Thoughts in a Haystack

Ophelia Benson has been making much of some commenter at Chris Mooney's and Sheril Kirshenbaum's blog, going by the 'nym "TB", stating that Benson was "lying" about Mooney and Kirshenbaum not having evidence for their assertions in their book. Benson has even demanded that the comments be removed by Mooney and Kirshenbaum and, in a different instance, Sheril apparently ... cough ... accommodated her.

In the United States, calling someone a liar is an expression of opinion protected by the Freedom of Speech clause of the First Amendment and does not, without more*, constitute defamation, unless the statement "implies the allegation of undisclosed defamatory fact as the basis for the opinion."** In other words, if the statement gives the basis for the person thinking the other party is a liar, so the hearers/readers can judge for themselves, calling the person a "liar" is a matter of opinion and not actionable. Here the commenter disclosed the basis of his claim and the statement is, therefore, opinion and not libel.

There are other elements of libel that Benson probably cannot meet. She needs to prove that she was financially damaged by being called a liar by an anonymous person in a comment section of a blog and, as an author engaged in a very public dispute with authors of another book on the same general topic as one of her own, she is, for all intents and purposes, a "public figure" and must prove "actual malice" in making the statement or "reckless disregard" for its truth or falsity. That is a very difficult burden to meet.

Of course, as always, truth is a perfect defense to defamation.

Benson "justifies" her outrage because she doesn't allow such charges to be made at her blog, not so much because it is wrong but because it might get her and co-blogger (who I gather lives in Britain) sued. It's certainly true that anyone living in Britain, where it is apparently libelous to say that chiropractic treatments are "bogus," needs to be careful in what one says or publishes. But I rather thought that the rationalist blogosphere considered that to be a bad thing. Surely Benson has no intention of becoming the British Chiropractic Association of the "New Atheist" movement ... in which case, it is hard to see why she feels justified in demanding the removal of these third-party comments from Mooney's and Kirshenbaum's blog.

More importantly, as part of a movement that claims the right and duty to engage in rhetorical combat to the death, with no holds barred, against religion and anyone who might give consideration to the feelings of religionists, it seems incongruous, to say the least, for Benson to suddenly get the vapors over being on the receiving end of some nasty rhetoric.

Is it really worse to be accused of lying than to be accused of being a "faitheist"?

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* Calling someone a perjurer, since perjury is a crime, may automatically be defamation depending on the circumstances.

** From the Restatement Second of Torts, a kind of "model code" widely followed in the US.
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Labels: Accommodationism Incompatiblism

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 1:57 PM 11 comments

There is a point-counterpoint in the Los Angeles Times between Francisco Ayala and Michael Shermer over the appropriateness of Francis Collins' appointment to head the National Institutes of Health. The most notable thing is this from Ayala:

Do I expect Collins to use his office as NIH director to promote religion? No. His past career -- both scientific and administrative -- justifies this expectation. Would I be concerned that a lapsed Catholic or a fully convinced atheist, if one were appointed NIH director, would use the office to promote atheism or attack religion? I wouldn't, as long as their resumes would not show such transgressions in the past or give reason to anticipate them in the future.

In his 2006 book, "The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief," Collins proclaims his Christian faith and how it inspires and fulfills his life. This is his privilege as long as he does not use his office to advance religious goals or misuse science for religious purposes.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 9:57 PM 1 comments

A thought:

It was clear to Paley and to other defenders of the organismic design argument that the intelligent designer who built organisms must have been far more intelligent and efficacious than any human being could ever be. This is why the organismic design argument was for them an argument for the existence of God. I predict that it will eventually become clear that the organismic design argument should never have been understood in this way. This is because I expect that human beings will eventually build organisms from nonliving materials. This achievement will not close down the question of whether the organisms that human beings observe were created by intelligent design or by mindless natural processes; in fact, it will give that question a practical significance, since the organisms we will see around us will be of both kinds. However, it will be abundantly clear that the fact of organismic adaptation has nothing to do with whether God exists. When the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the New World, several indigenous peoples thought these intruders were gods, so powerful was the technology that the intruders possessed. The locals were mistaken; they did not realize that these beings with guns and horses were merely human beings. The organismic design argument for the existence of God embodies the same mistake. If my prediction is correct, our descendants will someday look back on Paley and see him and Montezuma in the same light.

