Naturalism has defeated supernaturalism

There are at least two possible general approaches to obtain knowledge about how the world works. One way is methodological supernaturalism, another way is methodological naturalism. An example of the former is divine revelation. An example of the latter is matching empirical observation to a logical model by using the model to make predictions and verifying the predictions with reproducible experiments.

It is commonly claimed that science is intrinsically, and therefore a-priori and by definition, dependent on methodological naturalism. As will be shown here, this is false. This false assertion that methodological naturalism is intrinsic to science should not be confused with the similarly common and false claim that science can say nothing about whether the universe is naturalistic or supernaturalistic. Nevertheless, both falsehoods are logically related to each other and most people who assert one of these two falsehoods also asserts the other falsehood.

The fact that methodological naturalism is not intrinsic to science should also not be confused with the claim that methodological supernaturalism is a proper way of obtaining knowledge. This is because methodological supernaturalism is unproductive. Methodological supernaturalism has simply failed to produce any knowledge whatsoever and therefore has been universally abandoned by all knowledge dependent vocations and avocations for being a complete failure. Not just scientists, but everyone employed in any knowledge dependent vocation or avocation relies exclusively on methodological naturalism for obtaining that knowledge because methodological naturalism is the only method for obtaining knowledge that is productive.

Even though in practice it is the case that the universe that we were born into relies exclusively on methodological naturalism for acquiring knowledge about how the university's works, in theory it could have been otherwise. We could have been born into a different universe where the best way, or maybe even the only way, to obtain knowledge about how the universe worked was methodological supernaturalism. In this mirror image universe, all people engaged in knowledge based vocations and avocations would obtain knowledge through divine revelation by worshipping a deity, or deities, and closely following the rituals, rules, practices, beliefs, behaviors, etc. dictated by the deity or deities.

A universe where methodological supernaturalism prevails is the universe that the authors of the Tanakh, Bible, and Quran were convinced they lived in. It is the universe where uneducated and mostly illiterate people intuitively imagined themselves to be living for thousands of years. In those days, the knowledge that was considered most important was to know the future and what displeased and pleased god. Prophets like Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, and Daniel were said to have received divine revelations about God's current opinion of, and the future of, God's chosen people. The Christian bible added more prophets such as John the Baptist. Psalm 119:66 appeals to God to "Teach me good judgment and knowledge, for I believe in your commandments." “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” is the instruction of Proverbs 1:7. Furthermore, 1 Timothy 6:20-21 indicates divine revelation that supports biblical based religious belief is the only source of knowledge: "Turn away from godless chatter and the opposing ideas of what is falsely called knowledge, which some have professed and in so doing have wandered from the faith”. According to the Quran, all prophets through history, starting with Adam, have consistently preached the same main belief of worshiping Allah, and Muhammed is the final prophet.

If we lived in that mirror image, alternative universe, where knowledge was obtained by divine revelation, then we should all be theists. This is why it is important to understand and appreciate that all knowledge based vocations, and avocations, pragmatically rely exclusively on methodological naturalism provisionally because this method alone works, and not because of some a-priori, ideological bias or logical requirement. Furthermore, for the same reason that the success of methodological supernaturalism would constitute strong empirical justification for theism in a mirror image, imaginary, alternative universe, the exclusive success of methodological naturalism in the real universe that we inhabit is strong empirical justification for atheism. Given the universe we are all born into, we should all be atheists.

The close logical connection between methodological naturalism's monopoly for obtaining knowledge and philosophical naturalism is understandably awkward for those who, regardless of the evidence, are pre-committed to theism. This could explain why we so often hear this falsehood that methodological naturalism is intrinsic to science. If methodological naturalism was intrinsic to science, if methodological naturalism was a-priori a logical necessity, then methodological and philosophical naturalism can be declared to be logically separate and unrelated. But again, this is not true. The truth is that the strong success of methodological naturalism relative to methodological supernaturalism over the previous several hundred years is the primary reason methodological supernaturalism is rejected by scientists. Add to this the consistently naturalistic explanations we have acquired over this time that reliably answer so many questions and the supernatural worldview reflected in the holy books becomes archaic. It is long past time for people to recognize those books are fictional.

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

Can Science Test Supernatural Worldviews?

The notion that supernatural phenomena are fundamentally beyond the scope of scientific examination is promoted by prominent scientific institutions, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and the National Academy of Sciences (NAS). The court ruling in the United States against the teaching of "Intelligent Design" (ID) as an alternative to evolution in biology classes (Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District; Jones, 2005) was partially justified on the grounds that claims involving supernatural phenomena are outside the proper domain of scientific investigation.

A few other examples of this commonly asserted denial that science has anything to say about supernatural claims follow.

The booklet "Science, Evolution, and Creationism" from the National Academies Press says this:

Because they are not a part of nature, supernatural entities cannot be investigated by science. In this sense, science and religion are separate and address aspects of human understanding in different ways. Attempts to pit science and religion against each other create controversy where none needs to exist.

A statement by the National Science Teachers Association:

Because science is limited to explaining the natural world by means of natural processes, it cannot use supernatural causation in its explanations. Similarly, science is precluded from making statements about supernatural forces because these are outside its provenance. . . as noted in the National Science Education Standards, “Explanations on how the natural world changed based on myths, personal beliefs, religious values, mystical inspiration, superstition, or authority may be personally useful and socially relevant, but they are not scientific.”

A statement by the National Association of Biology Teachers:

Explanations employing nonnaturalistic or supernatural events, whether or not explicit reference is made to a supernatural being, are outside the realm of science and not part of a valid science curriculum. Evolutionary theory, indeed all of science, is necessarily silent on religion and neither refutes nor supports the existence of a deity or deities.

They are all mistaken. Science does not presuppose Naturalism and supernatural claims are amenable in principle to scientific evaluation. Here is an article on this topic by Yonatan I. Fishman, published in 2007 in the Science & Education, titled Can Science Test Supernatural Worldviews? His article explains that "whether the entities or phenomena posited by claim X are defined as ‘natural’ or ‘supernatural’ is irrelevant to the scientific status of the claim. If the fundamental aim of science is the pursuit of truth - to uncover, to the extent that humans are capable, the nature of reality - then science should go wherever the evidence leads. If the evidence were to strongly suggest the existence of supernatural phenomena, then so be it."

Yonatan Fishman concludes thusly: "Importantly, critical thinking and a scientific approach to claims are not just for scientists and debunkers of the supernatural. A well-informed population proficient in critical thinking will be better equipped to make intelligent decisions concerning crucial political issues of our day, such as global warming and governmental foreign policy. Indeed, an intellectually honest engagement with reality is a prerequisite for promoting the long-term interest of individuals and society at large." I recommend this article.

Why do so many groups and individuals, including institutions that advocate on behalf of educators and scientists, mistakenly deny that our modern knowledge can be biased (and in fact is biased) vis-a-vis various theisms? We can assume they are issuing these denials out of fear of offending religious people. These false assertions are counter-productive because they attack and undermine the very goal of critical thinking that these same institutions claim to be defending. This counter-productive appeasement of religious beliefs at the expense of truth by institutions representing educators and scientists needs to stop. When speaking the truth is inconvenient because the audience is intolerant or otherwise prejudiced against the truth, there is always the option of keeping silent. How about more silence here?

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

Petition Catholics to drop blasphemy complaints

Sanal Edamaruku is the founder-president of Rationalist International. He is also the president of the Indian Rationalist Association. He is the editor of the internet publication Rationalist International, and author of 25 books and numerous articles. He is a regular TV commentator on various Indian TV channels on superstitions and blind belief and is a major voice in defense of reason and scientific temper in India. He has spent 30 years debunking miracles and exposing fraudulent faith healers. Earlier this year he was charged with blasphemy for debunking a claimed miracle at a local Catholic Church.

A statue of Jesus on a crucifix was dripping water from the toes. Hundreds of people came every day, some from far away, to pray and collect some of the “holy water” in bottles and vessels. A TV channel invited Mr. Edamaruku to investigate the “miracle” that caused local excitement. He went with the TV team to inspect the crucifix in front of the Church of Our Lady of Velankanni. Within half an hour, he identified the source of the water (a leaking water pipe) and the mechanism for the water traveling to the statue feet (capillary action).

In March, a group called the Catholic Secular Forum filed a complaint against Mr. Edamaruku with the police in Mumbai, and two other groups, the Association of Concerned Catholics and Maharashtra Christian Youth Forum also filed complaints at other police stations. The Catholic Bishop of Mumbai called on Mr. Edamaruku to apologize for “hurting” the Catholic community by questioning the motives and sincerity of church authorities who allegedly encouraged people to believe there was a miracle occurring.

Because Mr. Edamaruku can be arrested at anytime (he was instructed by police to turn himself in for arrest), and because he was recently denied "anticipatory bail" (he could spend years in jail waiting for his trial), he was compelled to flee India.

