Tennessee needs your input

Tennessee is taking a big step backward with a new “academic freedom” bill that will open the doors of the public schools to a whole flood of nonsense. Students at the University of Tennessee sent a polite letter to the governor explaining the problems with the bill.

Dear Governor Haslam,

We are writing to you regarding HB368/SB893. As graduate students at the University of Tennessee, we strongly believe that this Bill represents a step backward for Tennessee and our state’s ascending recognition for Science and STEM education. We are specifically writing to address the nature of the Bill itself, which we feel was not adequately discussed during either the House or Senate hearings and misrepresents the undivided consensus among anthropologists, biochemists, biologists, ecologists, evolutionary biologists, genome scientists, geographers, and molecular biologists.

If given a cursory reading, this Bill appears to advocate for intellectual freedom in the classroom and hence would seem prudent. However, it is abundantly clear from both a careful reading and from the testimony at hearings that the intent of this Bill is to encourage teachers to call into question universally accepted scientific principles.

In Section 1(a)(2) of SB893, the generally assembly states “The teaching of some scientific subjects, including, but not limited to, biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming, and human cloning, can cause controversy;”

We agree. However, this “controversy” is not scientific. The controversy to which the Bill alludes is the reluctance of non-scientists to accept these principles due to certain religious and political beliefs. This can be the only explanation for the inclusion of human cloning in the Bill. Human cloning is solely an ethical issue. There is no scientific debate on how to clone an organism or whether genetic clones can be created. It is a fact that humans can create genetic clones. Only the ethics of the issue is at stake.

Scientific evidence supporting the occurrence of biological evolution, global climate change, and the chemical origin of life are not controversial among scientists. Scientists universally accept these principles based on their predictability and the overwhelming evidence supporting them. Among scientists, the controversy exists in the details such as how changes in temperatures will affect biodiversity or what evolutionary forces
regulate the speciation process. This type of discussion is due to the very nature of science, which requires the constant acquisition and analysis of data.

However, this is not the controversy to which the Bill speaks. The bill later states, in section 1(c), that “The state board of education . . . shall endeavor to assist teachers to find effective ways to present the science curriculum as it addresses scientific controversies.” This wording seems to imply that the controversy for these aforementioned subjects lies in the scientific realm where in reality they lie only in the political and religious ones.

We fear that this bill only ostensibly supports “critical thinking” in Tennessee’s classrooms. Instead, by implying that subjects such as evolution and global warming are “debatable”, this bill achieves the exact opposite of its purported goal. This is tantamount to encouraging educators to suggest students in science classes disregard the very nature of the scientific process and ignore factual data in favor of the beliefs of some individuals. Scientists cannot ignore data in favor of personal biases. If they did, they would be discredited as non-objective.

This Bill is a step backwards and would do irreparable harm to the development of STEM education in this state. As university educators, we continually face the challenge of losing students’ interests in science courses when they arrive at The University of Tennessee because they are frustrated by their lack of sufficient preparation. Many of them know very little about evolution by natural selection or the mechanisms of global climate change. We hope that you see that as with the legislatures who passed this bill, we too are concerned about the education of children in Tennessee.

This passage of this Bill has the potential to cost the state dearly in terms of lost revenue, a poorly trained scientific workforce, and an exodus of scientists and educators who do not wish to have their discipline diluted with non-scientific biases. We fear that calling into question scientific support of foundations to biological theory will cripple the ability of Tennessee’s students to become functional scientists, doctors, professionals, and contributing members of many growing fields.

We ask that you please thoughtfully consider our position, and veto this bill. Thank you for your time.

Signed,
Graduate Researchers in Ecology, Behavior, and Evolutionary Biology (G.R.E.B.E)
The University of Tennessee, Knoxville

[56 grad students from EEB and other departments signed the petition]

Now this is it: this is the last day before Haslam signs the bill into law. Contact the governor and urge him to veto this embarrassing law.

Here’s the contact information for his office:

Phone: (615) 741-2001
Fax: (615) 532-9711
email: Bill.Haslam@tn.gov

World-wide criticism would be helpful at this point.

Why I am an atheist – Erik Abretske

I once had a believer ask me “Every atheist I’ve met believes in something. So what do you believe in if not God?”

“Nothing” I replied. At the time, this was probably true. Even now, I can’t say that belief takes any part in what I consider to be transcendent, but there are some things I know to be true, and this knowledge, gained through science, is what allows me to comfortably call myself an atheist.

I don’t have to believe that mankind is like a newborn baby who’s eyes are darting around a lit room for the first time and noticing things, it’s self evident. To a newborn, everything is surprising, everything is new. As her attention shifts from her mother’s nose, to her eyes, she is learning. She’s adding it all up and forming a cumulative collage of her surroundings. Over time she’ll begin to understand who she is and develop a sense of self.