- Elliott Sober, Evidence and Evolution: The Logic Behind the Science

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 11:35 PM 0 comments

Ian Musgrave has a good post up at The Panda's Thumb on William Dembski's science envy. What caught my eye was Ian's responce to Dembski's claim that there is a "powerful new caste of scientists who have appointed themselves the guardians of humanity and the priests of a new social order," based on the scientific community's consensus about anthropogenic global warming. Ian replies:

Stand in awe at the power of us scientists, we only have to use big words, show lots of data, click our fingers and politicians will um, er, well .…. ignore us actually (see also here). Until real disaster actually does strike.

Take air pollution: Scientists had been pointing out the issues with air pollution for years, but nothing really started getting underway until the killer smogs hit London. With acid rain, it was only after large swaths of forests began dying and lakes became sterile did anybody actually take action on scientists warnings. Collapsing fisheries? Scientists keep on warning about the consequences of overfishing but people tend to take notice only after a fishery has collapsed, and then don’t even put in decent fishing controls. Ozone hole? Despite well researched chemistry no one really listened until the ozone hole appeared over the Antarctic, then they scurried moved sluggishly, until finally we have bans on most ozone destroying CFC’s.

The true pattern is that scientists find an important issue, back it up with careful research, and have to fight persistently to get governments, businesses and the general public to take notice. Global warming is a case in point.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 2:01 PM 2 comments

Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum are in Time humping their book Unscientific America (nothing wrong with that -- good ol' American free enterprise) when they just about ended any chance I'll like the thing.

Part of your book talks about the depiction of "mad scientists" in Hollywood films. Do you think film and television producers can realistically portray scientists considering they have to sometimes use stereotypes or exaggeration to get people to watch what they produce?

I don't think that we can demand incredibly high levels of fidelity to what scientists actually do. What I think we can shoot for is positive role model figures who are scientists. That's what really leaves audiences with a positive outlook on the scientific world is if the smart character is actually heroic for being smart. In The Day the Earth Stood Still, Jennifer Connelly is a scientist. It definitely cuts against stereotypes in a lot of ways. First of all, she's a woman and not an old man. She's not nerdy. She's a hero.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 8:12 AM 10 comments

Craig Nelson, author of Rocket Men – The Epic Story of the First Men on the Moon, on conspiracy theories that deny that American astronauts landed on the moon:

"Those people have a religion and no facts will undo them," Nelson said. His favorite response to conspiracy groups comes from Armstrong who said it was easier to just go to the moon than it would have been to fake it. And what about the 400,000 people who worked on Apollo 11? "What percentage of them are in on the conspiracy and do you really think 100,000 people could really keep this quiet for forty years?" he asked.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 5:45 PM 0 comments

The Fifteenth Carnival of Elitist Bastards is lounging about the beach at The Coffee-Stained Writer.

Stephanie Zvan at Quiche Moraine has an interesting take on the framing/accommodationist/incompatiblist debate that centers on the claim by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum in their book, Unscientific America: How Scientific Illiteracy Threatens Our Future:

Dawkins and some other scientists fail to grasp that in Hollywood, the story is paramount—that narrative, drama, and character development will trump mere factual accuracy every time, and by a very long shot.

Willing suspension of disbelief does not mean hanging it by its neck until dead.

Accuracy has an important role to play in building world, plot and character. Every time we flub or cheat a detail, we're making our audience, at least part of which will catch any inaccuracy, do more work. In writerly terms, it's called throwing our audience out of the story. It means that something has gone wrong enough to remind an audience that the story is only a story. In order to get back to the point where the story is a world that the audience is visiting, the process of suspending disbelief has to start all over again.

Every time another inaccuracy is noticed, the process starts once more, and upholding that disbelief gets harder and harder. Some readers or viewers will give up on us completely. They'll give up on the story because it asks too much of them–not in thinking but in forgiveness.

Yes, there is a kind of movie that can get away with flubbing all the details. Details aren't why people go to summer action extravaganzas, those movies in which everything explodes, even the water. They're not looking for accuracy. On the other hand, they're not going to these movies looking for story either.

Setting up story and accuracy as a dichotomy also ignores the richness that accuracy can add to a story. In fact, whole stories can be built from closely observed detail. Juno is one of those stories. It doesn't have a suspenseful plot. The characters don't change much from beginning to end, although a few of the relationships do. What we get instead is messy, accurate observations of the complexities of life, and that was enough to win Diablo Cody an Oscar to garner an impressive return for the movie.