If you have not done so yet, please consider signing the change.org petition appealing to the Catholic authorities in Mumbai, particularly the Archbishop and Auxiliary Bishop of Mumbai, and the Vatican and the global Catholic community to clarify their Church's position on the attempts to silence Mr Edamaruku's criticisms through legal channels, and to use their influence with local Catholics to encourage them to publicly withdraw their complaints.

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

Ideological dependency and misunderstanding

It was common for theists to be convinced that there are no atheists in foxholes even during the height of the Cold War when the enemies of freedom and democracy actively and aggressively fought with guns from hideouts in forested mountains on behalf of an anti-capitalist and godless, militant, totalitarian ideology. The contradiction should be obvious, how can atheists with guns be battling and overthrowing governments around the world when there are no atheists in foxholes? Yet even today many people seem to think, despite the lost Vietnam war, despite Communist victories in Cuba, China, Nicaragua, etc., that there are no atheists in foxholes. This suggests that there is a psychological mechanism at play here that overrides the evidence to the contrary. It turns out that the same psychological mechanism that helps convince people that there are no atheists in foxholes also helps to convince some of those same people that only their particular religion is true.

University of Missouri psychologist Kenneth Vail III and colleagues recruited 26 Christians, 28 atheists, 40 Muslims and 28 agnostics to study how religious individuals tend to believe so strongly in their own religion’s gods yet deny the gods of competing religions. Each participant was tasked with writing either a brief essay about how they felt about their own death or a "religiously neutral" topic, such as loneliness or how to cope when plans go awry. After a brief verbal task to distract the participants from the true purpose of the study, they filled out questionnaires about their religious beliefs, including their faith in the Christian God or Jesus, Buddha and Allah.

When Christians thought of death, they became firmer in their religious beliefs and less accepting of Allah and Buddha. Likewise for Muslims, who became more committed to Allah and less accepting of Buddha or the Christian God. Agnostics became more likely to believe in any deity, whether the Christian version, Allah or Buddha.

This explains why theists, including theistic leaning agnostics, so readily accept the counter-evidenced claim that there are no atheists in foxholes. They are projecting their own religiously motivated psychology onto atheists. However, that projection is a mistake because atheists lack this ideological dependency common to theists. Atheists showed none of the responses to thoughts of death that the theists and agnostics did. In the words of the researchers, "atheists do not rely on religion when confronted with the awareness of death."

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

Adults under 30 have more doubt

The Pew Research Center for the People & the Press released the results of the latest Pew Values Study survey. Compared to 1987, fewer citizens of the United States of America think books that contain "dangerous ideas" should be banned from public school libraries. Fewer people think that school boards should be able to fire teachers who are homosexual. Fewer people claim to have "old fashioned values" about family and marriage. The poll results in the "religion, social values" section have otherwise not changed much, with one exception.

In 2007 81% of people who were 18-29 years old said they never doubt the existence of God. The numbers that year were 87% for people 65 and older, 83% for people 50-64, 84% for people 30-49. Those numbers subsequently diverged as more people under 30 admitted to sometimes having doubts. The percentage went down to 76% in 2009 and 67% in 2012, increasing the sometimes doubting count from 19% to 33% over 5 years. Meanwhile, over 80% of people 30 or older continue to say they never have doubt.

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

Fictional absolute nothing and theology

David Albert, in addition to being a professor of philosophy at Columbia University, has a doctorate in physics from Rockefeller University. So it was appropriate for him to be selected by the NY Times to review Lawrence Krauss' book "A Universe From Nothing". In his critical review, David Albert correctly points out that the definition of nothing favored by theologists and some philosophers as a perfect nothingness does not exactly match the concept of nothing described by Lawrence Krauss. For David Albert, Lawrence Krauss' up-front refusal to adopt the theological/philosophical definition of the concept of nothing as absolute and total is a fatal flaw in Lawrence Krauss' argument. David Albert, depite his multiple doctorates, is wrong about this, and it is important to understand why.

It is often true that something is either absolutely and totally present or absent. Furthermore, we can generalize from the fact that there can be more, or less, of something, to the concepts of total nothing and allthing. There is no word in English that is the opposite of nothing, so I am making up this word "allthing". We go from less and less of something until we have a complete absence of something, and we go from more and more of something until we have a total presence of something. Similarly, we can imagine a complete cold and a complete hot, a complete dark and a complete light, etc. There are many phenomena that can be measured on a line of less and more, and we can generalize from the concept of less and more to the concepts of complete presence and absence of that phenomena. That is clearly what David Albert and theologians are doing when they imagine their concept of total nothing.

But David Albert and theologians are not stopping with imagining total nothing, they are also insisting that this imagined concept is a fact and that total nothing is the initial condition. After all, if those theological/philosophical concepts of total nothing and allthing are fictions then clearly Lawrence Krauss is doing nothing wrong by excluding those fictions from his efforts to describe how our universe works. So why does David Albert insist that the theological/philosophical concept of total nothing is factual? Does David Albert also insist that total darkness and total light are factual conditions? Total cold and total heat? We can imagine many things this way that are fictions. Where is the empirical evidence for this total nothing that justifies this assumption that it is a fact?

The bottom line is this: When it comes to determining what is true and false about how the world works, empirical evidence trumps everything else. Human intuition and imagination are not up to the task. So when philosophers and theologians place their intuition first, as they are doing when they insist a-priori that there is a starting point of total nothing, they are making a fundamental mistake. They are, in effect, putting the cart of human ideology/psychology ahead of the horse of evidence. In contrast, Lawrence Krauss takes the better approach here. Lawrence Krauss is simply pursuing the evidence and allowing the evidence to dictate the conclusions on a best fit basis.

David Albert also points out, again correctly, that our understanding of how the universe works is substantially incomplete, as Lawrence Krauss acknowledges in his book. Thus, we don't know why the forces of gravity and dark energy are as weak as they are. Similarly, Lawrence Krauss cannot demonstrate that his underlying assumption that quantum mechanics characterizes at least some of the multiverse beyond our universe is correct. But it is still reasonable, on a best fit with available evidence basis, to assume that the quantum mechanical and general relativity properties of our universe are also properties found elsewhere in the multiverse. If David Albert and theologians are going to dismiss that assumption in favor of the less plausible assumption that our universe is unlike the rest of the multiverse for being quantum mechanical, then they need better reasons for their preferred assumption than that we lack proof either way.

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

From nothing to something to nothing

Why is the Earth 93 million miles from the Sun and the distance from Earth to Mars between 34 and 250 million miles? Questions like these, that seek the underlying purpose, are the sort of questions that theology falsely claims to answer. Such questions assume that there is a purpose behind everything and then assume that we can discern that purpose. But this flies in the face of all of the empirical evidence that there is no such purpose associated with everything and that, in any case, we have no way to discern any such purpose.

And so it is also with one of the favorite question of theists: Why is there something rather than nothing? There is no human focused, purpose based, explanation since humans are not the goal, and purpose is not the essential, or foundational, property of reality. So as long theists keep falsely insisting, a-priori, and contrary to the evidence we have, that the only "satisfactory" answers to the "why" questions must provide ultimate purpose from a human-centric perspective, they will continue to give priority to their own make-believe version of reality over the evidence.

We can fruitfully address the related "how" questions, such as what physical processes led to the Earth ending up in its present position. Most of theology, with it's insistence on finding the imaginary holy grail of the ultimate purpose, is non-productive. Unlike science, theology never has produced, and we have every reason to think cannot, and therefore never will produce, any knowledge.

Lawrence M. Krauss, in his new book, "A Universe from Nothing: Why There is Something Rather Than Nothing", advocates for the productive, empirical evidence first, skepticism based approach of science to resolve the mysteries of origins. He summarizes what we know, including what we know we don't know, about the origin of our universe, and he also discusses the possibility that there are mysteries about origins that we will never be able answer.

There is no way around the fact that the laws of physics are counter-intuitive and can only be understood by people who spend years learning the mathematics and studying the subject. So, for example, it turns out that empty space has gravitationally repulsive energy "... because it causes empty space to have "negative" pressure. As a result of this negative pressure, the universe actually does work on empty space as it expands". The end result is an initial period of inflation, after which "... one ends up with a universe full of stuff (matter and radiation), and the total Newtonian gravitational energy of that stuff will be as close as one can ever imagine to zero". Starting with "an infinitesimally small region of empty space" with a vacuum energy, we end up with an arbitrarily large and flat universe, without costing any energy. Our best measurements of our universe's curvature favor the conclusion that our universe is flat, exactly as predicated for a universe born from a tiny empty space.

The book has 11 chapters plus an epilogue. In chapter 9 he states: "Just as Darwin, albeit reluctantly, removed the need for divine intervention in the evolution of the modern world, teeming with diverse life throughout the planet ..., our current understanding of the universe, it's past, and it's future make it more plausible that "something" can arise out of nothing without the need for any divine guidance." But so far we have assumed a starting point of an infinitesimally tiny empty space. Where did that tiny empty space come from?

It turns out that everything happens that is not forbidden by the laws of physics. And according to the laws of physics, nothingness is an unstable condition, nothing always produces something. Not only can nothing become something, it is required to, but in a way that balances negative and positive energy so that they sum to zero.

