A little skepticism about an extrasolar planet is required

Okay. It would be really cool if there were an earth-like planet orbiting the star nearest us. Now there’s news dribbling out about a putative discovery of a rocky planet in the habitable zone of Proxima Centauri. Except, unfortunately, the story is grossly premature and unreliable. A few warning signs:

  • It’s a rumor published in Der Spiegel, a news magazine, not a scientific publication.

  • The discoverers are unnamed. What science publication uses unidentified sources?

  • The general source is the La Silla observatory, which previously claimed to have found an earthlike planet around Alpha Centauri B…a claim that was later retracted.

  • The story gets stuff wrong.

    Knowing that there is a habitable planet that a mission from Earth could reach within our own lifetimes is nothing short of amazing!

    Whose lifetime?

    The fastest spacecraft we’ve ever fired off, Voyager, is traveling at about 17 km/sec, which is fast alright — but it would still take tens of thousands of years to get there.

Fraser Cain, usually a reliable source, has already made a video about the ‘discovery’.

Nope, I still don’t buy it. There’s no evidence there. You could make the same video with generic science-fictiony images declaring that scientists have discovered little green men on Mars, and it would be just as convincing, that is, not.

The video also mentions Project Starshot, which would be one way of getting man-made objects to velocities somewhat closer to the speed of light. This scheme involves building 100-billion-watt laser arrays and firing them at laser sails hauling teeny-tiny chips with built-in micro-gadgets to do everything our regular space probes do and transmit the data back to Earth. Project Starshot is the baby of a Silicon Valley billionaire, so of course it must be a good idea.

You know, we’re kind of in a golden age of space exploration, with all kinds of information coming in from robots on Mars or flying around Jupiter. The real data is exciting, but these impractical fantasies are not.

God’s stealing the credit again

godfail

Prayer doesn’t work. Miracles don’t happen. Faith and spirituality are nothing but magic words for nothing at all. So what is a church to do?

Easy. Buy something that does work, and slap a religious label on it. So the Catholic hospitals are busy growing again.

Catholic health care services are buying up an increasing number of hospitals in the United States — 1 in 6 hospitals now answer to the Catholic authorities — and in many towns, the only hospital in the area is Catholic. This normally wouldn’t be a problem, except that these hospitals usually have to follow the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services, which expressly forbid any care seen as fiddling with the “natural” course of reproduction. Interpreted faithfully, means no abortion, no contraception, no sterilization, and a ban on many fertility treatments.

It’s win:win for ignorance! Not only does Catholicism get to claim credit for scientific successes, but they get to spread harmful doctrines at the same time!

Here’s another case of a ‘higher power’ inflating it’s potency: 12 step programs. They don’t work.

There is a large body of evidence now looking at AA success rate, and the success rate of AA is between 5 and 10 percent. Most people don’t seem to know that because it’s not widely publicized. … There are some studies that have claimed to show scientifically that AA is useful. These studies are riddled with scientific errors and they say no more than what we knew to begin with, which is that AA has probably the worst success rate in all of medicine.

It’s not only that AA has a 5 to 10 percent success rate; if it was successful and was neutral the rest of the time, we’d say OK. But it’s harmful to the 90 percent who don’t do well. And it’s harmful for several important reasons. One of them is that everyone believes that AA is the right treatment. AA is never wrong, according to AA. If you fail in AA, it’s you that’s failed.

It’s always the victim’s fault when it comes to faith-based treatments. The very first comment there is a perfect example of religious apologetics.

I’m a recovering addict/alcoholic with over 5 years of continuous sobriety. I attend AA meetings regularly, and I take exception to Dr. Dodes statement, “AA is never wrong, according to AA. If you fail in AA, it’s you that’s failed.” I have never attended a meeting where this sentiment was expressed. The AA Big Book says, “Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path.”

Exactly. It doesn’t work, the stats show it doesn’t work, but according to AA, it always works, except when it’s the subject’s fault, which is 95% of the time.

Our marriage is over!

It seems awfully harsh that my wife will learn about the impending dissolution of our relationship on a blog post, but it’s true. There has been a formal announcement on the interwebs. All marriages will be imminently nullified by Jesus, and since our wedding was most definitely officiated by a Jesus-lovin’ god-walloper, I don’t see any loopholes.

