Born Believers

An interesting article in New Scientist.

Highlights some scientists' claims that religion, rather than being selected by evolution as an individual and social boon, is actually a byproduct of how the brain works.

Of particular interest:

People are predisposed towards mind-body dualism:

"We very naturally accept you can leave your body in a dream, or in astral projection or some sort of magic," Bloom says. "These are universal views." There is plenty of evidence that thinking about disembodied minds comes naturally.

People readily form relationships with non-existent others: roughly half of all 4-year-olds have had an imaginary friend, and adults often form and maintain relationships with dead relatives, fictional characters and fantasy partners

Based on these and other experiments, Bering considers a belief in some form of life apart from that experienced in the body to be the default setting of the human brain.

Over-attribution of agency:

"You see bushes rustle, you assume there's somebody or something there," Bloom says.

Predisposed to teleological explanations:

Put under pressure to explain natural phenomena, adults often fall back on teleological arguments, such as "trees produce oxygen so that animals can breathe" or "the sun is hot because warmth nurtures life".

Seeing patterns where there are none:

The subjects who sensed a loss of control were much more likely to see patterns where there were none. "We were surprised that the phenomenon is as widespread as it is," Whitson says.

The conclusion:

as Barratt points out, whether or not a belief is true is independent of why people believe it.

It does, however, suggests that god isn't going away, and that atheism will always be a hard sell. Religious belief is the "path of least resistance", says Boyer, while disbelief requires effort.

God VS Science

From Science Daily:

A person's unconscious attitudes toward science and God may be fundamentally opposed, researchers report, depending on how religion and science are used to answer "ultimate" questions such as how the universe began or the origin of life.

Especially considering that scientific theories regarding the origins of the universe or the origins of life are very controversial topics amongst religious people right now, with denialism still very much in ascendence. This is a recurring thing (evolution/cosmology is the new outrage, heliocentrism is an old and settled one) - religions tend to build their monasteries in human ignorance and when human knowledge expands - due to science - a conflict between science and religion is inevitable. Whenever any religion makes a falsifiable claim (a testable claim about the natural world), you'd better believe that the claim is going to be scrutinized and that the truth of the matter will eventually come to light - and the discoverable truth seems to contradict the premature dogma at every turn. Miracles, resurrections, depictions of the structure of the universe, and especially origin myths are all fair game. Only by restricting itself to the airy, insubstantial plane of utterly unfalsifiable claims will religions fail to conflict with science, and religions fail at attracting and keeping followers when supernatural beings no longer have real, tangible effects on the world.

"It seemed to me that both science and religion as systems were very good at explaining a lot, accounting for a lot of the information that we have in our environment," she said. "But if they are both ultimate explanations, at some point they have to conflict with each another because they can't possibly both explain everything."

Indeed, both science and religion are explanatory systems. But religion relies on faith while science relies on evidence. Science grows with new discoveries, while religions are threatened by them and find it difficult to change their old dogmas, which are (sometimes literally) set in stone. It's not hard to figure out which one will inevitably falter as humanity grows and learns.

But all this is hardly a recent revelation, the experiment is the new thing. It's interesting, but a little odd: subjects read an excerpt about the Big Bang theory or the Primordial Soup hypothesis, which ends with either positively or dismissively. Then the subjects had to categorize various words as either positive or negative, but before each word appeared on the screen, a 15 millisecond subliminal message appeared, saying "God" or "science", which seemed to nudge the subjects in that direction. Long story short, subjects primed for a positive evaluation of God tended to score science negatively and vice versa.

Why is this the case? Because these are two are very different systems of figuring out the universe, because they have historically been at odds, and because however artfully believers can mesh the findings of science with their dogmas, the methodologies of science and religion conflict at a fundamental level - the rugged skepticism of science has never been able to sit well with the magical thinking of religion.

Investigating Near-Death Experiences

Interesting article on the latest attempt to figure out scientifically exactly what's going in the brain while people are having near-death experiences.

“I see no reason why a priest should tell us about death when we have all this technology available,” says Dr West Dr Parnia. “Death is a biological process and there’s no reason why we shouldn’t study it through medicine.”

Heh.

Getting a scientific handle on this phenomenon is fiendishly difficult. Dead people don’t report back, and it is very hard to assess the status of survivor accounts — are they merely hallucinations occurring before the crisis or just after? Perhaps they are no more than the brain’s way of soothing your path to extinction.