At this point we encounter several of the big unresolved mysteries of cosmology. One question is what generated the asymmetry between matter and anti-matter? Dr. Krauss emphasizes that "independent of this uncertainty [regarding how our universe became dominated by matter], however, is the remarkable fact that a feature of the underlying laws of physics can allow quantum process to drive the universe away from a featureless state".

Another unresolved question is whether or not "small, possibly compact spaces ... themselves pop in and out existence?" And here Dr. Krauss follows the general principle that anything "not proscribed by the laws of physics must actually happen...". Citing Stephen Hawking, Dr. Krauss says "a quantum theory of gravity [which we currently do not have] allows for the creation, albeit perhaps momentarily, of space itself where none existed before." Furthermore, "a compact universe with zero total energy" could spontaneously appear and remain for a long time, without violating the Uncertainty Principle (a basic principle of quantum mechanics).

This suggests that our universe not only has total Newtonian gravitational energy of zero, and is therefore geometrically flat, but also has total energy, including the mass energy (e=mc2), of zero, and therefore our universe was initially geometrically closed. In other words, an initially tiny, closed universe can pop into existence, rapidly and exponentially expand (inflate) into an infinitely large flat universe, spontaneously, with impunity, carrying no net energy.

It is said that "out of nothing nothing comes". This has no foundation in science. Instead, the laws of physics imply there is a multiverse, with the other universes existing either in extra dimensions or in a context of eternal inflation within three dimensional space [the existence of extra dimensions is another unresolved question of cosmology]. The laws of nature in each universe may be set stochastically and randomly. It is even possible that there is no fundamental theory. It could be that "there is something simply because, if there was nothing, we wouldn't find ourselves living here." The question why is there something rather than nothing "... may be no more significant or profound than asking why some flowers are red and some are blue."

It may be that in the multiverse there are an infinite set of different laws of nature, or there may be a very restricted combination of laws that results in viable universes. Lawrence Krauss has clearly given considerable thought to the subject of origins, and he makes winning and important arguments on behalf of the conclusion in his epilogue that "I find oddly satisfying the conclusion that, in either scenario [infinite or restricted set of laws of nature], a seemingly omnipotent God would have no freedom in the creation of our universe. No doubt because it further suggests that God is unnecessary - or at best redundant."

This book received a strongly negative review in the NY Times. Having read the book, I can say that that negative book review was unfair. This is a very good book.

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

Aerodynamics? No, I don't have enough faith

Dr C. Destum gives us: "Ultimately, if you accept the aerodynamic lift theory, you dismiss accountability, you don't have to abide by a set of moral codes." Adding that if you accept aerodynamic lift theory, "you have no reason for things such as good behavior".

Sitting in his study with mechanical engineer C. Destum (CD), the United Nations liaison for the One-Week Departurist Church (DC) engaged him in conversation, and the discussion turned to the subject of aerodynamics and accountability. As they faced each other between the erudite tomes on the bookcase and the modern technological equipment on the desk, it felt appropriate to think about our incentives and airborne transportation.

C. Destum: Like this computer: If you came into this room and saw the computer, you wouldn't think it had just planted itself here. It didn't arrive here by random events.

DC: So why do so many people prefer to believe in the undeserved distribution of goods? Or to put it another way, Why is the matter of aerodynamic lift so important?

CD: It comes down to a matter of property ownership. Who distributes the property, who deserves the property, who is given ownership of the property? Those who believe in aerodynamic lift, and in a naturalistic explanation of the universe, ultimately see themselves as self-distributers -- as the creator and ultimate source of the distribution of goods. In this way they answer to nothing and nobody, for there is nothing higher than themselves.

DC: How does this happen? What are the consequences of accepting aerodynamic lift views of accountability? How does this affect society and the way we see ourselves?

CD: By believing that wealth is a product of random acts, we eliminate accountability and the basis of ethical behavior. For if there is no such thing as accountability, you can do anything you want. You make everything relative, and there's no reason for any of our higher values.

DC: If we are all the owners of property by chance, the random assortment of atoms, living in a deterministic universe that is simply the consequence of physical interactions, doesn't it all seem so futile?

CD: Yes, in my education I had to learn aeordynamical theories, and as a God-fearing Christian I wondered how to make God and aerodynamics mesh. The truth is that you can't make them mesh--you have to choose one or the other.

DC: Too many Christians have given up too much to "science," conceding not just the observed data but the anti-God interpretations. Are you often questioned about being both a logical engineer and a Christian?

CD: Yes, my answer is that the more you understand science, the less you can believe all this is an accident! Just look at the unbreakable antler, with its vascular skin providing oxygen and nutrients to the growing bone, until it is fully grown, and the velvet is lost, and the bone dies, the antler falls off, and the process repeats every year.

DC: Unbreakable? This does not seem to be a correct portrayal of some antlers at least! Antlers have been known to break.

CD: Put a probe on the antlers of an 18 year old reindeer, and those antlers are just as strong as his first antlers. Reindeers have died of old age without breaking any of their antlers. This is a highly complex and sophisticated organ. Not a likely result of chance processes.

DC: Not even by slow degrees?

CD: Even if you allow the distribution of a single millimeter of bone. And a single millimeter of bone is amazingly important -- every millimeter of antler can be the difference between success and failure in finding a mate.... Plus, we give aerodynamicists too much if we start with a millimeter of bone. Try starting with a single cell of bone.

DC: But just supposing that one cell wasn't God's reward for good behavior?

CD: Even if you accept aerodynamic lift theory, requiring an increase in the speed of the fluid occurring simultaneously with a decrease in pressure or a decrease in the fluid's potential energy, then there should be a best shape for flying. And why does flying occur with so many shapes -- birds, insects, bats, planes, helicopters, balloons, kites -- if there is some principle that reindeers cannot fly? Why isn't everything a hummingbird - superior hummingbirds? Daniel Bernoulli specifically stated that his theory hung on the the principle of conservation of energy, and was sure that we would find that energy was conserved.

Also, there's the whole subject of the Big Bang, the idea that something came from nothing. If energy was conserved, how could we get all the energy from nothing at the moment of creation?

DC: Would so many scientists who disagree with your views be a concern to you? After all, 99 percent may say you're wrong!

CD: Before Bernoulli most scientists were Christian. Even Bernoulli was brought up a Christian, but he became embittered. He set out to prove another explanation for the distribution of property ownership. I have to give the man credit -- he was a powerful measurer. He found a way to measure blood-pressure and published a book about the measurement of risk. He worked with Euler on measuring elasticity. He concluded that vaccination was efficacious based on measurements of outcomes. He was right that vaccinated people did better - the doctors prayed for their patients.

DC: A few closing thoughts?

CD: Ultimately, if you accept the aerodynamic lift theory, you dismiss accountability, you don't have to abide by a set of moral codes, you determine your own wealth accumulation based on your own desires. You have no reason for things such as good behavior, when children help out with chores - without being asked!! You can trash Santa Claus as irrelevant, just silly fables, since you believe that it does not conform to scientific thought. You can be like Lucifer, who said, "I will make myself like the Most High."

Can you prove aerodynamics? No. Can you prove flying reindeer? No. Can you use the intellect God has given you to decide whether something is logical or illogical? Yes, absolutely. It all comes down to "faith"--and I don't have enough to believe in aerodynamics. I'm too logical!

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

About tactics and framing

People learn about secular humanism and atheism from their family, local clerics, national clerics, their neighbors, various commercial sources of information, and the like.  In a religious society such as ours the portrayals from such sources will tend to be negative.  People are also taught to adopt a closed, circular mode of belief, where faith in the religious based beliefs is considered to be a high value, where related sets of religious based beliefs are characterized as being true because they are deemed to be necessary for human morality or for an eternal after-life, where self-identity and purpose are deemed to be products of the beliefs. These sets of self-justifying beliefs and negative misunderstandings of the people who reject the beliefs, including its theistic underpinnings, are what I have in mind when I refer to prejudices.

So it shouldn't be surprising that when psychologists examine people's reactions to criticisms of their religious beliefs it is found many people react negatively.  Good people, with the best of intentions, fear losing their beliefs and fear those who don't share their beliefs.    There is an argument that we should avoid arousing these defense mechanisms when communicating to the public. It is argued that we should avoid the topics that promote anxiety, that arouse suspicions, prejudices, disgust, feelings of being under attack. In this view, the new atheists have it all wrong, their plain and direct discussion of taboo subjects, including their rejection of theism, is too radical for the public and counter-productive.   I consider this conclusion to be mistaken and I am going to try explain why here.

There is another way of looking at this psychology.   When trying to treat a phobia, psychologists have concluded that it is usually best to adopt two elements:  1. exposure to the feared situation/object and 2. dealing with the frightening thoughts that are associated with the anxiety.  Prejudice has some of the characteristics of phobia and it is reasonable to think that, at least for adults, exposure to the contexts that arouse the prejudice is often going to part of any process that defeats the prejudice.

