Oh no, not Thunderf00t!

It’s been over a decade since I even thought about Thunderf00t AKA Phil Mason. He had a blog here on FtB for about 3 days before he flamed out spectacularly — he decided to use his opportunity here to screech about feminism, and rant about all us cucks and how contemptible the site was. He was an embarrassing disaster, and we kicked him out (although, unfortunately, he kept his password to the backchannel and copied all the private discussions we’d had about this mess, and dumped them to the denizens of the slymepit.) He was a truly awful, obsessive, immoral person, we discovered.

Now Rebecca Watson picks at the scab and tells us what Thunderf00t is obsessed with now. It’s Elon Musk. I can’t fault him for that, but I can fault him for being so bad in his arguments. He is objectively bad at making arguments about anything.

Would you believe Thunderf00t still has one million subscribers on YouTube? Getting booted off freethoughtblogs didn’t do him any harm at all.

Another conference I won’t be attending

The Center for Inquiry has been ideologically captured by the wingnuts. We’ve known this for a long time, since it was basically bought out by the Richard Dawkins Foundation. CFI has announced a conference coming up in July, in which Richard Dawkins will hand out his annual Richard Dawkins Award to someone he considers worthy. Can you guess who it’s going to this year?

Keep in mind that in the past it has gone to Bill Maher, despite all the groans from the CFI membership.

Do you have a guess?

I’ll spill the beans. He’s giving it to…JOHN MCWHORTER. Jesus christ. He’s one of that small group of anti-DEI freaks who have melted down over the idea that non-white non-men might actually have something to contribute to society (face it, that’s what all the anti-woke/anti-DEI goons are about, that idea that white men are not the pinnacle of civilization.) Here’s a bit from Elie Mystal’s review of McWhorter’s last book.

McWhorter’s central thesis is that being woke — by which he seems to mean acknowledging the ongoing fact of bigotry, systemic racism and the resulting forms of oppression — is a religion. Not “like” a religion — McWhorter refuses to hedge this contention with simile. No, McWhorter argues that people who advocate for anti-racism policies, racial sensitivity training and (of course) “critical race theory” are all part of a religious movement with its own clergy. (Ibram X. Kendi, Nikole Hannah-Jones and Ta-Nehisi Coates have all been ordained, apparently.) He argues that this religion’s “Elect” has taken over the country and “rule[s] by inflicting terror” on those who dare to speak against it. Along the way, he warns that it is “coming after your kids” with a breathlessness that makes him sound less like a thoughtful academic and more like a conspiracy theorist looking for hidden critical race messages in the menus at Chuck E. Cheese.

He’s also an author on that terrible “politicization of science” paper that complained about how science not kow-towing to the far right’s racism is an example of “politicizing”, while ignoring people like Chris Rufo.

The madness of King Dawkins continues its descent. I suspect that McWhorter was hand-picked by Dawkins specifically because they both endorse that “woke mind-virus” nonsense.

Believe in belief, says famous physicist

Marcelo Gleiser is a humble guy. The Templeton Foundation just awarded him $1.5 million for being humble, as we know because when asked, “which aspect of your work do you think is most relevant to the Templeton Foundation’s spiritual aims?” by Scientific American, he claims he was given all that money for his humility.

Probably my belief in humility. I believe we should take a much humbler approach to knowledge, in the sense that if you look carefully at the way science works, you’ll see that yes, it is wonderful — magnificent! — but it has limits. And we have to understand and respect those limits. And by doing that, by understanding how science advances, science really becomes a deeply spiritual conversation with the mysterious, about all the things we don’t know. So that’s one answer to your question. And that has nothing to do with organized religion, obviously, but it does inform my position against atheism. I consider myself an agnostic.

Oh. I suspect his position against atheism was a more relevant criterion in the award — I don’t think that people who brag about their humility are particularly humble, especially not when they think their humility is so vast and impressive that it deserves millions of dollars.

I’m also surprised by his claim that being an agnostic means he is opposed to people who make claims against the existence of a god. Does he express a similar opposition to people who make positive claims in favor of the existence of a god? I think not. He wouldn’t have won a Templeton prize if he did. Also, he’s very confused about what atheism is.

I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. “I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe.”

How dare those atheists simply not believe in a phenomenon for which they have no evidence! That is inconsistent with the scientific method, which according to Gleiser, expects you to accept any hypothesis in the absence of evidence! Better yet, you should accept it even if the only evidence you’ve got is against it!

I’d reply to his question “what is atheism?” by turning it around and asking “what are gods?” What are these things you expect us to respect and even believe? Be specific. I suspect that all I’d get is hand-wavey babble about spirituality.