Perhaps. Or "visions" are reconstructed from a barrage of random firings of an oxygen-starved brain into a semblance of a narrative.

The Skeptic's Dictionary and Secular Web have some useful notes on the variety of NDEs (suffice it to say that the typical white-light, life review, seeing dead people stories don't appear to be the norm)

It definitely seems like there is a cultural expectancy factor - there are famous stories of people seeing bright lights, so people tend to see bright lights. Christians see Jesus, Hindus see the Hindu god of death, etc. It's like UFO reports - the flying saucer-type was first popularized in 1947 and was the common reported shape until more recent times, and as the flying saucer craze has declined in popularity, other depictions (black triangles, cylinders, etc) have become more common.

And, as in all things, it is the human mind that is at the heart of the matter. If we can float out of our bodies, then the mind is separable from, and, perhaps not dependent on, the brain.

Well, we do know that our brains are adapt at filling in the blanks (think blind spots) and tricking us into thinking we can see things that we can't actually see.

Twelve years after Tom Wolfe famously announced in Forbes magazine that, as a result of developments in neuroscience, “Your soul just died,” it may be time to say: “No, it didn’t.”

Yeah, let me know when there's conclusive evidence for that.

But is such a thing as a separable mind poss-ible or even conceivable? The answer is yes. In explaining why, it will be necessary to plunge into philosophy and quantum mechanics.

*groans*

And why does "possible" have a dash through it?

Dualism is the default human conviction, embraced by religions, philosophies and, in fact, by everybody in their lives — if we didn’t embrace some degree of it, we’d be constantly worried about crashing our cars into other people’s thoughts.

Wait...what?

We’re all imprisoned in the chains of cause and effect that started with the big bang.

Materialism means fatalism, apparently. I don't buy it.

Just because things have material causes does not mean that we're stuck on some pre-ordinaned timeline - people can take different actions and a different timeline can be traversed. And in some cases, even if human actions do not change, one event could easily occur instead of another (a lightning bolt could strike one tree instead of another). Granted, those sorts of small-scale changes are unlikely to have large-scale results (a butterfly in Hawaii isn't going to stop hurricane season in the Gulf of Mexico), but it's something at least.

He is a distinguished physicist at the University of California at Berkeley. He is convinced that quantum mechanics applies to large as well as small things.

Okay, I'm not a scientist, but I'm pretty sure that doesn't happen. On a macro scale (i.e. our everyday world), stuff is pretty well explained by your normal, garden-variety physics. Quantum Mechanics doesn't enter into it.

The world as a whole is just as weird as the inner workings of the atom. The truth of the world and ourselves is that the whole thing is a chaotic swirl of energy and particles. But we don’t see it, because we make our own reality, our own truth, by only asking certain questions. The brick is a product of our mind; to all-seeing, non-human eyes, it is just a swirl of almost nothing.

New Age drivel. Where are the news editors when you need them?

Reporter: "I'm getting some quotes from a scientist, do you mind if I just spout deep-sounding New-Agey nonsense as if it were science between his quotes?"

Editor: "Sure, that sounds like quality journalism to me."

This idea would, if widely accepted, end the reign of scientific materialism, replacing it with a new dualism. It would mean the universe is not a “causally closed” system, locked down since the big bang, as mainstream science has always insisted it is, but open to freedom of choice by the autonomous, floating, matter-altering mind. We would have regained our souls.

*groans again*

Second, you’d have to accept that a lot of the things that now seem like products of charlatans and grifters — telepathy, spiritualism, even psychokinesis — will suddenly seem much more credible. Thirdly, you need not anticipate instant oblivion on death but a series of very weird and very illuminating experiences.

Let me know how that turns out.

But a bucket of iced water is necessary at this point. Few scientists think any of this is going to happen.

Finally, some much-needed skepticism. And yes, I rather doubt there's a lot of scientific backing for telepathy, psychokinesis, or an afterlife. It would have been nice if you stated that before making it sound like science was just inches away from proving it.

NDEs have fired the imaginations of the religious. But they also fire the imaginations of the investigators. Everybody with an interest in this area has been inspired by a personal experience of a confrontation with death and by the startling vividness and transformative powers of the NDE. Whatever it is, it means something.

Indeed they have fired people's imaginations, perhaps in the literal sense. At any rate, I'm confident that it will be figured out eventually, and I rather doubt it'll be the evidence for the truth of religion that the religious expect it to be, especially sense they claim different and often contradictory things.

