should flip that around: this happens to be a myth conjured up by people who weren’t living in a lush tropical paradise. Rather than this nonsense about a desert god, talk about a desert people.

But even there, this guy is talking nonsense. Once upon a time, many millions of years ago, the Middle East was under water — before people existed. This fact has nothing to do with the origins of the term, nor did the people there historically have any awareness of their geological history (even now, there are many Christians and Jews and Muslims who would deny it).

I also have to wonder about this persistent myth of the parched desert, barren, empty, and desolate. The Abrahamic faiths rose out of a pastoral people; they raised sheep and goats. The land of the Tigris and Euphrates was a well-watered flood plain, and the Hebrews invaded Palestine, with its coastal plains where olives and fruit trees grew, with areas forested with cedars, and fertile valleys with lovely streams and cool shady forests. They were well aware of the bordering true deserts, but we’re taking about a place with a Mediterranean climate — where perhaps the desolate desert was a place with mythic resonance to them.

So here you have people talking amongst each other, playing up the frightful horrors of the desert, and bragging about how tough and mighty their ancestors were to have lived through it, and this myth is now perpetuated by every believer in the Abrahamic faiths on the planet. I think it’s like the idea of persecution in the Roman arena — mostly legend, with next to nothing to connect it to reality.

Furthermore, deserts are actually complex, interesting places. They may be inimical to us damp, squishy apes who like our swimming pools, but “empty” is the wrong word to use for them.

You want a desolation, look at the parking lot at a WalMart superstore. There’s hell on earth; I’d hate to meet the god conjured up by the people who dwell there.

But let’s cut to the chase: where’s this nugget of anti-atheism to justify Salon publishing this tripe?

You write about the “New Atheism” emerging from England, catching on here. How is it new and why does it seem like a dead end to you?

It seems to me that the New Atheism — particularly its recent gaudy English manifestations — has a distinctly neo-colonial aspect. (As Cary Grant remarked: Americans are suckers for the accent!) On the one hand, the New Atheist, with his plummy Oxbridge tones, tries to convince Americans that God is dead at a time when London is alive with Hinduism and Islam. (The empiric nightmare: The colonials have turned on their masters and transformed the imperial city with their prayers and their growing families, even while Europe disappears into materialistic sterility.) Christopher Hitchens, most notably, before his death titled his atheist handbook as a deliberate affront to Islam: “God Is Not Great.” At the same time, he traveled the airwaves of America urging us to war in Iraq — and to maintain borders that the Foreign Office had drawn in the sand. With his atheism, he became a darling of the left. With his advocacy of the Iraq misadventure, he became a darling of the right.

That’s it? Pathetic. And Salon, why are you taking the most shallow point in his interview and making the title all about it?

He’s heard of Dawkins and Hitchens…well, good for him. What about the other big proponents of the New Atheism, Dan Dennett and Sam Harris? No plummy accents there. Or Ayaan Hirsi Ali? Or as I try to remind everyone, Susan Jacoby or Annie Laurie Gaylor, who were talking up freethought years before Dawkins’ spectacular book, or David Silverman or David Niose or Hemant Mehta or me, even? You simply cannot define atheism by one live Brit and one dead one, even if your weird premise is that we’re atheists because we like their accents.

I’ve noticed often that anti-atheists look at us and try to define us by our leadership, which doesn’t exist…so they appoint one, containing whichever people are a convenient fit to whatever thesis they’re trying to advance. News to believers everywhere (and to some misguided atheists as well): there is no hierarchy, no atheist pope, no atheist bishops, and if someone tried to declare themselves head of all atheism, 90% of all atheists would immediately announce their rejection and tear them down. We have no holy book — there are atheists who dislike The God Delusion and God is Not Great, and even those of us who like them feel free to criticize bits and pieces, as well as the authors.

You can also knock individuals for their politics — I detest Hitchens’ and Harris’s conservative and militaristic ideas — but there aren’t any politics that define atheism as a whole. Most (but not all!) of us are politically progressive and looking to broaden the appeal of rational unbelief, so it’s very strange to see some outsider trying to pin membership in the New Atheism on Hitchens’ politics. Or his accent.

But then, consistency and reason aren’t things we should expect from someone described as “gay, deeply Catholic”. It seems to be a too frequent combination that leads only to muddled thinking.

nun

OK, Salon, you are now on notice. The latest edition to the front page? An article praising the simple lifestyle of the nunnery, illustrated with that photo on the right. Yeah, because attractive young women with carefully applied makeup personify Catholic austerity so well.

Tightening the screws on Burzynski

The FDA is getting tough.

In letters to Burzynski and his research institute posted online Wednesday, the FDA says that Burzynski inflated success rates for experimental drugs that he calls antineoplastons. The FDA also says Burzynski failed to report side effects and to prevent patients from repeatedly overdosing.

