The most despised science reviewer of 2012 is…

We’re through the looking glass again, with another weird post from the Guardian’s pet anti-science writer, the philosopher/theologian Mark Vernon. He’s never met a critic of science he didn’t love, and every scientist is a promoter of scientism. He’s a knee-jerk teleologist, which is a fancy way of saying he sees god everywhere.

His latest is apparently an annual thing in which he announces “the most despised book” of the year. What that means is that it’s a book that’s recognized as bullshit by scientists, so by reflex he assumes it must be wonderful. In 2010, he gave it to Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini for a book that was genetically illiterate nonsense. In 2011 it was a book I know nothing about, but claimed that neuroscience could never explain the mind. In 2012, the runner-up was Rupert Sheldrake, who seems to be Vernon’s good buddy (I am not surprised), but the big prize goes to Thomas Nagel, who’s a well-regarded philosopher who dropped a big clinker this year, with a book that claims we ought to consider Intelligent Design more seriously.

I’ve skimmed Nagel’s book, and it’s a lot of ponderous musing with no foundation in evidence at all. Vernon’s article is no better. It’s enough that Nagel is an advocate for teleology, and that’s really all he can say about it: “he wonders whether science needs to entertain the possibility that a teleological trend is immanent in nature.” “Wondering” is cheap, evidence is hard. He basically finds it inconceivable that all of the universe could have natural causes, so therefore science is inadequate, so therefore we ought to be considering supernatural factors.

You know, that’s a really stupid argument. If you want the details on the poverty of Nagel’s book, read Leiter & Weisberg’s review.

But if you want to claim that there is a purpose or a pattern of goal-seeking behavior by the universe as a whole, show your work. Give me good cause to think there is positive evidence of something shaping our history; don’t just cite your incomprehension.

Well, unless that is you want to win an award from Mark Vernon. Unfortunately, that’s worth less than nothing.

Let’s make Houston cancer quack Burzynski pay!

We’re coming up on Burzynski’s 70th birthday — it’s a bit ironic that the man responsible for so many shattered hopes has had such a long life himself — and there is a plan to remind him of the grief he has caused.

Burzynski, if you’ve forgotten, is the guy who claims to have a cancer treatment called antineoplastons, a small set of compounds isolated from urine that he injects at high dosages into cancer patients. These drugs have not had their efficacy demonstrated, but Burzynski keeps cycling through clinical trials, taking the preliminary steps to demonstrating scientific utility, but never quite advancing the results to the point where they can demonstrate significance. He’s cunning that way; by constantly playing the game and running the mill of phase II trials, he puts up a pretense of scientific seriousness, but he never goes further, where his snake oil would be shown to be ineffective. Burzynski’s claims are total nonsense.

What he does do is promise remarkable results, and bilk people out of buckets of money — tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars gouged out of desperate patients — and then go home to his 6 million dollar, gated, wooded estate. Crime does pay, and it pays well. This fraud is living in luxury while his patients pour money into his clinic in the frantic hope that maybe the sciencey-sounding jargon of his well-practiced spiel means they’ll really get a cure.

They don’t. You can read the accounts of the other Burzynski patients — the ones he’d rather you didn’t know about. The Burzynski clinic is a place you go to die, and pay extravagantly for the privilege.

Right now, he and his propagandists are claiming to be doing “Personalized Gene-Targeted Cancer Therapy”, and touting the relevance of information from the human genome project for their treatment. But they’re still just injecting people with concentrated extracts of human urine! The lies are simply outrageous, but nothing seems to hinder him from making them.

Burzynski has plenty of lawyers and has fended off many attempts to shut down his quackery, so what can you do? We can raise money for a legitimate cancer center, St Jude’s Children’s Hospital, and challenge him on his birthday to match our contributions. The goal is to raise at least $30,000, an amount that is minuscule compared to the millions he has bilked from the sick and dying, but the point is to shame the man, and maybe get some money redirected to legitimate hospitals, where it can do some real good.

Read the latest on Burzynski from Science-Based Medicine, and get angry/inspired. Every penny raised does double-duty, making both a contribution to real medical work, and helping to raise attention about this shameless quack.

Donate!

It must be fun to be an atheist in Italy

Like that other historically strongly Catholic country, Ireland, Italy has to have some special challenges to the atheist community. Fortunately, they’ve got an active atheist group, Unione degli Atei e degle Agnostici Razionalisti (google translation) and they have an agenda (google translation).