There's very little Richard Dawkins or any other scientist will have to say about it, no matter accommodating they are.

Labels: Carnival of Elitist Bastards

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 10:21 AM 3 comments

Gary Peach, a retired British scientist who was working at the Tidbinbilla satellite tracking station near Canberra, Australia at the time of the Apollo lunar landing, claims to have come up with astronaut Neil Armstrong's famous statement upon setting foot on the moon: "That's one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind."

"The day before the Apollo mission, I was doing some final tests on the equipment," Peach told the Daily Mail newspaper on Wednesday.

"I was approached by the director, a Mr Monkton. He was an American who was in contact with Apollo. I told him I was worried about what would be said when they landed on the moon.

"I thought, being Americans, they might say: `Holy chicken s**t look at all that f***ing dust'. I felt that would not be a suitable thing to be quoted in history books until eternity.

"He asked me what should be said. I had been thinking about this. I told him: `One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind'. And I definitely said `a man'.

"What he did with my suggestion I have no idea, but he did leave immediately and at a greater pace than he had entered the room."

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 10:12 PM 2 comments

Ow.

I think it takes more faith to believe in evolution and the increasing order of things in the universe than creationism. Evolution directly opposes the repeated, scientifically-proven Second Law of Thermodynamics, which states that everything moves from a beginning state of highly organized order (which supports intelligent design) to a latter state of random disorder. This is observed and proven each time something decomposes, ages, breaks down or rusts. I'm surprised science teachers and professors, knowing this fact, still promote this unproven theory. You don't have to be a genius. Einstein, though he never professed Christianity, believed in intelligent design! Go figure.

Did you know every middle to major-sized people group in the world has, in their earliest history, a record about a great deluge? Coincidental, huh?

The Louisiana Science Education Act was viewed by some science educators as a sole attempt to allow creationism to only be taught. I support creationism and hope teachers take advantage of the opportunity. After all, if evolution and its nonbelief are allowed, why shouldn't intelligent design with its belief be allowed?

Labels: Designer As God

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 6:42 PM 4 comments

Michael Barton has a very interesting post at his excellent blog, The Dispersal of Darwin about an instance of multiple quote mining of John Tyndall, the 19th century Irish physicist and prominent supporter of evolution and Darwin. In the usual fashion, a scientist is made to look like he opposes evolution when, in fact, the opposite is true. As John Wilkins says: "It seems that the dishonesty is unchanging."

What also is of interest is another example of a prediction of the imminent demise of "Darwinism." This one wasn't in Glenn Morton's collection so I passed it along to him. It involves a lecture, at the meeting house of the Society of Friends in New York on November 24, 1884, given by one Thomas Kimber, apparently an author of several works on the history and theology of Quakers. The anonymous article in the New York Times, “Turn in the Tide of Thought: Thomas Kimber’s Lecture on Science in Relation to Divine Truths,” a pdf copy of which can be found here, describes Kimber as saying:

[T]he lecturer spoke of evolution's failure as a strong theory and the downfall of Darwinism. When the theory came out it was seized upon with avidity, and most of the great scholars examined it and accepted it. Now they had given it up.

Not only is dishonesty unchanging, but hope against hope springs eternal.
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Labels: Quote Mining

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 9:25 PM 3 comments

I just wanted to note this for future reference. A recent (and probably temporary) addition to my commentariat (hat tip: Dr. Isis), one Daniel Mann, an instructor at the New York School of the Bible, going under the nym "Mann'sWord," has again made the connection between ID and religion clear.

I mocked the Discovery Institute's breathless hyperbole in promoting the latest attempt to make good on The Imminent Demise of Evolution: The Longest Running Falsehood in Creationism, Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell, which the DI pronounced "The Book That Changes Everything!". In comments, Mr. Mann, while making the same old, tired arguments for ID, claimed:

However, as a paradigm, ID has some great advantages. It is both adequate to explain the phenomena within its domain and it's parsimonious. Furthermore, a life centralized in God has many psychological advantages.

Thus neatly demonstrating just who the "Designer" is universally understood to be, despite transparent lies to the contrary. He then went on to seamlessly say:

The biblical revelation of a God of order and beauty who truly wants His subjects to know Him has understandably inspired many seekers to attempt to plummet (sic) the depths of His ways. I would suggest that you acquaint yourselves with this revelation. You hopefully will find that everything that our God reveals about Himself is not only beneficial for doing science but also for living life. I would like to challenge you in this regard.