…

If Burzynski fails to adequately address the FDA’s concerns, the agency could terminate his clinical trial; disqualify Burzynski from conducting future FDA research; issue a civil fine; or pursue criminal charges, according to FDA regulations. Burzynski has 15 days to respond to the FDA.

That’s from a summary on USA Today, which you might not want to visit because of the annoying autoplay videos they’ll fling at you. You can read the FDA’s official letter instead, which is a solid rebuke. Here are the highlights:

1. You failed to ensure that the investigation was conducted according to the investigational plan [21 CFR 312.60].

2. You failed to protect the rights, safety, and welfare of subjects under your care [21 Cfr 312.60 and 21 CFR 312.305(c)(1)].

3. You failed to obtain informed consent in accordance with the provisions of 21 CFR part 50 [21 CFR 312.60, 21 CFR 50.25(b)(3), and 21 CFR 50.27(b)(1)].

4. You failed to adhere to requirements for all expanded access uses with respect to maintaining accurate case histories and retaining records in a manner consistent with 21 CFR 312.62 [21 CFR 312.305(c)(4) and 21 CFR 312.62(b) and (c)].

Each of those is accompanied by a detailed breakdown of all of Burzynski’s failings — it’s a real pleasure to read how this quack is getting ever so firmly and formally raked over the coals. I’m going to go out on a limb here — a very stout, strong limb — and predict that Burzynski is going to be incapable of addressing any of the complaints with anything other than bluster, and that right now he’s making plans to slither his clinic over the border into Mexico.

Jesus. Texas.

Four Republican candidates for Lt. Governor of Texas gathered for a debate. They all agreed on the most pressing issue facing the American state today: whether Jesus made dinosaurs.

Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst, Sen. Dan Patrick, Land Commissioner Jerry Patterson and Agriculture Commissioner Todd Staples said in the first televised debate of the campaign Thursday night that they favor teaching that there are flaws in the theory that humans evolved from lower life forms.

Late last month, state Board of Education members adopted new high school science books that include full coverage of evolution without the disclaimers sought by social conservatives and other critics of Charles Darwin’s theory.

While none of the lieutenant governor candidates mentioned the board’s decision, three — Patrick, Patterson and Staples — blasted teaching only evolution as a form of “political correctness.” They linked it to what they described as a broader moral decline.

“The breakup of the family in this country has started when we took God out of the classroom,” said Patrick, a radio talk show host.

“As a Christian, certainly creationism should be taught,” said Staples, a former state legislator.

Dewhurst, who is seeking a fourth term, agreed.

“It’s a fair discussion to expose students to both sides and let them make the decision with the advice and counsel of their parents,” he said.

Patterson said the country has gone too far in deleting religious instruction from government institutions such as schools. A 1987 U.S. Supreme Court ruling banned teaching of creationism in science classes.

How do you bear it down there? If you think I’m cranky and rude living in Minnesota, think what I’d be like if I had landed a job in Texas!

Well, most likely dead of apoplexy and barbecue, but other than that.

I get email

This is no help at all. I need provocative biology questions, not this physics crap.

But hey, if any physics professors want to hand this off to their students, go ahead, give ’em a laugh.

The prominent Pagan publication called New Scientist states that the “axis of evil” imprinted on the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation is “posing a threat to standard cosmology.” (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19425994.000-axis-of-evil-a-cause-for-cosmic-concern.html ) The article continues: “According to the standard model, the universe is isotropic, or much the same everywhere. However, in 2005, Kate Land and João Magueijo of Imperial College London noticed a curious pattern in the map of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) created by NASA’s WMAP satellite. It seemed to show that some hot and cold spots in the CMB are not distributed randomly, as expected, but are aligned along what Magueijo dubbed the axis of evil.”

The Pagans say concerning the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation ( http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20327245.900-13-more-things-axis-of-evil.htm#.Uqeo0lNi30R ) “WHAT would you do if you found a mysterious and controversial pattern in the radiation”: “In 2005, Kate Land and João Magueijo at Imperial College London faced just such a conundrum. What they did next was a PR master stroke: they called their discovery the cosmic “axis of evil.” Now why is it called evil? The Pagans answer the question: “The apparent alignment is “evil” because it undermines what we thought we knew about the… universe. Modern cosmology is built on the assumption that the universe is essentially the same in whichever direction we look. If the cosmic radiation has a preferred direction, that assumption may have to go – along with our best theories about cosmic history.” The Pagans then admitted that they are terrorized by the ‘axis of evil’ by saying: “The European Space Agency’s recently launched Planck space telescope might settle the issue when it makes the most sensitive maps yet of the CMB. Until then, the axis of evil continues to terrorise us.”