Furthermore, prejudice against secular humanism, and against atheism, is a substantial obstacle to promoting more secular government. People who associate only negative concepts to what it means to not share their religious beliefs, including their monotheism, are going to be inclined to judge as bad the policies that they think conflict with those religious beliefs, such as teaching modern knowledge in public schools that describes our universe as functioning without divine intervention. It would be nice if we could frame the policy disputes to hide the conflicts with religious doctrines so that people's prejudices against the non-religious are not aroused.  But even if we could do that, as long as the prejudices against the non-religious persist, secularists will be forever operating in a fire department mode. Furthermore, there are constraints against not arousing the prejudices, such as the opposing institutions that are committed to fighting secularism and inciting against secularism. The prejudices against the non-religious keep igniting and re-igniting the efforts against secular government. This problem is alleviated some by the presence of many liberal religionists within the ranks of secularists, but it is still a problem.

So I think it is a mistake to only focus on the "important" policy issues and to avoid addressing the underlying thinking that constitute the prejudices against the non-religious.  Furthermore, there is no way to do this effectively without confronting those prejudices and thus arousing them.  But instead of being counter-productive, this is actually a necessary step to making progress over the longer term.   It would be nice if we could dissolve, or even just attenuate, the prejudices while avoiding confronting the prejudices without the risk of arousing the prejudices.  But tip-toeing around the tulips isn't a good approach here, it has little chance of being effective.

In my view the "new atheists" are right, we need straight talk that communicates honestly and directly why we don't have, and don't want to have, religious beliefs, or any beliefs more generally that fail to comport with how the world functions.  This is not a negative message, it is more of a mixed message.  It is a message that we are vulnerable to fooling ourselves but also that we can anchor our beliefs so as to more reliably match how the world functions than we do when we follow our imaginations, intuitions, biases, feelings, and historical, tribal, myths.

We don't need to convert many people away from religion to make significant progress.  But we do need to melt away some of that closed-minded over-confidence (or maybe it is as symptom of lack of self-confidence?) by exposing more people to the different, and for many people alien, perspectives of non-theists.  Philosophical naturalists have good arguments and strong justifications for our belief that there is no supernatural realm.  Good enough to make our perspective sufficiently competitive in the minds of more of the public to undermine our isolation.  And that is all we need to achieve.  To get there we have to be willing to express strong convictions while being nuanced, to be judgmental and principled without being harsh, and to be persistent.  But we can't do this if we fear offending people who are too easily offended and if we value avoiding conflict over taking risks to achieve longer term objectives.

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

Avoiding conflict is not a primary value

The argument goes something like this: Many people, as a result of evolution, have a genetic predisposition to dogmatically hold onto their existing beliefs, to fear any challenge to their beliefs, to fight against any challenge to their beliefs, to acquire their beliefs for reasons that fail to properly justify the believers conviction that the beliefs are true. This is particularly true of conservatives who hold conservative beliefs. Therefore, liberals shouldn't challenge mistaken conservative beliefs because challenging conservative people's beliefs can only be counterproductive given the innate, genetic psychology of conservatives.

Let's say that historically everyone followed that advice. Then we would have no women's suffrage movement, because that movement upset many conservative people (including some conservative females) who strongly believed that females were insufficiently competent to vote. Then we would have no movement to protect the rights of workers to form unions and strike, because many conservative people (including some conservative wage workers) strongly believed that striking workers and unions were irresponsible and dangerous. And on and on. Every liberal movement against the status quo was supposedly destined to fail because by challenging the status quo such movements only anger biologically intransigent conservatives and are therefore counter-productive. Psychology and sociology scientifically demonstrate liberalism is futile and counter-productive, so don't even try, liberals should surrender and keep silent.

Absolutely, let's try to be reasonable and friendly and nice. But don't try to argue that psychology and sociology shows that liberals shouldn't voice their disagreements with conservatives. The fact is that public opinion does change. It does not change easily. It takes time and it takes effort. Change begins with a few people expressing unpopular truths. Anyone who thinks that popular and mistaken beliefs are going to change without argument, without debate, and without any of the conflict, risks, and inconveniences that this entails, isn't being real. Our civic responsibility is not to avoid upsetting people, our civic responsibility is not to express only agreement with majority opinion, our civic responsibility is not to be uninvolved, third party, objective, non-judgemental, observers. Our civic responsibility is to properly identify and favor the beliefs, policies, and laws that are better on the merits.

When we say we believe something exists we are making a claim about what is true or false. So merit in the context of belief isn't measured by how good it feels to have the belief, or by whether the belief expresses tendencies that were favored by evolution, or by tribal utility, or by anything other than whether the belief is more likely to be true than competing beliefs. Furthermore, the only method we have that we have any good reasons to conclude succeeds in justifying belief is best fit with the weight and direction of the overall available empirical evidence.

Being judgmental is an essential foundation for merit and ethics, and a refusal to be judgmental, an insistence that all epistimologies have equal merit, that beliefs are styles, that everything anyone believes is a product of evolution and therefore equally valid, that merit of beliefs is measured by its other effects, not by its veracity, is to sacrifice merit as the measure of belief justification. You are free to take that path if you want, but if you are someone who expects other people to adopt such an outlook, think again, that isn't a reasonable expectation. People are not going to stop arguing for what they believe is correct on the merits because other people are intolerant and react negatively. If you want people to stop arguing for their beliefs then you need to convince them to change their beliefs. Convincing me that people are intolerant of atheism isn't going to convince me to stop publicly arguing for atheism. On the contrary, the evidence that many people are intolerant of atheism refutes the argument that this is a trivial disagreement so we should focus on the other more important issues instead. I have said this before and I will keep saying it: If people were not so intolerant and fearful of atheism then fewer of the policy issues that secular humanists agree are important would be in dispute. The opposition to secularism is fed in part by intolerance and fear of atheism, so by confronting and challenging that fear and intolerance we are also promoting secularism more generally.

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

Sean Carroll on Naturalism

A ten minute video defense of philosophical naturalism. Sean Carroll, for those who do not know, is a theoretical physicist/cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology.

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

Colorado Day of Prayer ruled illegal

Today the Colorado Court of Appeals unanimously ruled against the state's Day of Prayer. They concluded that "the six Colorado Day of Prayer proclamations at issue here are governmental conduct that violates the Preference Clause" of the Colorado constitution. "We reach that conclusion because the purpose of these particular proclamations is to express the Governor’s support for their content; their content is predominantly religious; they lack a secular context; and their effect is government endorsement of religion as preferred over non religion". The judges correctly observe that “religious liberty protected by the Constitution is abridged when the State affirmatively sponsors the particular religious practice of prayer" and 'an individual’s right to choose his or her religion “is the counterpart of [his or her] right to refrain from accepting the creed established by the majority"'.

The Establishment Clause principle is unpopular and it is absent from the law of many other nations. It is also a valuable legal principle that protects individual liberty and the common welfare. Kudos to the judges for siding with the principle.

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

Theism provides no answers

Peter Harrison, a former Professor of Science and Religion, has published many books on the history of science and is editor of The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion. An article by Peter Harrison titled "DOES SCIENCE MAKE BELIEF IN GOD OBSOLETE?", published by Australian Broadcasting Company, tries to argue that religious beliefs are beyond the reach of, and therefore impervious to, challenge by empirical evidence.

Peter Harrison begins by pointing out that early scientists such as Copernicus, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton, were Christians. In those days the concept of galaxies was unknown and the germ theory of disease had not yet been formulated. What people believed in the 17th century is anything but a compelling argument that religious beliefs are consistent with modern knowledge given how much of modern knowledge was unavailable four centuries ago.

Peter Harrison then argues that the "difficulties for some Christian beliefs ... are not insurmountable" by citing "the religious support for "Darwin's views", both "in the nineteenth century and in the present". However, people are capable of supporting incompatible beliefs. The mere fact that people hold two sets of beliefs does not demonstrate that by reconciling themselves to both beliefs such people have established that such a reconciliation is properly justified. Indeed, Darwin himself characterized citing "the judgment of many able men who have fully believed in God" as an argument for theism this way: "I see how poor an argument this is."

Peter Harrison quotes Darwin as saying that someone can be a theist and an evolutionist. People can be astrologers and evolutionists. So what? It should be noted here that in the 1800s (and for hundreds of years before that), publicly speaking for atheism was illegal under the British Blasphemy laws. Peter Harrison must know this, yet when citing what Darwin said he omits acknowledging that Darwin had good reason to consider himself obliged to publicly counter any efforts by his critics to associate his views with atheism due to widespread intolerance against atheism.

Peter Harrison claims that Darwin lost his faith because "of suffering in the world", not because of "his theories". Yet Darwin did directly attribute his lack of Christian belief to "the habit of scientific research" in this quote: "Science has nothing to do with Christ, except insofar as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence. For myself, I do not believe that there ever has been any revelation". He also attributed his loss of faith to the conflicts between evidence and the stories in the Hebrew bible: "But I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament; from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow as a sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian." In other words, contrary to what Peter Harrison claims, suffering in the world was one of several different evidences, no doubt including the evidences for evolution by natural selection as the agent for generating humans and all other varieties of life, that contributed to Darwin losing his Christian beliefs. Nor is this a mutually exclusive, either or choice, as Peter Harrison is claiming, since evolution is built on a foundation of a history of millions of years of suffering by animals that experienced pain in their struggles to live.