Have you ever noticed that all these diverse atheist groups, when they settle on a set of goals, always end up being on the liberal/progressive end of the spectrum? The Italian group, in addition to wanting religious interference out of the government and schools (which I can see as reasonable aspirations for either conservative or liberal organizations) also supports a social progressive agenda of ending discrimination on sexual orientation, open availability of contraception, gay marriage, equality for women, stem cell research, evolution, etc.

Also, isn’t it weird that any of those issues should be associated with liberal positions, rather than conservative ones? Maybe one of the goals of conservatives ought to be bringing their ideology in better alignment with reality.

Kent Hovind has been honored

Hovind has been inducted into the Creation Science Hall of Fame, which is nothing but a website run by a crank. It seems a fitting honor.

I was amused that half the write-up about him had to consist of making excuses for the fact that he’s a jailbird, though.

The Creation Science Hall of Fame believes that Kent is in jail out of principle, and not deceit as per our discovery.

Kent Hovind is a tax protester. His is only one of many tax protests that Americans, from time to time, have lodged in the federal courts. Did Kent make mistakes during his attempt to prove his point? Yes, and he admits to them. None of us are perfect.

What the judicial system calls “tax crimes” was an attempt to invalidate the tax structure. In America at least, the simplest way to get standing to invalidate a law as unconstitutional is to break said law and suffer punishment for said breach. Kent Hovind gambled that he would find a righteous judge. He lost. And his experience bears witness to us all that our entire national judiciary is willing to accept disagreements on principle as illegal acts worthy of punishment. This is why the Creation Science Hall of Fame believes that Dr. Kent Hovind is in jail out of principle and not deceit and that he should be honored, especially among the Christians who believe in a super natural creation as described in Genesis by God.

He cheated on his taxes and lied about it; he made efforts to conceal his income by, for instance, making multiple bank withdrawals of less than $10,000 in order to avoid automatic reporting, and he also paid employees under the table to avoid having to pay taxes on that. He was not standing up for a principle, he was doing his damnedest to avoid getting caught lining his own greedy pockets.

(via Robert Baty)

Eric Hovind has shown up in the comments to claim that none of my allegations are true. However, the wikipedia summary of the charges is clear.

On July 11, 2006, Hovind was charged in the District Court in Northern Florida in Pensacola with twelve counts of willful failure to collect, account for, and pay over federal income taxes and FICA taxes, forty-five counts of knowingly structuring transactions in federally insured financial institutions to evade reporting requirements, and one count of corruptly endeavoring to obstruct and impede the administration of the internal revenue laws. Twelve of the charges were for failing to pay employee-related taxes, totaling $473,818, and 45 of the charges were for evading reporting requirements by making multiple cash withdrawals just under the $10,000 reporting requirement (a technique known as “smurfing”). The withdrawals, totaling $430,500, were made in 2001 and 2002. Jo Delia Hovind, his wife, faced 44 charges.

He and his wife were found guilty on all charges. Every one.

I think youtube culture really has gone pathological

OK, people, you insisted and demanded and rebuked me for not watching Thunderf00t’s latest video, so I did.

It was a great steaming pile of dishonest, sleazy shit, disgraceful propaganda to serve the cause of sexism.

Guess what? I’m never taking your advice again. Jerks. What a waste of time.

At least one good thing has come out of it, though: Michael Nugent takes it apart piece by piece. I can tell he was as appalled by the shameful smears as I was.

I also hadn’t realized until I watched it that Thunderf00t concludes by calling on conference organizers to blackball Rebecca Watson, Melody Hensley, Amy Roth, me, and all those other people who want to make the events respectful of women. It’s truly remarkable. He’s been whining about censorship! and bannings! and FREE SPEECH! yet here he is, organizing his followers to bombard secular leaders to silence feminists. I haven’t seen anything remotely similar from our side of this argument, yet here is the champion of holy sacred FREE SPEECH calling on his mob to ostracize people he disagrees with.

His priorities are genuinely screwed up, and if anyone is guilty of hypocrisy, it’s Phil Mason. Michael Nugent gets it right:

Please consider channeling your passion for freedom of expression into our fight for the right of people to express their secular beliefs without being beaten or jailed or killed for blasphemy, instead of fighting for the imaginary right of the Wooly Bumblebee to call Melody Hensley a twat on YouTube without having her video flagged.

