In which I join Michael Shermer in disagreeing with Jerry Coyne, and Coyne in disagreeing with Shermer

Although, to be fair, I think we’re mostly in agreement but talking past one another because of our prioritizing of certain premises.

Michael Shermer thinks that “the most any natural science could ever discover in the way of a deity would be a natural intelligence sufficiently advanced to be god-like but still within the realm of the natural world.”; Jerry Coyne claims that there could be, in principle, evidence for a supernatural god — there just isn’t.

My position is that we cannot find evidence for a god, that the God Hypothesis is invalid and unacceptable, because “god” is an incoherent concept that has not been defined. I could claim that a spumboodle exists, for instance, and we could go around and around with you presenting hypothetical examples and listing potential entities or forces that are spumboodles, but we’ll get nowhere if I never tell you what the heck a spumboodle is or what it does or even how I recognize a spumboodle. Without that, the whole concept is untestable and unverifiable. It really doesn’t count if I insist that something undefined exists, and then keep jiggling between vague realities (it exists in our dimension! It has a color!) and contradictory guesswork (it’s transdimensional! And completely invisible!) designed to keep moving the spumboodle away from any possibility of honest evaluation.

Coyne accepts the wobble. On the one hand, he is insisting on general principle in the possibility of existence of a divine being (I think a clear and unambiguous definition of “divine” is a prerequisite for that), but on the other he’s willing to substitute a mundane creature with only unexplainable abilities for “divine”.

Well, yes, we wouldn’t know whether a divine being was absolutely omniscient and omnipotent, or relatively more omniscient or omnipotent than us. But if the degree of, say, omnipotence and omniscience is sufficiently large (i.e, any miracle can be worked, all things can be foretold), then I think we can say provisionally that there is a God. I’ve previously described the kind of evidence that I’d provisionally accept for a divine being, including messages written in our DNA or in a pattern of stars, the reappearance of Jesus on earth in a way that is well documented and convincing to scientists, along with the ability of this returned Jesus to do things like heal amputees. Alternatively, maybe only the prayers of Catholics get answered, and the prayers of Muslims, Jews, and other Christians, don’t.

Yes, maybe aliens could do that, and maybe it would be an alien trick to imitate Jesus (combined with an advanced technology that could regrow limbs), but so what? I see no problem with provisionally calling such a being “God”—particularly if it comports with traditional religious belief—until proven otherwise. What I can say is “this looks like God, but we should try to find out more. In the meantime, I’ll provisionally accept it.” That, of course, depends on there being a plethora of evidence. As we all know, there isn’t.

And that’s where he loses me. What does it mean to be relatively omniscient or omnipotent? If our criterion is that the being has to be a certain amount more powerful than us to be defined as a god, what is that amount? The sun is much larger than us, and has far more power than we do…is it a god? Or will that suggestion be met by the sudden appearance of additional criteria to constantly exclude all entities from consideration that don’t also meet certain unstated requirements?

What I want is something like the Higgs boson: a description of a set of properties, inferred and observed, that can be used as a reasonable boundary for identifying the phenomenon. If you’re going to dignify it with the term “hypothesis”, there ought to be some little bit of substance there, even if it’s speculative. The god proponents can’t even do that. God beliefs are remarkably specific — belief in Jesus as an admission ticket to paradise, for instance — but somehow, when it gets down to saying who, what, where, when, and why, they all fly to pieces, and when it comes to saying how they know of its existence, all goes silent, or subsides into ritualistic repetitious chanting of words from a holy book.

The only way to win this game is to not play. Don’t concede the possibility that X might exist unless you’ve got clear criteria for defining the bounds of X’s existence, and it’s up to the advocates for X to provide that basic foundation. If they can’t do that, reject the whole mess before you brain gets sucked into a twisty morass of convoluted theological BS.

(By the way, I do agree with Coyne on one thing: I also reject Shermer’s a priori commitment to methodological naturalism. If a source outside the bounds of what modern science considers the limits of natural phenomena is having an observable effect, we should take its existence into account. If Catholic prayers actually affected medical outcomes, we shouldn’t reject it out of hand because of the possibility of a supernatural source. But it’s still not evidence for a god, unless you’re going to commit to defining god as a force that responds to remote invocation via standard Catholic ritual chants by increasing healing…in which case god becomes something we can disprove, and also faces the prospect of consolidation with other phenomena. Maybe god becomes the placebo response, for instance, in which case he’s been reduced to something feeble.)