Wait. It’s an interpretation of the book of Revelation? That’s a relief. I guess I can ignore it, even though the prospect of living in sweet, delicious sin was appealing.

It did make me think of one thing, though. You know how the Republican party has discredited itself by nominating an orange turd with cotton candy floss for hair and very tiny hands for the presidency? Not just his ridiculous appearance and behavior, but his lack of policy knowledge and his absurd accusations and second amendment solutions…all conspire to demolish the credibility of the entire party, and expose the hypocrisy of its leaders.

I would suggest that the Book of Revelation does the same for all of Christianity. That it was included at all in the early formulations of dogma should be an embarrassment — it’s as if a physics textbook were to include a screed from the Time Cube guy, or a biology textbook had a chapter on the age of the earth that just babbled on about 6000 years and the Great Flood. Even if there are nice, poetic, humanist sections of the Bible, shouldn’t the incorporation of raving apocalyptic lunacy as a legitimate part of the story, especially when the most demented members of the faith seem to gravitate towards it, tell you that this is not a credible text?

It’s not alone, either. The book of Genocide — I mean, Genesis — and Leviticus and the misogynistic dictates of Paul…shouldn’t they all make you hold the ol’ Holy Book at arms length and deposit the nasty book in the nearest trash can? You can talk all you want about the sweetness of the Song of Solomon or the Psalms, or the wisdom of Ecclesiastes, but that just makes the whole thing the canonical shit sandwich made with the best pickles and good chewy homemade bread.

I get email — theistic tears edition

cryingjesus

This one guy keeps sending me faux-sincere emails asking me to confirm that atheism is in trouble.

Dear Mr. Myers,

Recent reports point to British atheism being in trouble.

With atheism faltering in Britain, is American atheism headed for trouble?

Sincerely,

Paul

He only sends me links to two blogs, one titled “Examining Atheism” and the other called “Combatting Atheism”, which sound exactly the same, and are almost certainly also written by my very concerned correspondent. The kinds of ‘evidence’ he uses to show that atheism is doomed are the number of google searches for the word “atheism”, the number of immigrants to Great Britain, the publication of yet more apologetics from the likes of the tiresome Lennox and McGrath, and — get this — Ray Comfort’s new movie, The Atheist Delusion. It’s pathetic, wishful thinking on his part, nothing more, and the insincerity of his polite requests suggest nothing but dishonesty on his part. But sure, I’ll answer his question.

No.

I would make two general explanations of that answer.

One is that we are seeing a shake-up within the atheist movement — there is a lot of dissatisfaction with the kind of atheism that is easy to measure with the crude metrics my correspondent wants to use. Let’s call it “Charismatic Atheism”, where people happily embrace the points of view offered by “thought leaders” like Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens, often without doing much thinking for themselves. That is a legitimate gateway into atheist ideas, and had a surge of success in the 2000s. It was a way to bring in a strong cohort of people who were quite open about saying that they were atheists.

But it’s not a long-lasting effect, and it’s actually antithetical to the strengths of atheism, which ought to be freethought, evidence-based thinking, and self-criticism. Hero worship is the path to orthodoxy and dogma. So while I might like Hitchens personally, and find many of his ideas worthy and beautifully expressed, I also consider him entirely wrong on some other ideas. Meanwhile, there are some atheists who practically worship the guy, use photos of Hitchens as avatars, and get very irate if you point out that he was also a war-mongering neocon. That represents a split within the movement, and demonstrates a growing dissent. We also see a lot of authoritarian atheists, for instance, or nonegalitarian atheists who despise feminism, and a robust atheism will not simply hide these significant conflicts in the name of protecting the idea that there is no god as dogma. But that’s all good. Atheism is not the kind of monolothic institution that, for instance, the Catholic church is, or other churches try to be, and that is exactly the way it should be.

For many people, atheism has become something we take for granted, and is not the primary cause we struggle to advance. There are other, more important battles to be fought. The label is less important than the body of secular ideals, and the failure of religion to recognize secular goals. More atheists are openly embracing humanism, especially in Britain, where the BHA is very successful.