The Paingod

Once upon a time, there was a little paingod attached to humanity. It was mostly benign and useful; it was there to warn people not to step into that patch of thorns, that that spearpoint was sharp, that fire was hot, that you’d regret drinking that whole skin of beer in the morning. It brought with it the gift of empathy and forethought, as well, so the people were mainly well-served by its presence.

Humanity prospered and grew, and the paingod got ever busier; as societies got larger, not only were there more people experiencing or avoiding pain, but the complexity of their lives created new opportunities for pain. New diseases erupted in the denser populations, wars flared up between competing city-states, social stratification created breeding grounds for envy and contempt. The paingod also grew.

Now this is the thing about gods of all types: they are ambitious. They all aspire to be the greatest manifestation of their gift that they can be. After all, people had been defining god as “that than which nothing greater can be conceived”, so there was definitely pressure to escalate — if it wasn’t the greatest of all possible paingods, then it really wasn’t a god at all, now was it?

But now comes the tricky part. The paingod served humanity, and that was also an essential part of its existence. It could not simply lash out and promote death and suffering, like a cartoonish cult in a cheesy sword-and-sorcery novel; no, it had to convince people that their personal pain was a great boon, get them to revel in it, and also get them to willingy define their existence by their suffering. Then the paingod would be the the ultimate deity!

And so was hatched a cunning plan. The paingod would ask everyone to give it their pain as a gift; it would present itself as a savior to the world, telling everyone that they can find salvation from the suffering they experience by consecrating it to the paingod, that it loved them so much that it would accept their burdens and bear them for humanity. And it spread a story that claimed the paingod took on the form of a man and suffered heinous torture and died in agony, just to prove it was willing to take on the very worst that people could offer.

It was actually true. The man, though, was symbolic; it was the paingod, and it experienced every death and felt every person’s agony. There was no sudden change in the paingod’s role, only a clever semantic twist: now you metaphorically bestowed your unhappiness on the paingod as an offering, and it was no longer your fault or your responsibility, or anyone’s responsibility, really. It was the paingod’s will. Your duty was to bear up under it, and thank the paingod for sharing it with you.

And so it came to be that the people accepted the paingod’s rationale. When the inequities of their society bore them down, they wouldn’t rise up to change them — they’d go to the paingod’s church and praise it. When the paingod’s acolytes enthusiastically embraced their role in giving charity — after all, the poor and hurting were clearly the most blessed of the paingod’s subjects — they subverted that role into one of maintaining poverty and disease. They would provide a quiet place for people to die as slowly as possible, every moment one of redemption as you shared your pain with the paingod.

Every improvement that reduced the people’s suffering was shunned, and every social change that might make pariahs appreciated for who they were was discouraged. The paingod rules, and the only way the paingod can grow in power is if the misery of our existence were made the central focus of our lives.

And now we live in the world the paingod made, and true to form, it’s a world of pain.

We can’t end the pain, but we can kill the paingod and end the cycle of reinforcement. We can own our pain. It’s not the god’s, it’s ours — we don’t reduce it by pretending to share it with a supernatural being. We cause pain in others, and we don’t minimize it by claiming our sins are redeemed by the paingod — we accept the fault as our own, and struggle to change and repair and redeem ourselves. Tell the paingod that nobody died for your sins, they can’t…because they’re yours. The suffering we cause, the inequities we propagate, the unfairness and misery of a world split between those who have and those who don’t, those are all our responsibility, and no one else’s, especially not a paingod who feeds on grief and regret and sorrow and harm.

Keith Kloor responds

And it’s even worse than I expected. I had presentiments of failure: last night he tweeted this at me.

kloor

Talk about completely missing the point…he had previously written a post quoting Saul Bellow saying science was unsatisfying; I was baffled about why he thought Bellow was a particularly insightful contributor on this topic, especially since his comment was so banal and ignorant. I was NOT suggesting that he needed to get a better-ranked author to convince me; I’ve got nothing against Bellow’s literary contributions. But that seems to be the only thing he took away from my post.

So now he’s put up a short post (promising more later) which consists of little more than a quotation from Margaret Atwood.

I think that the religious strand is probably part of human hard-wiring…by religious strand, I don’t mean any particular religion, I mean the part of human beings that feels that the seen world is not the only world, that the world you see is not the only world that there is and that it can become awestruck. If that is the case, religion was selected for in the Pleistocene by many, many millennia of human evolution.

