It’s going to be a great conference on science, education, and human rights (and that’s precisely what my talk will be about: science as a human responsibility and ethical obligation). You should all come! Don’t you want to visit Bucharest?
IHEU Conference in Romania, May 2013
I might get lost in that building.
The skeptics are circling the wagons. I knew they would. It’s what they always do to defend their naive version of “science”.
Stephanie Zvan has a good post rebutting Daniel Loxton’s defense of the skeptical delusion that atheism is “unscientific”. I can summarize his argument briefly: “I’m an atheist, skeptics have gone after some religious claims, and science can’t tell the difference between invisible dragons and nonexistent dragons and therefore doesn’t care.” And of course he props all this up with the claim that this is the official scientific view.
No, it is not. There is no one true scientific method; testability is not the sole criterion that scientists use to work towards the truth; there is no absolute definition of what constitutes science (nor can there be, I would argue), which is why the demarcation problem is so difficult. Establishment skeptics love to parade their kiddie version of how science works as justification for dismissing atheism as a legitimate scientific position in a way that they would never do to homeopathy or UFOs or any of the other subjects they are willing to pursue. Why, I don’t know. I’ve always assumed it was a political ploy to avoid annoying numerous donors and the mass media, but if they insist it isn’t, I’m going to have to fall back on another explanation: they’re just ignorant.
These skeptics love their little gotcha games. Their ideal is the experiment that, in one session, shoots down a claim cleanly and neatly. So let’s bring in dowsers who claim to be able to detect water flowing underground, set up control pipes and water-filled pipes, run them through their paces, and see if they meet reasonable statistical criteria. That’s science, it works, it effectively addresses an individual’s very specific claim, and I’m not saying that’s wrong; that’s a perfectly legitimate scientific experiment.
I’m saying that’s not the whole operating paradigm of all of science.
I’m saying that we use all kinds of methods: reason, empiricism, inference, hypothesis testing, modeling. Sometimes it conforms neatly to the standard diagram of the scientific method you’ll find in the first chapter of your introductory biology textbook, and often it doesn’t. Science has more avenues to explore questions than just the insta-test skeptics favor, and you should mistrust skeptics who tell you that we know less than we do, because simplistic reasons, like testability.
Individual skeptics may have opinions about all those philosophical matters, but none of these are questions science can answer. As Novella and Bloomberg explained [in a well-known 1999 Skeptical Inquirer article], “science can have only an agnostic view toward untestable hypotheses. A rationalist may argue that maintaining an arbitrary opinion about an untestable hypothesis is irrational—and he may be right. But this is a philosophical argument, not a scientific one.”
Uh, guys? Science is a philosophy, a very specific one. That disavowal doesn’t even make sense.
And you know, I deal with creationists all the time who use arguments very much like skeptics’ to claim that paleontology is untestable and therefore unscientific. “Were you there?” Can you design a simple test that can be demonstrated on a stage to a crowd of onlookers that really shows that that fossil bone is 70 million years old? And the answer is that no, we can’t make our tests conform to the simplistic skeptic standard. That doesn’t mean they’re unscientific, or that we should be agnostic on the age of the earth.
I think this is where the skeptic movement’s foundation in stage magicians begins to hurt. They offer a valuable perspective — they’re far better at detecting intentional fraud than most scientists — but when your whole perspective on science is shaped entirely on criteria that make for a good show, your understanding suffers. And when it leads to stage magicians yelling from the stage at scientists that they don’t understand science, you’ve got a real hubris problem.
You know how real scientists treat untestable hypotheses? Pragmatically and operationally as invalid*. If you don’t even have an evidential chain of reasoning to lead to your hypothesis, we reject it out of hand. If that hypothesis, unsupported by evidence, further contradicts known properties of the universe, we can dismiss it as falsified, even without direct testing of that specific hypothesis…especially if such testing requires elaborate, expensive, time-consuming procedures with negligible likelihood of coming up with a useful result (and if there is no possible way to test your absurd claim, then fuck it, into the trash bin with it). When there are a thousand equally unjustifiable hypotheses being flung about with fanatical certainty and equal lack of reason, we cut the Gordian knot and reject them all and start working our way through known facts to determine a root cause of all the chaos.