What? You can just get a blog post published in a journal?

Especially a paper about scientific fraud that uses this clever figure? (It’s short and openly accessible, go ahead and read it.)

I’m envious. But then, it is a pretty good summary of the kinds of wickedness some scientists are up to. I’d have to put a few of the scientists in the ENCODE consortium in level II, and evolutionary psychology is definitely condemned to level III.

It’s titled the nine circles of scientific hell, so sorry, creationists don’t even register.

Think of it as God’s bloody practical joke

Wow. I had no idea that some Catholics would go so far as to prevent simple procedures to remove ectopic pregnancies. These are conditions in which the zygote implants in the wrong place — the fallopian tube, rather than the uterus. The embryo can grow for a while, but not long, before it reaches a size that ruptures the fallopian tube and causes the mother to bleed to death. The solution is easy: either surgically remove the doomed embryo before it can become deadly, or use a drug, methotrexate, that kills dividing cells to destroy it.

But no, that’s an abortion and some Catholic hospitals prohibit even procedures that would end an utterly futile pregnancy.

Yes, some Catholic ethicists argue that the catholic “Directives” preclude physicians at Catholic hospitals from managing ectopic pregnancies in a way that involves direct action on the embryo. So a woman can have her whole tube removed (an unnecessary procedure that could reduce her future fertility), but she can not have the pregnancy plucked out (as is done with the standard therapy, a salpingostomy, where a small incision is made in the tube and the pregnancy removed) and she most certainly could not have the methotrexate.

How common is this practice? Well, it is pretty sad that someone had to study it. According to a study from 2011 by Foster e. al., (Womens Health Issues, 2011) some Catholic hospitals refuse to offer methotrexate (three in this study of 16 hospitals). The lack of methotrexate resulted in changes in therapy, transferring patients to other facilities, and even administering it surreptitiously. All of these expose women to unnecessary risks, expense and are, quite frankly, wrong.

These patients who are turned away go, we hope, to less ideologically abusive hospitals, where they get treated. Imagine a country with nothing but Catholic hospitals, though: they’d be sending these women away to die.

I have no understanding at all of the logic that justifies a Catholic hospital refusing to remove a deadly embryo, but does allow them to chop out the whole organ bearing the deadly embryo, at a cost of reduced fertility. It seems somehow un-Catholic…but on the other hand, the fact that it requires twisted theological logic that ignores basic human needs makes it profoundly Catholic.

The principles of atheism promote a positive ethics

Last week, the Irish Times published an opinion piece that was generally quite positive about atheism, but also perpetuated a stereotype.

Ireland is seeing the emergence of a newer kind of atheist, who is anxious to dispel the myth that they are all one-dimensional, rabidly anti-religious Dawkinsians.

It then goes on to praise charitable efforts by atheists, the emergence of the Atheism Plus movement, and the ongoing discussions about ethics within the atheist community (like I said, it’s mostly a nice article saying good things about atheists). However, it’s as if the author is surprised that we aren’t all out hanging priests from lampposts and blowing up churches.

But that’s wrong. The New Atheist movement has always been about applying reason and evidence-based thinking to everything, without exception. Atheism+ was established by aggressive, out atheists who do not compromise on the foolishness of faith, and take the very same take-no-prisoners approach on social justice issues.

In 2010, atheists met and formulated the Copenhagen Declaration (see also the Irish amendment). These are entirely ‘Dawkinsian’ in spirit!

It is actually no surprise at all that atheism is taking this direction. The only people who have been surprised are that obnoxious subset of atheists who thought nobody would ever expect them to defend their viciously anti-equality views rationally and with evidence — they’ve gotten a bit of a shock when they’ve found themselves marginalized and regarded with contempt. But they are well out of the mainstream of the New Atheist movement, and are reduced to angrily lashing out on the internet against the decent human beings who make up the bulk of our godless horde.

Michael Nugent has written an excellent article rebutting some of the misconceptions in the original opinion piece, which has also been published in the Irish Times.