Peter Harrison argues "it would be a gross overgeneralization to conclude from this single episode that science and religion inevitably compete for the same explanatory territory. In any case, such a view rests on a conflation of two different kinds of explanation." That first remark misses the point, which is that religion, and ideology more generally, has no capability at all beyond that of fictions to distinguish what is true from what is false. Only logic together with evidence, the methods that undergird the natural sciences but that are utilized by everyone more generally, have the capability to increase knowledge. Religions self-assert that they offer another, similarly non-fictional basis for acquiring explanatory insight, and each religion claims it is better than the others in revealing the most important truths. Such assertions have no merit.

He then draws the distinction between atoms, molecules, neurons and brain states on the one hand versus personal interests, intentions, and concerns to illustrate his concept of two kinds of explanation. He claims that only the first kind of explanation is the scientific one and "if your reasons for thinking about these important questions boil down to nothing more than physics, why bother?" Well, I suppose all atheists could just starve ourselves to death since nothing ultimately matters, but somehow that sounds more like a childish and silly attitude that has nothing to do with determining if a theistic god exists. Peter Harrison's question about motivation is irrelevant to demonstrating that there is a non-empirical alternative for grounding explanation, let alone for demonstrating his claim that religion qualifies as such an alternative.

Peter Harrison then discusses a question asked by Socrates: "Why I am here?" He says that the empirical explanation cites the disposition of bones and sinews while the allegedly non-empirical explanation cites purpose in life, divine mission, and quest for truth. The latter explanation is characterized as being of greater consequence for having ultimate import to human beings. The implicit assumption here is that the latter explanations, unlike the former explanations, constitute independent, non-material phenomena. Without that assumption there is no need to associate purpose, mission, and quest with divinity, although Peter Harrison tries to sneak in divinity by pre-declaring mission to be divine. The problem here is that this independent and non-materialistic phenomena assumption is counter-evidenced. All of the evidences we have are that purpose, mission, and quest are emergent properties, that are attributed to minds, that reside in brains, which are part of living bodies. The living bodies consist entirely of matter and energy (mostly in the form of water) embedded in space and time.

Peter Harrison argues "While there is no doubt that science can offer powerful explanations in its own sphere, it seems premature to insist that the only questions worth posing are ones that science can answer." Of course, if we define science narrowly as the peer reviewed results published in scientific journals then that is correct, but what does this have to do with determining whether or not theism is properly justified? Theism is not a question, it is an answer, and answers that are contrary to the direction of the overall evidence are unjustified. Period.

Obviously, the natural sciences answer some questions, not all questions. Some evidences are forever beyond our capability to obtain, but it doesn't follow that therefore God exists. Peter Harrison sidesteps the real issue here, which again is the overall evidences being in contradiction to theism. The gaps in our knowledge do not justify beliefs beyond the "we don't know" conclusions. Furthermore, it is the overall evidences, and what those evidences logically infer, that is the basis for justifying our beliefs, not just the much smaller subset of conclusions that have been directly demonstrated by reproduceable laboratory experiments. Those experimentally demonstrated conclusions, where available, cannot be disregarded, nor are they the only conclusions that we can properly reach from the overall available evidences.

Peter Harrison then says "For all their differences, most philosophers in the Western tradition, and indeed most of the world's religious traditions, have held that a satisfactory account of the things of greatest concern to human beings requires reference to some transcendent reality." But the only transcendent reality supported by the available evidences is the laws of physics, not a creator God. Again, our empirical evidences, including evolution by natural selection, and going beyond that to also including empirical evidences from many academic areas, favors the conclusion that all religions are human created fictions.

Peter Harrison is claiming that the laws of physics are "unsatisfactory" explanations, but the opposite is true. The laws of physics as the ultimate explanations have no viable competition. No alternative "explanations" are as well-evidenced or as complete as the laws of physics. Relative to the laws of physics, theism has nothing. It isn't even clear that theism qualifies as an explanation by any proper measure. People who cite God as a catch-all "explanation" are really saying that they have no explanation. Theism has never produced any knowledge. Nothing of substance that Copernicus, Kepler, Boyle, and Newton learned which contributed to modern knowledge was provided to them by a God, it was all obtained by their own pursuit of the empirical evidences.

Peter Harrison concludes that "God provides one possible answer ... to the problems of life." One possible answer to the problems of drought is a rain dance. There are many such "possible" and mistaken answers. Peter Harrison completely fails to show that the theistic God hypothesis, unlike empirically based theories such as evolution by natural selection, uniquely provides any correct and additional answers to any knowledge questions whatsoever.

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

Paleontologist Robert Asher's accommodationism

In his Huffington Post article Science, Religion and the First Amendment, paleontologist Robert J. Asher writes "Never mind that the winning side of major U.S. court decisions supporting evolution in public schools has regularly featured experts who recognize compatibility between science and religion. If they are 'creationists,' then so was Charles Darwin." Unlike Darwin, these experts sometimes claim that ancient miracle stories, such as the resurrection and the divinity of Jesus, are true. These experts who claim compatibility between their own religious beliefs and science make arguments in defense of their claim that are in conflict with the overall evidence. In contrast, Darwin stopped attending church and stopped calling himself a Christian. He wrote "Nor must we overlook the probability of the constant inculcation in a belief in God on the minds of children producing so strong and perhaps an inherited effect on their brains not yet fully developed, that it would be as difficult for them to throw off their belief in God, as for a monkey to throw off its instinctive fear and hatred of a snake." Given the contexts that atheism was a crime in those days, and that we know so much more today about plausible materialistic mechanisms for origins than we did in those days, Darwin expressed views that hinted his beliefs leaned in an atheistic direction, even though he was a Christian as a younger man.

Robert Asher then wrote: "However, it is not 'creation' itself that conflicts with science, but the implication of certain processes (involving for example a ridiculously short period of time) by which this 'creation' took place." Although theists will deny it, the implications of our knowledge about the universe are also unfavorable for a creation of humans by deity process. The evolutionary process replaces
as creator of humans with biology and natural selection. To keep insisting that a god created humans is thus also similarly ridiculous. Theism requires almost as much mental gymnastics to refuse accepting the evidence to the contrary as does belief in young earth creationism.

Robert Asher continues: "Asserting that a deity is behind a given process leaves the material basis for that process completely open to further investigation." This is true to the extent the person making the deity assertion is willing to abandon that assertion if the evidence better fits the assertion that no deity is behind a given a process. Evolution is behind the process of speciation. So asserting that God is behind the process of speciation can, and sometimes does, close the material basis referred to as biological evolution from at least some further investigations.

Robert Asher then argues: "Analogously, regarding Thomas Edison as the inventor of the light bulb says nothing about how it actually works, and no reasonable person would conclude his non-existence from our understanding of electricity. In other words, understanding a natural mechanism is generally independent of a potential agency behind it." Obviously, there is no conflict between a scientific understanding of electricity and the existence of Thomas Edison. On the contrary, we are rationally compelled to believe in the existence of Thomas Edison because the evidence for his existence is very strong. But it would be wrong to assert that a deity is responsible for the light bulb instead of Thomas Edison and it is similarly wrong to assert that a deity is responsible for homo sapiens instead of biological evolution. We should always be following the evidence instead of contradicting the evidence. In other words, a natural mechanism can, and more to the point in this case, does, provide an explanation that functions as the agency behind something else.

Robert Asher then comments on the first clause of the 1st amendment of the U. S. constitution: "The U.S. constitution was written by individuals who viewed nature and its laws as consistent with the existence of a deity. I too believe in God, and am grateful to the framers for crafting a system by which religious beliefs cannot be legislated. Yet this constitutional assurance is double-edged because it seeks to balance the protection of society from popular superstition with each individual's right to religious expression. This balance lends itself to one of the most pressing issues of our society today: distinguishing superstition from religion, and ensuring that the right to believe does not cripple an understanding of our planet and ourselves." This is mistaken. Our laws speak for distinguishing religion from government. There is nothing at all about distinguishing superstition from religion in our laws, nor should there be. People are free to be "superstitious" and to express their superstitions via their religion. Insofar as such "mixing" is one of the more pressing issues of our society, it is a protected right of individuals under the second clause of the 1st amendment. Taking the superstition out of religion is like removing the water from lakes. Eliminate the former and the latter becomes nothing more than an artifact from the past.

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

Stanley Fish's untenable post-modern relativism

In his New York Times opinion article, "Citing Chapter and Verse: Which Scripture Is the Right One?", Stanley Fish, professor of humanities and law at Florida International University, argues that all "original authorities" choices are equally parochial, equally tribal, equally partisan, equally ideological, and equally arbitrary. Stanley Fish has his own beliefs, and he views himself as one of many other equally parochial, tribal, partisan, ideological advocates. What is important, in his view, is that while we hold and advocate for our beliefs, we simultaneously recognize that all competing beliefs have equally valid foundations. He criticizes modern atheists for placing "the tenets of materialist scientific inquiry" above other equally valid authorities, such as "revelation and conversion".