So, ID is not only religious in nature and intent, but it is a proselytizing tool. I knew you'd want to be the first to hear this "revelation."
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Labels: Designer As God

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 10:11 PM 5 comments

Steven Pinker responded to Stephen Meyer's dishonest attempt to hijack Thomas Jefferson as an IDeologist by pointing out that Judge Jones (a conservative Republican) after a six-week trial where the IDers were given every chance to defend ID's supposedly scientific status, ruled that it is religion in disguise.

Now Wild Bill Dembski, who was supposed to be a witness at that trial but backed out, has this to say about Pinker's point:

Is this vapid appeal to authority all the Darwinians have left?

Intelligent design is just the Logos theology of John's Gospel restated in the idiom of information theory.

For somebody who is such an expert in the field, you'd think he'd be better at recognizing them.

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And, of course, as the inestimable TomS points out, the whole attempt to hijack Jefferson was, itself, a vapid appeal to authority.
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Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 12:10 AM 2 comments

Well, the Spencer (Iowa) School Board is back at it, further discussing a Draft Policy on Religion that is bound to get them in trouble. School Board member Rev. Barb Van Wyk, one of the drafters of the policy, went so far as to say:

"We are looking for common ground here, not battle ground," added Van Wyk, one of the policy's writers. "And in our community, I think it's a really good thing to have a healthy discussion about this - because we all know that there is a spiritual component to our lives..."

So I think it's important for us as a school district to look at having a policy, because we are interested in educating the whole person, the whole student. And to totally avoid the spiritual component because we're afraid to do so because it's going to cause more trouble, and everyone's afraid of the trouble it might cause, I think we are doing a disservice to our students. That's why I'm eager to see a policy adopted that would bring it out."

... the public district cannot, under the First Amendment, promote one school of thought or one secular [sectarian?] belief - and cannot prevent an individual from expressing his or her free expression of religious belief.

A local religious program, course or materials, he warned, "needs to be very broad brush."

"You do need to be certain that there's no agenda with regard to the course or the materials...You will not be successful avoiding, in my opinion, litigation if you adopt a secular [sectarian?] view or a course material that only would be supported by one type of thinking or one group.

He warned that graduation and extra curriculars are areas that will attract lots of attention and litigation if religion is included.

"To have a prayer as a portion of a program is not going to pass muster," Avery said, as opposed to students voluntarily gathering for a baccalaureate... "watch out there."

On distributing religious materials on schoolgrounds, Avery warns to "use the same policy for all organizations, no matter what they are."

"It's all over the news that we're talking about a religious liberty policy. If we just drop it now, the message will be that God is a four letter word."

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 7:47 PM 3 comments

Not content with the Discovery Institute's attempt to hijack Thomas Jefferson into the ranks of IDeologists, despite his death some 33 years before he could consider Darwin's first exposition of natural selection as a mechanism to explain evolution, David Klinghoffer has decided to go medieval. The latest hijackee is Moses Maimonides (1135-1204 C.E.).

[T]he relatively new and admirably lucid Maimonides biography by Joel L. Kraemer at the University of Chicago, Maimonides: The Life and World of One of Civilization's Greatest Minds (Doubleday) ... asks what should a student of Rambam (Maimonides) like himself reply if asked, "What is the most important idea taught by Maimonides in his scientific and philosophic writings?"

Answers Kraemer: "A good answer would be that it is the idea of an orderly universe governed by laws of a cosmic intelligence." Contemporary relevance, please?

Replies Kraemer:

Maimonides grasped the great divide between monotheists, who believe that an intelligence guides the universe, and Epicureans, who believe that everything happens by chance. The argument continues nowadays between intelligent adherents of intelligent design and Darwinian atheists who believe in chance mutation.

Until 1859, the main alternative [design advocates] considered was Epicureanism; here I don't mean the philosophy of eat, drink, and be merry, but the hypothesis due to Epicurus and his followers that physical particles whirling at random in the void eventually combine to produce orderly, stable, and functional arrangements.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 9:25 PM 4 comments

Uh, oh.

The new atheism is over and done, and its angry tone of voice will not be missed.

First, they dramatically overestimated the number of unbelievers. According to the American Religious Identification Survey, 15 percent of Americans are not currently members of any religious organization. This finding led to the claim that one in six Americans is now an unbeliever. But the data actually show that three quarters of the people in that 15 percent are "in between" religious commitments. ...

