Thoughts in a Haystack

Formal debates -- the pitting of two sides of an issue against each other with more-or-less formal rules, lasting an hour or two -- are essentially useless as far as the audience is concerned -- though the participants can learn much about how to structure and present an argument, which is why schools often have debating societies. But any issue worth debating cannot be fairly aired in the span of an hour or two by participants who may not have equal debating skills. The Lincoln-Douglas debates, spanning twenty-one hours over seven dates, might be an exception, but notably debated slavery from only the perspective of white Americans.

It's worse if the audience comes to the debate with a set opinion on the question -- and who is likely to be interested in attending a formal debate unless he or she already knows something of the issue? But when the organizers of the event prime the audience with arguments in favor of one side and against the other, it can hardly be called a "debate" at all. As noted at Open Parachute and Friendly Atheist, the recent "debate" between William Dembski and Christopher Hitchens falls very much in the latter category.

The event was held at Prestonwood Christian Academy, primarily before the middle school and high school students. Hitchens amusingly says, after surveying the audience, that he feels "like a Daniel being introduced to a den of, I'm sure very charming, lion cubs." To its credit, the audience got the joke even before he finished and laughed.

What wasn't amusing in the least was the "Discussion Guide" the school published as "a tool used either to prepare students for this debate or answer questions following the debate." A better description would be "a tool to load the dice so there is no debate."

I said it wasn't amusing but that's not strictly true. It's intent wasn't, but the execution was, in several instances, quite amusing ... such as this:

A nation once strong in its faith in God, once labeled a "Christian nation" and dubbed as the "city on a hill," America has lost its spiritual moorings and is adrift in the relativistic sea of tolerance, equality, and affluence.

C.S. Lewis, tongue-in-cheek, wrote this, "If Darwin's theory of Evolution was correct, cats would be able to operate a can-opener by now." Funny, yes; but also profound.

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.
~ Charles Darwin

Hitchens is going through chemotherapy fighting the cancer that is ravaging his body. From the evolutionary standpoint this effort appears to be counter-productive to the death sentence that nature has given Hitchens, and one would question why someone who believes so strongly in evolution would attempt to counter its effects on mankind.

Labels: Quote Mining

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 5:49 PM 5 comments

... except, of course, for these guys.
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Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 4:41 AM 0 comments

Jerry Coyne has a post I can entirely agree with ... almost!

First of all, Jerry points to a gloriously vicious (and thoroughly funny -- the worst sort of viciousness of all!) disemboweling perpetrated by Gregory A. Petsko, at Genome Biology, upon one George M. Philip, President of the State University of New York at Albany, who recently eliminated the university's departments of French, Italian, Classics, Russian and Theater Arts. You can find more about this shameful episode at Leiter Reports.

I cannot recommend highly enough Professor Petsko's explanation of what a university should be, as opposed to what our public, and even our private, institutions threaten to become in our MBA-driven, corporate-sponsored, ignorance-dependent oligopoly that is sometimes called the United States.

Jerry quotes two notable parts of Professor Petsko's essay:

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that you have trouble understanding the importance of maintaining programs in unglamorous or even seemingly 'dead' subjects. From your biography, you don't actually have a PhD or other high degree, and have never really taught or done research at a university. Perhaps my own background will interest you. I started out as a classics major. I'm now Professor of Biochemistry and Chemistry. Of all the courses I took in college and graduate school, the ones that have benefited me the most in my career as a scientist are the courses in classics, art history, sociology, and English literature. These courses didn't just give me a much better appreciation for my own culture; they taught me how to think, to analyze, and to write clearly. None of my sciences courses did any of that . . .

. . . No, I think you were simply trying to balance your budget at the expense of what you believe to be weak, outdated and powerless departments. I think you will find, in time, that you made a Faustian bargain. Faust is the title character in a play by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was written around 1800 but still attracts the largest audiences of any play in Germany whenever it's performed. Faust is the story of a scholar who makes a deal with the devil. The devil promises him anything he wants as long as he lives. In return, the devil will get – well, I'm sure you can guess how these sorts of deals usually go. If only you had a Theater department, which now, of course, you don't, you could ask them to perform the play so you could see what happens. It's awfully relevant to your situation. You see, Goethe believed that it profits a man nothing to give up his soul for the whole world. That's the whole world, President Philip, not just a balanced budget. Although, I guess, to be fair, you haven't given up your soul. Just the soul of your institution.