Hard materialism is just one more philosophical position, and the authentic sceptical reaction is not a derisive snort but a humble acceptance that there are more things in heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in any of our philosophies.

Jeez, talk about derisive. What's up with the blatantly evil connotation of materialism anyway? It's like these people first learned about materialism while Night on Bald Mountain played in the background.

Creationism on the View

Wow, we're really scraping the bottom of the barrel now.

The Intelligent Designer Jeans. The Blind Pursemaker. Uggh.

fyi - they stole my cockroach retort.


The stupidity antidote: Stupid Design with Neil deGrasse Tyson

Dinesh D'Souza, still not very bright

Dinesh D'Souza. He was the 2007 Bad Faith Awards winner, a notable idiotic apologist and generally not very bright fella, but I didn't find out just how bad he was until just now, when I recently tortured myself by reading the drivel firsthand instead of watching the slapstick from the merciful distance of the nosebleed section.

Here's the article in all its self-embarrassing glory:

Contemporary atheism marches behind the banner of science.

Whoa. Hold it. That's not necessarily the case. A lot of atheists are rather ticked off about religious demonization of science and theists' attempts to remove or censor scientific facts that they dislike for religious reasons. The effect of this ongoing denialism is that now atheists can point to facts about our world that some religious people still don't accept as proof positive that some religious beliefs are faulty and that the concept of religious faith certainly plays its role in enabling this triple tragedy of being wrong, refusing to learn, and foisting known falsehoods on one's children and the public in general as if it were gospel truth.

But don't confuse atheism with science. Even though they both scare fundamentalists, they're not the same thing.

The central argument of these scientific atheists is that modern science has refuted traditional religious conceptions of a divine creator.

Well, God-of-the-Gaps conceptions at any rate, where God is trotted out to explain gaps in human knowledge (i.e. creationism). The other conceptions of God are too ghostly to have much weight.

But of late atheism seems to be losing its scientific confidence.

Why? Because atheists put up billboards that don't have anything to do with science, apparently. Is that really what they consider a good argument on the planet that you're from?

Instead, we are given the simple assertion that there is probably no God, followed by the counsel to go ahead and enjoy life. In other words, let’s not let God and his commandments spoil all the fun.

*cue the clips of atheists descending into reckless hedonism and carnal lust*

Oh, and here's why atheists have "given up the scientific card": fine tuning and the question of whether or not there are other universes.

Uggh. Been there, done that, got the T-shirt and lost it in Universe Alpha (we're in Universe Beta, by the way)

There are two hurdles here, one historical and the other methodological. The historical hurdle is that science has for three centuries been showing that man does not occupy a privileged position in the cosmos, and now it seems like he does.

Umm...okaaay, there are all kinds of things wrong with that. #1 - we're talking about life in general, not necessarily human life. #2 - it's a just-barely-possible existence, combined with numerous planet-sundering threats and a nigh certainty of extinction. #3 - "privileged position in the cosmos"? Seriously?? How on Earth did he arrive at that conclusion?

The methodological hurdle is what physicist Stephen Hawking once called “the problem of Genesis.” Science is the search for natural explanations for natural phenomena, and what could be more embarrassing than the finding that a supernatural intelligence transcending all natural laws is behind it all?

...

Wow. Apparently, hackneyed fine-tuning arguments are all that's needed to prove God. A lot of conditions in the universe are suitable for life to form (there wouldn't be any discussion on the matter if they weren't), therefore God. God-of-the-Gaps logic, what could possibly go wrong?

No wonder atheists are sporting billboards asking us to “imagine…no religion.” When science, far from disproving God, seems to be pointing with ever-greater precision toward transcendence, imagination and wishful thinking seem all that is left for the atheists to count on.

Oh my God. This whole editorial was a fraud. "When Science Points to God". Guess what it has a distinct lack of? Science in any way supporting theism.

What a crock.

Theology professor says atheism contradicts science

Link

Up next, a creationist says that airplanes contradict the theory of gravity.

Contrary to the news headline, his argument seems to be that science must be agnostic on the concept, a conclusion that I agree with. (Similarly, science is agnostic on the existence of tiny, invisible, undetectable fire-breathing dragons but we don't take their existence seriously either) His reasoning is interesting to say the least:

If the world is endless than the science can't prove there's no God,"

*unfalsifiable theory alarm activated, burden of proof shifting detected*

According to the theologian, science and religion do not oppose one another, but should jointly oppose various superstitions and false doctrines.