Like the Bellow quote, I really have nothing against the source; in fact, I’ve enjoyed the writings of both Atwood and Bellow. My complaint is with the abysmal vacuity of the content, and the fact that Kloor seems to be playing a game of Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. It doesn’t advance the argument to quote someone else saying something wrong. (Although he probably feels it gives him cover.)

I will congratulate him on dodging my accommodationist bingo card — there were so many possibilities to fit into a mere 25 boxes, and “religion is hardwired” didn’t make the cut, because I really didn’t think he’d be so stupid as to trot that one out.

“Awe” is probably hardwired as an emotional response. The effort to try to comprehend the world around us is probably hardwired into our brains. Religion isn’t. Religion is a parasitic phenomenon that short-circuits honest sensations, the desire to understand and our humility before the complexity of the universe, and plugs in a false belief that we do understand everything to resolve the two. That’s my objection: not that there are sincere and interesting questions about our place in the cosmos, but that religion lies and claims to have all the answers. Yet when we actually look at what religion focuses on, it’s all petty trivial dogma and weird justifications for tribal cosmetics.

What the New Atheists actually argue is that we aren’t giving up wonder, but that we focus on real paths to knowing and understanding, rather than the delusions of prophecy and pettifogging scriptural interpretation and blithe acceptance of the inanity of “god did it.”

And then this final gambit is ludicrous.

You’d that think the atheists who are evolutionary biologists would be able to process this with their super-rational minds. And that they (Myers, Coyne et al) would be smart enough to recognize that one-size-fits all denunciation is likely counterproductive to their goal.

There must be a name for this logical fallacy: “You accept [broad scientific discipline], therefore you ought to accept [my quirky and unfounded personal interpretation of it]!”

I have little hope that his continuation of this discussion will be any better.

Sweet jebus, he’s continuing — and just when I can’t imagine him getting any dumber, he says this:

I don’t understand why he’s making such a big issue of me quoting writers like Saul Bellow and Margaret Atwood.

Aargh! No! I haven’t made a big issue of it — I was baffled by why he was making those quotes the centerpiece of his argument, and why he was making such a big issue of the quotes. But that’s all he sees.

I’m done with him. He’s too stupid to argue with further.

Accommodationists are so easy to outguess

Brace yourselves. Keith Kloor promises to rebut me once he finishes watching some football game today.

Just to make it easier for him, though, I threw together a simple accommodationist bingo card. Let’s see if he can do it while avoiding these extraordinarily cliched words and concepts.

accommbingo

I’m going to predict it will be the same old tired whine, without a single original idea in it.

The new definition of “fundamentalist”

Keith Kloor, a journalist and blogger at Discover, really doesn’t like those fundamentalist atheists and he echoes those ridiculous comments by Peter Higgs.

The other big argument waged by a vocal group of prominent scientists involves the assertion that science is incompatible with religion. This insistence by the likes of Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne is a puzzler. As someone who dislikes dogma of any kind and distrusts vested powers, I’m no fan of institutional religion. I’m also an atheist. But I see no value in making an enemy of virtually the whole world. What’s more, an argument that lumps together the Taliban, the Dali Lama, and Jesus strikes me as rather simplistic. The atheists who frequently disparage religion for all its faults don’t dare acknowledge that it has any redeeming value, or that it provides some meaning for those who can’t (or aren’t yet ready) to derive existential meaning from reason alone.

This sneering and strident approach by the religion haters is not just bad manners, it is puritanical. That’s what scientist Peter Higgs (of Higgs Boson fame) is getting at with his recent sharp criticism of Dawkins.

Jerry Coyne has already replied, but that comment was so appallingly dumb that I have to chime in.

This isn’t a matter of making an enemy of the whole world; it’s an issue of scientific integrity. Are you going to sit back and let people say things that are wrong simply because you’re afraid to annoy them? And yes, you can legitimately lump together the Taliban, the Dali Lama, and Jesus together on certain traits: they’re all three promoting superstition and falsehoods. That doesn’t mean you think the Dali Lama blows up statues, or that Jesus is crusading for Tibetan independence.

I am unimpressed with this constant claim that religion has redeeming value. What is it? That it provides dishonest answers to questions that trouble people? How is that a virtue? Only apologists for religion seem to think it is.

And now Kloor has doubled down with a reply to Coyne.

He quotes Saul Bellow. Seriously, dude: Saul Bellow? Why? He’s a good writer, but does he have some special authority on this matter?

What do you think happens at death?

This I don’t know, but I don’t think everything is resolved with the destruction of the body. What science has to say seems to me insufficient and unsatisfying.