Which brings me to my second explanation: that you’re finding fewer google searches for the word “atheism” (as if that is even a useful metric) does not change the fact that religion has failed to provide one word of truth, and that the defense of religious belief has collapsed into absurdist irrelevance. If you are citing Ray Comfort, or Kent Hovind, or Ken Ham to support your ideas, you’ve lost — they’re people who actively promote counterfactual nonsense. I see a lot of desperation for affirmation in Paul’s sad little letters, not confidence. That’s where I like to see believers, weak in their faith and grasping at straws.

Nowhere in Paul’s blogs does he present a speck of evidence for theism. He just whines endlessly about atheism, and he can’t even muster any substantive criticisms of atheist thought — it’s solely about how he thinks atheism is becoming less popular. That is not evidence that theism is correct. If I was the last person on Earth calling themself an atheist, it would not make any difference at all in the validity of that mish-mash of bullshit called Christianity or Islam or Judaism or Hinduism or Buddhism.

He can keep sending me his emails, though. His irrationality and desperation only serve to make me stronger.

Oblivious Christians

One of those absurdly vile and perpetually smug Christians is complaining about the FFRF reminding a police department that they are a secular organization that is supposed to serve all citizens. The FFRF informed the police department of Oviedo, Florida that their awards ceremony violated the separation of church and state. This prompts this angry Christian to a rebuke.

The absurdly vile and perpetually smug Freedom From Religion Foundation claims to have just given a Florida police chief “constitutional lessons” following a clearly contentious departmental awards ceremony last month.

The offending event? It was an awards ceremony for officers, which just happened to be held in the multi-purpose building of a seminary.

Seriously. That’s it.

Oh, and because they actually dared to take two minutes out of an otherwise secular, non-religious ceremony to offer an invocation. Which is apparently all it takes to cause militant atheists’ heads to spin around and explode.

The police chief made a remarkably clueless excuse.

“Our Annual Awards Ceremony and Career Track Recognition was not held in a church,” Chudnow pointed out in his written response to FFRF. “Yes, the even was held at the Reformed Theological Seminary complex, but in a multi-purpose room and not a religious sanctuary.”

“Finally, as a practicing member of the Jewish faith, I was not offended by the invocation, nor did I receive any complaints from any attendees,” Chudnow added.

None of those excuses work.

  • So now a placed called “the Reformed Theological Seminary” is not a religious institution? That’s amazing. It’s about as silly as the argument that Christmas is a secular holiday (I’m fine with that, it just means we won the War on Christmas. Apparently, we’re also winning the war on Reformed Theological Seminaries.)

  • That one individual is not offended is irrelevant. You could find a member of the KKK who is not offended by burning a cross on someone’s lawn, too. The question is whether other people of a different faith (or no faith) would feel excluded or disinclined to participate in what should be a secular event because it was unnecessarily colored with religious overtones.

  • His last argument is particularly ridiculous. He is the boss. He has authority that can be misused. Of course people kept quiet.

    I’d also point out that anyone who objected to the religious nonsense would not have attended, and so would be in no position to complain.

I was actually most fascinated by the comments at that fanatically Christian site. Guess what they wanted to complain about?

The Muslims.

There’s nothing about Islam in the ceremony, nothing about Islam in the FFRF’s complaint, not even one word about Muslims in the bitter Christian’s diatribe…yet that’s what the commenters rave about.

CAN ANYONE TELL ME………

Do these secular demons ALSO go after Muslims…..

I’ve heard quite enough on the subject of Separation of church and state – a made-up agenda.

BUT HOW ABOUT SOME SEPARATION OF MOSQUE AND STATE……..those Muslims can do anything, anywhere. I don’t understand it.

If they’re just a religion, let’s subject them to the same strictures as Christians.

If they’re more than just religion, let’s not give them the protections of religion.

Bizarre. If Muslims possessed secular authority, and then tried to muddy it with religious rituals, of course the FFRF would be sending them polite letters and telling them to stop or their lawyers would spring into action. But here’s the thing: Muslims are a tiny minority in the USA. They don’t have the numbers to use their majority as an oppressive tool to compel non-Muslims to participate in their rituals. Christians do. They are subject to exactly the same restrictions as Christians — the problem is that Christians have an entitled status and regard any attempts to curtail their privilege to proselytize as unfair.

