Philosophism

I have seen scientism, and it’s usually not us. The most blatant example recently was Pinker’s appalling essay in which he suggested that Hume could have used some instruction in molecular biology; I’ve seen people like Hawking and Krauss claim that philosophy is dead, killed by science. But usually the prominent atheists manage to step back from the brink and acknowledge that there is virtue to the humanities that is not dependent on science (but make no mistake, poetry is not a tool for generating new knowledge, but for communicating insights into human nature, which is fine and valuable — science is the tool we have for testing and verifying, and for acquiring new information about the universe).

Massimo Pigliucci has written a paper chastising the New Atheists for taking a turn towards scientism. But take note of my first paragraph: I’ve already given more specific examples of scientism than Pigliucci does in his entire paper. I’d also consider them illuminating: Krauss has retracted his sentiments, both Krauss and Hawking took a lot of flak for their weird ideas about philosophy (science is a branch of philosophy, so I found both rather discombobulating), and Pinker…well, I’d consider that the most damning evidence for a plague of scientism within atheism, that so many praised that blatant example of ahistorical and aphilosophical BS. Pinker isn’t even mentioned anywhere in the paper.

Pigliucci has picked his scientistic enemies: Dawkins, of course, and Harris and Stenger, adding just for the sake of completeness a couple of other scientists, me and Jerry Coyne, who also strongly criticizes the paper. Hitchens is dismissed as a mere polemicist, while Dennett, as a philosopher, causes some discomfort to his thesis, Pigliucci simply acknowledges that he can’t accuse him of scientism and moves on to his other targets.

But he can’t really defend his accusation against any of the others, either, and he doesn’t seem to care that there is a range of perspectives on philosophy even within his hand-picked sample. I consider myself to have a strong appreciation of philosophy and the humanities, and have even proposed to colleagues that a real liberal arts education ought to require learning some philosophy. Stenger’s work is full of history and philosophy; read God and the Atom, for instance, to see what I mean. I think Harris’s The Moral Landscape was all kinds of awful, but that he exercised some bad philosophy does not support his claim that the New Atheists reject it.

And look who he leaves off: Susan Jacoby, David Silverman, Hemant Mehta, Greta Christina, Ibn Warriq, Ophelia Benson. And worse, he has to explicitly deny that AC Grayling is a New Atheist! The impression I get is that what he has done is not find prominent New Atheists who endorse scientism, but prominent New Atheists who also happen to be trained as scientists, and then clumsily elided “is a scientist” into “is practicing scientism,” while also glossing over the existence of philosophers in our clan. We have a word for this: cherry-picking. It’s not a compliment.

Then he tries to define New Atheism, mentioning that nothing in it is actually “new” (a point that I think all of the New Atheists have made repeatedly! It’s a stupid name we got stuck with by a journalist writing in Wired). Here’s his definition.

Rather, it seems to me that two characteristics stand out as defining New Atheism apart from what I refer to as classical Atheism, one extrinsic, the other intrinsic. The extrinsic character of the New Atheism is to be found in the indisputably popular character of the movement. All books produced by the chief New Atheists mentioned above have been worldwide best sellers, in the case of Dawkins’s God Delusion, for instance, remaining for a whopping 51 weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. While previous volumes criticizing religion had received wide popular reception (especially the classic critique of Christianity by Bertrand Russell), nothing like that had happened before in the annals of Western literature. The search for the reasons explaining such an unprecedented level of popularity is best left to sociologists, and at any rate is not really relevant to my aims here. It is likely, though, that the New Atheism qua popular movement is a direct result of the complex effects of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. We have seen that the first book in the series, by Sam Harris, was written explicitly in reaction to those events, and I suspect that careful sociological analysis will reveal that that is also what accounts for Harris et al.’s success.

The second reason is intrinsic, and close to the core of my argument in this paper: the New Atheism approach to criticizing religion relies much more forcefully on science than on philosophy. Indeed, a good number of New Atheists (the notable exception being, of course, Daniel Dennett) is on record explicitly belittling philosophy as a source of knowledge or insight. Dawkins says that the “God hypothesis” should be treated as a falsifiable scientific hypothesis; Stenger explicitly—in the very subtitle of his book—states that “Science shows that God does not exist” (my emphasis); and Harris later on writes a whole book in which he pointedly ignores two and a half millennia of moral philosophy in an attempt to convince his readers that moral questions are best answered by science (more on this below). All of these are, to my way of seeing things, standard examples of scientism. Scientism here is defined as a totalizing attitude that regards science as the ultimate standard and arbiter of all interesting questions; or alternatively that seeks to expand the very definition and scope of science to encompass all aspects of human knowledge and understanding.