“New Atheism” as promoted by Richard Dawkins has always combined promotion of critical thinking and science, strong rejection of religious beliefs that are unsupported by evidence, active campaigns against the harm caused by religion around the world, and philanthropic and charitable projects such as Nonbelievers Giving Aid and Foundation Beyond Belief.

Atheist Ireland is part of this evolving project, not a deviation from it. We promote atheism and reason over supernaturalism and superstition, and we promote an ethical and secular Ireland where the State does not support or fund or give special treatment to any religion.

We reject religious beliefs that are silly in their claims about reality, such as intervening personal gods who answer prayers and impregnate virgins to give birth to themselves; and religious beliefs that are harmful in their corruption of human morality, from Catholic sexism and homophobia to Islamic floggings and executions for blasphemy.

We believe that society should address ethical issues based on human rights and compassion, and applying reason to empirical evidence, and not on religious doctrines; and that individual ethical decisions should where possible be made on the basis of personal autonomy and individual conscience, while not infringing on the rights of others.

This is not to deny that there are jerks among atheists — but the principles of the New Atheism have always been clear, and the imperfections of humanity should not be regarded as a slight against the ideals to which we aspire.

Godless Patriots

You need more t-shirts. You need some with a positive patriotic message so you can dumbfound all the yokels who think atheists hate America. Here’s the place you can find them: Godless Patriots.

They’re just starting up, and they’re looking for business and assistance — they also have a kickstarter page where they’re trying to raise money to expand their inventory.

They’re nice designs, and this isn’t mindless patriotism. They’ve got shirts for Americans and for the British.

Take a look and pick one up.

Screw those women and neuroscientists, we should let Kant make abortion decisions!

William Egginton has an op-ed in the NYT in which he suggests that neuroscience might challenge Roe v. Wade. It’s long — about 1900 words — and it’s revealing that in all the ambiguous fudging about whether a fetus is conscious, there is no consideration at all for the woman wrapped around it. In fact, she isn’t even mentioned…not once. Yes, it’s another man pontificating on the rights and privileges of the fetus as if the pregnant woman were not there. It’s astonishing how completely women vanish when they get pregnant — it’s as if some people can only see women as an incubator for the Holy and Sacred Child.

It starts out promisingly, discussing an Idaho law called the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act”, which tries to outlaw abortions by claiming that fetuses can feel pain. This is a neuroscientific claim. So Egginton asks,

So why not call an actual neuroscientist as an expert witness instead of a scholar of the humanities?

And I thought for a moment that Egginton, who I hadn’t heard of before, was perhaps a neuroscientist offering up his expertise. Alas, at the end I discover that he’s the “Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities at the Johns Hopkins University”. He’s not making an informed contribution on the science, apparently his goal is to “criticize the hubris of scientific claims to knowledge that exceeds the boundaries of what the sciences in fact demonstrate.” So that was actually a rhetorical question which is answered by the fact that he thinks neuroscientists aren’t actually good witnesses on subjects of neuroscience. OK.

Reminder: it still isn’t an argument in which the rights of the pregnant woman are considered.

Fortunately, he dismisses fetal pain as a criterion for prohibiting abortion — not because they don’t experience pain, but because awareness of pain is not a basis for legal prohibitions. Animals feel pain, for instance, and we don’t outlaw farming and hunting. I would suggest that pain awareness is a general feature, like having a heartbeat or two eyes, that isn’t particularly indicative of a special status that demands protection (that doesn’t stop Pro-Life Across America from putting up billboards with pictures of smiling babies saying, “My heart started beating at 28 days!” — it’s an emotional appeal).

Unfortunately, Egginton then arbitrarily replaces “pain” with another amorphous concept, “personhood”.

Those wishing to abolish abortion believe that “the fetus is a ‘person’ within the language and meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment.” If, as Justice Harry A. Blackmun continues in his opinion in 1973, “this suggestion of personhood is established, the appellant’s case, of course, collapses, for the fetus’ right to life would then be guaranteed specifically by the Amendment.” If a fetus is a person, in other words, then it is not a potential human life at all, but is a fully human life deserving of full legal protection, and abortion must be murder and punishable as such. The intent of current fetal pain statutes is, clearly, to infer from the ability to feel pain on the part of a human fetus — if it can be established by neuroscience — a claim for actual human life or full personhood.