PS. Results from the WMAP satellite (early 2000s) indicated that when looking at large scales of the universe, the CMB could be partitioned into “hot” and “cold” sections- and this partitioning is aligned with our ecliptic plane and equinoxes. This partitioning and alignment resulted in an axis through the universe which “scientists” dubbed “the axis of evil”- because of the damage it does to their myths. This axis passes right through our tiny portion of the universe. Laurence Krauss commented in 2005:“ But when you look at [the cosmic microwave background] map, you also see that the structure that is observed, is in fact, in a weird way, correlated with the plane of the earth around the sun. Is this Copernicus coming back to haunt us? That’s crazy. We’re looking out at the whole universe. There’s no way there should be a correlation of structure with our motion of the earth around the sun — the plane of the earth around the sun — the ecliptic. That would say we are truly the center of the universe.” (http://www.edge.org/conversation/the-energy-of-empty-space-that-isn-39t-zero )

Most “scientists” brushed the scientific observation off as a fluke of some type, and many myth-theories were created to explain it away. Many awaited the Planck mission. The Planck satellite was looked upon as a referee for these unexpected (and unwelcome) results. The Planck satellite used different sensor technology and an improved scanning pattern to map the CMB. In March 2013, Planck reported back and in fact verified the presence of the signal in even higher definition than before! There is Absolutely No Salvation Outside the Catholic Church see www.vaticancatholic.com Geocentrism is absolutely irrefutable.

He followed up with another message an hour later.

Heliocentrism is a myth There is Absolutely No salvation Outside the Church visit www.vaticancatholic.com According to the evolutionist myth called heliocentrism the earth revolves around the sun traveling at speeds of 65,000+ miles is each hour which equates to approximately 20 miles per second while spinning on its axis 2,000 miles per hour. Science disproved heliocentricism centuries ago and decades ago and continues to do so.
Remember: Every experiment designed to measure the speed of the earth through space has always returned a speed of zero just as the Bible claimed all along. All the MMX experiments and related experiments of the late 19th and early 20th centuries showed prima facie evidence that the Earth wasn’t moving around the sun – and this continued to be the case with every repeat of an MMX-type experiment from 1881 to 1932 when the last one was done. That is science. That is irrefutable. Michelson did the experiment again and again and again because he was absolutely devastated by the results. He did it again with a man named Dayton C. Miller in 1904. Dayton Miller decided to go on his own track and was so devastated that the earth was Geocentric that he did 100,000 experiments with even more sophisticated and sensitive equipment– compared to 36 MMX experiments done by Michelson-Morley: and he got the same results. Dayton earned a doctorate in science from Princeton University in 1890, was president of the American Physical Society during 1925-1926, chairman of the National Research Council’s Division of Physical Sciences from 1927 to 1930, and president of the Acoustical Society of America from 1913 to 1933.

The Michelson-Gale-Pearson experiment (1925) which is a Sagnac and Morley Michelson (MMX) experiment in one: debunked relativity and heliocentrism. The Sagnac experiment scientifically demonstrated ‘Absolute Motion.’ It debunked Einstein’s “relative motion” myth with his myths of “general and special relativity.” The Sagnac experiment absolutely devastates ‘relativity’ mythology.
Ronald R. Hatch is a recipient of the Johannes Kepler Award from the Institute of Navigation because he was the most significant contributor to the advancement of satellite navigation. He has over 30 years experience in designing navigation systems and has been consulted by government agencies and companies. He authored Escape from Einstein – a work which debunks the relativity myth and other related myths. He brought up the issue of the GPS programming and what NASA does with the old experiments that disprove Einstein’s special myth of relativity and also heliocentrism. Ronald R. Hatch the Director of Navigation Systems engineering and founder of NavCom Technology, Inc had to go and investigate line by line how NASA was constructing the computer data or computer programs- rather- for the positioning satellites. What he found was that NASA -without telling people– preprogrammed the computers of the global positioning satellites to include the Sagnac effect. Sagnac did his experiment in 1913 and established and demonstrated that since motion is absolute – that means it is not relative. It was a very phenomenal experiment because it proved motion was absolute. Believers in Einsteinian mythology cannot get away from this and that is why they have to preprogram their computers for the Sagnac effect of absolute motion without telling anybody – and then they say that the global positioning satellites are working by the special “theory” of relativity. The global positioning satellites disprove the special “theory” of relativity because if those computer programs of the GPS were not preprogrammed for the Sagnac effect – in other words if they were not adjusted for the fact that there was absolute motion – then the GPS wouldn’t work.