Humans are doing the same thing as we focus our telescopes at the farthest depths of a vast and incomprehensible universe, or hurl protons at one another at close to light speed to see if we can catch a glimpse of what they are made of when they collide and break down into even smaller pieces. Mankind is an infant in an infinite universe. It doesn’t require belief to recognize or understand this.

Just as a newborn would feel alone and helpless if she didn’t see the soothing eyes and hear the gentle voice of her mother, so does humankind look out into her universe and pray that there is something there, some comfort to be found. Here a believer would say that there IS something there. They claim they can see their celestial father smiling back at them and stroking their hair. “It’s all right” they hear him say, “I will take care of you if you trust in me.”

I do not share that delusion, but I do however feel that sense of longing. I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t. All mammals, most birds, and a smaller percentage of cold blooded animals exhibit extremely tight bonds between at least the mother and her young through infancy and adolescence. Not until they are ready to survive on their own do parents cut ties with their offspring. Evolution has thoroughly conditioned us to need that relationship. It doesn’t surprise me that we collectively long for a cosmic hug.

However, as we humans open our eyes for the first time, and let out that first intergalactic scream, we are coming to the conclusion through science that our virgin birth has luckily not rendered us helpless or alone at all. More like a colt or a fawn, we are able to hit the ground running and fend for ourselves. Billions of years of evolution have already done the job of making us self sufficient. No parenting is needed, no hand holding or teaching; we will learn and grow, and when we reach adulthood in some distant future we will be beautiful, strong, confident and humble for having made it so far; together, not alone.

The sense of awe and wonder I feel when thinking about such things doesn’t require me to believe in anything supernatural or irrational. It doesn’t require me to take anything on faith.The feeling that comes over me when I’m able to just sit and think about the universe and how lucky I am to be a part of it, but yet how small we all are in it’s presence, is a transcendent experience that requires me to “believe” nothing, only to come to “know” as much as I can in the blink of an eye we call a lifetime.

I find comfort through knowledge, not faith. Life has meaning because there remain things to be known. To the believer, a life with unanswered questions is void of meaning, to me, a life with all the answers penciled for me is pointless.

Erik Abretske

Dawkins/Pell on Q&A

It’s about to be a long weekend of triumphant atheism in Australia, and Richard Dawkins set things up by sacrificing that idiot, George Pell, on the altar of reason. The whole debate is now online.

I was really unimpressed with most of the audience’s questions, and even less impressed with Pell. Pell threw in Atheist Hitler at about 11 minutes in, and some smug audience member exhibited his confusion about atheism and agnosticism at 14 minutes. Also, the guy at 21 minutes with a video embarrassed all Australians, I think.

It’s a good warmup for the rest of the week, though.

It was also a warmup for Richard: here he is the next morning on the radio.

How it’s done

I’m not against diplomacy; I don’t think you need to beat up the religious; I like nice people who represent atheism and humanism. What I can’t stand are the simpering suckups who give away the store in the name of getting along.

If you want to see how it’s done right, watch Andrew Copson, the British humanist. He’s all friendly and understanding, offering helpful, reasonable explanations, without budging an inch on principle. Can we have more American humanists like that?

Sunday Sacrilege: Bad without god

In my recent speech at the Reason Rally, I closed with a rather cryptic suggestion that I wanted us all to be bad without god. I couldn’t expand on it there — I was right down to the wire in my 15 minute time slot — but I can explain myself here. I’ve been feeling a bit bugged by the common “good without god” campaign, and I’ve been thinking about what it means.

On a glib and superficial level, I sympathize with its intent. Atheists have a bad rep, and the general public thinks we’re all amoral, corrupt monsters who reject god so that we don’t have to be held accountable for our wild drug-snorting, baby-chomping gay sex orgies. It’s a false stereotype; most atheists are indistinguishable from their Christian neighbors and make many of the same ethical choices they do. So a campaign that emphasizes that atheists are also good citizens and cheerfully socialized human beings is a good thing.

But sometimes the pendulum swings too far the other way. Announcing that atheists are “good” is a repudiation of our actual goals, which are subversive. We aim to change the culture. By the definitions of the people we’re trying to reach with that slogan, we’re actually very, very bad. So here are a few of my objections, and why in principle I can’t say any longer that I’m “good without god”.

“Good” is an over-used and generic word; the only word worse would have been to declare that we are nice without god. It’s so vague and context-dependent that it is meaningless: tell Rick Santorum “be good!” and he’ll make a speech declaring women to be ambulatory ovaries, slaves to their husbands; tell me “be good!”, and I’ll be thinking about a weekend of beer and sex and heresy. And I suspect that every one of my readers has a completely different vision of what goodness involves.

