Author: Ophelia Benson

Some more Pharyngula.

He’s exactly right about one thing: all the people on his little enemies list say terrible things about religion. Speaking for just myself, I don’t like it at all—I think it’s a bad idea to afflict a society with an institution dedicated to opposing critical thinking, the acceptance of dogma, and belief in unsupported and frankly, ludicrous claims. I’m going to express my detestation often and without reservation here, as the others in that list have done in their own venues. So? Is this an opinion we are not allowed to have? Does it make us unfit to speak on science or philosophy? Is it more offensive than the frequently stated and rarely questioned Christian opinion that we unbelievers are damned to spend all of eternity suffering in agonizing torment?

Well, yes, of course this is an opinion we’re not allowed to have. We know that. We also know that it’s less legitimately offensive than the opinion that we’re all going to fry, and that that’s just too damn bad, because it’s Be Kind To Theists century. Get used to it, as the saying goes.

I was talking yesterday in ‘Abdication not the Way to Go’ about this asymmetry between religion and non-religion. It’s a real problem, you know, because it handicaps one side and gives a boost to the other. Quite unreasonably. The inhibition or taboo on challenging religion – ‘other people’s cherished beliefs,’ you know – doesn’t operate at all in the other direction. No one ever has the smallest hesitation in challenging rational, secular, non-theist beliefs on grounds of tolerance or sensitivity or kindness or respect or diversity. The presumed touchiness and ‘sensitivity’ of believers is not matched by presumed anything of non-believers. (And nor should it be. Who wants to be such a delicate flower that she can’t stand to hear her ideas or beliefs challenged? Yet apparently believers are perfectly happy to be thought of that way – in fact they get very indignant and outraged if you don’t think of them that way. Odd.) This means that one side has an immense advantage and the other side has an immense handicap. One side is awarded a large shield or wall, and the other side has its weapons taken away.

And the joke is that this is precisely backward, in the sense that the first party has the weaker case – that is, the worse case, qualitatively. It’s not that it’s disabled or handicapped, injured or damaged, so that we ought to give it an advantage out of fairness – it’s that it has no standing, no warrant, no evidence, no good argument. It ought not to be given extra compensatory help – but it is. This second problem is rooted in the first, which is nonsensical. It amounts to: because the ‘faith’ team has no evidence and no good arguments, it feels stupid when challenged, therefore the reason team is required not to challenge it – so the faith team gets to make its unwarranted assertions unimpeded.

Do a thought experiment: put that in other contexts, and see how ridiculous it is. X declares that aliens from another galaxy are living among us and that the income tax and national health are alien inventions, and that we should execute all the aliens immediately to save ourselves. The rest of us are strongly discouraged from challenging this assertion, because X has no evidence, these are X’s personal subjective opinions.

If it doesn’t fly in normal everyday contexts – in courtrooms, laboratories, newsrooms, police stations – why does it fly anywhere? Especially given the fact that these supposedly personal subjective beliefs and opinions are allowed to influence, shape, determine public policy and law? Why are religious beliefs exempt from challenge? What is the justification?

Another item from Pharyngula. About the fact that scientists talking about the details of a scientific subject can quickly bore an audience.

It’s true: we aren’t trained to be showmen. We are very good at talking to other scientists – I’m sure Wesley’s talk would have been a pleasure for me to listen to, and I would have learned much and been appreciative of the substance – but most of it would have whooshed over the heads of a lay audience. I wrestle with this in my public talks, too. There’s always this stuff that I am very excited about and that I know my peers think is really nifty and that gets right down to the heart of the joy and wonder of biology, but it’s so far from the perspective of the audience that it is well nigh impossible to communicate. And I know that when I try, I usually fail.

And the important thing to notice there is that we’re the ones who are missing out. Necessarily; we can’t know everything, and we’re all always going to have subjects we don’t know enough about to follow detailed discussions with interest, let alone excitement and joy – but I think it’s really important to keep always in mind that that means we are missing out. There’s something there, and it’s joy and excitement to people who understand it. This is kind of basic to the running argument I’m always having with ‘anti-elitists’. With people who accuse me of 1) thinking I know a lot (which is a joke; I know damn well I don’t know a lot; I know damn well I wouldn’t be able to get the joy and excitement in PZ’s public talks) and 2) thinking that means I’m Special. But that’s not it. That’s completely point-missing. No, what I think is that there is joy and excitement to be had in many kinds of knowledge and intellectual exploration, and that the more ‘anti-elitists’ insist that easy obvious poppy stuff is every bit as good as more challenging subjects, the more they encourage people never ever in the whole of their lives to find that out. ‘Anti-elitism’ pretends to be somehow sticking up for ‘ordinary people’ or some such amorphous group, but what it’s really doing is just encouraging them to remain permanently shut out from intellectual excitement. With friends like that who needs enemies, kind of thing.