Poor guy, he doesn't realize that his own religion is assuredly among the superstitions he disdains.

"Knowledge itself is only a building material. It's impossible to live in building materials, you need to build a house. The house is integral world outlook," Osipov believes.

"Integral world outlook"? Oh, he means worldview. Well, yeah, that comes into play frequently - any information people are exposed to is inevitably colored by their preconceptions, beliefs and values. But part of becoming an adult means coming to terms with reality and abandoning faulty beliefs that clash with the facts, having the courage to admit error and constantly striving for greater and greater precision as new facts are uncovered. In that way, even the most esteemed theologian still has a lot of growing up to do.

Science's Alternative to God

...the Multiverse Theory.

They definitely could have picked a better headline, because every time anything in science is branded as an alternative to religion *cough evolution cough*, the zealous hordes quickly descend to smear it mercilessly in imagined defense of their imagined God.

everything here, right down to the photons lighting the scene after an eight-minute jaunt from the sun, bears witness to an extraordinary fact about the universe: Its basic properties are uncannily suited for life.

Well, yeah, I suppose that's true in a trivial sort of way. I would be a tad surprised if a planet that contains life wasn't suitable for life.

But it's a bit of a stretch to say that the whole universe is "uncannily" suitable for life as we know it. As far as we know, every other planet in our solar system is utterly lifeless (or nearly lifeless, with nothing more impressive than microscopic unicellular life) in contrast to Earth. And it's a pretty safe guess that most other solar systems out there don't have nearly as favorable conditions our own does (red dwarfs tend not to be very good for life, some stars may not have rocky planets at all, etc). And of course, the enormous void of space and the tendency of the universe to bathe planets in radiation, smash asteroids into them, and overall have horrible things happen repeatedly to any planet's biosphere (we've had 5 big ones ourselves) is not the least bit conducive to life.

It's like a rabbit out on a field that's being used as a firing range (and not one of those wimpy blue state firing ranges either, I'm talking about claymores and anti-tank munitions) remarking about how suitable it is for a burrow.

Consider just two possible changes. Atoms consist of protons, neutrons, and electrons. If those protons were just 0.2 percent more massive than they actually are, they would be unstable and would decay into simpler particles. Atoms wouldn’t exist; neither would we. If gravity were slightly more powerful, the consequences would be nearly as grave. A beefed-up gravitational force would compress stars more tightly, making them smaller, hotter, and denser. Rather than surviving for billions of years, stars would burn through their fuel in a few million years, sputtering out long before life had a chance to evolve. There are many such examples of the universe’s life-friendly properties—so many, in fact, that physicists can’t dismiss them all as mere accidents.

That's the anthropic principle in a nutshell. And apologists have certainly seized on it, declaring, "Life, therefore God!" (adding, "and don't ask where God's vitality comes from!")

But what if life really is just a happy accident? What if our universe just happened to be the way that it is (it would be strange if it weren't the way that it is).

Short of invoking a benevolent creator, many physicists see only one possible explanation: Our universe may be but one of perhaps infinitely many universes in an inconceivably vast multi­verse. Most of those universes are barren, but some, like ours, have conditions suitable for life.

The idea is controversial. Critics say it doesn’t even qualify as a scientific theory because the existence of other universes cannot be proved or disproved. Advocates argue that, like it or not, the multiverse may well be the only viable non­religious explanation for what is often called the “fine-tuning problem”—the baffling observation that the laws of the universe seem custom-tailored to favor the emergence of life.

It's a decent hypothesis, and it logically makes sense (after all science has shown us a panoply of new worlds, new solar systems, new galaxies - wouldn't new universes fit the progression?) but sans falsifiability, it doesn't seem to have much of an advantage over supernaturalism.

“If there is only one universe,” Carr says, “you might have to have a fine-tuner. If you don’t want God, you’d better have a multiverse.”

False dilemma, big time. I remember it from when the IDiots tried to pull the old "God or Evolution" - any failure of evolution to explain the development of life is evidence for the "Intelligent Creator". It's disappointing to see the same thought process on the march again, with a much less well-supported multiverse hypothesis taking evolution's place.