~ University students are still, in many respects, children, who should not be allowed to choose their own academic programs but should, instead, be required to complete a core curriculum, including the humanities -- unless, of course, you want to change the title of your institution to "trade school" or "vocational college." The very fact that "comparatively fewer students enrolled in these degree programs" is due to the faculty's abrogation of their duty to broaden the knowledge and love of learning of their students.

~ "Knowledge" cannot be easily classified and "what seems to be archaic today can become vital in the future. ... [T]he real world is pretty fickle about what it wants. The best way for people to be prepared for the inevitable shock of change is to be as broadly educated as possible."

~ "One of the things I've written about is the way genomics is changing the world we live in. Our ability to manipulate the human genome is going to pose some very difficult questions for humanity in the next few decades, including the question of just what it means to be human. That isn't a question for science alone; it's a question that must be answered with input from every sphere of human thought, including - especially including - the humanities and arts. Science unleavened by the human heart and the human spirit is sterile, cold, and self-absorbed."

The best teachers are not the ones who instill knowledge in your brain, but those who instill a love of learning, making you autodidactic in their subject for the rest of your life. I don't think I've attained that ability as a professor, but I sure benefited from it in college. And I don't give two hoots for a scientist who knows nothing of music, art, or literature (or food!). They're missing a great swath of the world's wonder.

Those other disciplines aren't really "ways of knowing," but they're ways of experiencing*, and to die without that panoply of experience, had it been available to you, is to have lived in vain.**

Labels: Accommodationism Incompatiblism

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 5:44 AM 7 comments

As we all know, any place with a dome is one of them thar mosquity places:

Every last one of them:

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 4:50 PM 0 comments

Some Brits like animals ... sorta ...

In Britain, it is a crime to kill a conscious cow or sheep or chicken for meat by slashing its throat without numbing it first. The reasons are obvious. If you don't numb an animal, it screams as you hack through its skin, muscle, trachea, oesophagus, carotid arteries, jugular veins and major nerve trunks, and then it remains conscious as it slowly drowns in its own blood – a process that can take up to six minutes. So we insist that an animal is stunned before its throat is slashed, to ensure it is deeply unconscious. There isn't much humanity in our factory farming system, but this is – at least – a tiny sliver of it, at the end.

You are allowed to skip all this and slash the throats of un-numbed, screaming animals if you say God told you to. If you are Muslim, you call it "halal", and if you are Jewish you call it "kosher". Back in the Bronze Age, or the deserts of sixth-century Arabia, it was sensible to act this way. You needed to know your meat was fresh and the animal was not sick, so you made sure it was alive and alert when you killed it. As Woody Allen once said, it wasn't so much a commandment as "advice on how to eat out safely in Jerusalem". But we have much better ways of making sure meat is fresh and healthy now. Yet for many religious people it has hardened into a dogma, to be followed simply because it was laid down in their "holy" texts long ago by "God".

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 8:39 PM 4 comments

Having hit a slightly slow spot in life that, I'm sure, won't last long, I'm taking the time for another drive-by of the paper by Maarten Boudry, Stefaan Blancke and Johan Braeckman ("BBB"), "How not to attack Intelligent Design Creationism: Philosophical misconceptions about Methodological Naturalism."

Consider their definition of "supernatural":

[W]e propose to define 'supernatural' as referring to any phenomenon which has its basis in entities and processes that transcend the spatiotemporal realm of impersonal matter and energy described by modern science ...

Consider the claims of IDC. ... [I]f God has left observable traces in our material universe, as IDC proponents claim He did, these are in principle open to scientific investigation, and thus God would be reduced to the realm of the 'natural', by a matter of philosophical definition. Pennock thinks it is ironic that, in the course of introducing God in science, IDC theorists actually naturalise God without realizing it. That may well be true according to Pennock's definition of 'supernatural', but by the same token IDC theory does not violate the strictures of IMN any longer, and Pennock's argument on the basis of IMN misses the mark.