I like Stephen Jay Gould’s definition of a fact:
In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
By that definition, the non-existence of gods is a fact. Those scientific atheists, the New Atheists, that the skeptics scorn have been working their way down the objective chain of evidence, not trying to disprove gods with simplistic tests (because they’re too incoherent and contradictory), but developing better ideas that more accurately describe how the world works. They’ve been doing the hard work of science. When Victor Stenger can so eloquently describe the natural origin of the universe godlessly using mathematics and physics, when Richard Dawkins can explain the origin and modification of life without recourse to magic or the supernatural, it becomes perverse to withhold provisional assent and babble about being agnostic towards religious explanations. The New Atheists aren’t expressing mere opinions, they’re telling you about hard-earned knowledge about the real world.
And the skeptic movement has become an inbred circle of perversity. They disrespect that hard-working progressive pattern of scientific inquiry because it doesn’t fit neatly into their game-show model of science.
And, as Stephanie points out, they aren’t even consistent about it. Somehow, they insist that we must be agnostic towards religion, while not being so gentle towards alternative medicine, alien astronauts, or moon landing conspiracy theories.
You do realize that the moon landing conspiracy theories are exactly as ridiculous as religion, don’t you? Assertions of insidious agents carrying out elaborate plans, selective and distorted interpretations of the available evidence, avoidance of the actual, substantial evidence that there actually was a natural event…yet no skeptic is getting up and announcing that we must be agnostic about the moon landing, nor are they all beating up Phil Plait for his “unscientific” confidence that men have walked on the moon.
*And even there, there are exceptions: think of string theory. But the exceptions prove the rule that science is a lot more complicated than the neat tidy package into which movement skeptics want to tie it up.
Some Christian dorkasaur named Gene Mims has an argument for silencing atheists. It’s about unicorns.
Unicorns
Stay with me for a moment and I think I can give you a better understanding to my perplexity concerning atheists. You see I do not believe in unicorns. You may and that is surely your right, but I don’t. They are cute in cartoons, movies, and comic books, but I must confess that I don’t believe in them. So what’s the point. The point is that since I don’t believe in unicorns I don’t give them much thought. I don’t write about them or speak about them. I don’t go to conferences on how to stop people from believing in them. I do not fund legal societies to stop people from being able to talk about unicorns in schools and public places. I don’t worry if people celebrate holidays dedicated to unicorns. For me they don’t exist.
Give It Up
To all bent-out-of-shape atheists I say simply, GIVE IT UP! Find something else to worry about like global warming, Republicans, education, war, and rain forest destruction. Let those who believe in God alone. If He doesn’t exist then why all the worry and concern? If He does exist then you don’t care anyway. He won’t bother you. Try not to be bothered by what you don’t believe in and work on what you do know. The more you talk about God the more likely it is that those who may share your position might begin to doubt it and actually search for Him and find Him.
Aww, we have something in common. I don’t believe in unicorns, either! So I don’t spend much time dwelling on them, myself. We’re both a-unicornists! We should form a club.
Of course, there’s a reason I don’t worry much about unicorns or unicorn believers. We don’t have institutions dedicated to preaching about unicorns every week. People don’t get tax breaks for believing in unicorns. Unicornists don’t have a de facto lock on elected office. Nobody is telling me I need to include unicorn biology and paleontology in my courses at the university, or in high school. The unicorn lobby is essentially non-existent.
I’m not at all concerned about unicorns. If we had them, it would be unicorn-believers who would worry me. I’m not afraid of getting gored by a unicorn, and neither is Mr Mims, but we might just have reason to be terrified of the kind of fanatic who would consider mindless faith in unicorns to be a necessary prerequisite to moral behavior and inclusion in civilized society, to the point where they try to force unbelievers to obey and be silent.
Same with God, Mr Mims. Gods don’t exist, so they don’t trouble me in the slightest. But I fear your dumbassery, Mr Mims — that exists, unlike the invisible being to which you so zealously devote your life.
Maybe you should think just a little bit more deeply about your analogy between god and unicorns. I think there’s a significant similarity that you missed.