He points out that any defense of empiricism is circular because "the reasons undergirding that belief [in empiricism] are not independent of it." Such circularity is necessarily true of any possible method of belief justification (what Stanley Fish calls "original authorities") that is uniquely correct and successful. If there is only one method that reliably works then the only way to justify that method is to utilize that method to justify itself. But that doesn't mean all methods of justifying belief are equally valid. There is a way to compare the methods to each other. Consider the hypothetical: What would happen if we did not rely on this method?

Let's start with abandoning the methods of religious revelation and conversion, because those were the only two other methods Stanley Fish mentioned, and rely on empiricism (what Stanley Fish refers to as "education" or "materialist scientific inquiry"). What would happen? Well, generally speaking, people who convert from one religion to another other religion, or to or from no religion, and people who cite one religion based revelation as against another revelation, or no revelation, do equally well, more or less. So, for the sake of argument, lets just say that without relying on revelation and conversion people can, and do, proceed with living their lives as modern atheists (or, if you prefer, as "scientists") without major negative or positive impact.

Now let's try abandoning empiricism. Without empiricism we ignore our senses of smell, touch, hearing, and sight. We can stay perfectly still and within about one week we starve to death for lack of water sitting or lying in our urine and feces. Or maybe we move around, cut ourselves, break our bones smashing ourselves into things, burn ourselves, bleed to death, get run over by a car, walk over a cliff. The details don't matter, there are lots of possibilities, all of them leading to death within a few days.

Of course, outcomes are evidence, and we learn of these outcomes through the "original authority" that Stanley Fish refers to as "education", not from "revelation and conversion". So pointing to outcomes is an empirical way of defending empiricism. Stanley Fish thinks that makes the justification for empiricism circular, and he is right. But he is foolish, not just wrong, to claim that therefore empiricism is no better than any other authority for justifying beliefs. It is foolish because outcomes matter. The only method that reliably works is empiricism. Unlike all other ineffective methods, our lives literally depend on this one method, no one can survive as an independent person without many beliefs that are empirically justified. Everyone, even dependent young children, even dependent adults in adult care institutions, relies on empiricism to navigate our world.

There is no other method of belief justification that has any record of success whatsoever for distinguishing what is true from what is false. The reason that people who rely on revelation and conversion survive at all is that they are inconsistent. Religious people invariably rely on empiricism when they face important decisions that risk their health and welfare, such as whether to walk on water. These same religious people then arbitrarily rely on revelation and conversion when they make decisions that are relatively unimportant, such as whether to spend some time each weekend in a house of worship. Many religious people don't seem to recognize how inconsistent they are and fail to acknowledge the complete failure of revelation and conversion as methods for distinguishing what is true from what is false. Those religious people who really do follow revelation and conversion over education when making health decisions, also known as faith healing, such as Christian Scientists, sacrifice their, and their children's, health and welfare as a result.

At least one professor of humanities and law, maybe thinking he is being sophisticated by being non-judgmental, tragically appears to be unwilling to publicly acknowledge this substantial and important difference. Stanley Fish himself probably relies on medical doctors, not on faith healers, when it really matters to maintain his health, even though the medical knowledge database is obtained indirectly through second hand education that requires some trust in the sources of that information. He argues that because empirical evidence is often obtained second-hand, it is is no better than any other method. But almost all group activities require trust, such as the market economic system and democracy. It doesn't follow that a mixed market and command economic system and republican democracy are no better than North Korea's strictly command economic and political model. It is by inter-person and inter-generational sharing of empirically obtained knowledge that we continuously build up our knowledge base for better outcomes in the future than we had in the past. Yet according to Stanley Fish's relativistic argument, anyone with real and serious injuries who seeks assistance from faith healers instead of medical doctors has acted on equally valid evidence, and for equally good reason, as everyone who opts for medical doctors. The post-modern relativism that Stanley Fish is peddling is foolish nonsense on stilts.

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

Atheism is not scientism

Philip Kitcher, John Dewey professor of philosophy at Columbia University, in his recent New York Times article titled "Science is Unbelieving", identifies "scientism" as a major flaw in modern atheism. He defines scientism as "this conviction that science can resolve all questions known" including "questions about morality, purpose, and consciousness" and places this label, which he acknowledges is intended to be pejorative, on Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.

He then elaborates that scientism "rests on three principal ideas. The facts of microphysics determine everything under the sun (beyond it, too); Darwinian natural selection explains human behavior; and brilliant work in the still-young brain sciences shows us as we really are." However, none of these three assertions, neither individually nor in combination, imply that science can resolve all questions known. Everyone with any common sense, including modern atheists, recognizes that science is a human endeavor, that humans are limited to operating within the confines and limits of their location and time and abilities, and that humans never have, and never will, have access to all evidence about everything, everywhere, over all time, past and future. Accordingly, science does not, and will not, resolve all questions known. Indeed, all questions do not have answers because many questions have no relevance to what is true or false or are incoherent. The issue of what questions should be asked is itself an issue that can only be reliably resolved by following the available evidence.

And when we follow the evidence, as all rational people are obliged to do, the assertions that physics is “the whole truth about reality”, that we should achieve “a thoroughly Darwinian understanding of humans”, and that neuroscience makes the abandonment of illusions “inescapable", are not scientism, as Philip Kitcher asserts, they are simply the conclusions that arguably are most consistent with the available evidence. Those are short quotes that Philip Kitcher excerpted from a book by one particular atheist ("The Atheist's Guide to Reality: Enjoying Life Without Illusions" by Alex Rosenberg). He is using his critical review of that book as his launching pad for his more general attack against modern atheism. I have not read that book, but taking short phrases like that out of context is not conducive to fair criticism of the author's argument. I can imagine such short phrases appearing in paragraphs whose context gives them a more nuanced interpretation than Philip Kitcher appears to be trying to attribute to this author. Philip Kitcher clearly dislikes these sorts of conclusions, but his mislabeling these conclusions as scientism fails to demonstrated that they are "premature".

It is true that "very little physics and chemistry can actually be done with its fundamental concepts and methods, and using it to explain life, human behavior or human society is a greater challenge still. Many informed scholars doubt the possibility, even in principle, of understanding, say, economic transactions as complex interactions of subatomic particles.". But again, science is a human activity, and humans are limited in many ways. So none of these limitations in science as a human activity counter the conclusion that physics underlies the whole truth about reality. Quantum indeterminacy, the necessary incompleteness in the description of a physical system, is one of the characteristics of the universe as understood by modern physics. So even if some predictions are impossible "in principle", it still doesn't follow that it is mistaken to conclude that physics underlies the whole truth about reality. What Philip Kitcher derides as "imperial physics" makes complete access to the future forever inaccessible to us. Furthermore, nothing in basic physics requires that the properties of complex systems be identical to the collection of the properties of that system's constituent parts. It is well established in physics that entirely new properties sometimes appear in complex systems. Nothing about this emergent properties phenomena supports the conclusion that god exists. Philip Kitcher may not like that physics rules over us and the universe, but that doesn't make the evidence that it does any less convincing.

Philip Kitcher then disparages the generalizing from evidence to conclusions "unfettered by methodological cautions that students of human evolution have learned". Indeed, atheism is a generalization, not a conclusion of science. Generalizing from the evidence is something we all do. It is a basis for sound philosophy, so it seems kind of odd to hear a philosopher criticize such activity in such general terms. We need to make decisions on the basis of the available evidence, and since the available evidence often falls short of being complete in the context of answering the questions relevant to making our decisions, we generalize on the evidence. Shame on atheists for being like everyone else in this regard!?

Philip Kitcher then points out that "others hold the equally staunch position that some questions are so profound that they must forever lie beyond the scope of natural science. Faith in God, or a conviction that free will exists, or that life has meaning are not subject to revision in the light of empirical evidence." The first two questions are existence questions and the only reliable basis for answering such questions is by matching the answer against the available evidence, not on faith or conviction. The evidence disfavors both, and the people who argue that empirical evidence can have no relevance when trying to answer those questions are no less mistaken for being adamant. The last question is an attitude question. But even human attitudes, to be properly sustained, need to be anchored in facts and therefore should be built on a foundation of evidence, not on counter-evidenced possibilities such as God and free will. And what in the world does the measure of profundity have to do with a question being beyond the scope of natural science? Profundity is irrelevant here. Questions are either inside or outside the scope of natural science primarily in relation to the availability of evidence.