At any given moment, 15 percent of us may be unaffiliated, but most of those are believers. In a recent Pew Forum survey, in fact, only 1.6 percent of respondents identified themselves as atheists.

Second, the new atheists thought that books about science and logic would convince Americans to stop believing in God. They tried to use evidence and reason to change American hearts. But in the Pew survey, only 2 percent of respondents said that science and logic play any role their religious choices.

... We opt for religious affiliations that help us with our personal spiritual quests. When one stops working, we begin looking for another. ...

Yet the new atheists' biggest mistake, by far, was to be openly intolerant of religion. They mocked, derided and made fun of it. But Americans today are overwhelmingly committed to religious tolerance. ... Some of us do not believe in God, but virtually all of us agree that personal religious choices should be respected. The angry hostility of the new atheists struck exactly the wrong note.

[I]n America today, tolerance and freedom are stronger than narrow-mindedness and prejudice. And it opens the way for a kinder, gentler, more American brand of atheism. In our spiritual marketplace, there is plenty of room for atheist groups that can attract seekers by presenting unbelief as a practical option along life's way. Perhaps non-belief can be re-framed as a productive hiatus during the busy life of a spiritual migrant, or as a thoughtful expression of principled religious dissent. In these ways, atheists might begin to work with, instead of against, important facts about religion in America.

Sales of atheist books have fallen off the charts, literally. Months have gone by since one appeared on the best-seller list.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 6:42 PM 23 comments

And That's The Way It Was ...

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 9:01 AM 2 comments

In no surprise whatsoever, Jerry Coyne has also endorsed Sean Carroll's attempt at a de novo philosophy of science, without regard to the work of generations of philosophers and scientists who have come before. Coyne's adoption of Carrollism has some amusing aspects.

Carroll cites, as a central example of his particularly muscular version of "inference to the best explanation," the theory of quantum uncertainty and its defeat of the theory of determinism. And yet, it was not very long ago that Coyne was complaining that Francis Collins was allowing "his scientific statements and beliefs to be infected with religion" because Collins had the temerity to point out that quantum uncertainty was an area of the world, as revealed by science, in which a God could act without our being able to detect such action or to even be able to say that that such action is against "the laws of nature." Coyne plaintively complained that theists would not give up their beliefs if we eventually find out that what appear to be totally unpredictable events entailed in quantum uncertainty really do have a deterministic causation. Coyne, of course, does not ask that of Carroll.

Which brings us to the mind-numbingly ironic part. If theists appealing to the facts of the world as revealed by science are "infecting" or "contaminating" their science with metaphysics, what is Carroll doing when he says:

In the real world, by far the most compelling theoretical framework consistent with the data is one in which everything that happens is perfectly accounted for by natural phenomena. No virgin human births, no coming back after being dead for three days, no afterlife in Heaven, no supernatural tinkering with the course of evolution. You can define "religion" however you like, but you can't deny the power of science to reach far-reaching conclusions about how reality works.

Labels: Accommodationism Incompatiblism

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 8:17 AM 13 comments

PZ Myers points to Sean Carroll's article as if it is a good thing, demonstrating that Carroll is not alone among scientists who concurrently do not understand philosophy but, nonetheless, deride it -- much as Ray Comfort treats evolutionary biology. Interestingly, PZ also points to Daniel Dennett's article on the belief in belief. I'll leave it to the reader to judge how well he makes the case that belief in religious belief is not necessary (though, inevitably, he does better than Carroll did). What I find interesting is this:

"[B]elief in belief" is a common phenomenon not restricted to religions. Economists realise that a sound currency depends on people believing that the currency is sound, and scientists recognise that the actual objectivity of scientific studies on global warming is politically impotent unless people believe in that objectivity, so economists and scientists (among others) take steps to foster and protect such beliefs that they think are benign. That's acting on belief in belief.

Labels: Accommodationism Incompatiblism

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 1:07 PM 2 comments

[Sigh!]

Here we go again. Scientists are justly upset with people who have no experience or knowledge in their field nonetheless presuming to lecture them on science. For some reason, scientists who have obviously never put much effort into studying philosophy think themselves competent to babble on about it.