Now what they have found between GPS satellites in space – is that they worked in foursomes. They have 3 up in space at any one time and they have the ground station. When a signal is sent from one in-orbit GPS into another GPS in orbit to get the triangulation that is needed: the light beam that goes from west to east travels 50 nanoseconds slower than the light beam traveling from east to west. That may not seem much but if you add up 50 nanoseconds for every beam that is sank from one satellite to another: in a day’s period the typical GPS would be off by 15 miles. They have a certain parameter that they have to fit into and so they have to measure these things in nanoseconds- it’s a pretty intricate calculation- but that’s what they discovered. Now why is that the case? If light always travels at c as Einstein told us then why are these GPS beams coming back at different times – 50 nanoseconds worth? Therefore the GPS has just falsified the special “theory” of relativity. In other words the global positioning satellites are just one big Michelson-Morley experiment or its one big Sagnac Experiment –and they thus adjust the computers based on what Sagnac found in 1913. That’s the story for you. That should make headlines but you won’t find it in headlines of course because the aura around special and general relativity is so great – not only to answer Michelson-Morley experiments but is the absolute foundational basis for all of Pagan cosmology today. Everything you hear about: the big bag, and the expansion, and dark matter, and dark energy, and inflation and all these terms you hear are for one reason only: because everything has to be fit into the tensor equations of Albert Einstein g= 8PiT – that’s the reason why. That all comes from general relativity which is the next step. Special relativity was invented in 1905 to answer the amazing Michelson-Morley experiments – in order to keep the earth moving around the sun and then we begin to see flaws in special relativity and one of the major flaws of course is it doesn’t deal with gravity. If special relativity dealt with uniform motion – that is motion that’s going the same all the time or you are standing still – that’s called an inertial frame. What happens when you are accelerating however, or what happens when you are decelerating, what happens when you meet up with inertial forces like centrifugal force, or Coriolis force, Euler force: well things change. Now you have to have a whole new “theory” and that’s why Einstein had to develop the general “theory” of relativity because he had to answer gravity and inertial forces. Where do these things come from? Well general relativity proposes to give us an answer and it says space is warped, and time is warped by matter, and all kinds of things like that- these are totally unproven too- but that’s just the “theory.” That’s why it’s still called the “theory” of general relativity because none of this has been proven. It has been debunked. There is Absolutely No Salvation Outside the Catholic Church see www.vaticancatholic.com

Man, Catholics. They’re still plaguing my inbox.

Proud to be a mutant, then

Chris Mooney has done it again: he has rationalized a piece of the conventional wisdom to support the status quo and to make it harder to break the creationist habit. He has an article on Mother Jones titled
Seven Evolutionary Reasons People Deny Evolution, and I gakked at every word, from the linkbait in the first word to the presumption of the second to the obvious promise of self-justification in the third.

And I let it go.

It’s Mooney, after all. But then Larry Moran is getting on his case, and Hemant Mehta has been hoodwinked into accepting this nonsense, so I feel compelled to dig into it. One interesting thing about the article, though, is that Mooney is unself-consciously practicing the same delusions he claims are natural in putting his argument together — you’d think he’d be a little bit aware…but no.

Let us begin with the last and work backwards through the essay. It’s his conclusion that pissed me off the most.

In any event, the evidence is clear that both our cognitive architecture, and also our emotional dispositions, make it difficult or unnatural for many people to accept evolution. “Natural selection is like quantum physics…we might intellectually grasp it, with considerable effort, but it will never feel right to us,” writes the Yale psychologist Paul Bloom. Often, people express surprise that in an age so suffused with science, science causes so much angst and resistance.

Oh, really?

I was brought up Lutheran, and got the full weekly dose of church and Sunday School; I was also a zealous reader from an early age, and discovered the science section of my local library when I was probably in first or second grade. I was exposed to both religion and science from an early age, and guess which one I found difficult and unnatural to grasp? That’s right. Somehow, these people think recognizing natural causes in the world around us, something we experience every moment of our lives, is difficult, while accepting the existence of magical, supernatural forces that we never ever see is “natural”.

Yet there I am at 8 years old, given a choice between a book about Noah’s Ark and Jesus, or one of Asimov’s collections of science essays, and there’s no question, no doubt in my mind, no niggling worries or hesitation — I choose Asimov every time, hands down. If I do read the Ark book (because I was bored and eventually devoured everything), it’s with arched brow and child-like incredulousness, because the story is so goddamned stupid.

And now, as an adult, I not only intellectually grasp what we know about evolution, it feels right to me.

That either makes me a super-powered mutant, or that someone has got everything all wrong in their attempt to make the argument that religion is natural and evolved, and perhaps I’m just a mundane, ordinary guy who had a freedom to explore ideas not usually granted to most people, and that all the barriers to the acceptance of evolution are artificial, cultural, and recently imposed.

I assume most of my readers here also accept the idea of evolution. So which is it? Are we all special little flowers, the shining brilliant lucky recipients of a wisdom-bestowing mutation, while hoi polloi are dullard turds lacking in our biologically glorious powers, or do essentially all humans have capable, plastic brains capable of responding to the environment in reasonable (if limited) ways? I rather lean towards the latter view, as flattering as the former might be. I’m pushed even further towards that view by the bad arguments Mooney gives.

But first, let’s dismiss a standard rhetorical trick: before you give your grand conclusion, bring out a couple of caveats that you can dismiss. It gives the appearance that you’ve carefully weighed the evidence and have examined the opposition position. Mooney does not fail. He dredges up two irrelevant counter-arguments.