You know damn well what would happen to the Asstheists if they went after Islam…remember the beheadings on the beach? Or casting non-Islam believers (e.g., Asstheists) over into the ocean IN A LOCKED CELL?, or slitting throats? Yep…no asstheists need to bother getting after the the Muslims!

You knew that was coming. Did you know all Muslims believe in decapitation and throat slitting and murder and terrorism, and that atheists are afraid to criticize them? You probably didn’t, because it’s not true.

And here we go again…

Christians are just easier pickings because they don’t threaten to cut off your head. Muslims frequently irritate them.But when push comes to shove, Satan is the father of both. In all fairness, some Muslims are less radical and really would like to know God. They have just been taught lies about his nature and character. When they get radically saved they become the most awesome Christians.

No Muslim has ever threatened to cut off my head. But Christians regularly threaten my job, rage about expelling atheists from the country, and call me unAmerican. They even expect me to sit through their inappropriate religious ceremonies without complaint. I assure you that I personally feel far more threatened by Christianity than I do about any other religion, because Christianity has a huge amount of social and political power here.

The assumption that ‘converting the heathen’ is desirable is also exactly why the FFRF has to be diligent in checking the power of Christians in America, too.

Muzzies are the new protected minority for some sick reason. They will kill the lefties first.

Right. <Ethnic slur> is being treated too nicely! It’s OK to call them names and deny them the same rights Christians have, because they all want to kill us!

Yeesh. If only they had the ability to look in a mirror, maybe they’d realize why the FFRF needs to send out all these letters to smug Christians.

Proudly waving their flaws for all to see

I have not been watching the Olympics, so I missed the latest embarrassing spectacle. Athletes are showing up for their competition with great big circular bruises all over their bodies.

They’re cupping to, they imagine, improve their performance. Orac has the rundown on the pointless wickedness of the practice.

This kind of woo does no good and does nothing but harm. But it also hurts the sport in another way.

I am not a sports fan, but I can respect the athletes for their discipline and their commitment. When I do watch them, I admire their skill and their grace and their strength. And then I see them willingly scarred with pseudoscience and all that respect evaporates — these people are idiots.

Ray Comfort can’t even keep the question straight

Ray Comfort has this new cheesy “movie” in which he claims he destroys atheism with one scientific question — which reviews revealed was where did the DNA molecule come from? I explained that that was not very challenging and was actually a rather stupid question. But now he’s got new ads out that present a completely different question.

A thought-provoking question to ask an atheist is whether or not he thinks that his brain was intelligently designed.

No.

Well, that didn’t provoke much thought now, did it? All I have to do is look at Ray Comfort, who has the same kind of brain I have, and it’s obvious that if it were designed at all, it was done badly. Alternatively, I could look at a chimpanzee and see that its brain is smaller but otherwise very similar to mine, and it’s obvious that we have a modified generic ape brain, which is a kind of mammalian brain, which has all the hallmarks of a standard vertebrate brain.

If the whole premise of his movie is that he’s got this killer question that will rock atheists back on their heels, why is it that every question that’s leaking out of it is just kind of pathetic? Doesn’t he try out his question on informed subjects to see how they really react to it before he builds an entire movie that claims he has some kind of potent approach?

Any story of Kent Hovind needs more Nazi imagery

RationalWiki has an expanded front-page feature on Kent Hovind, and it’s pretty thorough — I learned a few new things. I hadn’t known that he claims to have four doctorates, and it has a good breakdown of several examples of his bad math. However…

Does it feature any apocalyptic imagery? No.

How many times does it mention Hitler? Only once.

Does it have a doom-laden industrial soundtrack? Nope.

Sorry, RationalWiki, but you are hampered by that “rational” thing. When you’re talking about Kent Hovind, you need to bring the gold-plated stupid to the fore. Kent knows this. Kent knows how best to summarize his life: with lies and screeching and threats of imminent destruction.

Like in his trailer for a possible “documentary” that Creation Science Evangelism is making (warning: grisly scenes of death and corpses, and truly over-the-top Godwining).

That is so metal.

I notice, though, that for all of his Hitler-howling, most of the trailer is somehow about how he was an innocent man thrown into prison for blamelessly preaching the Gospel, rather than mentioning that he was really imprisoned for blatant tax evasion. C’mon, Kent, own your badassery: you were arrested for defying those Satanic tax accountants. You can’t simultaneously claim to be be a brave rebel while hiding behind claims of pious innocence.