I’m getting the impression that Jamy Ian Swiss also kinda pissed off Greta Christina.
He has a new movie coming out this summer, After Earth. It looks awful, but then, that’s what I’ve come to expect from Will Smith’s Sci-Fi outings.
Jebus. Anyone remember that abomination, I, Robot? How about I Am Legend? I steer clear of these movies with a high concept and a big name star, because usually what you find is that the story is a concoction by committee with an agenda solely to recoup the costs and make lots of money…so we get buzzwords and nods to high-minded causes and the usual action-adventure pap. Just looking at the trailer, I’m getting pissed off: it’s supposed to be a pro-environmentalism movie, and what’s it about? A guy running around in the wilderness fighting off the hostile wildlife.
Anyway, I got one of those generic invitations to help reassure the world that it’s a good science movie. Here’s part of what I was sent:
On May 31st, Columbia Pictures is releasing what is perhaps the biggest movie of the summer, After Earth, starring Will Smith, directed by M. Night Shyamalan.
No. Just no. Shyamalan is a hack. Why do people keep handing him big money and big projects?
There are a lot of science parallels to this film, and I write to see if you or a colleague might be interested in interviewing one of After Earth’s top filmmakers and or a scientist associated herein.
Famous futurist Ray Kurzweil
Jesus fuck. Kurzweil is a consultant? Pill-popping techno-geek with an immortality fetish and no understanding of biology at all is the consultant on a movie with a supposed environmental message? WHY?
explored with Will, his son Jaden Smith, and Elon Musk, how science fact meets science fiction in After Earth, and tghis can be seen here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RocpHuJWolc. As well, XPRIZE has teamed up with Sony to launch an unprecedented robotics challenge (information attached). What’s more, NASA plans to disseminate a lesson plan to teachers based on the scientific implications of After Earth, as seen here http://www.lifeafterearthscience.com/.
OK, I checked out the lesson plan. It’s not bad, but it has nothing to do with the movie — it’s all about biodiversity and cycles and climate change and that sort of thing, by a respectable author of biology textbooks. It’s a merkin to cover the toxic crap that will be in the movie.
In After Earth, earth has devolved, in a sense, to a more primordial state, forcing mankind to leave. One thousand years after this exodus, the planet has built up defense mechanisms so as to prevent the return of its previous human inhabitants. It might be said that nature reacted this way because it perceived humans as a threat to its survival.
“Devolved”? “Primordial state”? Look at the trailer. It’s a lush planet thick with plant and animal life, nothing to force people out. Except, of course, the bizarre hint that there are rapid — really rapid — weather changes (I won’t call it “climate”), in which you can be running through a temperate forest and suddenly a tree will freeze. Yeah, right. As for the teleological rationale, just gag it, goofballs.
Given the backing behind it, the extravagantly expensive Will Smith, the fact that he’s using it as a vehicle to give his son star billing, the horrible director, and the hints of bad science in the trailer, I’m going to call this one right now: it’s going to suck. It will be shiny and glossy and have lots of CGI, but it will suck hard.
I saw Iron Man 3 last night, and let me just say…I am so tired of SF movies that resolve all of their conflicts with a big battle with the baddies, preferably featuring huge explosions and impossible physics. This one is going to up the ante with idiot biology added to the profit-making mix.
They asked if I wanted to interview any of the scientists or writers involved. I don’t think so.
Although a conversation with Ray Kurzweil could be…fun.
Ophelia reports that CFI, at least, has the right idea.
ANY large group who feels like they have a particular beef with religion (or pseudoscience, or other wacky beliefs) has a legitimate interest in addressing that problem as a group.
At CFI-L.A., we’ve hosted Black Skeptics, Spanish-speaking atheists, gay and lesbian humanists, and others who’ve had specific troubles in our society based on who they fundamentally are. And I say, welcome to our tent.
Ideally, our whole movement is a coalition of individuals and groups who all have an interest in promoting a secular and reason-based society. And if some of those groups want to get together to fine-tune their methods for dealing with and changing this uber-religious society we live in, more power to them.
How can we help?