The latest to fall victim, in a rather spectacular way, to this syndrome is the physicist Sean Carroll, who is admittedly uninterested in philosophy, but who does not let that stop him. He gets off on the wrong foot (the one with the bullet in it) by claiming that, on the issue of what sort of questions science is competent to answer:

... one popular but very bad strategy for answering this question [is]: first, attempt to distill the essence of "science" down to some punchy motto, and then ask what questions fall under the purview of that motto. At various points throughout history, popular mottos of choice might have been "the Baconian scientific method" or "logical positivism" or "Popperian falsificationism" or "methodological naturalism." But this tactic always leads to trouble. Science is a messy human endeavor, notoriously hard to boil down to cut-and-dried procedures.

I'm quite sure that the generations of philosophers (and scientists interested in philosophy) who have formulated, studied, critiqued and attempted to improve on those systems of thought over hundreds of years, would have been, and are, quite surprised to learn that they've only been working on "punchy mottoes."

I'm afraid that it doesn't take any great skill in prediction to surmise that anyone who thinks those philosophical systems are just popular mottoes, unsuitable to cover the "hard to boil down to cut-and-dried procedures" of science, is getting ready to boil science down to some cut-and-dried procedure embodied in something very like a motto. Carroll does not disappoint the prognosticator, even if he disappoints those who hope that scientists might be a bit more cogent and self-aware thinkers.

Carroll sweeps all those mottoes aside by first presenting an example:

Here is my favorite example question. Alpha Centauri A is a G-type star a little over four light years away. Now pick some very particular moment one billion years ago, and zoom in to the precise center of the star. Protons and electrons are colliding with each other all the time. Consider the collision of two electrons nearest to that exact time and that precise point in space. Now let's ask: was momentum conserved in that collision? ...

... The scientific answer to this question is: of course, the momentum was conserved. Conservation of momentum is a principle of science that has been tested to very high accuracy by all sorts of experiments, we have every reason to believe it held true in that particular collision, and absolutely no reason to doubt it; therefore, it's perfectly reasonable to say that momentum was conserved.

Let's just stop here and note that Carroll is appealing to induction as a process that delivers "truth." But how does he know that? Over 200 hundred years ago, one of those motto producers, David Hume, pointed out that anyone who looks to empiricism cannot justify the truth-delivering qualities of induction because the only possible empiric evidence on the subject comes from experience -- in other words, from induction. We "know" induction produces truth because, in our experience, induction produces truth. That itself is an induction and trying to justify induction by an induction is circular reasoning, a logical fallacy. No one has solved this conundrum in the time since Hume but that doesn't bother Carroll, probably because he is unaware of it and ignorance is bliss.

Carroll continues:

[S]cience does not proceed phenomenon by phenomenon. Science constructs theories, and then compares them to empirically-collected data, and decides which theories provide better fits to the data. The definition of "better" is notoriously slippery in this case, but one thing is clear: if two theories make the same kinds of predictions for observable phenomena, but one is much simpler, we're always going to prefer the simpler one.

This is, of course, Occam's Razor, which is far closer to an empty motto than the Baconian method, logical positivism, falsificationism or methodological naturalism. In fact the razor is a rule of thumb for making a first approximation (less formally known as "a guess"). Carroll cites to the replacement of determinism with quantum uncertainty as an example of science appealing to "the inference to the best explanation." I'd dearly like to know by what metric he determined quantum mechanics to be "simpler" than determinism. In any event, what guarantee of truth does the razor deliver even if you can manage to wield it rationally? As Samir Okasha's Philosophy of Science: A Very Short Introduction states:

The idea that simplicity or parsimony is the mark of a good explanation is quite appealing, and certainly helps flesh out the idea of [the inference to the best explanation]. But if scientists use simplicity as a guide to inference, this raises a problem. For how do we know that the universe is simple rather than complex? Preferring a theory that explains the data in terms of the fewest number of causes does seem sensible. But is there any objective reason for thinking that such a theory is more likely to be true than a less simple theory? Philosophers of science do not agree on the answer to this difficult question.

Simplicity is surely attractive to those who want to think simplistically but does it have any truth-delivering capability? After all, it is the inference to best explanation and Occam's razor that the Intelligent Design Creationists appeal to. As Carroll notes, the IDers, like Carroll, don't see methodological naturalism as standing in their way:

There's no obstacle in principle to imagining that the normal progress of science could one day conclude that the invocation of a supernatural component was the best way of understanding the universe. Indeed, this scenario is basically the hope of most proponents of Intelligent Design.