More seriously, he opposes rejecting a hypothesis for the trivial flaw of being unsupported by any evidence.

But in science we don’t really do declarations. We say, “Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that.” And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about. “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and all that. This positions me very much against all of the “New Atheist” guys—even though I want my message to be respectful of people’s beliefs and reasoning, which might be community-based, or dignity-based, and so on. And I think obviously the Templeton Foundation likes all of this, because this is part of an emerging conversation

OK, I agree with part of that. You do have to have evidence for a hypothesis — you can’t make a proposal to NIH and expect to get funded if you have no preliminary evidence from your lab or the scientific literature to justify it (although you can submit such an empty proposal to the Templeton Foundation and get a big bucket of cash in return). However, we do have the right to strongly and provisionally reject a claim that is advanced in the absence of any support — in fact, it is necessary that we reject unfounded hypotheses out of hand, unless we want to waste immense amounts of time and effort and money in the futile pursuit of nonsense.

I encourage Dr Gleiser to invest that $1.5 million to research the existence of elves, which have roughly the same amount of evidentiary support as gods. It’s the scientific thing to do. Or, since he’s a theoretical physicist, maybe it would be more appropriate to use the money to make a perpetual motion machine. There is an immense number of absurd hypotheses that are dismissed by sensible scientists, and among them is the god hypothesis. That’s the atheist position that Gleiser opposes. Before you can expect rational people to believe your claims, you have to have a body of acts of god that aren’t better explained by natural mechanisms. No, the resurrection of Jesus doesn’t count, because we don’t believe it and you’ve got nothing but cultish claims and confused exaggerations in a holy book to back it up.

To return to his claim of humility, he doesn’t believe that at all. He thinks humans are all special!

You know, I’m a “Rare Earth” kind of guy. I think our situation may be rather special, on a planetary or even galactic scale. So when people talk about Copernicus and Copernicanism—the ‘principle of mediocrity’ that states we should expect to be average and typical, I say, “You know what? It’s time to get beyond that.” When you look out there at the other planets (and the exoplanets that we can make some sense of), when you look at the history of life on Earth, you will realize this place called Earth is absolutely amazing.

Great. What’s the new hypothesis to replace the idea that we’re the product of universal general properties of physics and chemistry? What’s special about Earth? Is there a specific insight that contributes to science that can be used here? The “rare earth” hypothesis is usually used as a tool to smuggle a god into the works, rather than chance and necessity.

He goes on and on, and some of the things he says are sensible — like yeah, we should take better care of our planet — but to be honest, I don’t care. I stopped caring when I read “Templeton Prize”.

The ghouls are rising in California

Ray Comfort is doing his thing, blaming the California wildfires on Hollywood blasphemy. I warn you, this video is a combination of the nauseating and the banal: Ray is trapped in his usual schtick. First we get excerpts from the Golden Globes, to tell us how awful Glen Powell is and how evil Hollywood is, and then…he can’t help himself. He starts interviewing random people on the beach, asking them what caused the wildires (they don’t know), then asking them if they ever told a lie, etc., before telling them they have to find Jesus, when, presumably, the rains will come down.

Jeez, but I despise that loathsome little freak.

I reaffirm my support for the Freedom From Religion Foundation

Now, both Jerry Coyne and Steven Pinker have announced their resignation from the honorary board at the FFRF. Good. They were a terrible influence, and their departure strengthens the FFRF as a defender of reason.

Their latest post on their website declares Freedom From Religion Foundation supports LGBTQIA-plus rights. They admit that they erred in permitting someone (Coyne, of course) to publish an article in their newsletter that was ignorantly prejudicial against transgender individuals.

However, advocacy is rarely perfect, and progress is not always linear. Recently, we published a guest blog post as part of an effort to provide a forum for various voices within the framework of our mission. Although we included a disclaimer that the viewpoints expressed within the post were not necessarily reflective of the organization, it has wrongfully been perceived as such.
Despite our best efforts to champion reason and equality, we recognize mistakes can happen, and this incident is a reminder of the importance of constant reflection and growth. Publishing this post was an error of judgment, and we have decided to remove it as it does not reflect our values or principles. We regret any distress caused by this post and are committed to ensuring it doesn’t happen again.
Moving forward, we are reviewing our content guidelines and internal processes to ensure our public messaging consistently reflects our values. We are committed to learning from this experience.
We stand firmly with the LGBTQIA-plus community and their allies in advocating for equality, dignity and the freedom to live without fear of religiously motivated discrimination. Our mission to keep religion out of government is inextricably linked to preserving and advancing these fundamental rights.
Together, we will continue to champion a society where all people — no matter their sexual orientation, gender identity, beliefs or nonbeliefs — are treated equally under the law.