Reminder: it still isn’t an argument in which the rights of the pregnant woman are considered.

But then, in an interesting twist, Egginton uses the idea of defining personhood as a bat to pound on anti-choice activists. It would be a big mistake, he suggests, to let scientists define what a person is, because, basically, scientists are reductionist jerks, and science “can tell us nothing about the existence of God, the immortality of the soul, or the origin of human freedom”. He’s wrong. There is no god (and those humanist types can’t even freakin’ define this entity, let alone provide evidence for it), the soul is a ridiculous concept, and freedom is an interesting cognitive illusion and a political idea. He can cite Kant at me all he wants, but science has made great progress in explaining the nature of the universe and ourselves to the point where we definitely don’t know all the answers, but we know enough to constrain the wide range of possible answers to something that precludes the primitive guesses of uninformed old philosophers and theologians.

So Egginton isn’t really making an anti-abortion rant: he’s making an anti-science argument. Interesting.

When science becomes the sole or even primary arbiter of such basic notions as personhood, it ceases to be mankind’s most useful servant and threatens, instead, to become its dictator. Science does not and should not have the power to absolve individuals and communities of the responsibility to choose. This emphatically does not mean that science should be left out of such personal and political debates. The more we know about the world the better positioned we are to make the best possible choices. But when science is used to replace thinking instead of complement it; when we claim to see in its results the reduction of all the complexity that constitutes the emergence of a human life or the choices and responsibilities of the person it may develop into; we relinquish something that Kant showed more than 200 years ago was essential to the very idea of a human being: our freedom.

Well, I was trained as a neuroscientist (I’ve since drifted towards developmental biology), and if I were made dictator of the world, I can tell you what I’d say: “personhood” is not discrete and absolute, so no scientist will be able to declare a black & white switch from non-personhood to personhood (although the reverse is easier: we call it “death”). I would also say that even if we could measure it, “personhood” is a matter of degree and also is a criterion like “pain”: it’s not something we can use as a logical bludgeon to deny abortions. Even the one neuroscientist Egginton cites in his article, Antonio Damasio, talks about degrees of consciousness in animals. So much for the demonization of scientists. We are aware of the limits of our knowledge; it’s unfortunate that professors of the humanities don’t seem to be similarly aware of the boundaries of their domain.

Oh, and if I were the dictator of the world, I’d look into the eyes of the teenager who faces the sacrifice of her dreams if she bears that child, the eyes of the woman whose fetus carries a birth defect, the eyes of the victim of rape, and I’d say…”Your choice — do what is best for your life. It’s your life that matters.” That overrides all other considerations.

I’m a little surprised to learn that humanities professors don’t pay much attention to that sort of thing. Maybe we should exclude them from future deliberations on these matters.

Did anyone attend The Paradigm Symposium?

I’m just curious — The Paradigm Symposium was held last weekend in Minneapolis, featuring such remarkable stars of the wacky contingent as Erich von Däniken, Giorgio Tsoukalos, and George Noory. This is the conference I was invited to attend, but didn’t bother.

For such a glitzily publicized event and a large collection of weird “stars”, though, there isn’t much appearing on the web about it. Maybe everyone who attended was sworn to secrecy as they left, or the Men in Black showed up and wiped all their memories.

Anyway, if you were there and would care to submit a guest post, I’d probably put it up here.

I’ve been told that Eve Siebert attended, and also tweeted about it. Surprise, surprise, the speakers didn’t understand evolution.

Stedman being Stedman

Oh, christ, Chris Stedman has an excerpt from his book Faitheist on Salon. It’s classic Stedman, and classic accommodationism: it’s all about Stedman and how awful atheists are. He does a lot of humble bragging — he goes to a party with a bunch of cold, dead-eyed atheists who treat him dismissively, but hey, his socks have holes in them and he’s sad about how rude atheists are! — and he “quotes” a lot of nameless atheists who say unkind things about religion. His message is that atheism is toxic, and you can’t help but feel that it’s all about how they don’t love Chris Stedman and his wise appreciation of the deepitiness of faith enough.

But don’t you worry about Stedman! After his brutal manhandling by the godless zombies of atheism, he just scurries off to his “weekly religion class at Loyola University’s Institute of Pastoral Studies, a Jesuit Catholic-run program for priests, nuns, and lay leaders”, where everyone is loving and tolerant and most importantly, appreciative of Stedman.