Imagine that IDC theorists, contrary to the actual state of affairs, had provided us with clear and unmistakeable evidence for intelligent design behind functional biological complexity (in the next section we will consider what could constitute such evidence)*. Following Pennock's logic, even if the designer were to reside beyond the known material universe, forcing a complete revision of our metaphysics, our reply to the IDC proponents would be something like this: 'You see, now we have a scientific proof for Intelligent Design. By definition, that means that we have to do with a natural phenomenon. Thus, I was right after all, supernatural causes and forces have no place in science.'

[W]hen Pennock and Forrest adopt this analytical definition of the 'supernatural', they can no longer challenge IDC by using IMN as a philosophical shield, because it misses the mark by their own definition. Instead, they will have to convince IDC theorists that the so-called Intelligent Designer would be 'natural' like anything else. This is a different route to the same conclusion we are defending in this article: that claims of IDC have to be confronted head on, and rejected on scientific grounds, instead of being excluded by fiat on shaky philosophical grounds

Labels: Methodological Naturalism

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 9:20 AM 30 comments

I discussed William Dembski's recent "heresy trial" and his recantation of his mild suggestion that "Noah's flood, though presented as a global event, is probably best understood as historically rooted in a local event. "

But, as Michael Zimmerman points out:

While the results of the midterm elections provided some evidence on the state of the economy, there's a far clearer indicator of just how bad things are. William Dembski, one of the main proponents of intelligent design, has recanted his scientific views in an attempt to keep his job. As philosopher Michael Ruse has said, explaining but not condoning Dembski's actions, "here he is with a wife and kids to support and the threat of the sack."

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 8:41 PM 0 comments

PZ Mxyzptlk continues to resist the notion that the existence of gods (or the supernatural) can be demonstrated by science.

I read Greta Christina's list of events that would convince her [reccomended by Jerry Coyne], and I have to say that none of them would sway me. They'd convince me that there are unexplainable phenomena and beings greater than myself, but I already believe that with no problem and without budging from atheism. I've already dealt with the 900 foot tall Jesus fallacy (it's not a prior conclusion of religious thought), and while finding amazingly detailed scientific information in a holy book would be impressive, evidence of beings in the past who were smarter than me isn't evidence of a god. Also, they haven't because they didn't, so postulating circumstances that have been shown not to have occurred is only persuasive in the most abstract and imaginary way possible.

The emphasis and [cough] methodology may be slightly different from my own but the point is the same: atheism is an honorable and self-sufficient philosophical position that does not need to be weakly, if at all, propped up by science. It can be, as all good modern philosophy, informed by science, but it is not in thrall to it ... or vice versa.

Those who insist that they are do no favor to atheism or to science.
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Labels: Methodological Naturalism

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 10:04 PM 16 comments

I really do intend to say more about the paper, "How Not to Attack Intelligent Design Creationism: Philosophical Misconceptions About Methodological Naturalism," by Maarten Boudry, Stefaan Blancke and Johan Braeckman.

An unfortunate lack of infinite time and energy has prevented me from clearing this whole subject up for everyone.

In the meantime, however, Sean Carroll, at Cosmic Variance, has weighed in on the subject, in reply to Chris Schoen's "Is "Dark Matter" Supernatural?," with what Chris rightly calls “a thoughtful (and goddamned civil) response.”* Jerry Coyne largely agrees with Carroll, so I thought I'd spend some time on Carroll's conception of the problem.

I don't think Carroll's attempt to classify the potential effects of the supernatural into three categories (the “silent,” the “hidden” and the “lawless”) is particularly helpful for reasons that will have to await a further deposit of time and energy into my account.

Instead, I'd like to focus on what actually would happen if, as Carroll contends, “the best explanation scientists could come up with for some set of observations necessarily involved a lawless supernatural component.”