First, this doesn’t mean science and religion are fundamentally incompatible. The conflict may run very deep indeed, but nevertheless, some individuals can and do find a way to retain their religious beliefs and also accept evolution—including the aforementioned biology textbook author Kenneth Miller of Brown University, a Catholic.

You cannot know how much I despise the Ken Miller Argument. Not Miller himself, of course, but this weird happy relief people seem to find in dragging him out and gleefully pointing at his Catholicism and his science credentials. They are irrelevant to the point that science and religion are incompatible — people are complex and embody all kinds of contradictions. You simply cannot point to a single human being as a test for the logical incompatibility of two ideas. That presupposes that we’re capable of nothing but rational thought, and that our brains contain flawless logic circuits that do not allow clashing ideas to exist in our heads.

What would be interesting and relevant would be to ask Miller, or any scientist no matter what their religious beliefs, whether they found evolutionary thinking difficult or unnatural. Mooney does not do this, despite the fact that it is the only question relevant to his premise. He does raise a second irrelevant caveat, though.

Second, while there are many reasons to think that the traits above [his list of properties that predispose us to religion –pzm] comprise a core part of who we are, it doesn’t automatically follow that religion is the direct result of evolution by natural selection. It is also possible that religion arises as a byproduct of more basic traits that were, in turn, selected for because they conferred greater fitness (such as agency detection). This “byproduct” view is defended by Steven Pinker here.

I personally think the byproduct explanation is the best one I’ve heard, but so what? It says that religion exploits properties of the mind that evolved for other reasons. We could say exactly the same thing of mathematics: we didn’t evolve to solve calculus problems, there has never been significant selection pressure for people whose expertise is specifically in calculus, but we do have some properties — a surplus of capacity, perhaps, or general flexibility — that could be reworked by experience to enable the exercise of mathematics. Is math natural or unnatural?

But when you actually think about it, it is a killer argument against Mooney’s thesis…it’s too bad that he doesn’t think about it much at all. What does it even mean to talk about “natural” or “evolved” cognitive traits, like religion or science? Mooney is blithely talking about a “core part of who we are”, while describing culturally conditioned superficial myths held by a tribe of talking apes, all while ignoring the fact that his core traits are not universal.

Let’s consider his list of natural core.

Fear and the Need for Certainty. Finally, there appears to be something about fear and doubt that impels religiosity and dispels acceptance of evolution. “People seem to take more comfort from a stance that says, someone designed the world with good intentions, instead of that the world is just an intention-less, random place,” says Norenzayan. “This is especially true when we feel a sense of threat, or a feeling of not being in control.”

Fear and uncertainty are real — even us self-confident happy atheists have to deal with them. Every one of us has felt loss and grief, and we know that these are also great tools to use to manipulate people. But take it a step further. Fear is a universal, but how we cope with it is variable. This person Norenzayan is making an assertion that religious thinking is an evolved coping strategy for dealing with fear, but none of the evidence given supports that claim. It does support the idea that people with religious concepts stuck in their head tend to reinforce those concepts when stressed.

But that statement by Norenzayan is ridiculous. You’re in a difficult situation: which is more reassuring, the idea that a) it’s an accident of chance, or b) there really is a super-powerful being who is doing this on purpose to you? If you’re just looking for a good way to deal with your troubles, I find (a) immensely more comforting than (b). And when I have experienced stress and suffering, I don’t find myself suddenly looking for a supernatural agent out to get me. That view is a product of long cultural conditioning.

Turn this view on Mooney: he lives in a world full of superstitious people. How to explain this uncomfortable situation? Why, there must be an external agency, evolution, that has shaped them to be inimical to science.

Group Morality and Tribalism. All of these cognitive factors seem to make evolution hard to grasp, even as they render religion (or creationist ideas) simpler and more natural to us. But beyond these cognitive factors, there are also emotional reasons why a lot of people don’t want to believe in evolution. When we see resistance to its teaching, after all, it is usually because a religious community fears that this body of science will undermine a belief system—in the US, usually fundamentalist Christianity—deemed to serve as the foundation for shared values and understanding. In other words, evolution is resisted because it is perceived as a threat to the group.

Again, tribalism is real, and we apes do turn to our friendly support groups all the time, and we need our social glue to live happily. Nothing in this predisposes people to think religiously rather than scientifically, however. That we allow and encourage our fellow apes to cultivate their own peculiar rituals and behaviors to forge coherence actually says that those individual sets of rules are arbitrary, not determined. We can make subtribes within the human community that are bound together by religion, by atheism, by science (yes, science certainly does have its quaint bonding practices), or by such things as anime fandom.

Place the blame where it belongs. Not on human tribalism, but on the fact that a huge, successful, widespread binding factor, religion, also frequently imposes absurdly anti-scientific views on its members. And even there, the blame must be apportioned to historical contingencies, not fixed inevitabilities.