The two creationists in the series, on the other hand, are simple and clear (and the young earth creationist has the advantage of being entertainingly insane). They don’t have any complex data to explain, so they aren’t tempted to try, and they put everything in terms everyone can follow. An absence of evidence can be an advantage in a talk, because then everything rests on well-honed rhetoric; the scientist’s reliance on actual information means we often skimp on the presentation. I’ve heard Johnson speak, and he’s smooth and confident, and slyly appeals to his audience’s prejudices. Of course, he also lies like a [censored] . It simplifies lecture preparation if you can simply make up glib lies to fill in the holes, another strategy to which scientists will not resort.

And that’s another important thing to keep in mind. Part of the appeal of the religious side is that it’s easy. It’s easy. Never forget that. In fact it ought to play a much bigger part in the rhetorical toolkit. Religion is for lazy thinkers, because there is literally nothing to do. No evidence-finding, no argument-improving, no illogic-detecting. It’s easy. Easy, easy, easy. It’s like lying back in a soft chair watching tv while the cat gently spoons chocolates into your mouth. Got that? Easy. Couch-potato thinking, lazy thinking, easy easy easy. Not impressive. Not buffed. Not butch. Easy.

They won’t like that!

I was surprised to read this about Panda’s Thumb at Pharyngula yesterday. I didn’t know any of it. I don’t read Panda’s very often, whereas I do read Pharyngula almost daily, because I love PZ’s steady flow of irascible atheism. I now realize that the absence of irascible atheism is not absence of mind but intentional. No wonder I’ve never formed a habit of reading it.

The Panda’s Thumb has done a terrible job of covering the Mirecki situation. F-. Total flop. Nosedive into the latrine pit…No names, no details, but let’s just say that there are a few people in the group who would be more comfortable with Michelle Malkin’s innuendo or John Altevogt’s slanders than with supporting an academic critic of fundamentalism…Another lesson I’ve learned, that might be reassuring to some, is that the group as a whole is far more religion-friendly than you might think from reading creationist sites. Criticizing “fundies” is a bad, bad thing, and will cost you the support of many of the Panda’s Thumb gang. Mirecki should be grateful that he isn’t an atheist; I definitely got the feeling that there’d have been anti-Mirecki diatribes publicly washing our hands of him if that had been the case. At least, I don’t feel particularly welcome there, and definitely perceive that I’m a third-class citizen in the hierarchy (heck, I didn’t even know there was a hierarchy until recently). I don’t feel bad enough about it to start going to church to win the prize of being a valued theistic evolutionist, though.

Oh. Oh dear. How unfortunate. See, I think criticizing fundies is one of the more urgent tasks out there right now. What else can we do? Just lie down and let them take over?

While I’m a flaming liberal atheist, most of the people there are not, and they’re actually a diverse bunch; it’s too bad there’s less interest in seeing that diversity expressed than in maintaining a bland front of tepid inoffensiveness. The Panda’s Thumb is a great resource for science and focused critiques of creationism, and everyone should keep reading it, but we should also be clear on what it is not. It is not ever going to address the root causes of creationism in our country: the virulent, pathological brands of fundamentalism that are growing in our midst. That would be…rude.

That’s just it – the root causes problem. They have to be addressed, because the alternative is just submission.

One of the PT people commented on PZ’s post, and said something I find very strange and somewhat worrying.

As a biologist, I can claim some expertise in my area of study. I also have strong views on politics and religion. But no matter how strongly felt my views of religion and politics are, in these I’m just another citizen. As a biologist, I’ll happily tell you when your facts about science are wrong. As a citizen, I don’t believe I have the same warrant to make pronouncements about the personal, individual, subjectively held beliefs of whole classes of people.