Also, the title needs work: An Atheist’s Worse Nightmare? Seriously, Kent, comparing yourself to a banana is so wimpy.

I do feel a lot of sympathy for the RationalWiki crew, though. Imagine if this Hovind “documentary” ever actually happens — the fact-checking will be exhausting. It’s going to be measured in errors/second, or lies/second.

I want to turn this world upside down

Behold Eric Greitens, who is running for office in Missouri by advertising his ability to fire really big guns.

He’s getting millions in donations for his campaign.

Now here’s Daisy Ridley, who attended an event that recognized the victims of gun violence, and wrote this:

Thinking about how lucky I am like……… Serious bit: as I sat in the audience yesterday tears were streaming down my face at the tribute to those that have been lost to gun violence. I didn’t get a great picture of the incredible group that came on stage but they were so brave. It was a true moment of togetherness. We must ‪#‎stoptheviolence‬

Weeping at the useless deaths of so many people so strongly antagonized NRA fanatics that they hounded her off instagram.

I want to live in a world where the Eric Greitens are laughed at and don’t have a chance of being elected to office, and the humanism of the Daisy Ridleys is appreciated and praised.

This is not that world.

Mike Pence, creationist

In 2001, a French anthropologist discovered some very interesting specimens in West Central Africa: the skulls of some 6-7 million year old apes that showed some chimpanzee-like features and some human-like features. He called it Sahelanthropus tchadensis.

In 2002, Mike Pence used the bully pulpit of the house of representatives to denounce Sahelanthropus and the entire theory of evolution, in a pointless exercise of flouting his ignorance. Why, I don’t know; perhaps he thought he could use a scientific discovery to somehow legislate against science? The performance has been caught on video.

It’s an extended riff on the “just a theory” argument, revealing that he doesn’t understand what a scientific theory means. He cites the 1925 Scope trial as the moment where this mere “theory” was legislated into the classroom and taught as fact; wrong. The Scopes trial was the result of a law that tried to prohibit teaching evolution, the side of science lost the case, and the theory has been taught in classrooms ever since because it is the best-supported explanation of the history of life. And evolution is a fact — life has not been static, but species change over time.

Then he claims that we all remember our classrooms illustrated with that linear portrayal of humans evolving from little monkeys to Mel Gibson. Well, I’ve been teaching for 30 years that that linear sequence is wrong, and that evolution is all about branching descent, which is also, as it happens, how Darwin thought about it (that popular Time-Life illustration is a true curse on evolution education).

darwinsdrawing

But I also challenge Pence on his claim that this portrayal was ubiquitous in classrooms. I had a public school education, in the liberal stronghold of King County, Washington, and never once heard the word “evolution” pass the lips of my teachers. What I learned about evolution before college I got from sneaking into the “Adult” section of the local public library, because this was a subject they didn’t even allow children to read about.

Pence reads about Sahelanthropus and claims to be surprised, that this represents a new theory that human evolution was taking place all across Africa and on the Earth. Uh, what? He also criticizes it because the textbooks will have to be changed, because the old theory of evolution…is suddenly replaced by a new theory.

I really want to play poker with Mike Pence. The astonishment on his face when the second hand dealt to him is different from the first will be something to behold. He will be aghast that the rules of poker get changed with every deal.

And then he gets to his point. Every theory is equivalent. We ought to also teach the theory that the signers of the declaration of independence believed — that humans were created by a creator. The Bible tells us that God created man in his own image, male and female he created them, and I believe that. He also thinks that scientists will come to see that only the theory of intelligent design provides even a remotely rational explanation for the known universe. Alas, scientists have scrutinized intelligent design explanations for a century or two now, and have generally found them to be useless crap.

It’s clear. Mike Pence is not only a babbling loon, but he’s a generic Biblical creationist who sees Intelligent Design creationism as a loophole to smuggle his religious ideas into the classroom. He’s wrong about virtually everything in that pompous little speech.

He’s lucky in one thing, though: he’s got Donald Trump boldly distracting most of the media from making any noise about Mike Pence’s incompetence and ignorance. Even without Trump, I don’t want this goober anywhere near high office.