So he’s got two criteria: 1) We’re popular. That’s an accusation that has me stumped; would we be more respectable if nobody liked us at all? 2) We’re scientists and take a scientific approach. Well, we’re not all scientists, and what’s wrong with looking at an issue using evidence and reason? Why shouldn’t we reject ideas that might be pretty to some people, but contradict reality? It’s not as if we can’t appreciate beauty or justice, entirely non-scientific ideas, unless they’re also counter-factual. Beauty and justice are best when they aren’t wrapped around lies and nonsense!

I’m going to start replying to these broad-brush accusations of scientism with my own accusations of philosophism. It seems to me we’ve got a plague of people who resent the success of atheism and respond by belittling it with trite claims of it being “bad theology” or “naive philosophy”. I’m about to be served with a big plumbing bill for a frozen pipe — I wonder if I can get a discount if I argue that those two guys with the big toolboxes were insufficiently appreciative of the philosophy of flowing water, and are unwarrantedly popular with homeowners this time of year. Damn plumbists.

I’ve seen this argument somewhere before

I think they ripped it off from a theology textbook, simply changing the name of the mystery in question: You Can't Prove There's No Cannibal Rat Ship.

Except, of course, there is a possibility that the Cannibal Rat Ship exists, and there are at least verifiable records that a ship called the Lyubov Orlova once existed. The theologians don’t even have that much of a glimmering of likelihood.

No sympathy. None at all.

I have been harassed by Dennis Markuze/David Mabus for going on 20 years, and I have an imposing collection of filters in my email to block him. At the peak of his mania, he was dunning me with 20-30 emails a day, all repetitive, all totally nuts, and he was sending death threats and other attempts to intimidate me…which were remarkably ineffective, since everything he wrote was twisted and bizarre.

Now he’s found a way to get past my filters: he had a friend write to me!

Written on Behalf of Dennis Markuze by an old friend. Here he presents his SIDE and I think you will agree that he is right!

“I was never approached to offer me my side of the story. Here are the FACTS not the faulty information fed to you by a gang of atheists and drama producing police. Hopefully you can do an article taking my side. I am a odd character, a unique individual, who has been turned into a media monster for my strange ideas, BUT I’M RIGHT!

AFFIDAVIT OF TRUTH

On November 16, 2012, I was arrested in my own house for being on a chat room and apparently harassing Tim Farley. He tweaked and twisted my words to make them appear threatening because he knew that for me to be simply on the Internet was a crime. He reported me to the police and made fraudulent and out of context remarks on what I said. He took harmless banter and converted it into hostile hate speech. Overnight the police got a search warrant and raided my house, seizing property. Again, simply being on the internet was enough. No threats were made and no violent acts committed. He suffered no injury. He suffered no financial loss. He suffered no loss in credibility. But I have suffered all these things and more. I have no history of violence in my past. I’m a writer who engages in debate with the power of words not force of arms. I debate, sometimes hotly, with skeptics and atheists to disprove their ideas. Farley doesn’t like what I have to say about him and his organization, the James Randi Foundation. He wants to silence my right to state my ideas on religion and politics, and he and his gang have called the police whenever they suspect I’m on the Internet. All they want to do is deprive me of my freedom so as to discredit my ideas. I am being ganged up on, bullied, and marked by atheists and skeptics, and even the media is taking their side, not once asking for my side of the story. True, some of my words may be rude or tasteless such as, “I will crush you,” or, “I will be rid of you etc.” My actual ideas center upon the utter waste of intelligence used in the ideology of atheism and the importance of peace and disarmament for the planet, and the terrible costs of war. My real words can be found here not the broken fragments they produce to use as lies to condemn me:

Please spend the time to read, watch, and hear what I have to say here:

http://storify.com/deltoidmachine/how-we-won-the-james-randi-dollar-1-000-000-parano

Dennis Markuze
Montreal
January, 21, 2014″

His “old friend” is now also blocked. And no, I am not convinced. That he is having a lucid moment (and good for him, maybe he’s getting better) does not offset tens of thousands of obsessive, ridiculous emails.

Here’s one he sent as xjustos@gmail.com:

I have you by the BALLS…

Dumb, right? “Harmless banter”, you think? He sent that to all of my students in my classes that term.