Turn this view on Mooney: he’s arguing for a tribe that cannot grasp basic principles of science for biological reasons. Yet I suspect that he does not place himself in the category of a person doomed to struggle against the unnatural weirdness of science. It’s always comforting to separate the other, the Creationists, from ourselves, the Scientists, isn’t it? But I can tell you that they’re just as smart and capable as we are — just that their intelligence is shunted off in unproductive directions.

Inability to Comprehend Vast Time Scales. According to Norenzayan, there’s one more basic cognitive factor that prevents us from easily understanding evolution. Evolution occurred due to the accumulation of many small changes over vast time periods—which means that it is unlike anything we’ve experienced. So even thinking about it isn’t very easy. “The only way you can appreciate the process of evolution is in an abstract way,” says Norenzayan. “Over millions of years, small changes accumulate, but it’s not intuitive. There’s nothing in our brain that says that’s true. We have to override our incredulity.”

I will give him this: I cannot imagine the magnitude of millions of years. Billions are right out. Heck, even a thousand years is a strain.

But I find it bizarre to argue that visualizing the accumulation of small changes is not intuitive — it’s actually imbedded deeply in the human experience. Every child knows that once they were a baby, and talks about growing up; Mom and Dad make a pencil mark on the door jamb for our height every year; we go through that awkward transition at puberty, and then we spend the rest of our life aging, feeling every creak and every fading ability. Old people rail against this new generation and praise the previous one. We live lives full of change, and usually spend our time complaining about it.

“Once things were different” is such a natural and easy sentiment that it is perverse to suddenly claim that no one thinks that way. That we have a hard time appreciating the magnitude of time over which changes occur is one thing; but inability to perceive change? Pfft.

Turn this view on Mooney: One thing I often find irritating in discussions of creationism are all these people who think the creationism of the last 60 years is the way religion has always been. Go back a century, and you might be surprised: deeply religious people were struggling to reconcile faith and science, and you don’t typically find that the depth of the geological record was a serious obstacle. You don’t find that change was a problem: the book of Genesis is all about a rather abrupt change, and of course theologians are dab hands at rationalizing and accepting the grand changes we see in the shift from the Old Testament to the New. Young Earth Creationism, as practiced in America today, is a relatively new and odd phenomenon.

Dualism. Yet another apparent feature of our cognitive architecture is the tendency to think that minds (or the “self” and the “soul”) are somehow separate from brains. Once again, this inclination has been found in young children, suggesting that it emerges early in human development. “Preschool children will claim that the brain is responsible for some aspects of mental life, typically those involving deliberative mental work, such as solving math problems,” write Yale psychologists Paul Bloom and Deena Skolnick Weisberg. “But preschoolers will also claim that the brain is not involved in a host of other activities, such as pretending to be a kangaroo, loving one’s brother, or brushing one’s teeth.”

This is another one that I will grant to Mooney, to a degree. Consciousness is a ubiquitous illusion, and it is all about taking a material substrate, the brain, and generating a perception of a self-aware monitor floating above it all. It’s a hardware/software distinction, in many ways, and it’s natural to interpret others’ behavior with a theory of mind.

But I gotta love studies that rely on the perspectives of pre-schoolers. Babies love to play peek-a-boo, and are endlessly surprised when you open your hands and…and there you are! Giggle and coo! But you know, when we get older, we would consider it grossly unnatural if an individual failed to acquire the concept of object permanence. Did you know that human minds mature over time? Inclinations in young children are not necessarily likely to be held by adults.

Also, creationists and religious people are not children, nor do they have child-like brains. Give ’em some credit, they can learn and adapt and grow just like us Grown-Up-Sciencey-Types.

Turn this view on Mooney: Grow up.

Overactive Agency Detection. But how do you know the designer is “God”? That too may be the result of a default brain setting.

Another trait, closely related to teleological thinking, is our tendency to treat any number of inanimate objects as if they have minds and intentions. Examples of faulty agency detection, explains University of British Columbia origins of religion scholar Ara Norenzayan, range from seeing “faces in the clouds” to “getting really angry at your computer when it starts to malfunction.” People engage in such “anthropomorphizing” all the time; it seems to come naturally. And it’s a short step to religion: “When people anthropomorphize gods, they are inferring mental states,” says Norenzayan.

Yes? Isn’t that what we were just talking about under Dualism? The logic of listicles is always reinforced when you use a magic number like 7 or 10, isn’t it?

It is true, I have been known to snarl at the TV (especially on, say, Sunday morning, when the pundits are babbling, or when I accidentally flip through Fox News), even though it is an inanimate object that is not responsible for the idiocy displayed on it. But you know, my mind is slightly less literal-minded than the story makes it out to be: even when my irrational side is getting tickled by the provocation of the noises from the magic box on the wall or the shapes of clouds, I’m quite able to draw myself up short and recognize reality. I know that turning the television off does not make the annoying people disappear, and that the bunny hopping about in the sky is no threat to my salad. While we recognize that the brain contains fallible perception generators, could we please also recognize that the brain also has more sophisticated processors to interpret those phenomena? And guess what — creationists and religious people also have them!