Not surprisingly, Philip Kitcher tries to divorce his attack against "scientism" from disrespect for natural science. He notes that "The natural sciences command admiration through the striking successes ....". But "... the natural sciences have no monopoly on inferential rigor. Linguists and religious scholars make connections among languages and among sacred texts, employing the same methods of inference evolutionary biologists use to reconstruct life’s history. Attending to achievements like these offers many alternatives to scientism." With that last sentence, Philip Kitcher appears to be implying that modern atheism (a.k.a "scientism") is inconsistent with "employing the same methods of inference evolutionary biologists use to reconstruct life’s history" in contexts beyond the natural sciences. This is nonsense. Modern atheists very much support and favor "employing the same methods of inference" on the empirical evidence beyond the confines of the natural sciences. Inferring from the evidence is what we are doing when we observe that the available evidences favor the conclusion that gods are human created fictions.

Philip Kitcher then asserts "Instead of forcing the present-day natural sciences to supply All the Answers, you might value other forms of investigation — at least until physics, biology and neuroscience have advanced." But that is what atheists are doing. Atheists look to psychology, to anthropology, to sociology, to history, to evidence grounded philosophy, etc., and the evidences available from all sources that relates to this particular question is consistent in its direction wherever we look. That is why we are atheists. This has nothing to do with natural sciences supplying "All the Answers", it is about the best fit with the overall evidence answer to a particular question. There are human tendencies that explain the common bias against accepting the evidences that our universe is all space-time and matter-energy, such as the tendency to internalize the beliefs of the people around us during childhood. Maybe in the future we will have evidence that our universe consists of something more than space-time and matter-energy, or maybe not, but it is a mistake to insist that there is also a god without the evidence.

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

Why is there something instead of nothing? Part 1.

One of the reasons many people shy away from atheism is the conviction that a creator God is a reasonable explanation, and the only viable explanation, for how the universe came to exist. The commonly held assumption is that nothingness was the initial condition sometime prior to the Big Bang and that nothingness is a condition from which something cannot appear. This perspective underpins deism, although many agnostics and theists also share this perspective and see this need for something to originate from nothing as being the Achilles Heel of atheism. The new book, "A universe from nothing: Why there is something rather than nothing", by Lawrence M. Krauss, disputes this assumption. I will discuss that book in a future blog post. For now, let's take a quick look at another cosmologist's overlapping commentary on this topic.

Sean Carrol of the California Institute of Technology, in his article "Does the Universe Need God?", says this: "Most modern cosmologists are convinced that conventional scientific progress will ultimately result in a self- contained understanding of the origin and evolution of the universe, without the need to invoke God or any other supernatural involvement." Furthermore, citing Hawking, he notes that "nothing in the fact that there is a first moment of time ... necessitates that an external something is required to bring the universe about at that moment." Indeed, "the issue of whether or not there actually is a beginning to time remains open." Instead, the Big Bang may be a "transitional stage in an eternal universe." He also explains that "the multi-verse is not a theory, it is a prediction of a theory", based on combining string theory with inflation. Furthermore, contrary to what theistic critics sometimes assert, a multi-verse complies with the preference for simple explanations because "the simplicity of a theory is a statement about how compactly we can describe the formal structure ..., not how many elements it contains."

Sean Carrol points out that a compelling argument for God "would consist of a demonstration that God provides a better explanation (for whatever reason) than a purely materialistic picture, not an a priori insistence that a purely materialistic picture is unsatisfying." Furthermore, "to refer to this or that event as having some particular cause .... Is just shorthand for what's really going on, namely: things are obeying the laws of physics." Accordingly, "there is no reason ... to think of the existence and persistence and regularity of the universe as things that require external explanation." Furthermore, with theism "we're not simply adding a new element to an existing ontology (like a new field or particle), or even replacing one ontology with a more effective one at a similar level of complexity .... We're adding an entirely new metaphysical category, whose relation to the observable world is unclear." Sean Carrol then notes the discrepancies between the universe we should expect if traditional theisms were true and the universe as it is. God "isn't needed to keep things moving, or to develop the complexity of living creatures, or to account for the existence of the universe." At 14 pages, his article is worth the time investment required to read.

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

Theism is an existence claim

By Mathew Goldstein

Janet Daley, writing for the British newspaper Telegraph, cites the "clash between President Obama and the Roman Catholic Church over the matter of whether Church institutions should be obliged by federal statute to provide free contraception. There can be no question of where the Constitution stands on this issue: if a case should ever come to the Supreme Court, it is the Church that will win." in her article "A good week for the smiting of the ungodly". Did Janet Daley miss the news that the Obama administration granted religiously affiliated Institutions an exemption that allows their employees to acquire the contraception coverage from the insurance companies without employer subsidies? Any lawsuits would now be against the contraception coverage subsidy required for institutions not affiliated with a religious institution. Legal precedent says that government can enforce a "neutral law of general applicability" that conflicts with some citizen's religious beliefs provided that the law can be shown to benefit the general welfare of citizens.

She then points out that there are questions whose answer is not based on evidence such as: Is it wrong to hurt people unnecessarily? She correctly points out that it is a mistake to require evidence for "those kinds of belief that do not rest on empirical evidence but which are still central to human experience." She then incorrectly concludes that theists are therefore correct to believe without evidence. That final therefore is incorrect because theism is not one of "those kinds of belief" that is exempted from the need for empirical evidence. Claims that theism has moral benefits are derivative, they come after acceptance of the existence claim. Therefore theism is not a moral axiom like the axiom that it is wrong to hurt people. Theism is an existence assertion like the claim that God the Holy Ghost exists as part of a Holy Trinity. So atheists are correct to look to evidence for evaluating the merit of theism.

She then calls it "a very odd kind of obtuseness in people who clearly see themselves as possessing superior intelligence. Do they really not understand what it is that it is so unsatisfactory about “scientific” accounts which reduce life to the ticking over of sensory apparatus?". This is also mistaken. First of all, atheists really do understand that both theists and atheists posses a full range of intelligence. The difference here is that atheists are applying their intelligence better on this question. Secondly, accurate explanations do not "reduce" that which is being explained. Life continues to be exactly the same phenomena, neither enhanced nor reduced, by the availability of previously unavailable explanations for how it originated and evolved. The obtuseness here is on the side of people like Janet Daley who have this very odd notion that an explanation should be rejected if it is subjectively deemed to change the value of that which is explained in a direction that some people decide is undesirable. We are obliged to follow the evidence wherever it takes us. Since we are not the creators of the universe we don't have carte blanche to redefine the explanations to match our preferences. When a preference conflicts with the evidence the proper way to resolve the conflict is to abandon the preference.

Janet Daley then asserts about Dawkins "Most to the point was the comment that he had failed to “understand the nature of faith”. It is that incomprehension which is perhaps the weakest element in the scientific rationalist atheist case." On the contrary, the irony is that it is the atheists who understand faith better than those who live by it. If the people of faith acknowledged how vacuous this reliance on faith is as a source of knowledge about what exists then they wouldn't be so proud to publicly assert their beliefs are faith-based as if that was a positive attribute or sufficient justification.
.
In defense of faith, Janet Daley returns again to questions of morality, asking: "Why do they, and we, feel such unbearable compassion even for those unknown to us – even, indeed, for hypothetical tortured children who have been invented for the purpose of argument? Why is sympathy, and revulsion at the pain of others, such a characteristic feature of our condition that it is actually called “humanity” and its lapses regarded as “inhuman”? Presumably, the Dawkins lobby would say it arose from the need to preserve our collective genes. What an impoverished view of life and its moral complexity, that is.". Having previously mischaracterized the correct insistence that evidence be provided to support the existence claims intrinsic to theism as " facile atheism", it is actually Janet Daley who is the one being facile here. The explanations for moral sensibility, and life, provided by biology are rich. They combine a deep simplicity with incredible complexity, have broad implications, and are anything but "impoverished". Most to the point, we are justified in believing that this "view of life", unlike theism, is true because the evidence tells us it is true. And that is what counts here, everything else is hot air.

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

Identity versus evidence

A common theme of those who argue in favor of government establishment of a majority's religion is "religious identity". In her speech against "militant secularists" promoting "totalitarian regimes" and "denying people the right to a religious identity", British Cabinet Minister without Portfolio, Sayeeda Warsi, mentioned identity three times in the first three minutes. "In order to encourage social harmony, people need to feel stronger in their religious identities and more confident in their beliefs", "in a globalized world it is easy to think that, to relate to others, you must water down your religious identity", and "it demonstrates similar traits to totalitarian regimes, denying people the right to a religious identity". What is the relationship between belief and identity and secularism?

Religious conservatives have a tendency to assert that a primary purpose of belief is to define individual and group identity. However, that isn't generally true. We believe that cows exist and dragons do not exist, not as a means to give ourselves an identity, but as a result of the evidence for the existence of cows and against the existence of dragons. What religious conservatives are doing here is inconsistent. They are insisting on two conflicting standards for belief justification, one rational, based on the evidence, and another arational, based on maintaining a self-confident identity.

Maintaining self-confidence isn't an issue with rational beliefs. We are self-confident in our rational beliefs in proportion to the evidence. Because rational beliefs are not about self-identity, there is no need for a preset and never changing self-confidence in our beliefs. As additional evidence is accumulated over time, rational beliefs adjust to fit the available evidence. The past is not the future, and rational beliefs are flexible enough to respect and accommodate future changes. Neither self-identity nor self-confidence are dependent on rational beliefs.