That article is currently flooded with comments criticizing the FFRF — many of them seem to be coming from the horde of haters at Coyne’s blog. The gist of many of their comments seems to be that the FFRF is the transphobic one, which is ludicrous and little more than a childish playground taunt. I think we can ignore that nonsense.

Some of them are claiming that Coyne’s claim that sex is totally binary is scientific, and that it is unscientific to argue for a more complex continuum of traits. This is also nonsense. Don’t argue with me, though, take it up with the Society for the Study of Evolution’s position on transgender identity from back in 2018.

We, the Council of the Society for the Study of Evolution, strongly oppose attempts by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to claim that there is a biological basis to defining gender as a strictly binary trait (male/female) determined by genitalia at birth. Variation in biological sex and in gendered expression has been well documented in many species, including humans, through hundreds of scientific articles. Such variation is observed at both the genetic level and at the individual level (including hormone levels, secondary sexual characteristics, as well as genital morphology). Moreover, models predict that variation should exist within the categories that HHS proposes as “male” and “female”, indicating that sex should be more accurately viewed as a continuum.* Indeed, experiments in other organisms have confirmed that variation in traits associated with sex is more extensive than for many other traits. Beyond the false claim that science backs up a simple binary definition of sex or gender, the lived experience of people clearly demonstrates that the genitalia one is born with do not define one’s identity. Diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans. As a Society, we welcome this diversity and commit to serving and protecting members regardless of their biological sex, gender identity or expression, or sexual orientation.

*Here we are speaking of the multi-dimensional aspects that underlie male-ness and female-ness, including hormones, physiology, morphology, development, and genetic aspects. We acknowledge that many of these aspects are bimodal. Furthermore, some of these aspects are discrete categories (e.g., XX/XY, SRY presence/absence, gamete size, sperm production vs egg production, presence/absence of certain genitalia), but these categories don’t always align within individuals, are not always binary, and should be irrelevant to the determination of a person’s legal rights and freedoms.

There’s a second letter there, too.

As scientists, we write to express our concerns about the attempt by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to claim that there is a biological basis to defining gender as a strictly binary trait (male/female) determined by genitalia at birth.

Variation in biological sex and in gendered expression has been well documented in many species, including humans, through hundreds of scientific articles. Such variation is observed at both the genetic level and at the individual level (including hormone levels, secondary sexual characteristics, as well as genital morphology). Moreover, models predict that variation should exist within the categories that HHS proposes as “male” and “female”, indicating that sex should be more accurately viewed as a continuum. Indeed, experiments in other organisms have confirmed that variation in traits associated with sex is more extensive than for many other traits. Beyond the incorrect claim that science backs up a simple binary definition of sex or gender, the lived experience of people clearly demonstrates that the genitalia one is born with do not define one’s identity.

Diversity is a hallmark of biological species, including humans. Our three scientific societies represent over 3000 scientists, many of whom are experts on the variability that is found in sexual expression throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. If you wish to speak to one of our experts or receive peer-reviewed papers that explain why there is a continuum of sexual expression, please contact us at president@evolutionsociety.org.

Sincerely,

Dr. Hopi Hoekstra
President, Society for the Study of Evolution
Professor, Harvard University

Dr. Sharon Strauss
President, American Society of Naturalists
Professor, University of California, Davis

Dr. Susana Magallón
President, Society of Systematic Biologists
Professor, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

Hmmm. Hoekstra has published with Coyne in the past, so maybe that will have some weight with him.

I look forward to Coyne’s resignation from the SSE, as well. Or maybe he’s waiting and hoping for a purge of all those woke scientists from the Society? He might get his wish, given the ascendancy of the ideology he favors in our government.

Breaking news: Richard Dawkins has also resigned from the FFRF! And there was much rejoicing!

Why should I trust an organization that honors the worst among us?

Actually, in my experience the decay is spread everywhere

A commenter made me aware of a conflict I’d completely missed. The FFRF, an organization I’ve always appreciated, published an article by Jerry Coyne. It was the usual anti-trans, anti-scientific, hateful heap of bogosity; the FFRF retracted it, too late; Coyne was chagrined by the retraction; and I just missed it all. Here’s a good summary.

If you believe gender-related issues are tangential to atheism, I assure you that religious conservatives believe the topic is perfectly intertwined with their faith. Just as they used religion to fight marriage equality and abortion rights, they’re using the Book of Genesis in defense of their anti-trans beliefs. If you don’t want religion dictating our laws, and you believe LGBTQ people deserve civil rights, then you understand why these are issues atheist activists ought to care about.