Whether we live in a multiverse or a lone universe, it's disturbing to see people try to install their God in science.

Science is the collective effort to "read the mind of God"

Article

And here I was, all this time, thinking that scientists were just people trying to piece together facts and figure out how stuff works. Apparently, it was celestial mind-reading all along.

Whew, I'm glad that someone who already believes in God managed to shoehorn science into their pious worldview, otherwise science might be wrongly interpreted as an irreligious endeavor (or possibly even a threat to religion's influence) and then it would have to condemned as atheism and opposed by the faithful. And speaking of, someone really needs to tell the fundamentalists over here in the U.S. that science is complementary to religion, they seem to have missed the memo.

Heller has presented his idea of the unity of science and religion in various forums in recent months. "Physics says nothing about God, but our reflections on, our analysis of the physical, suggests the possibility that God exists outside of time," he said earlier this week in Chicago

Ummm...no it doesn't. Nothing in nature suggests anything at supernatural at all - not ghosts, not fairies, not angels, not demons, and certainly not gods. Rather, people who already believe in Gods imagine that nature points to their God, and every one of them believes in a slightly different God.

In fact, the whole "God exists outside of time" thing is a pretty transparent ad hoc hypothesis specifically devised because of the encroachment of science into what was previously religion's turf - explaining the natural world and the only unfalsifiable God of the Gaps left is the unknowable outside of the universe. Such hasty flights speak volumes of the indefensibility of the God idea.

"This is my idea but it was also the idea of traditional philosophy. Physics nowadays seems to support the traditional view."

Oh come on! What traditional view is that? The traditional view is one of an interventionist god smiting his people's enemies, performing miracles and imparting revelations - a God who lives and acts in the world. Methinks a hidden god wasn't what they had in mind.

"If we ask about the cause of the universe we should ask about the cause of mathematical laws," he said in March when he received the Templeton Prize, a $1.6 million US award given annually to those who advance scientific discovery on "big questions" in science, religion and philosophy.

I sure hope the $1.6 million wasn't for that gem.

"By doing so we are back in the great blueprint of God's thinking about the universe; the question on ultimate causality: why is there anything rather than nothing?

Normal person answer: "Well, we don't know, but it's possible that some form of matter/energy always existed."

Religious answer: "Because Jesus did it."

Normal person retort: "...but what created God?"

Religious answer: *crickets chirping*

Then why the heck do religious people bring ultimate causality up as some sort of knock-down argument for their beliefs when in actuality, they don't have any more of a clue than anyone else as to why things are the way they are? It's just silly. And it's even sillier hearing the same ancient apologetic thought-terminating cliches (i.e. God works in mysterious ways) spouted not only as if they were new and intellectually-savy things, but also worthy of praise and riches.

The God-bots Are Stirring

It seems that the meat bots are stirring and your brain is going to be the next big cultural battleground between the religious nuts and everybody else.

Gah, reading the propaganda piece over at Evolution News is an attack on the mind in and of itself. Essentially, it's one long, whinny rant against materialism, with pronouncements of the vile materialists' imminent defeat of the sort that would make the former Iraq Information Minister blush.

P.Z. Myers and Steven Novella have recent posts on a new front in the war between materialism and reality.

Having convinced only a small fraction of Americans that chance and tautology — i.e. Darwinism — adequately explains life (despite a court-ordered monopoly on public education for the last half-century), materialists are moving on to your mind.

Materialism posits that your mind is meat. No soul, no spirit, just chemicals, congealed by natural selection to dupe you into believing that you’re more than an evanescent meat-robot.

Geez, where to begin. Okay, first of all, calling their superstitions "reality" is a huge lie. Only a small fraction of Americans accept "Darwinism" (IDiot-speak for evolution) - that's lie #2. Describing evolution as a tautology - lie #3.

After the initial spate of lies, they finally move on to the heart of the matter - those evil materialists say that you're just a heap of matter! Oh noes! That's what really ticks off the religious nuts, the horrible indignity of scientists describing the mind in purely physical terms, with no mention of their much beloved invisible, weightless, and as-far-as-we-can-tell-nonexistent souls. Apparently, that idea is not only offensive, but also has vague and terrible "sociological implications".

Anyone else experience a little deja vu? Well, that's because they're all just repurposed creationist/ID talking points.

• "Darwinists say humans are animals!" "I'm no monkey!"
• "Darwinists say that we're animals and should treat each other as such!"