It’s something I’ve noticed before in the conflicts between New Atheists and these accommodationists. We’re willing to say that their softer approach is part of the spectrum of tools we need to use to overcome the folly of religion (heck, the UMM Freethinker’s group invited Stedman to speak here last year), and we don’t mind someone with different views working with us towards that, but the accommodationists have a completely different enemy. They consider religion their good buddy and pal, while the real target is…atheism. That shines through in Stedman’s excerpt — everywhere, he makes excuses for religion, while treating atheism as inexcusable.

There’s a reason Stedman gets no respect at atheist parties, and it isn’t his socks.

Larry Moran has got his number, though, and rips into him. Just go read that.

I’m not a believer any longer, but I do believe in respect. The “New Atheism” of Dawkins and Harris is simply toxic.

I’m getting awfully sick of this nonsense. What he really means is that it’s okay to passionately disagree about all kinds of social and political issues (gun control, socialism, capital punishment, quackery, political parties, abortion) but if atheists challenge the existence of god(s) that’s a whole different kettle of fish. Somehow, it’s “disrepectful” to declare that belief in supernatural beings is wrong and it means that intolerant atheists can’t, and won’t, work with anyone who disagrees with them because their position is “toxic.”

As a bonus, read the comments. Lately, I’ve been getting asked a lot of questions about why atheists who care about social justice and ethics (like Larry) don’t just become humanists. Larry explains why: he doesn’t find the specific goals of most formulations of humanism to be in alignment with his principles, so he doesn’t identify with them (he sees too much of a libertarian taint to most humanist definitions). In the future, when people pester me with those questions in which they are unable to see any difference between atheists and humanists, I’ll just send them to Sandwalk.

Ian Cromwell has about the same level of respect for Stedman as Moran. Must be the Canadianity.

Ophelia joins in the pigpile! And she’s not even Canadian!

Bad argument #2: No more Poes

(This is part of a list of bad arguments I heard at the Texas Freethought Convention.)

There were a couple of fundagelical fanatics picketing the event. I got a few pictures taken posing with this one guy, and he was standard-issue boring creationist: he kept telling me “Darwin was a big dummy” and otherwise sneering at evolution. I just politely asked him what he’d read by Darwin, and for specific points Darwin made that he rejected, and he shut up hard. He was reduced to muttering “I’ll pray for you, brother” — trying to pin them down to specifics is usually a good tactic for exposing the vacuity of their position.

But the creationist is too obvious a source of bad arguments. I want to complain about a few of the atheists.

I heard several announce “He’s a poe” or “he must be a poe”. Dear god, but I’m sick of that stupid word. It’s become a standard response to batty stupidity — lately, it doesn’t matter how ordinary a comment is or who said it or how well verified it is — there’s always someone in the crowd who has to show off how insightful or cynical they are by declaring that it must be a pretense.

Look, people, we live in a country with Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck and Joseph Farah as prominent media sources; where Akin and Broun and Jindal get elected to high office; where every newspaper is full of common folk writing in to complain about those gays or those socialist commies or those egghead liberals. There is nothing unlikely or unbelievable about a down-home ministry that announces you’ll go to hell for believing in science. Bat-buggering bullshit is routine.

Declaring something to be a “poe” is a minimizing tactic; it’s a way to pretend that a real problem doesn’t exist. Are you really going to try to delude yourself and others into thinking that the Tea Party, Fox News, and the whole goddamned Repuclican party are an act put on by snarky liberals?

I’m hereby declaring the term “poe” to be anathema here. Don’t use it anymore. We don’t need denial, we need a confrontation with an ugly reality. I’ll probably start leaving rude remarks when I spot people throwing the term around in the comments from now on.

Oh, and for anyone who tries to mimic creationists, Republicans, or Christians as a clever mockery of their beliefs, if it isn’t clear what you’re doing, don’t try to dignify it as a “Poe” — all it is is bad fucking satire. Satire is a good and historically authentic method of speaking against power and foolishness, but if your schtick can’t be distinguished from the real thing, it’s contributing to the crapfest of idiocy we’re already drowning in, rather than opposing it.

So just stop it.