And yet some prominent figures in our loose movement have spent years arguing the opposite, allowing white evangelicals to control the debate on LGBTQ rights—and often taking their side. Jerry Coyne, author of Why Evolution is True and Faith Versus Fact: Why Science and Religion Are Incompatible, is another one of those atheists who has spent years spreading anti-trans rhetoric on his website. His blog is now mostly a cesspool of blockquotes from his favorite conservative writers. A deep dive through his “sex and gender” posts will rid you of any respect you may have had for him. (Coyne gave a similar anti-trans talk at the Center For Inquiry’s CSICon in October. Dr. Steven Novella, who spoke at the same event, rebutted it here.)

Accurate. That’s one of my complaints about the atheist movement. Coyne is still a member of FFRF’s honorary board; Richard Dawkins is still a big name in the atheist community; his handpicked agent, Robyn Blumner, still runs CSI. The rot isn’t just a scattered subset of the community, it’s rooted deep in the leadership, and it’s not going anywhere soon. It makes me wary of wading into even the shallow end of the pool.

Do I want to hang out with atheists any more?

I’m tempted. American Atheists national convention is being held in Minneapolis on April 17-20 in 2025. Hey, that’s just down the road! It would be easy for me to attend!

I used to enjoy these events, and liked being part of the community. Unfortunately, I am actively hated by a subset — I still get hate mail from atheists — and I don’t know who the speakers at this event will be yet, so I feel some hesitation. Maybe I can just show up, sit quietly in the back, and see how it goes. Maybe if some of the sensible atheists from the upper Midwest show up I’ll be comfortable with the event.

A novel Xian argument

It’s only 4 minutes long, but it’s just packed with ‘clever’ arguments for god.

If you don’t feel like wasting 4 minutes on this guy — and I don’t blame you — here is his logical argument: if, in the future, people can invent an app that lets you instantly teleport a package to Nebraska, therefore God. If, in the future, we could 3-D print human tissue, therefore God. If, in the future, we decide not to color our tech in sleek black boxes, but use earth tones instead, therefore God. If you can imagine miraculous future technologies, then why can’t you imagine God?

OK, his first example has physical limits that make it extremely unlikely, his second is one researchers are already working on, and his third is trivial. Fundamentally, though, I don’t think you get to analogize human technological progress to a god poofing things into existence by miracles.

Man, that guy is thick.

TODAY: Freethoughtbloggers discuss the problem of evil

Just in time for your Christmas shopping list!

It seems obvious today that people are operating on different principles for defining good and evil. Some people seem to believe that it’s virtuous to massacre Palestinian children, strangle homeless people on the subway, murder healthcare CEOs (or deprive people of health care), and oppress trans people. All those things would put you on my naughty list! What are the rules for ethics and morality anyway? Are there any?

Do we really need a taxonomy of idiots?

I’m going to be a bit contrarian. Years ago, one phenomenon that was horribly popular among skeptics was the identification and labeling of logical fallacies — it sill is, as far as I know. There’d be a debate, and after the goofball had made his arguments, our side would triumphantly list his Official Fallacies, preferably in Latin, and declare victory. Here’s an example of thorough detailing with nice graphical fillips to give you a feeling of satisfaction as you tear your opponent apart.

I’m not arguing that these aren’t fallacies — they definitely are, and they do invalidate an argument. As a tactic, though, is this effective? You might as well be peppering your opponent with colorful stickers while propping up your ego and reputation with language that comes out of a first year logic course. It all does nothing. I’ve witnessed creationists gushing out a blizzard of logical fallacies — they’re creationists, after all, and they’re defending very silly ideas — emerging unfazed and undefeated, and the audience is never persuaded to abandon their beliefs. They’re right, don’t you know, since God or their incestuous circle of fellow conspiracy theorists agree with them, so who cares if the college boy knows a bunch of fancy words. Anyone who disagrees with us is a Fake Expert with Nefarious Intent and so can be disregarded. Also, the only Latin fallacy they know is ad hominem, and they’re pretty sure that it means strongly disagreeing with me so anyone who thinks the earth is round or that it’s billions of years old or that the climate is changing are guilty of a logical fallacy, too.

It might be satisfying to have a scorecard and tally up errors, but this isn’t a baseball game and there are no referees to award you with victory. These lists of fallacies isolate you from the audience and short-circuit any attempt to make a well-meaning exploration of the deeper reasoning behind bad ideas.