In contrast, the religious belief based self-identity, having thus entangled itself with self-confidence, does not like being confined to individual expression. Because religious belief is insecure and entangled with self-confidence, it seeks support from the nation as a whole. Without active and ongoing governmental expression of the majority's religious practice, the otherwise insecure majority religious beliefs are "sidelined, marginalised and downgraded" in the words of Ms. Warsi. Confidence in religious beliefs merges with self-confidence, religious beliefs merge with self-identity, self-identity merges with national identity, and the government sphere merges with the non-governmental sphere. There is then just one comprehensive and indivisible identity and public sphere, and that identity and public sphere are themselves merged together with, and defined for everyone by, a majority religious belief.

Thus, according to Ms. Warsi, merely forbidding a prayer ritual at the start of government meetings becomes a denial of "the right to a religious identity" for people generally. But of course, it is no such thing. Government meeting prayer rituals are not even a denial of the right to an atheist identity. If not having a prayer ritual were a denial of the right to a religious identity then the right to a religious identity would necessarily be incompatible with the right to an atheist identity, or to any conflicting, unrepresented minority religious identity, since the government meeting cannot simultaneously have an opening ritual affirming all conflicting beliefs. That is nonsense, and that is the real core problem here. The people who are insisting on government establishments of their preferred religions are in effect asserting a right to impose promotion of their insecure and arational religious self-identity, practices, and beliefs on all the citizens of the nation through the common government. There is no such right.

Starting with the false foundations that individual identity is the same identity as national identity, government actions are the same public actions as non-government actions, confidence in a particular set of beliefs is the same confidence as self-confidence in one's self, and the purpose and function of beliefs is to define and maintain an identity, is it any surprise that arguments for establishment of religion go awry, descending into bombast and ending in self-contradiction?

The applicable right here is for individuals to freely form and express their own beliefs and identities without government interference. This requires unbiased government with no religious identity. Practice your religion as you wish, in public or privately, government has nothing to say about which religious beliefs, or identities, or rituals and practices, are preferred or patriotic. People do not need their government to practice their religious beliefs for them, or define a national religious identity for them, and there is no civic right to a government favoring your own religious beliefs or identities over competing beliefs or identities. If Ms. Warsi really thinks that is an intolerant prescription that is reminiscent of totalitarian regimes then she is a very confused lady representing a very confused government.

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

The Clergy Project's Evolution Weekend

By Mathew Goldstein

The goals of the Clergy Project's Evolution Weekend are to support the teaching of science in public schools and promote moderate religion. Yet the founder of the Clergy Project, Michael Zimmerman, indulges in superficial, false, negative caricatures of the "new atheists" that are irrelevant to, or at cross-purpose to, these goals.

In his Feb. 9 Huffington Post article, "Evolution Weekend: Protecting Both Religion and Science", he writes "These new atheists will attack the clergy who are participating in Evolution Weekend even though those very same clergy should be their biggest allies when it comes to combating the assault on science taking place in our public schools. But these new atheists can't see past their own biases and recognize that only a combined effort will protect science."

There is something odd and revealing about the words "should be" in the phrase "those very same clergy should be their biggest allies when it comes to combating the assault on science". Either we are allies, or we are not allies. If we agree then we are allies. We do agree here, therefore we are allies here. Why is the organizer of this project expressing doubt about this alliance? In the next sentence he asserts that the new atheists fail to "recognize only a combined effort will protect science". I have seen no evidence whatsoever that the new atheists oppose a combined effort to protect science. In fact, every new atheist I know of supports alliances with all people, including the people that we otherwise disagree with, to support all common goals. On what grounds is this incredible accusation otherwise being made? It is the pot calling the kettle black.

Now it is true, obviously, that new atheists and the clergy attending this Evolution Weekend have substantial differences on the question of religious faith. For example, Michael Zimmerman also says of the participants "they understand that a deeper understanding of the natural world will only enhance their faith. And they are not so insecure in their faith that they feel compelled to condemn all other belief as false and demand that everyone else be forced to accept their singular perspective." On the contrary, a deeper understanding of the natural world enhances atheism and being compelled to declare false those beliefs that are counter-evidenced is rational and proper. Furthermore, there is no proper basis for Zimmerman's correlating the "condemning" as false those beliefs that are counter-evidenced on the one hand with the "demanding" everyone else be "forced to" accept a singular perspective on the other hand. .

No one has any obligation to never criticize (a.k.a. "attack") other people's mistaken beliefs as a pre-condition to working together with those same people for a shared goal. Sincere differences over the proper role of faith (including the disagreement over whether faith is itself incompatible with a scientific approach), the direction of the evidence, proper epistemology, and the like, do not translate into substantial reasons for refusing to combine efforts to defend science education. New atheists, like all thoughtful people of good will, agree that people should be encouraged to adopt the better justified perspectives by argument and persuasion.

Michael Zimmerman also slanders the new atheists with this additional absurd accusation: 'Some of the attacks on participants in Evolution Weekend 2012 will also undoubtedly come from "new atheists" who like to lump all religious individuals in with fanatical fundamentalists. In their eyes, anyone who expresses religious sentiments to even the slightest degree is no different from a Biblical literalist.' We lump them together only as theists who believe with no supporting evidence, and despite substantial contrary evidence, in a parental deity that created the world and takes a special interest in human affairs. As anyone with eyes can see (or who reads Braille or hears or whatever the case may be), in all other respects theists are a very diverse group. Their beliefs are so diverse because theisms are a free-floating fiction lacking the anchor of empirical evidence that produces the voluntary international consensus seen among scientists. But by pointing out the differences between religion and science we atheists are failing to combine our efforts to "support science" under Zimmerman's theological re-definition and mis-definition of that concept.

If Michael Zimmerman was really as fully committed to a combined effort on behalf of "protecting science" as he self-declares himself to be then why is he restricting the discussion of strategies to defeat anti-evolution laws to religious congregations? He advocates for diversity and pluralism as a strength while excluding atheists and the non-religious from the discussion. This self-contradiction is blatant and damning. All these different religions have no single religious belief in common. He acknowledges that they are meeting to promote a secular goal that is shared with atheists and the non-religious. If the commitment of these clerics to pluralism is the basis for his proud claim that they "are not so insecure in their faith" then, again, why the exclusion of the non-religious and atheists? And how is blaming atheist's atheism for this decision by theists to exclude atheists ethical? This is akin to men excluding women from participating in group discussions while blaming the female voice.

But moderate religionists claim to be better than that. Unlike narrow-minded and exclusionary religious fundamentalists, they wouldn't play blame the victim games to avoid taking responsibility for their own self-centered intolerance, right? Science does not have to support, or even co-exist comfortably with, religious beliefs to be defensible or to merit being taught, learned, and actively supported. If scientific results conflict with, or otherwise undermine, religious beliefs then the loser is the religious beliefs, not the science. Anyone who doesn't recognize this doesn't really understand why science should be taught in the first place. Don't you agree Dr. Zimmerman?

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket

Non-religious religious institutions and the law

The conflicts between religious beliefs and secular laws are numerous. Our taxes pay for alcohol production and sales regulation enforcement, but alcohol consumption is prohibited under Mormonism. Businesses are open on Saturday, but working on Saturday is prohibited by Judaism. Tattooing regulation is funded by taxes, but Islam prohibits tattoos. Regulation of hair cutting businesses is funded by taxes, but cutting hair is prohibited by Sikhism. Meat production and sales regulation is funded by taxes, but meat consumption is prohibited by Hinduism.

The empirical evidence demonstrates that availability of contraception correlates positively with better health outcomes for women and children such that the additional cost of covering contraception in health plans is more than offset by the overall health benefits. So government has an obligation to require that employer health insurance covers contraception. But some religions prohibit contraception, so isn't such a law a violation of the Free Exercise clause? The Catholic church, among others, argues that it is whenever the employer is affiliated with their church.

Notre Dame and Saint Mary's, to give two examples, are Catholic universities. Religious corporations, associations, educational institutions, or societies are exempt from the federal laws that EEOC enforces when it comes to the employment of individuals based on their particular religion. So can government require that Notre Dame and Saint Mary's subsidize health insurance that covers contraception?

No statement of faith is required to attend or teach at Notre Dame or Saint Mary's. There is no doctrinal control over what is taught in the classroom. Faculty, staff and students are encouraged to seek the truth in whatever form it takes, including that of scientific research.

Institutions like Notre Dame and Saint Mary's must make a choice. Either they commit to being modern universities and accept all that entails, or they commit to being primarily Catholic. They cannot plead special exemptions from generally applicable laws on the grounds that they are a religious institution on the one hand while placing no religious restrictions on the beliefs of employees and students on the other hand. Religious institutions have no free exercise right to impose their religious beliefs on their employees against the will of those employees when those institutions do not require their employees to profess or practice those religious beliefs in the first place.

delicious, Digg, technocrati, reddit, stumbleupon, designfloat, google bookmark, BlogThis!, Newsvine, email this post, Pocket