Carroll may not understand, or may not care, but, if his account of science is correct, then ID cannot be barred from American public classrooms. It is, under his version of science, a valid attempt at science and, even if he thinks it is wrong or unsupported, it cannot be barred from public classrooms just because it has religious implications. Nor is there any basis under our law to bar it just because it is "bad" science. Of course, simply because it will have bad consequences doesn't mean that Carroll's definition of science is wrong but, if your version of science includes something so clearly not science, it may be time to reexamine your definition.

But Carroll isn't done with the razor. Based on it he declares:

In the real world, by far the most compelling theoretical framework consistent with the data is one in which everything that happens is perfectly accounted for by natural phenomena. No virgin human births, no coming back after being dead for three days, no afterlife in Heaven, no supernatural tinkering with the course of evolution. You can define "religion" however you like, but you can't deny the power of science to reach far-reaching conclusions about how reality works.

In short, Carroll is maintaining that philosophical naturalism is a scientific result. I wonder when he will be publishing this in the scientific literature? I'd suggest he try publishing in a philosophical journal but I think philosophers would take him even less seriously.
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Labels: Accommodationism Incompatiblism

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 9:34 PM 50 comments

Okay, I've made my case for the overreaching of the "incompatiblists." Now it's time to turn to the "accommodationists," in particular Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum. At their blog, The Intersection, they say this:

Science and religion are not mutually exclusive and must not continue to be portrayed as such. Though some very vocal voices in the science community disagree, I assure you they are not representative of the whole. I continue to work day to day with scientists who hold a very broad array of beliefs across fields from molecular biology to physiology to conservation. And when it comes to issues like climate change and ocean acidification, everyone must be engaged if we're to get anywhere. The new atheist movement takes an adversarial approach, but only succeeds in alienating the majority of the planet away from science. When it comes to enacting sound policies on what really matters, this will always be a losing strategy.

Labels: Accommodationism Incompatiblism

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 9:29 PM 7 comments

Okay, this is just cute:

"There have been 23 elephant-like animals in history, and yet only two survive today (and we add, they're not doing very well). Clearly, this is the mark of an all-powerful creator who is stuck on the same stupid idea and can't figure out why the hell they keep dying off. Hmm, perhaps it's because giant, big-eared mammals with huge, prehensile noses are ridiculous? I mean, WTF? A giant, powerful, grasping... nose? It looks like something a preschooler would make up."

You know how there are some people who think there is a good Designer and an evil Designer and I wondered which one was responsible for inept design in the world? Now maybe we need to posit a third Designer, who we could call the Dusfus Designer. As RaulVB at Daily Kos points out, the DD would have a tailor-made spokesperson who just happens to be between jobs ...

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 11:22 PM 4 comments

Here is a bit more on the "incompatiblist" position on religion and science. An "Anonymous" commenter [Konrad Scheffler] on my last post stated this:

As often with this sort of debate, it seems to come down to quibbling about definitions. The word "science" is commonly used to denote at least four distinct concepts:

1. A body of knowledge
2. An "establishment" consisting of people and organizations, and an associated set of rough consensus views
3. A methodology for producing knowledge
4. A philosophical system of thought.

John (as well as, I assume, most religious scientists) is using definition 3; Larry et al (along with, I hope, a majority of scientists) are using definition 4.

The point is somewhat moot because most non-scientists use other definitions such as 1 or 2 (in which case "science" is obviously compatible with all but the most fundamentalist religions - no debate required).

Labels: Accommodationism Incompatiblism

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 11:27 PM 21 comments

Thony C., the longtime and generally rational commenter on John Wilkins' blog, Evolving Thoughts, has taken the deeply irrational step of starting his own blog, The Renaissance Mathematicus -- the intellectual equivalent of owning a boat, i.e. a hole in the water into which you pour all your money. Thony will now be pouring all his thought into a hole in his time (as I well know). The reason he gives for that decision:

The doorbell rang and when I opened the door this albino gorilla with a thick Aussie accent said, "Yer should start yer own effin blog or I'll sit on yer!" so here I am…

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 5:11 PM 5 comments

That well-known New Agnostic, Larry Moran, has once again entered the Accommodationist-Incompatiblist fray with at least something new (to me, that is, as far as my memory goes), the so-called "Doctrine of Joint Belief." Larry cites to a short piece by Clay Shirky at The Edge on "Religion and Science" that asserts that:

The idea that religious scientists prove that religion and science are compatible is ridiculous, and I'm embarrassed that I ever believed it. Having believed for so long, however, I understand its attraction, and its fatal weaknesses.