Or how about this one, from operationarchangel4@gmail.com?

you have NOTHING TO DO WITH CRITICAL THINKING join the socialist faith
how about you keep this one up as a TESTIMONY FOR THE TRUTH
rich millionaires with their heads up the arses
I think this qualifies as a DOS attack… for RATS IN A TRAP
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wHs0vM3gRTA
you can thank RANDI
now for some SYMBOLIC TWO-DIMENSIONAL ANALYSIS!
on the TIMELINE
0 min 33 sec – Randi in the RED SHIRT – signifying the *bl..dy deed* that is about to happen
1min 18 sec – Banachek talks about respect for the claimant and then they mock “these kind” of people in the final part
3 min 20 sec – the test of the power bracelet that increases a person’s energy and balance. Notice our challenge is all about POWER & BALANCE, proving the existence of a HIGHER POWER
5 min 15 sec TEST BEGINS. Skeptics one by one stand in CRUCIFIXION POSE
1 hr 10 min 21 sec Test is ended in failure
1 hr 10 min 30 sec request is made to make change in the PROTOCOL
1 hr 10 min 51 sec Applause is made by all those who wanted him to fail from the very beginning
1 hr 25 min 39 sec Now they talk about the Nightline clip that was filmed in Manhattan, also the scene of the 9/11 event
1hr 28 min 42 sec – They talk about make-shift tests. They think that because no one can win the prize that psychic phenomena does not exist
1 hr 29 min 45 sec Banachek says “the majority of *these* people.'” A contemptuous reference that occurs repeatedly
1 hr 31 min 53 sec The reference to envelopes. Remember the 911 in Angel’s envelope!
1 hr 37 min 11 sec Swiss says he is not worried about a paranormal event happening. Little does he know what is actually taking place
1 hr 39 min 50 sec The mocking of SPIRITS!
1 hr 40 min 27 sec Reference made to the TERROR of witnessing a supernatural event, i.e, the blood leaving the face
1 hr 41 min 15 sec Reference to “these people”
1 hr 41 min 40 sec Belief in the supernatural is claimed to be a psychological defence mechanism to cope with reality. Swiss talks about how desperate the psychics become when debunked. Little does he know what is happening to the skeptics!
1 hr 42 min 11 sec WHEN PROPHECY SUCCEEDS! KABOOM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=gHbYJfwFgOU
which WORLD-VIEW will not exist, sh*thead?
____________
5000 whining atheists vs the Great Prophet
how the divine pen of Michel Nostradamus crushed the international atheist movement
http://www.skepticalcommunity.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=34862
________________________
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=s3lwG4MytSI
one applicant right here…
get the POINT, Randi….
__________________________

for lies on top of lies
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbmXpNEFipE

do you think you can threaten my right to FREE SPEECH?
what if I told you that I am not who you think I am….
Not Dennis Markuze – but a FAN!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nvatDdOWcLw
you’re not the center of the universe!
____________________________
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3yRpSNIOwA4
a dishonest liar

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ruQFh_TkPto
WHINE WHINE WHINE
________________________
Best Clips on Atheist:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V6B9D1S4xQ – JUST A TINY SMIDGEN OF A GAP! JUST A TINY SMIDGEN OF A GAP!
______________________________

a vitally important essay dealing with the new age of madness that poses as ENLIGHTENMENT!
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/adorno/1944/culture-industry.htm
they speak for those who cannot speak…
_____________________
outside the doors of the Loto Quebec Building
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=wwWr-zwUHqA
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/1967/violence.htm
http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/1967/questions-answers.htm

That’s what he calls a debate. He sent me dozens of copies of that one week; in addition, he sent that same incoherent screed to my university’s department of admissions, to the chancellor, to every single faculty member on my campus. And that’s not an exceptional email; that’s pretty much the tone and content of every single goddamn rant he’s ever sent me.

And now he thinks a single paragraph in which he whimpers that he was just stating his ideas will somehow make me forget decades of spam and lies and babbling nonsense and harassment of not just myself, but of my students and colleagues? It was persistent spam under a parade of fake email addresses.

Harmless banter. Fuck you, Dennis Markuze, never send me another email, and don’t have your asshole friends act as your proxy, either.

It’s not a good time to be a Republican

Not that it ever is, but now…it’s the corruption. Christie, McDonnell, and — you knew this would happen eventually to one of the dumber conservatives — Dinesh D’Souza has been indicted for violations of campaign ethics.

My big worry now with the Republicans in such disarray is that there won’t be much competition in coming elections, and stupid Democrats will nominate dull, moderate-conservative, ‘safe’ candidates.

Oh, really? You mean that accusation was serious?

Guess who just got a vaguely threatening Freedom of Information Act request demand? Me!

You may recall that bizarre letter slipped under my door by John Geiger, editor of the right wing campus rag, the North Star. In it, he blithely accused me of stealing a print run of his newspaper because the distribution locations smelled like chloroform and other sciency things, and because I’d written a post expressing my contempt for the disgusting racism he exhibited.