That’s the way any inclusive organization ought to be: welcome to our tent. Hey, can you help us make our tent bigger? Is there any particular patch of ground we ought to expand into? It also echoes our sentiments exactly when we set up Freethoughtblogs — we want to increase the range of voices speaking for this cause.
If you’re looking for friends, it’s really easy to choose between tent-makers and tent-nazis.
Greta Christina has a good post up about the common defense against broadening the approach of an organization, the plaintive whine against “mission drift”. I’ve never quite grasped the point: if you’re a largely volunteer organization with only a minimal paid organizational structure, as is true for most skeptic and atheist organizations, it’s relatively painless to adapt to meet the desires of your membership — in fact, it ought to be considered necessary to do so.
If you’ve got a significant subset of your membership who are saying they’re really interested in, say, the application of atheism to interior decorating, you might be wondering what the heck that has to do with your ideal of what atheism ought to do, and you might have zero interest in interior decorating yourself, but you should pay attention: somehow these self-selected atheists who are already willing and enthusiastic members of your constituency see a connection. Your apathy is irrelevant; their enthusiasm matters.
Instead of announcing that interior decorating has nothing to do with atheism and your vision will not be sullied with this strange sideshow, you should instead be interested in seeing where this unexpected connection might lead. Tell them, “Cool — let’s form a committee of interested members, and maybe you can pursue this subject further under the umbrella of our larger organization.” It doesn’t mean atheism has been sabotaged, it means it has an avenue for tapping new and interesting ideas.
I’ve given a talk before where I’ve pointed to the American Humanist Association as a model for expanding these interests. Go down to the bottom of that page and look at the row of icons there: they’ve formed special interest groups for legal issues, a feminist caucus, an LGBT council, even a cinema section. It’s an embrace and sponsor approach that really works well to foster greater inclusion and widen the appeal of the movement.
Contrast that with the skeptics: instead, we get representatives angrily shouting at atheists who dare to taint their movement, which has one focus, one methodology, one pure strategy. They could have set up an Atheist SIG (or a Cryptozoology SIG, or Interior Decorating SIG, whatever) within skepticism, coopted that subset of skeptics while simultaneously keeping the overall organization independent of the narrower interests, and grown their movement. As far as I’m concerned, it’s too late for them…maybe an atheist organization will be interested in setting up a skeptics subgroup that will be a happier place for godless critical thinkers.
I see Atheism+ as being part of the same principle: recognizing that not every atheist will be interested in social justice issues, but for those who are…here’s an outlet and a focus for those concerns.
Use mission drift, people! Don’t oppose it, channel it!
Eugenie Scott is planning to retire from the NCSE. This is not possible. There is no one fit to replace her!
Although…perhaps I should apply for the job. I looked at the qualifications, and it was like looking in a mirror, man — especially that last bit about “the ability to work effectively and diplomatically with diverse communities and allies”. It sounds just like me, right, gang? I should go for it.
Look here, we’re like clones of each other! If I can so perfectly emulate her lecturing gestures, there’s no reason to assume I won’t be as great at the rest.
<quick cut to directors of the NCSE, all looking horrified…then scrambling to find more inducements to Genie to keep her on>
In comments on PZ’s “divorce” post, Antiochus Epiphanes sez:
Skepticism™ the movement and skepticism, the practice of thinking critically, shouldn’t be conflated. The latter is no great intellectual achievement and should be in the skill set of grade schoolers. That it isn’t may be the motivation of the former, but we shouldn’t expect any intellectual advances to emerge from the movement, because what it’s doing is necessarily remedial.
I wholeheartedly agree with the above, and a couple years ago it struck me that skepticism (small-‘s’) is essentially a form of basic intellectual hygiene, something that everyone is capable of to varying degrees and something that everyone should do.
“Kind of like brushing your teeth,” it occurred to me back then, and ever since I’ve quietly replaced references to Skepticism Writ Large with “Tooth Brushing” in my mind.
