Yeah, I gave a talk at Skepticon like several other rascals here at Freethoughtblogs. Now, even if you didn’t make the pilgrimage to Springfield, Missouri, you can watch it too.
It’s a straight science talk with several swipes at creationism, so unfortunately, I don’t think it will make any ice cream salesmen cry.
(Also on Sb)
I was sent this comic by Ian.
I have a vague impression that he might have been making some point or other to me, but I can’t quite imagine what it would be. Of course I know how to hug. Hugs are for crushing everything.
Some people on the open thread, which is mainly about socializing, are complaining that it’s been taken over with tedious philosophizing about free will. There’s an easy solution: here’s a new thread just for anybody to talk about free will. Stick it here.
Myself, I don’t believe in free will — I think it’s an obsolete concept that confuses rather than clarifies, and would rather stay out of it.
As best as I can remember, I was eight or nine years old, and I was looking through one of my parents’ books that I liked. It was almost an accidental find, or at least I don’t remember anyone showing it to me. I had discovered it on my own. I occasionally went through the large bookshelf my parents had, looking for something that didn’t look terminally boring. On one such occasion I had discovered a Time-Life science book, titled simply “The Stars”. The first time I ever looked at it, it was of course largely over my head, but every now and then I returned to it, and found more and more of it comprehensible, and more and more of it interesting. This early-sixties era Time-Life book introduced me to such marvels as galaxies, globular clusters and supernovae. (In later years it taught me about the Main Sequence, the carbon fusion chain, and the predicted fate of our own sun.)
One day, after admiring the artist’s conception of colliding galaxies near the back, I was paging through it looking for more to read about, and I hit upon a two-page spread that described the early formation of the solar system. It showed a cloud of interstellar dust slowly collapsing from its own gravity, spinning faster as it became denser, until there was enough matter crammed into the center to be a sun, at which point it started to heat up. When pretty much everything had collapsed into a single ball, it was spinning fast enough that it threw off a bunch of extra matter at the equator, where the speeds were fastest (and gravitational attraction was weakest). The ejected matter began repeating the original process in miniature, with several different areas forming their own local balls of matter that eventually drew in everything nearby. Many of them even repeated the part where at the point of maximum rotational speed they threw off a bit of matter from the equator before stabilizing, which in turn eventually collapsed into other balls. Voila: sun, planets, and moons, with the last straggling bits of matter winding up as asteroids or comets.
Pretty typical as explanations go at that age, in that it seemed to raise a bunch of really obvious followup questions, like for example if it just formed out of a bunch of preexisting matter then where the heck did THAT come from? Still, it was very likely easier to explain where a formless cloud of dust came from than a fully formed solar system, so even at that age I could see where this explanation was helpful. It wasn’t trying to do everything, but was just one piece of the puzzle.
I had read these pages before, of course, but on this one day something struck me about it. A light bulb went on within my head. I reread the text to make sure, even though I already knew full well there was no mistake. Here was a description of the formation of the solar system (complete, for the part that it described) that made no reference to God. None. Not even to suggest that God had nudged the cloud into position, or had given some chunk of matter a bit of a backspin in order to get things started, or even that he had carefully watched over it without interfering.
Not even to apologize for not mentioning God. It was that irrelevant.
There were people, I realized, who didn’t believe in God.
There were holes in my logic, I saw (if not immediately, then not long after). Just because these people contradicted the first chapter of Genesis didn’t mean they didn’t believe in God. They might still believe other parts of the Bible were right. Or they might believe that God created the interstellar dust, knowing that it would lead to the solar system and human beings. They might believe in a God I wasn’t familiar with.
But none of those objections really mattered, I realized. This explanation for the formation of the solar system was printed in a regular book, after all, and meant for kids to read. Clearly it wasn’t the work of a handful of lunatics trying to push their wild-eyed beliefs onto children before they were old enough to know better. No, this theory of the solar system’s formation had to be pretty widely accepted. Or even if it wasn’t, they at least were comfortable with the idea that it wasn’t God just stepping in and doing it by hand. And I knew that, even if all those people actually still believed that God existed, they couldn’t speak for everybody. I mean, taking this idea to its logical conclusion was simply too obvious, too compelling. If you could come up with a plausible notion of how the solar system formed just by leaving a bunch of interstellar dust alone for millions of years, then surely the formation of everything else could be explained similarly. So even if everyone who worked on this book believed in God, there were definitely other people out there who didn’t.
And if it truly turned out that there weren’t any other such people, well, there was one now.
If it had turned out that every adult I ever met believed in the Bible, then I wasn’t about to rebel against that. Those are long odds, stupid odds. But something within me, even at that age, didn’t find the Bible stories particularly compelling. They were just too strangely skewed while at the same time trying to be too pat. (Pat in a way that real explanations never seemed to succeed in being.) All I had needed was reassurance that I wasn’t the only one who felt this way.
The moment I deduced the existence of atheists, I knew that I was one too.
Brian Raiter
United States
Elaine Howard Ecklund is the sociologist who studies atheists and always twists the interpretation of her results to laud religion. She’s done it again.
She has a new study about “Atheists embracing religious traditions”, which notes that some unbelievers will still send their children off to church, out of familial obligation or a vague sense that that is an appropriate way to socialize the kids. I think that’s entirely true, and I’ve seen it myself — but it doesn’t say much about atheists as much as it does the pervasive cultural attitudes that falsely make “church” a synonym for morality.