• "Materialists say we're just cells/chemicals/atoms!"
• "Materialists say that we're just heaps of matter and should treat each other as such!"

Ugggh. So stupid.

Being something of a materialist myself, I think I can address this objection:

Yes, you are just matter. Your pet dog is just matter. Your family is just matter. All the paintings in the Louvre are just matter. Even your favorite song is just a series of vibrations travelling through the air.

Obviously, the material makeup of things doesn't dictate their worth. Only an idiot or a creationist liar would make such a boneheaded claim.

And besides, how the hell do the IDiots expect to inject the soul into neuroscience? They're hundred years too late for that, science long ago moved moved on from that sort of nonsense. Seems like this is even more of a lost cause then their evolution denialism.

But it seems like the have another strategy in mind, instead of trying to get positive evidence for their mystical mumbo-jumbo, they'll just fall back to ye olde standby - the argument from ignorance - and point to real research and claim that the material explanations can't possibly fully explain the phenomenon, therefore an unknown soul-like entity must be the cause. Mark my words, it'll happen.

It's all so stupid, not the least of which is the problem that even the devout don't seem to understand exactly what they're saying when they speak of souls (not unlike Intelligent Designers). Sure, they're believed to be some ethereal vehicle that somehow stores our consciousness and personality and survive our deaths - but even simple folk have figured out that all the soul talk runs headlong into the problem of brain damage. If you change the brain, you change the mind. So even assuming that souls actually exist, they're irrelevant because of the massive extent that the brain determines personality.

DI's latest foray into the world of science is just going to be a huge headache.

This is your brain on morality

Interesting speech by Sam Harris:



Summary

He says that we should strive towards a society that maximizes the well-being of its people, and we can figure it out in a scientific and objective way that there are societies in the world which do not maximize their people's well-being as much as others. His examples are a society where women are forced to wear burqas, people demonize homosexuals, stone adulterers to death, and solicit the murders of novelists and cartoonists - it's obvious that these are bad ways to run a society.

However, in science, there's a big taboo on making normative claims or touching morality - that describing one society as better than another is a form of cultural imperialism. There's a culture of moral relativism that resists any attempt to address questions of morality, especially in a scientific way, and anyone attempting will undoubtedly get accused of scientism. But there's a moral imperative for a maturing science of the mind to address such questions.

Response

In some ways, his speech covers a lot of new ground - using science to figure out which ways of organizing a society would produce the best results, but in other ways, this is the same basic thing that people have been saying for hundreds of years. An ancestor of Harris's notion of maximizing well-being can be seen in John Stuart Mill's greatest happiness principle, where morally right acts produce the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number of people.

One potential criticism may be in quantifying and defining societal well-being. But surely, most of us can grasp this on an intuitive level - for instance, comparing a western, liberal democracy (like the UK) to an totalitarian state (like Hitler's Germany) to an Islamic theocracy (like Iran) - most of us would figure out that door #1 is a heckuva lot more conductive to a whole host of factors that we'd want in the ideal society - citizen happiness, freedom, economic prosperity, health, etc. And thankfully, there are plenty of statistics that attempt to track societal health in many countries - everything from poverty and infant mortality rate to quality of life and happiness.

One particularly interesting thing about Harris's lecture is that it's extremely relevant and important political policy makers, and using his well-being approach really could help foster positive changes in how our society is structured.

For example, let's talk drugs. It's always puzzled me that, around the world, different drugs are legal and different drugs are illegal. In the United States, alcohol and tobacco are legal while marijuana and opium are illegal, while in the Netherlands, marijuana is perfectly legal and in Saudi Arabia, alcohol is illegal (and the prescribed punishment is a public lashing. Yikes!). And if you go back and look at the history of drug laws, it doesn't seem like these decisions were made very rationally, and certainly not taking into account what science has to say on the matter. More often than not, we're talking about religious prohibitions or cultural norms. Yet, science has shown than some drugs are worse for societal well-being than others, and it's interesting to note that some of the legal ones are worse than the illegal ones.