Saul Bellow’s dissatisfaction with an honest truth is not an argument. It’d be like me saying I’m unsatisfied with astronomy because it doesn’t have enough squid in it, or that science education needs more parades and trumpets. Your personal expectation of what reality ought to deliver is not a valid criticism; I’m not going to claim that Islam fails because 72 virgins isn’t enough. (If only they promised 73, I’d convert in a flash.)

To wave away the persistent questions and yearnings that still drive the religious impulse as merely the last bastion of ignorant superstition is, as I wrote here, “inconsistent with the spirit of science.”

The assertion that religion and science are incompatible has become an article of faith for some–a kind of dogma that I recently discussed in this post. Aside from this being a form of fundamentalism, I also said that I saw no constructive use “in making an enemy of virtually the whole world” by broadly denigrating all religious believers.

I’m not waving away the yearnings, they’re real enough, and we all have them. I’m waving away the goddamned answers as inadequate, contradictory, and false.

You do realize, Mr Kloor, that that’s what religion promises? Not more questions (if that were the case, it would be philosophy), but deep cosmic truths, answers hallowed by nothing more than generations of prophets pulling stories out of their asses? It is “inconsistent with the spirit of science” to simply accept those claims unquestioned, to assume that there is some validity to them because you’re afraid that pointing out the flaws might be regarded as “denigrating all religious believers.”

If telling people that they are wrong is denigrating, then my profession of education is dedicated to denigration.

I guess it also makes me a fundamentalist, if your definition of fundamentalis is lacking in reverence for the unsupported authoritarian dogma of religion, and feeling no respect for faith at all.

Spleen venting, or the inadequacy of twitter

For the last few days, my twitter account has been getting spammed by some twit named @lettlander; he seems to be one of those Christians who is infatuated with the First Cause argument. Here’s a small sampling:

@f0xhole @pzmyers @Pipenta something appearing out of nothing isn’t just scientifically impossible – it’s logically self-refuting.

@f0xhole @pzmyers @Pipenta The ONLY way the problem of an infinite regress can be solved is the postulation of an extra-natural element

@f0xhole @pzmyers @Pipenta Besides, you’re perfectly fine with scientifically asserting the universe was uncaused, right? Why not “God”?

@f0xhole @pzmyers @Pipenta Since science and philosophy lead us to a concept of a contingent universe, a non-contingent element must exist

Don’t you just love how these guys pompously dress themselves up as philosophers and scientists to defend the silly notion of a god? But let’s go through those one by one.

1. Something appearing out of nothing is impossible? Tell that to Lawrence Krauss and other physicists. Not only can it theoretically happen, it happens all the time. We must be done already — he’s simply wrong.

2. Since I don’t accept the premise that simple causation is present at all levels, microscopic and macroscopic, no, I don’t have to postulate an “extra-natural element”. The initial cause could have been a quantum fluctuation in nothingness, nothing more. I certainly don’t have to postulate a grand, intelligent cosmic being.

3. Caused, uncaused, it doesn’t matter — show me the evidence for an intelligent agent at the beginning of the universe. I’m not a physicist, though, so I’m neither an authority nor a committed proponent of any particular model of origins, and I’ll heed instead what people like Krauss and Hawking and Stenger say…and they all argue that god is an unnecessary hypothesis.

Why not “god”? Why not a purple space gerbil? Why not snot from the nose of the Great Green Arkleseizure? Even if @lettlander were correct and there was a reasonable logical argument for a necessary first cause, it wouldn’t mean Jesus was the one.

4. On the large visible scale, the scale that we perceive and operate under, it is true that we see a pattern of contingency, where one event leads to another. But on the quantum scale, that is no longer true: science and philosophy lead us to a completely different, unintuitive understanding of how the universe works, and the naive and silly guesses of theologians do not apply.

And isn’t it cute how these kooks blithely reduce their omnipotent, omniscient god to “non-contingent element”? It’s as if they expect that if we acknowledge the possibility of a spontaneous accident, a fleck, a speck and spatter of a singular dot of existence that is not the product of a causal chain, then they’ve proven the existence of the Christian God, the truth of the Bible, and the veracity of their own personal dogma.

Sorry about all that. I couldn’t fit that all in a tweet — although I suppose I could have reduced it to a simple accusation of “bullshit!” It’s just that these presumptuous pseudoscientists who claim science supports their cult leave me cold and contemptuous.