Chris has already answered this and I agree with him that “studying lawless phenomena (whether chaotic or capricious) with science is logically insensible.” But I'd like to take it from a slightly different angle.

In passing, I'd note that it is hard to imagine just how we'd ever get to the situation that Carroll proposes. The point I believe Chris was making about dark matter is that we have no particular reason to believe it exists, except that it is a natural explanation for the phenomena that we observe that would explain the phenomena and that suggests ways that science could further study the cause or causes of the phenomena.** In short, it is an example of the operation of what the supporters of IMN would call the a priori assumption in science that natural phenomena have natural causes. Carroll acknowledges this but calls it a “preference.” That just raises the question of what we should call something that is universal among scientists and the violation of which is consistently deemed not to be scientific, outside philosophical discussions such as these.

After all, an objection to Newton's theory of gravity that was raised immediately was that it proposed an “occult” force that acts at a distance with no known mechanism. For some 300 years we have been looking for a mechanism that enables gravity to do that, without success, but that has not stopped us from continuing to try. At what point does the scientific community throw up its collective hands and say that any phenomena is “supernatural”?

More importantly, what would happen if they did? Would the normal routine of science -- further observations and experiments, the publishing of results and peer review and criticism – continue? Would scientists propose Goditons and quantum spirituality and try to test them? If so, then they would fall afoul of PZ Myers' criticism that they would then be proposing “natural, repeatable, measurable, and even observable…properties” that can no longer be thought of as “supernatural.”

And if the scientific community didn't do those things – if it agreed that the cause of the phenomena is supernatural and nothing further can be said by science about it – how could we characterize the situation other than as science having “stopped,” at least as far as the causes of that phenomena are concerned?

The real question, then, is how we should characterize the decision to call a halt to scientific investigation of a phenomena. Those supporting PMN would say it is a “scientific result.” Those who support IMN would say that, no, it is a metaphysical conclusion that, at least in this particular instance, science does not and cannot work, not an actual result of a scientific investigation, which, after all, has been called to a halt.

Another way to put it is that, a priori, we know that the only way to conclude that the cause a phenomenon is supernatural is by calling a halt to the scientific study of that cause.

That sounds like IMN to me.

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* Incidentally, Massimo Pigliucci and Jerry Coyne have made up and promised to stop sniping at each other and I too will try to restrain my snide side ... at least when it comes to this subject.

** See my discussion of the two objectives of science in my previous post on this subject.

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Update: For another, slightly different, take on this issue, see Steve Novella's description of why "anomaly hunting" is not science in his article, "Ghost Hunting Science vs Pseudoscience."
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Labels: Methodological Naturalism

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 9:46 AM 13 comments

Heh!

Lauri Lebo at Religion Dispatches has this:

So what’s the happy news? At least Sharron Angle, with her ties to the Christian Reconstructionist movement and who believed her candidacy was divinely inspired, was unable to beat out Harry Reid.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 4:54 PM 0 comments

Eric Mariani is a man after my own heart:

It's silly that Modesto City Schools won't allow a teacher to teach intelligent design in class. The ID theory is clearly a scientific hypothesis devoid of religious dogma; it has "theory" in its title, as does the "theory of evolution." And considering religious faith is absolute, it's probably sacrilegious only "theorizing" a God-like creator within the scientific framework. Here are some other theories we should be teaching our children:

Intelligent impregnation — We all know that women can be impregnated intelligently without sexual intercourse or in vitro fertilization, so our anatomy and physiology curriculum must be altered in fairness to this theory.

Intelligent zoology — Though it's never been observed in modern cetology, it's well-known that man can survive within the stomach of a whale for up to three days without being digested and excreted.

Intelligent physics — The human body is slightly denser than liquid water, but did you know that in some special circumstances humans could walk on water without aid of any buoyant instrument?

Let's make sure intelligent design gets into our classrooms, folks. It's certainly on par with Darwinian evolution, which is limited by the evidence and research that fully support it.

Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 8:45 PM 5 comments

Non Sequitur, April 7, 1992
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Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 5:14 PM 11 comments

Via Ed Brayton.
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Link - Posted by John Pieret @ 4:18 PM 2 comments