And I don't know how Harris's talk is going to go over with the religious. Badly, I think. After all, he was the one who pointed out that religious morality, dependent on the imagined commands of God, is divorced from notions of human suffering. So why would such people possibly agree with him about maximizing human well-being across the globe, especially when Harris accuses certain religious norms (like demonizing homosexuals) of being morally deficient? They probably don't. In that case, they should stop advertising their religion as some sort of panacea for all the world's ills. (How many times have you heard people claim that only if more people believe in their sort of God, things in the world would be better? Bonus points if it was in response to someone in their religious group committing a grave moral misdeed)

But couldn't one make the case that religious organizations do a lot of good in the world, like charity work, and that the mission of increasing human well-being need not be at odds with following God's commands?

Well, there are a couple things wrong with this. Obviously, some religious codes don't maximize well-being, and would in fact cause a great deal of harm in the world if carried out (like stoning adulterers or killing apostates). If the religious mandate is merely helping people, then it can be achieved in a purely secular manner. But if it is obeying God above all else, then it cannot be reconciled with Harris's idea of promoting well-being because the two will inevitably conflict, since ancient holy books unavoidably reflect the moral norms of the time they're written, norms that have been rendered obsolete by more recent norms that more effectively increase human freedom and happiness.

So which direction shall we choose? A better world (assuming we have both the knowledge to figure out how to get there and the courage to see it through) or a faith-based world (where we let our ancient superstitions and prejudices guide our behavior)?

Beyond Belief 3: Candles in the Dark

The videos are finally up, and I'm currently trying to digest what little I can in between all the other stuff I have to do throughout the day.

But I really enjoyed the speech from Sam Harris, and I'll write about that next.

Dark Flow

I love a good scientific discovery, but oh man, this is just plain weird.

Dark Flow

Apparently, some star clusters are moving towards a region in the sky as if by gravity, but nothing we know of in the observable universe could conceivably be responsible. It's as if there's something outside the observable universe pulling them there.



Now, it's important to understand that the observable universe isn't necessarily the totality of the universe - there may be lots of matter out there that we can't see yet because it's so distant that its light hasn't made it here yet.

But still this is a pretty amazing and bizarre discovery.

In my geekiness, I'm tempted to call this the Beyonder Force. :D

Evolution 101

Among popular misconceptions of scientific theories, evolution is by far the worst. It astounds me how horribly evolution is framed in popular culture and how maligned it is in public discourse. It is no doubt a result of the Christian-Republican campaign to stifle the teaching of evolution and inject religious dogma straight into the science classroom.

Firstly, among creationists it's abundantly clear that few (if any) of them even understand the scientific theory in the first place. I can't count how many times they have considered "proof" of evolution to be a cat giving birth to a dog or an individual chimpanzee spontaneously metamorphosing into a human overnight. The ignorance is baffling, but unsurprising - these people have been told that evolution is a direct threat to God, so it makes sense to manufacture such self-deceits in a misguided attempt to protect their beliefs.

Not once do they hit on the remarkably simple real idea - that evolution is simply accumulated genetic change from one generation to another. Instead, they attack a strawman of their own devising in an attempt to justify their beliefs.


The process of evolution, pulled from an actual "creation science for kids"-type site.

[Editor's note: finally tracked down the site, it's from our good friend Harun Yahya/Adna Oktar]

Straight-line evolution


Like the horribly bad starfish-->fish example, people sometimes think of evolution as a one-way ticket, with a single species "improving" up to a radically different form. The seductive thing about this misconception is that it's partially true - you can trace a current species lineage from its more humble ancestors, but that's only part of the picture. In reality, speciation involves lots of daughter species and many extinctions. It's a messy affair. And the notion of "progress" in evolution is mistaken - fitness is all about surviving in the current environment, and adaptions always have their disadvantages. Examples in nature abound - pangolins have forelimbs so well adjusted to digging that they're no longer very good for walking, leaving pangolins with a hobbling gait. Also, every once and a while, a species seems to "devolve" and go against our vaunted notions of progress - for example, cave fish that no longer have functioning eyes.

Clade-skipping



Also like the starfish example, creationists seem to think that evolution operates by species launching from their branch in the nested hierarchy to another branch - what was once an echinoderm is now a full-fledged chordate! Sorry, it doesn't work that way; species form a nested hierarchy and continue to evolve, but a mammal species is never going to become a bird species, no matter how much time elapses, their common ancestors have long ago diverged from each other, never to reunite. If they did, that would pose serious problems for the theory of evolution.

Common objections to evolution:

But it's just a theory!

That's true, it is a theory. Heliocentrism is also a theory. Scientific theories are models used to explain facts and scientific laws are mathematical relationships. There's no hierarchy of accuracy - theories don't graduate to law status, no matter how well supported they are by the evidence.