The implication of “good” is thorough conformity. Has challenging an authority figure ever fit the definition of being good? When abolitionists broke the law by smuggling slaves into Canada, when suffragettes picketed to demand the vote, when Stonewall erupted and Martin Luther King marched, when students protested the war in Viet Nam, were they being “good” in the general public’s understanding of the term? I don’t think so. They were being very, very naughty. Which was good. See what I mean? It’s an empty word that offers nothing but vague reassurances.

It gets worse. We’re addressing the misconceptions of Christians by telling them we’re good, but many Christians have a specific understanding of goodness: it’s defined by their religion. Being good involves obeying the laws of their faith, of heeding the rules that their god uses to determine whether you get into heaven. Do you obey the ten commandments? Do you believe in Jesus? We overtly and explicitly reject the rules: by their definition, we aren’t good at all. They see our claim to be “good without god” as a contradiction in terms that proves that we’re bad.

Yet I can still see myself as “good” because my definition of the word doesn’t involve obedience or blind loyalty or acceptance; it’s all about integrity, honesty, principles, questioning, independence. Try replacing “good” with any of those words — it becomes more accurate, but it also loses the blandly reassuring quality that is intended.

And that’s really my big problem with the phrase: I don’t want to be reassuring to people whose awful bogosity I oppose. I want to provoke and challenge, I want to change the status quo, I want to tear down the gooey conventionality of morality and narrow standards of public behavior. I want us all to mock and laugh at public professions of piety. I want to change how people think, and I want people to reject the absurd claim that our morality is founded on an odious holy book. If you want to have a wild weekend of sex and drugs and rock and roll, as long as you don’t hurt anyone, I will say, “good for you.” If your weekend is spent as an escort at an abortion clinic, if you spend it lobbying for separation of church and state at your Capitol, if you spend it heckling homophobes, good.

Nobody ever changed the world by being complacent, obedient, pleasant, or “good”. Atheists intend to change the world. Therefore, atheists should be as bad as they can be…productively, aggressively, happily bad.

Why I am an atheist – Erik

Growing up as a little kid I was not exposed much to devout religion. I only went to church when my sister and I were visiting our grandparents who were southern baptist. One time I remember sitting in the pew listing to the pastor talk one moment about how we should fear Jesus Christ and the next moment how Jesus was Love. It didn’t make sense to me one bit. That’s when I started questioning. As I grew I started having intense sexual feelings for other guys, even before puberty. I wished and prayed to god that I wasn’t gay but the feelings just grew and became more intense. I began hating myself for who I was because I felt if god made me this way he must hate me too. When my grandfather passed away when I was 14 all the church folk stood around saying things like, ‘God has called him back,’ and ‘God works in mysterious ways.’ To me it sounded as if they were saying god gave my grandfather lung cancer and made him suffer a terrible death just to bring him back to Him. I realized that was total BS. If there really was a god that was all loving and powerful, he would not give someone a horrible disease causing gross suffering just to ‘bring him back.’ He would not work in mysterious ways, he’d be upfront and to the point. With that realization I was able to free myself of the homophobia of religion and just struggle with the societal taboo of homosexuality. I eventually overcame my self hatred and came out at 18. One year later my mother came out to me. Oddly enough when she came out as a lesbian she ‘Found Jesus’ through the local gay church and became a born again gay christian. Yes, those do exist. She once admitted to my sister and I that one of her biggest regrets is that she didn’t find Jesus sooner to allow us as kids to share in her revelation. I looked at her and basically said I am alive because of the absence of Jesus. Growing up I hated myself for being gay. If I hadn’t been able to free myself of the thoughts that god hated me as well I firmly believe I would have killed myself for being gay.

Erik
United States

Why I am an atheist – Remy Porter

A simple question deserves a simple answer: I am an atheist because I have no reason to be otherwise.

I was raised religious, but even at a young age, it didn’t “take”. I accepted what I was told as truth, but I didn’t believe what I was told. I’m not actually terribly good about believing in things, which is what I appreciate about the scientific method and the natural world. What I believe is not important to the world outside of my head, but what I do is. It’s extremely liberating to not have to invest belief in things- I just accept what works and ignore what doesn’t. New evidence can’t challenge my beliefs, only change what I accept as useful.

I’m still a human being, and I still very much want certain things to be true. I can’t claim that I’m always so coldly rational, but it’s something I get to aspire to.

Remy Porter
United States

I am so proud of myself

I just discovered a short write-up of an encounter I had at the Reason Rally with a gang of evangelicals.