But here’s what makes me disrespect her pretense of objectivity.
Ecklund said one of the most interesting findings was discovering that not only do some atheist scientists wish to expose their children to religious institutions, but they also cite their scientific identity as reason for doing so.
“We thought that these individuals might be less inclined to introduce their children to religious traditions, but we found the exact opposite to be true,” Ecklund said. “They want their children to have choices, and it is more consistent with their science identity to expose their children to all sources of knowledge.”
Religion is not a goddamned source of knowledge. Quit pretending that it is.
But also, that’s her twist. When our kids were living with us, we freely encouraged them to go to church with their friends when invited, but it wasn’t because we thought it was a “source of knowledge”. Religion is an unfortunate reality in our society, and we wanted them to be able to see for themselves what was going on. Ecklund simply doesn’t understand what science is about: it’s part of the ethos that we don’t hide data, but confront it and address it.
Another consistent angle to Ecklund’s work is spotlighting the statistics that fit her bias and trivializing the rest. Here’s the evidence that atheists are “embracing religious traditions”:
The researchers found that 17 percent of atheists with children attended a religious service more than once in the past year.
I am underwhelmed. The only surprise there is that the number is that low — given that American society is soaking in religion, and that atheists are a minority surrounded by friends and family who are religious, I’m impressed that 83% have succeeded in escaping the church trap so thoroughly. That ought to be the news.
But that’s Ecklund. Show her a population with an overwhelming majority rejecting faith, and she’ll ignore them to turn to the minority and pretend they are representative, just to find some tiny reassurance that scientists and atheists really are god-lovin’, deep down.
So go fix it.
Do you believe same sex couples should have the right to marry?
Yes 55%
No 45%
The last time I saw an appearance of the founder of the Intelligent Design movement, Johnson was looking very frail, recovering from a stroke. It’s also been quite some time since I’ve seen him make an appearance. I hope that his mental faculties are also strong, and that he’s alert and aware. The IDists are celebrating the 20th anniversary of the publication of his book, Darwin on Trial, so I’d love to know that he’s having a grand time.
Why, you might wonder…after all, that book they’re celebrating is dishonest tripe, and the ID movement has been pure poison to science. I make no bones about the fact that I consider Johnson to be an intellectual criminal.
The reason is simple: Jason Rosenhouse is right. Intelligent Design is dead. I want Johnson to suffer the pain and frustration of knowing that he has wasted his life, and that he’ll be remembered as a failure.
His book was a cobbled together hodge-podge of specious reasoning, using legal logic to raise unwarranted doubts over concepts he couldn’t understand. He was no scientist; neither are his followers. He was a pettifogging lawyer coming off a divorce and a midlife crisis who tried to find redemption by lying for Jesus. It didn’t work.
Creationism staggered out of the Edwards v. Aguillard case in 1987 in a shambles — creationism was repudiated, it was tarred entirely as a religious concept, and prohibited from schools as a violation of the Establishment Cause. They had to find a strategy to hide its religious underpinnings, and there was good ol’ Lawyer Johnson, happy to provide it. That was his contribution, the smokescreen of ID.
It thrived for a while; it had its successes as yokels everywhere embraced it as a way to pretend their Old Time Religion was actually cutting edge science. It received a mortal blow in the Kitzmiller trial, which saw through the nonsense. It’s tainted fruit now. THey’re struggling to find a new frame in which to cloak their agenda, but the Discovery Institute is always going to be associated with Intelligent Design.
All they have succeeded in doing is flooding the discourse with fallacious turds like “irreducible complexity”, which still gets parroted by ignorant politicians, like Michele Bachmann.
Irreducible complexity is poorly formulated and not an obstacle to evolution; at this point, the explanations are so common that bringing up IC is simply an admission of ignorance, of someone with a Bachmann-like understanding of biology.
And for a scientific movement, look at the quality of the proponents who have flocked to it: basically no one. The primary spokesperson of the Discovery Institute is Casey Freakin’ Luskin, a freshly minted lawyer with an undergraduate degree in earth science, and who is demonstrably incompetent at basic biology — not that that prevents him from flooding the DI website with patent nonsense.
They’ve got propagandists like David Klinghoffer, who’s reduced to sticking his fingers in his ears and chanting la-la-la to the existence of criticisms.
It’s latest pseudo-scholarly efforts are bloated, preening, vacuous babble like Signature in the Cell, books that even fans of the idea find tedious and uninspiring.
Their websites are little walled garden, either no comments allowed or comments carefully screened, because they cannot tolerate open discusssion and criticism.
They’ve got nothing new. There is no new science emerging from the cesspit of ID.
I think we’re done.
I really just hope that Phillip Johnson is vaguely aware of, and vaguely perturbed by, the failure of his ideas. And I hope he lives many more years, to witness the continuing decay of his pathetic movement.
(Also on FtB)
Nice idea. They had a contest to design tattos for ScienceOnline2012, and are planning to give them away as temporary tattoos to attendees. They built up a nice gallery of designs.
One of them is a pirate squid, which looks excellent. Good move!
And then…they set up an internet poll to decide which ones to use. Seriously. I think that they forgot that I exist.
Time to remind them. Fly, my pretties, fly! Pirate squid must win!