Where I object is that “short step to religion”. Fine; we can see that it’s an easy first step. But when I take a step, I try to keep on walking. What’s unnatural is take a step and then just stop when there’s a wide open path ahead of me. Why assume that those Religious Others are incapable of thinking beyond first impressions? Why not assume that they are just as capable of going on beyond that preliminary, primitive perception?

Turn this view on Mooney: It’s always tempting to find that first confirming impression and stop. No need to think further, we’ve already got the answer. It’s particularly tempting when we’ve got a thesis that we want affirmed, and there it is: by golly, I have grumbled at my computer, therefore, GOD is an entirely reasonable conclusion. Keep on walking, Mooney, there are more steps beyond the first.

Teleological Thinking. Essentialism is just one basic cognitive trait, observed in young children, that seems to hinder evolutionary thinking. Another is “teleology,” or the tendency to ascribe purposes to things and objects so as to assume they exist to serve some goal.

Recent research suggests that 4 and 5 year old children are highly teleological in their thinking, tending to opine, for instance, that clouds are “for raining” and that the purpose of lions is “to go in the zoo.” The same tendency has been observed in 7 and 8 year olds who, when asked why “prehistoric rocks are pointy,” offered answers like “so that animals could scratch on them when they got itchy” and “so that animals wouldn’t sit on them and smash them.”

Oh, jebus, more kiddie minds. Could we stop this please? Religious people aren’t primitive children. A lot of religious thinking is abstract, convoluted, elaborate, and sophisticated — it’s also deeply flawed, but let’s not pretend that we can find the roots of Catholic or Jewish theology in the simplistic thinking of seven year olds. The Summa Theologica, the Talmud, and the Hadiths are not one-off guesses produced by some kids on the playground at the prompting of psychologists. They are highly unnatural (in the sense that Mooney is using the word) products of exquisitely higher order thinking on the part of thousands of people deeply imbedded in an elaborate cultural tradition.

Simplistic biases like those we see in those kids are easily overcome. I’m an example, so is Mooney, so is Ken Miller, so is every scientist brought up in a Christian or Jewish or Muslim or Hindu society. That isn’t the problem. The problem lies in very detailed rationalizations assembled by scholars and leaders and influential social messengers that might play on intrinsic biases in our thinking, but I would say that that is also true of science. Shall we argue that Newtonian laws are built on our childlike appreciation of “funny man falls down” slapstick? That would be just as naive.

Turn this view on Mooney: You’re looking for intent and purpose in the pervasiveness of religious thought; you’re seeking simple causal agents behind a presumed bias towards religion. Have you considered the possibility that you’re engaging in the same teleological thinking that you’re labeling as a foundation for religion?

Biological Essentialism. First, we seem to have a deep tendency to think about biology in a way that is “essentialist”—in other words, assuming that each separate kind of animal species has a fundamental, unique nature that unites all members of that species, and that is inviolate. Fish have gills, birds have wings, fish make more fish, birds make more birds, and that’s how it all works. Essentialist thinking has been demonstrated in young children. “Little kids as young as my 2 and a half year old granddaughter are quite clear that puppies don’t have ponies for mommies and daddies,” explains McCauley.

“we seem to have a deep tendency to think about biology”…stop right there. We do? People think deeply about biology? Really?

Biologists think deeply about biology, and thinking deeply about biology seems to have produced the theory of evolution. Thinking superficially about the causes and origins of species, treating them as merely descriptive categories of convenience, seems to have produced creationism. Again with the little kids — are we seriously going to consider that 2½ year old kids have been “thinking deeply” about biology?

There are other people who think deeply about biology — hunters, for instance, or farmers. And they come up with schemes that also group animals and plants in patterns, but they generally aren’t trying to explain origins, but behavior. It’s when you actually think about where things come from that the assumptions of pre-schoolers begin to readily fall apart.

Turn this view on Mooney: Mooney has long been an opponent of “data dump” science, the idea that merely educating people about science is sufficient to persuade them to abandon religion. I’m somewhat sympathetic to that myself; it does take more than just hammering with facts to get an idea accepted. But I would also suggest that one major problem with Mooney’s argument is that he is so willing to assume that the first impressions of children represent deep thoughts — that he doesn’t seem to appreciate the importance of data and evidence in shaping how people think. This stuff matters. I am not the boy I was who first stepped into a library. Learning is actually central to the human experience.

Our cognitive architecture and emotional dispositions are certainly natural and biological, but they can equally well incline us to accept natural explanations as well as supernatural ones — we are shaped by our experiences as well as crude preliminary suppositions. The argument that religion is more “natural” than science is a bow to the naturalistic fallacy and a nod towards the status quo. Do not try to tell me that my mode of thinking, as easy and simply as I fell into it (and as readily as many in the scientific community similarly find it) is somehow weird, unnatural, inhuman, or in defiance of my evolved instincts. It is not. Every person has the capacity to think scientifically or religiously or even both, and there are modes of thought that are not limited by the presumptions of our particular culture as well.