I thought it was a joke. But no, he has enlisted something called The Alliance Defending Freedom For Faith For Justice to come after me. They sent a letter. Here’s the relevant part:

Pursuant to Minnesota’s open records law, MINN. STAT. §§ 13.01 to 13.99, we request access to and a COPY of the following documents and data:

1. Video surveillance of all cameras near the following locations on the University of Minnesota Morris campus from 12:00 a.m. on November 22 to 11:59 p.m. on November 23, 2013:

a. In the tunnel between the Science building and the Student Center; and

b. In the Humanities Fine Arts building; and

2. Written communications, including electronic, sent or received by UM- Morris Professor Paul Z. Myers that refer to the “NorthStar,” “North Star,” or John Geiger; and

3. Written communications, including electronic, sent or received by UM- Morris Chancellor Jacqueline Johnson that refer to the “NorthStar,” “North Star,” or John Geiger.

Do we even have video surveillance cameras there? I have no idea. Anyway, I was happy to oblige, did an email search for those terms, and came up with all of…about a dozen items. Most were references to the North Star STEM alliance; one was a message to the whole campus from our chancellor deploring the allegations of fascism and racism published by the North Star, and that was actually the only correspondence at all that mentioned Geiger. Other than Geiger’s own letter, of course.

There won’t be any evidence of a conspiracy, or that I stole their dreadful papers, because there wasn’t and I didn’t…but one thing we know, wingnuts love to make noise about dreadful sneaky conspiracies against them and the American Way.

Besides, I have an alibi. I was in Benghazi, extorting money from Bill Clinton’s mistresses to invest in the Whitewater project, and also gathering fake temperature readings for Al Gore to fool everyone into believing climate change is real.

Ceterum censeo Creationism esse delendam

Aww, the poor Discovery Institute. They are so oppressed and censored that they are now asking for nominations for Censor of the Year. Because, as you know, criticizing creationism and expecting science teachers to have basic competence in their fields is tantamount to silencing alternative views.

They do admit that the majority — the vast, overwhelming, Jebus-crushing majority — of scientists accept evolutionary theory, but they put a paranoid twist on it.

Yes, a majority of scientists who will speak openly will you tell you, if questioned, that they accept the Darwinian account and reject the scientific alternative of intelligent design. But the statistical fact of such a majority is the result, in no small measure, of rule by fear. For every story of a scientist or teacher silenced that we have covered here, many, many others could be told — but the censored scholars and instructors are careful about keeping safe from further threats and reprisals, which means keeping quiet.

First, we aren’t “Darwinians” any more. Evolution is much bigger than Darwin imagined. Could these goobers someday learn that? I recognize Darwinian processes in evolution, but I also appreciate others.

But more importantly…”rule by fear”? Nonsense. The training of biologists and biology educators involves learning a great deal about the evidence and studying the research that lead to the conclusion that life evolved. The only thing we might be afraid of is looking ridiculous and uninformed if we were to promote the ridiculous and uninformed ideas of Intelligent Design creationist clowns.

But do help them out. Nominate those science educators who have done a great job of informing the public about the absurdity of creationism — because that’s the Discovery Institute’s working definition of “censorship.”

Henry Gee is gently, delicately, softly chastised

Nature has posted a rebuke to one of their employees for outing a pseudonymous blogger.

We would not normally comment on a point of view expressed by an employee in a personal capacity and in their personal time. However, as Nature was mentioned in a recent personal Twitter post by a Nature editor, it is necessary for us to clarify our views and policies. Firstly, we are pleased that the editor in this case has apologised to Dr Isis for the language used and for the fact that her identity was revealed. We also wish to make clear that both the language and behaviour are contrary to Nature’s principles and codes of editorial practice, and indeed contrary to the practices of all our editors. We encourage civility and respect on social media by our employees, and hope for similar standards from those we interact with. Blindness to the status of research authors is enshrined in our editorial selection policies and practices, as is the respect for, and protection of, anonymity. We take our responsibilities to our authors and reviewers seriously and we protect the identities of anonymous reviewers, manuscript authors or authors of magazine articles. Our policies on anonymity are detailed on our author and reviewer services pages: http://www.nature.com/authors/index.html. We continue to listen to reactions and are carefully considering the issues. The history and circumstances are complex, so we will not be commenting further on the specifics at this time.

The only comment directed at the offending employee begins with “we are pleased”. Wait, did I say “chastised” and “rebuked”? My error. I meant to say “lovingly stroked.”

This is how Nature‘s reputation gets dethroned, you know.