Don’t forget to keep those deep rifts flossed
Though it might seem to trivialize skepticism to compare it to brushing your teeth, that’s not at all what I intend. Brushing your teeth is incredibly important. Most people don’t do it diligently enough, and when they do many of them get it wrong. Failing to engage in proper dental hygiene can shorten your life significantly — not only can bad teeth consign you to somewhat less healthy diets, but gum disease and heart disease have been conclusively linked. And not brushing your teeth has certain social ramifications too, not to mention a likely legacy of personal discomfort.
So dental hygiene is crucial for proper health, and while we can rely on experts for some advanced treatment the responsibility is on each and every one of us to take responsibility for our own teeth.
Skepticism is to the intellect as brushing is to teeth. Sometimes we need expert assistance, but the only way it really does us any long term good is if we engage in the practice of mental hygiene as a habit, preferably after each bout of consuming something that might cause problems down the road, whether it’s a bag of chips or an article in the New York Toast.
As A.E. says in the above-blockquoted blockquote, that’s pretty basic stuff. We really ought to learn the basics of each at around the same time in our lives. Basic doesn’t mean unimportant, as I’ve said, and there’s nothing at all wrong with devoting a substantial portion of your life campaigning to educate people who aren’t quite where they should be in their hygienic practice. People concerned with better tooth-brushing have associations and conventions. They devote a lot of time to the topic, some of it paid (and likely quite well, depending on location) but some of it on a volunteer basis spurred by their personal commitment. Again, much like skepticism.
But I’m not aware of too many people who describe themselves as “toothbrushers.” Dental hygiene seems to be something that even its most fervent advocates do, not something that they are. There seem to be no videos on YouTube by users with names like W0ndert00th decrying other Toothbrushers for getting Toothbrushing wrong, diluting Pure Toothbrushing, or threatening to destroy the Toothbrushing Movement.
It’s a trivial exercise coming up with ways in which the practice of skepticism is important in daily life. People who work in the sciences constitute one large, obvious example. As someone who writes about environmental issues and is beset by not only the whole chemtrail and HAARP crowd but also non-comprehension of basic math and science, skepticism is something I find opportunities to use every hour of my life. The same was true when I worked as a landscaper and as an (accidental) IT person. Directed at my own feelings and motivations, it’s helpful in getting through troubles in interpersonal relationships. It helps keep me from buying sugar pills when I have a cold. It’s crucial practice.
But I have to confess that for the last couple of years, every time I hear someone announce that they’re A Skeptic™ as though no further explication is necessary, this is how my brain parses that. Tell me what you actually do with your skepticism, and I may well be really interested. But claiming that the practice itself is enough to define you? Call me skeptical.
He asked to interview me for a documentary he’s doing. I agreed because I knew exactly what he was going to ask me…and I was right, there were no surprises at all.
He started by asking me for evidence of evolution. I tried to explain the evidence for speciation in sticklebacks, but he asked if they were still fish, and when I said they were, he said that didn’t count because they didn’t become a different “kind”, like a dog becoming a cat. So I told him that doesn’t happen in a single lifetime, and that carnivores diverged over 60 million years ago. I suggested he look at fossils, but he rejected that, because he wanted “observable” evidence, and anything that happened millions of years ago isn’t observable. So I said it was, too — fossils and molecular evidence are observable.
So the usual creationist run-around, where he defines what evidence he’d find acceptable by rejecting historical evidence as nonexistent, and contemporary evidence as too trivial.
Then he tried the usual stunt: “Are you a good person?” “Yes.” “Have you ever told a lie?” “Yes, but that a person has flaws doesn’t make them a bad person. The overall estimation of an individual’s character is not determined by one mistake.” And then he dropped the whole line of discussion.
It was as pointless as I expected. I think I managed to frustrate his usual line of patter, which was the best I could hope for anyway.
Hey, lots of people were taking pictures of the two of us. Send them to me, so I have a memento!
That’s Jessica Ahlquist dueling Margaret Downey with a banana in the foreground; the far less interesting event in the background is Ray Comfort asking me about evolution. (Photo by Kent Martin.)
Also, some of you in the comments are psychic. Yes, I mentioned Lenski’s experiment to him: “they’re still just bacteria”. I also explained to him that “just a fish” is meaningless, that we humans are derived fish. He thought that was all weird.
Another photo!