It is a logical failure to assume that what is is what must be, or that the currently dominant elements of our culture are representative of how the human mind must work.

Was Mandela an atheist? The answer is no, and it doesn’t matter.

Here’s the summary from Jacques Rousseau.

We do now know that Mandela was a member of the Communist Party, and some might therefore think it follows that he was an atheist. On the other hand, we do know that he was baptised as a Methodist, and we have Wikipedia quoting an interview with Mcebisi Skwatsha, in which Mandela apparently confirmed that he was a Methodist. In Mandela’s book Conversations with Myself, he says ”I never abandoned my Christian beliefs”, and a comment on Pharyngula points to a CNN story, where it’s described how Mandela would regularly receive blessings from Chief Rabbi Cyril Harris.

Mandela also spoke at churches on a semi-regular basis, and in short, clearly seemed to have no antipathy to religion. Instead, his attitude to religion seems to have been exactly the right one for the leader of a nation to have – to hold it as a personal issue, and to devote himself to allowing others to exercise their religions, or lacks of religion, in the manner they see fit. In other words, regardless of what his personal beliefs were, he seems to have been fully committed to secularism in government.

He was a secularist. That ought to be good enough.

David Silverman did kick butt

Ophelia has the video of Bill Donohue, David Silverman, and Schmuley Boteach on Fox News — and she’s right, the two flanking nutcases were embarrassing, while Silverman was the voice of reason. The two theistic cranks kept whining about Satanists! Ruining Christmas! while Silverman just pointed out that yes, you don’t get to decide which religion gets to be the right one in a pluralistic country, and that means you have to give satanists the same accommodations you do Christians. But Satanists! How can you support Satan?

I found out what that was about. Oklahoma has a Ten Commandments monument on their statehouse steps…so a Satanist Temple has asked for parity. Seems fair to me. Cue predictable dismissals:

Rep. Bobby Cleveland, who plans to introduce a one such bill next year, said many Christians feel they are under attack as a result of political correctness. He dismissed the notion of Satanists erecting a monument at the Capitol.

"I think these Satanists are a different group," Cleveland, R-Slaughterville, said. "You put them under the nut category."

Brady Henderson, legal director for ACLU Oklahoma, said if state officials allow one type of religious expression, they must allow alternative forms of expression, although he said a better solution might be to allow none at all on state property.

But I think Baptists belong in the “nut category”! Can we have the Christian monument taken down? Although I think Henderson is actually the voice of reason here.

Also, the Hindus want to put a monument to Hanuman there, too. Are they in the “nut category”? How do you decide which religion is nutty?

I would also point out to Donohue and Boteach that there has been a long history of discrimination against both Catholics and Jews in the US — they won’t disagree, I’m sure both are far more aware of that history than I am — so it’s a bit weird for them to be participating in a discussion that attempts to label one religion as fringe and undeserving of recognition, support, or even respect. I guess empathy is not one of those “Judeo-Christian” virtues.

I’m a bit uncomfortable with this

Gregory Paul says that Nelson Mandela was an atheist. I’ve looked around a bit, and I can’t find any confirmation of that — I wouldn’t be surprised, but at best I find that he was a committed secularist who avoided coming out clearly about religion. Can anyone confirm? I don’t like it when dead people are immediately brought into the fold of a religion when they can’t deny it, so I’m not keen on atheists doing likewise.

Back in the last decade there was a cable talk show titled Faith Under Fire. Hosted by a right wing Christian, it featured theists and atheists in direct conflict over assorted matters. In one segment a theist challenged a leader of an atheist organization to name a single atheist who had become a great moral leader. To my annoyance the had-not-thought-about-that-one-before atheist was stumped. 

A leading example, of course, is Andrei Sakharov. The wholly ungodly leftist physicist started out as the father of the Soviet H-bomb, but became so fed up with dictatorial communism – Khrushchev’s insistence on detonating a colossal 50 megaton thermonuclear device for no practical reason being a factor – that he became the leading dissident against the system, fighting for progressive democracy at considerable expense to himself.

And the other great moral atheist leader of the 20th century was Nelson Mandela. He too was an nontheist of the left (as most are, in the US 3/4s of the nonreligious are progressives, the rest Randian libertarians.)

Now that last bit is interesting. If you’ve been wondering how big the atheist rift is, and are a little tired of vague claims that those jerks are a minority, it at least pins a specific number on them: 25%. Which isn’t small.

The claim is a little overstated, though. They aren’t necessarily Randian libertarians. The basis of that 25% comes from the Pew poll of the “nones”, which found that about a quarter of them were politically conservative.

nones-vote

I looked through the whole thing; no sign that they actually assessed the details of political alignment closely enough to recognize libertarians. But yeah, 25% does sound like a reasonable estimate of the fraction of jerks infesting the atheist movement.