“We”?

So Daniel Loxton comments on his tent. I found it exceptionally revealing, just not in the way he probably intended.

(From another commenter) Again, it would result in much less heat to declare that atheism/religion in not wiyhin your focus or interest, rather than insisting on a controversial position that plenty of scientists apparently don’t agree with.

(Loxton) I’m not about to accept the controversial positions of handful of atheist activists as representative of the wider view of scientists. (These are, you realize, positions novel enough to them that they felt they were good hooks for controversial books?) But regardless, many skeptics have argued just as you ask: that for reasons of division of labour, skeptics will stick to the testable paranormal claims that we do best. Paul Kurtz, for example, argued in 1999 that,

As I have said, I do not believe, however, that CSICOP or the Skeptical Inquirer should in any way, except tangentially, deal with religious issues. But my reasons are pragmatic, not theoretical. It is simply a question of the division of labor. We lack the resources and expertise to focus on the entire range of scientific questions about religion: biblical archaeological, biblical and koranic criticism, linguistics, psychology, anthropology, sociology, the genetic or environmental roots of religion, etc. It would take us too far afield. We have focused on fringe science and specialized in the paranormal, and we have made important contributions here. Skeptical inquiry in principle should apply equally to economics, politics, ethics, and indeed to all fields of human interest. Surely we cannot possibly evaluate each and every claim to truth that arises. My reasons are thus practical.

Atheist hardliners are no more willing to accept that pragmatic argument than any other. The only answer that will satisfy atheist activists, apparently, is that skeptics must accept that atheist activism is the most important cause in town.

That’s an impasse that skeptics resolve by getting back to our own work.

I think he’s feeling a little exasperation — it’s a cheap and ineffective shot to complain that some scientists write “controversial” books, therefore…what? The only worthwhile books are bland and uncontroversial? And if he’s thinking of, for instance, Dawkins’ book, wrong — atheism wasn’t controversial among scientists at all. It was just a bold move to slap the facts down in front of the public.

But it’s the Kurtz quote that is most remarkable. What jumps out when you read it?

I. I. We. Us. We. We. Who, kemosabe?

Who has specialized in those particular subsets of skepticism? Why, Kurtz, and Loxton, and Swiss, and Shermer, and Dunning, and Radford, and many others. And that’s fine; they should do what they know and what they’re good at. Yet somehow they’ve got this amazing close-minded privilege that what they are doing, their local “we”, is what their entire constituency, the more global “we” of all skeptics, should be doing.

Are these people even aware that their movement should be more than the desires of a few so-called leaders? That their group is made up of individuals, each with unique talents and interests, and that what determines the focus of the skeptical movement ought to be the ever-changing concerns of the people in the movement, and that as the movement grows (as we hope it would), the wider pool of talent would broaden the range of interests?

If an atheist joins the skeptical movement, and says she wants to work on the harm religion does to society, what are you going to tell her? “No, you have to study the wily chupacabra”? If an atheist joins the skeptical movement, does that mean some High Poo-Bah goes up to Daniel Loxton, and orders him, “Put down that keyboard, Loxton, we’re sending you off to rural America to blow up a church, because we’re all atheist hardliners now”?

No. And it’s idiotic to fret over it. I’ve been listening to the gay marriage debate in the Minnesota House this afternoon, and the skeptics sound so much like the conservatives — somehow, opening the door to different views means that their personal interests are compromised. No, they’re not. Keep on chasing Bigfoot, guys! Keep on doing “your own work”! No one is telling you to stop!

But, you know, if skepticism really is an analytical tool set for examining the world, stop being so damned possessive of it, and let people apply it in ways that reflect their expertise, not yours. Skeptical inquiry should, in principle, apply to all fields of human interest, as Kurtz said. What is impractical is policing skeptical inquiry and straining to keep it from being applied by people who aren’t members of the skeptical elect, who have goals different from the usual white male magicians and libertarian dilettantes. You don’t get to do that.