The Doctrine of Joint Belief isn't evidence of harmony between two systems of thought. It simply offers permission to ignore the clash between them. Skeptics aren't convinced by the doctrine, unsurprisingly, because it offers no testable proposition. What is surprising is that its supposed adherents don't believe it either. If joint beliefs were compatible beliefs, there could be no such thing as heresy. Christianity would be compatible not just with science, but with astrology (roughly as many Americans believe in astrology as evolution), with racism (because of the number of churches who use the "Curse of Ham" to justify racial segregation), and on through the list of every pair of beliefs held by practicing Christians.

Labels: Accommodationism Incompatiblism

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 11:30 AM 30 comments

Sometimes I think David Klinghoffer is more un-self-conciously honest than the other Discovery Institute drones because he is more literary and, therefore, cannot help but reveal himself through the stories he uses as tropes. The latest, and perhaps the funniest, is his "argument" against Simon Conway Morris' claim, adopted as well by Ken Miller, that the well-known cases of convergence in evolution (multiple evolutionary origins of eyes and wings, for example) suggest that an intelligent creature was bound to arise somewhere in the universe through evolution.

The argument goes that our own example -- going from an obscure and highly localized primate on the edge of extinction to world-spanning, environment manipulating and resource dominating super-organism, in a few tens or hundreds of thousands years -- is a testament to the selectionist power of intelligence. The importance of this, theologically, to Conway Morris and Miller is that it suggests that there may be at least some sort of directionality to evolution which, in turn, would make it more "suitable" for use by a provident god as a means of creating creatures "in his image."

Needless to say, there are many objections to this notion. Atheists such as Jerry Coyne are against it as much as conservative theists are, and for much the same reason: neither want evolution to be seen as compatible with religion. There is certainly something appealing about the notion that, once we "hit" upon intelligence (actually, a combination of intelligence, social organization, ability to manipulate the environment, particularly through fire, and who knows what other traits), we were destined to be an evolutionary success. The problem is that there is no way to settle the argument as long as life on Earth is our only example. Determining whether we are a fluke or inevitable based on a single instance of developing life is like trying to determine if a coin is fair or rigged on a single toss.

But Klinghoffer's attempt to answer the question is, shall we say, telling:

Picture a majestic T. rex receiving the tablets of the Ten Commandments in its undersized forelimbs, or an elegant octopus crucified on an old rugged cross with four crossbars instead of one.

Such images are what Kenneth Miller presumably has in mind with his comforting Darwinist thought that intelligent creatures were guaranteed to pop up even in the course of an evolutionary process of purely unguided, purposeless churning. ...

He and others (such as Obama's favorite geneticist, Francis Collins) invite us to imagine God being delighted with such creatures, noble and impressive in their way, as the culmination of the evolutionary process that He chose not to guide. But what if the intelligent creature that resulted from all the purposeless churning, and that was intended to reflect God's own image, had been something really horrible. [Emphasis in original]

Sure, they're just stories -- and often kind of silly ones at that, though wickedly entertaining. Yet after reading him, you can't comfortably go back to the naïve Ken Miller way of thinking that Darwinian evolutionary was somehow certain to provide God with children over whom He would approve with the Biblical formulation, "And behold it was very good."

Of course, to us Cthulhu, with his tentacles and such, would appear grotesque and abhorrent. However, to such a being, WE would doubtless prove to appear the same.

Obviously there is no particular cosmic standard of beauty between squid and man, snake and bird, dolphin and planaria. Even within traditional theology, beauty remains a subjective concept in the eye of the beholder, at least at the physical level.

As for the non-physical, of course Cthulhu would seem abhorrent to us...he is opposed to our very existence. (Although honestly, he's simply indifferent to it...man matters not to the Great Old Ones, just as ants matter little to man.) Of course, you can rest assured that to animals in factory farms, or deer on the run from hunters, we too seem terrifying and abhorrent. This is nothing more than a matter of perspective.

Perhaps there is room for discussion and debate concerning evolution, intelligent design, et. al. But the idea that the specific physical form of man as a bipedal hominid somehow reflects perfect beauty, and the likeness of God, requires the most facile and thoughtless reading of Scripture imaginable.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 12:00 PM 4 comments