It's morally wrong



A favorite tactic amongst creationists is to throw out irrelevancies - changing the topic from whether or not evolution happens to whether or not evolution is "bad". It's an absurd ploy - no matter how distasteful the facts are, they don't stop existing merely because one doesn't like them - I can't close my eyes and make the world disappear.

It's atheistic



This is the mother lode of objections. I love it because it betrays the motivations of the speaker so well - the main gripe against evolution isn't on factual grounds at all, but on theological grounds.

Well, it's true that the theory of evolution doesn't have much to do with God. Neither does any other scientific theory. Science itself is agnostic on the subject.

But the intent of this objection is to label evolution an "atheistic science" and therefore make it anathema to all theists.

Once again, it's an irrelevant objection - evolution either happens or it doesn't, theological quandaries need not apply.

Another Day, Another Hatchet Job

This time it's from Salon, under the groan-worthy heading: What's wrong with science as religion

Since PZ himself and Chris already sunk most of the arguments, I'm going to leave Karl Giberson's personal beef with PZ alone. And as tempting as might be to reiterate my thoughts on Crackergate, I'm going to try to leave that alone as well. Besides, I have bigger fish to fry: his editorial drive-by on the notion of science itself.

The distortions come out right away: Crackergate apparently damages the reputation of science.

That's right, one person's controversial opinion (controversial in the sense that a sizable chunk of the population doesn't believe that crackers are crackers) damages science as a whole. Presumably, if Myers was a math professor, the headline would read that he does "addition no favors". This is incredibly silly argument, a thinly-veiled way of telling someone to shut up.

It seems like every time an atheist (who happens to be a scientist) criticizes religion, there's always wailing and gnashing of teeth about how scientists are intolerant, fundamentalist atheist bigots (sigh), claims that science is just like religion, and accusations of scientism.

And this editorial is no different: PZ is an atheist reverend (he's also called a televangelist and an inquisitor), Dennet is an atheist preacher, and the Big Bang theory and the theory of evolution form a secular creation myth. From this dubious foundation, he insinuates that science is like religion. The inanity is breathtaking.

Oh boy, where to begin. Let's start with the basics, something Karl apparently needs a refresher course in: science is a way of gathering knowledge through empirical means - hypotheses are driven by fact. Needless to say, this is VERY different from how religions operate.

Secondly, some scientists are very vocal about their rejection of religion. Good for them. They have every right to air their opinions, just like everyone else. They shouldn't be forced into silence on the matter or maligned as atheist inquisitors simply for saying what a lot of people are already thinking - that religious claims about the nature of the universe are mistaken (and in some cases, absurd).

You'd think this would be obvious, but the Catholic leadership just sent out a statement saying that "freedom of religion means that no one has the right to attack, malign or grossly offend a faith tradition they personally do not have membership or ascribe allegiance". Clearly, some religious people are strong proponents the sit-down-and-shut-up approach.

This often gets packaged as a Science VS religion narrative, with the world's devout under siege from an unmerciful army of atheist scientists. This isn't just incredibly dishonest, it misses the point entirely - this isn't a war between science and religion. This is a war between humanity and religion. Large chunks of the populace, from astrophysicists to janitors, have serious reservations about religion. And I'm grateful that people like PZ get out there and say it in a big way.

Science itself doesn't demolish religion, it merely undercuts religion by providing a method of knowing about the world that doesn't involve divining with pig entrails. And in cases where religions make empirical claims about the world (i.e. that the world is 6,000 years old or that touching someone will cure their cancer or that prayer will bring rain), science serves to contradict our superstitions. Religious people often have trouble accepting facts that contradict their deeply-held views, but that's their own problem, and not the scientist's.

Finally, Karl gets around to to what he's really after: "In order for many of us to truly feel at home in the universe so grandly described by science, that science needs to coexist as peacefully as possible with the creation stories of our religious traditions."

Okay, so he just wants peaceful coexistence between science and religion. Except for cases where the priests say one thing and scientific discoveries say another, this already exists - few religious people are offended by algebra or physics.

But I think what's really getting his goat is that PZ, a fellow scientist, is rocking the boat by openly attacking religion. Well, that's too bad. People are going to have different opinions on matters of religion and he's just going to have to deal with it. His hatchet job certainly isn't going to silence anyone.