It’s not your damn tent. It belongs to everyone.

I should have mentioned, and will do so now since it was brought up in the comments, that Kurtz’s “we” was focused on just the organization he was running, and in that it is perfectly appropriate for a specific organization to limit it’s brief to what the personpower within the organization can manage. It requires a deliberate administrative commitment to focus on a topic. An example would be NCSE’s recent expansion from a group that addresses evolution education to one that addresses evolution and climate change. This is very different from what a larger movement can do; there, expertise can bubble up from the base.

John Shook weighs in now

And he offers a historical perspective on Skepticism and Religion.

Enlightenment theologians had to strike a bargain with scientific skepticism since they were terrified by a different, far older kind of skepticism: ancient Greek Skepticism. This rationalistic skepticism demanded high standards of provability before accepting anything as knowledge. The basic idea for a rationalist skeptic during the Enlightenment was something like this: Where reason and empirical inquiry cannot confirm, it must be disbelieved as unreasonable. For this rationalist skepticism, all the gods must go. The core of religion, and not just the claptrap, is entirely unreasonable and unbelievable, since no theological argument demonstrates a god’s existence and no empirical evidence is sufficient to support a god’s existence. Instead of saying "No Comment" to religion’s core claims, rationalist skepticism says "That’s unreasonable for anyone to accept."

To this day, many skeptics rely on both scientific skepticism and rationalist skepticism. It’s all about the appropriate use of reason. That is why being a genuine skeptic means being a disbeliever and being open about disbelieving everything religions talk about. But joining up with this current Skeptic(TM) movement means never having to tell the faithful how their god isn’t real. Is that too big a price to pay, to get more science accommodated by society?

To answer that last question, yes, it’s much too high a price to pay, especially since we aren’t getting a reasonable return on the investment. Science is a disruptive, revolutionary force, and lying about its implications does not lead to acceptance — it leads only to acceptance of an insipid shadow of science.

Sean Carroll is wise

In a piece explaining why he won’t take Templeton money, Sean Carroll says why promoting godlessness is important. It’s how the universe works, something quite fundamental to how science operates.

Think of it this way. The kinds of questions I think about—origin of the universe, fundamental laws of physics, that kind of thing—for the most part have no direct impact on how ordinary people live their lives. No jet packs are forthcoming, as the saying goes. But there is one exception to this, so obvious that it goes unnoticed: belief in God. Due to the efforts of many smart people over the course of many years, scholars who are experts in the fundamental nature of reality have by a wide majority concluded that God does not exist. We have better explanations for how things work. The shift in perspective from theism to atheism is arguably the single most important bit of progress in fundamental ontology over the last 500 years. And it matters to people … a lot.

Or at least, it would matter, if we made it more widely known. It’s the one piece of scientific/philosophical knowledge that could really change people’s lives. So in my view, we have a responsibility to get the word out—to not be wishy-washy on the question of religion as a way of knowing, but to be clear and direct and loud about how reality really works. And when we blur the lines between science and religion, or seem to contribute to their blurring, or even just not minding very much when other people blur them, we do the world a grave disservice. Religious belief exerts a significant influence over how the world is currently run—not just through extremists, but through the well-meaning liberal believers who very naturally think of religion as a source of wisdom and moral guidance, and who define the middle ground for sociopolitical discourse in our society. Understanding the fundamental nature of reality is a necessary starting point for productive conversations about morality, justice, and meaning. If we think we know something about that fundamental nature—something that disagrees profoundly with the conventional wisdom—we need to share it as widely and unambiguously as possible. And collaborating with organizations like Templeton inevitably dilutes that message.

“Testable claims” is used as a “religious exemption”

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.

Gene Mims and the mysterious missing point

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.

Will Smith must be stopped

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.

The tent metaphor gets a workout

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.

What’s the harm of “Mission Drift”?

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!