Blake Anderson and I had a very pleasant talk with him. Blake invited him to his church again; Myers had already blogged on Blake’s earlier email invitation to him. He declined explaining that he liked to be polite in public but he could not be polite in church. He acknowledged we were being polite here. He asked, “Are they ridiculing you here?” We said they hadn’t been so far. He said, “They should be.”

Leave it to Christians to think that being polite was a triumph. They set the bar very low for themselves, don’t they?

I do like this comment, though.

In that short interaction, PZ Myers was quite charming, quite polite and warm, and at the same time quite intentionally insulting and rude.

It’s a gift.

Why I am an atheist – Se Habla Espol

Once upon a time, I was a child (believe it or not). My mother taught me to read very early, at about two or three, by reading to me and showing me what it was that she was reading. She tested me, by reciting from a different page: I caught her. She taught me to read for imagination and entertainment, and for information and education. I learned to love to read, for all purposes. In addition to the old standbys, like the Alice in Wonderland books, we had Uncle Remus and The Little Engine that Could (teaching acceptance of race and gender), the Golden Encyclopedia. National Geographic (the magazines and the maps), someone’s textbook of anatomy and physiology, and anything else that looked interesting.

Mom taught me something else of vital import to this subject. She had told me, many times, of seeing people and events that on-one else saw: the universe she lived in differed from mine, but no-one in the family seemed to find it remarkable. Since no mention was ever made that her condition was not abnormal, I accepted that it was what everyone did. Among the lessons were:

  • I had to find my own universe, by reading, listening, observing, and synthesizing some coherent (to me) place to live and think;

  • I need to accept people as they are, rather than imposing my arbitrary ‘should be’ on them;

  • any statement (in memory or in discourse) of information must always be accompanied by source and reliability identification.

I was in my fifties before anyone –her psychiatrist, in this case — mentioned ‘paranoid schizophrenia’ as a description of Mom’s reality.

We would spend the summers on her father’s farm, to escape the city heat, she said. Dad joined us when he could. Grampaw was a tenant farmer on forty acres of reasonably good dirt; he was also a deacon, and sometime preacher, at a local Southern Baptist church. Thus, he imposed on me the rule that only material ever worth reading was his bible. The farming magazines in the sitting room were pretty skimpy. It was either too hot and stinky, or too dark and stinky, to read the Sears catalog in the outhouse. So I read his bible: the whole thing. It was terrible, containing nothing of interest (no reality, no reliability, no entertainment, nothing worth imagining). It must have impressed Grampaw that his 6-year-old grandkid could read that well; he let me read his magazines after that.

I had learned, independently, that doing some things would result in a feeling of severe unpleasantness; I later learned that this feeling was called ‘guilt’, and the only remedy is to fix whatever my actions had broken. The actions that caused such guilt were characterized as ‘bad’. My problem was that my attempts to predict whether a given action would be ‘bad’ or not were not very reliable: there were to many false negatives. Later in my childhood, someone told me that these predictions were called ‘morality’, and that ‘morality’ was what churches were all about. So, with Mom (and sometimes, Dad, a Mason), I investigated.

We examined the teaching of many different christianities, like Disciples of Christ, Episcopalianism, Methodism, Lutheranism and Baptism. None of them could give me any guidance on improving my moral understanding: I still had to learn by doing, and suffering the consequences. None of them were of assistance towards my goal. Each of them, however, taught a conflicting story: “We go by the bible; we’re right and everybody else (that goes by the same bible) is wrong.” My lesson there was: ok, ignore the christianities, in their arrogance, and go straight to the putative source. Although I had read the bible, years earlier, I realized that I had grown some over those years. Maybe, says I, I was too young to catch any meaning in the work. I read it again, more than once: still no coherent, morally useful content, other than a few obvious things that were not at all original.

I gave it up, and called myself an agnostic for the next few years. In college, I encountered Ayn Rand, both her fiction and her non-fiction. The fiction works are ambiguous, so that some people find there ideas that I have never seen (greed, mostly), and they fail to see the ideas that I find useful (empathy, honesty, cooperation). Her non-fiction is more concrete and (shall we say) objective, particularly her works on epistemology.

From that, I learned this lesson: the arrogance of faith never works; the humility of the scientific method does. That taught me, in turn, to call myself an agnostic atheist: I don’t know whether any gods exist (or an specific god exists); without such knowledge, necessarily based on scientific processes, I cannot profess any belief in such a crittter.

From early Libertarianism (more Randish than now), I finally got the ‘moral compass’ that none of the christianities offered: Do not initiate force or exercise fraud on anyone.

Se Habla Espol