But we’re all just other citizens in our views on religion and politics. Why would it follow that we don’t have warrant to make pronouncements about everyone else’s views – whether they belong to whole classes of people or not? That’s just a total abdication of argument, thought, and rational discussion, isn’t it? And if we do that – if we just throw up our hands and say we don’t have warrant to make pronouncements on people’s ‘beliefs’ then we just give the irrationalists a free hand. And that’s the worst thing we can do. The worst. We’re all citizens (if we’re lucky, if we don’t live in dictatorships), we live in democracies (those of us who do), and public matters are for public discussion. Public discussion rests on reasons rather than authority or revelation – it has to – those are the only alternatives. If you give up on reasons and reason, then authority and revelation is what takes over. So the idea that citizens should abstain from challenging one another’s beliefs merely because they are personal, individual, and subjectively held – is a dangerous idea, in my view. It’s just locking up the only tools we have, in the face of a determined, aggressive, hostile, totalitarian enemy. Why would we want to do that?

It’s hard to tear oneself away from The Panda’s Thumb today. They are having one hell of a party over there. And writing one great post after another while they’re at it.

One on our friend Steve Fuller for example.

Professor of Sociology Steven Fuller may not know much about the history or content of science (see his recent confusion — just like Linus Pauling’s! — between protein and DNA at Micheal Berube’s blog) but he is good the kind of jargoneering that the Discovery Institute and its allies use to confuse the public about science…Fuller proved to be quite compliant generally, but Judge Jones seems not to to have heard his pleas to institute in Dover a kind of affirmative action program for ID. Instead, it was the repeated acknowledgement that Intelligent Design is, in fact, creationism, that Judge Jones took away as the salient point of Fuller’s testimony…What the TMLC failed to appreciate when they booked Fuller as a witness was that he doesn’t believe in any kind of science. In the pomo view, science is all about social relationships and power dynamics. Whatever privileged role science has in society is fraudulantly obtained. Scientific authority is a sham…Calling an expert witness who doesn’t believe in science to a trial about an idea’s scientific status was probably a mistake. Certainly, Steven Fuller wins second place (behind Michael Behe) in the race for the title of “Best Defense Witness for the Prosecution.”

Pretty funny! Also satisfying – especially after the display of condescension mixed with confusion he gave at Michael’s.

And Tim Sandefur does a great one on the judge’s reasoning, full of interesting stuff.

In summary, the disclaimer singles out the theory of evolution for special treatment, misrepresents its status in the scientific community, presents students with a religious alternative masquerading as a scientific theory, directs them to consult a creationist text as though it were a science resource, and instructs students to forego scientific inquiry in the public school classroom and instead to seek out religious instruction elsewhere. Furthermore…introducing ID necessarily invites religion into the science classroom as it sets up what will be perceived by students as a “God-friendly” science, the one that explicitly mentions an intelligent designer, and that the “other science,” evolution, takes no position on religion…. [A] false duality is produced: It “tells students…quite explicitly, choose God on the side of intelligent design or choose atheism on the side of science.” Introducing such a religious conflict into the classroom…forces students to “choose between God and science,” not a choice that schools should be forcing on them.

This could turn into something of an education in science and epistemology for a lot of people.

Avoiding magical explanations is “a ‘ground rule’ of science,” which some call “‘methodological naturalism,’ and is sometimes known as the scientific method.” (at 65). This approach is not arbitrary. It is based on the demands of epistemology as well as the proven superiority of this approach in producing usable results. “[O]nce you attribute a cause to an untestable supernatural force, a proposition that cannot be disproven, there is no reason to continue seeking natural explanations as we have our answer.” (at 66). ID proponents, Judge Jones notes, (and we might mention Beckwith by name here) are trying “to change the ground rules of science to allow supernatural causation of the natural world” to factor into the analysis. (at 67) But this approach would “embrace astrology,” (at 68), among other things. And, in any case, the fact that ID proponents seek “to ‘defeat scientific materialism,’” and “‘replace materialistic explanations with the theistic understanding that nature and human beings are created by God,’” (at 68) demonstrates that ID at least cannot qualify as science, whatever “merit” it might have (at 65). Since the current “essential ground rules…limit science to testable, natural explanations,” only changing those rules would allow ID to qualify as science. But “[s]cience cannot be defined differently.” (at 70).

Oh why not. Please? Pleasepleaseplease? Can’t we define science differently just a little bit just for this one time just for awhile if I’m really really good? Can’t we just pretend a little tiny bit that an untestable supernatural force is a good answer can’t we please please?

The judge is a Republican. Which doesn’t surprise me in the slightest. This has nothing (inherently) to do with left and right, it’s an epistemic issue. Making evidential questions into political ones is a mug’s game.