Biblical verification of an atheist message

Austin has put up one of those mild, positive, and effective billboards that so rile up the faithful. It’s impressive that it’s happening in Texas, but I noticed something portentious in its placement: it’s on I-35, a road familiar to me as the major north-south artery in this region (Minnesota and Texas have a direct connection, you see). I-35 also has a freakish association in the fundagelical brain, because of a passage in Isaiah 35:8:

And an highway shall be there, and a way, and it shall be called The way of holiness; the unclean shall not pass over it; but it shall be for those: the wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.

If any indignant bible-lovin’ Texans start complaining about the billboard, I suggest we tell them to read their Good Book, where it clearly says there can be no error in the sign.

Henry Gee is probably chortling happily right now

He’s tweaked the noses of those ‘New Atheists’, for sure! One of Gee’s roles is as the editor of the Futures science fiction section in Nature, and he’s proud to have published a story by Shelly Li, which actually is a well-written short dystopian fantasy, titled The End of God. Gee really detests those obnoxious atheists, though, so I think one of the reasons he picked it was that it so perfectly conformed to his idea of militant atheists as fascists.

The story is about a future in which satellites can somehow pick up on activity in the parietal lobe of the brain in individuals — amazing resolution and sensitivity, that — and detect when people are praying. And when they do, naturally, the godless thought police whoosh into action, take the faithhead into the hospital, and zap that lobe of their brain so god won’t talk to them anymore. And then they’re so lonely. Aww.

Taking away faith is a bad thing, don’t you know.

“Faith means believing in something when common sense tells you not to,” I reply, looking around. No one is moved. “And faith gives me a warmth that no amount of common sense ever will. Don’t take this away from —”

Of course, it’s science fiction in multiple ways, not just in the unlikely technology, but in the weird idea of a godless world state enforcing anti-religious mind control with surgery. It’d be a bit more potent if it was something we could do, or if anyone had ever endorsed such a hypothetical procedure as desirable.

I don’t think Henry Gee would have accepted this story if the plot had been inverted, so that it was a member of an atheist minority that was zapped to induce warm, happy feelings of the godhead — so just a hint to SF writers hoping to get published in Nature: Gee wouldn’t compromise on writing quality, so it had better be good stuff, but your odds of acceptance will probably be improved if your Bad Guys are cartoonish Dawkinsites with a penchant for doing evil things to the religious.

Just so I’m not being too vicious, although I would argue that it’s very hard to be too vicious, I’ll mention that I did rather like Gee’s review of the iPad, and he has my sympathies for his back pains, which I’m currently sharing with him to a lesser degree. But please, less unbelievability in Futures in the future, OK?

The Woman Problem

It’s an odd way to put it, I know, but it gets your attention. I could have called this the Atheist and Skeptic Problem, which is more accurate, but leads people to start listing all of our problems, starting with how annoying we are, and just for once I’d rather not go down that road. So here’s the Woman Problem, and it’s not a problem with women: it’s a problem with atheist and skeptic groups looking awfully testosteroney. And you all know it’s true, every time I post a photo of some sampling of the audience at an atheist meeting, it is guaranteed that someone will count the contribution of each sex and it will be consistently skewed Y-ward.

Why? And what are we going to do about it?

Obviously, the way for us to answer these questions is for me, the loud and assertive male, to pontificate on the issues and tell the women what’s wrong here and how they can fix it. That would be the manly thing to do, after all — let’s take charge and tell the little ladies what to do so we don’t look quite so sexist when the all-male review prances about on the stage. More tokens, please, join us up here! Make us look good!

But no. I think the right answer is for us males to shut up now and then and listen. It’s not for us men to tell women how to fix our (both men and women) problems, but if we’re to have a lasting and equitable representation at the tables of atheism and skepticism, the guys who currently dominate need to step back and stop pushing.

I was thinking about this because I was reading Skeptifem’s take on the absence of female skeptics, and my first reaction was that it was pretty good, but I had some little disagreements here and there where I thought I could put together a quick blog post with plusses and minuses listed…but then I realized that these are the problems she honestly sees. These are real obstacles in both perception and reality, not an academic exercise. Shut up and listen, I told myself.

So I’m going to try something a little different. Instead of telling you my opinion, I’m going to forgo the essential principle of blogging (which is “Me! Me!”) and just ask people, especially women, to leave links to their godless/skeptical feminist blog or make suggestions or gripe or tell me what these stupid male-dominated conventions have to do to correct the imbalance. I know there are some great blogs out there run by women — Skepchicks and Greta and Ophelia and more — so share more wealth. Skepchicon 2010 is happening this weekend, so people can nag me there, too. I shall be a passive receptacle for your ideas.

I do have to make one suggestion (the testosterone compels me) for something I’d really like to see happen. Skepchicon 2010 is terrific, but it’s fairly small in scale. Meanwhile, Atheist Alliance International is sponsoring all these big noisy conferences, and lately they’ve been themed: Copenhagen was Gods and Politics, Montreal will be Atheists Without Borders. I think what we really need is a Women and Secularism conference, organized by women and for both male and female freethinkers, where the women call all the shots and bring together all these great homogametic speakers — while the women are always the minority at these conferences, there’s still always great talent, and looking over the lists of past speakers it would be easy to put together a stellar female cast. All we need is some uppity women with ambition to make it happen, and the application of a little pressure to the staff at AAI.

Oh, and guys: in this thread, unless you’re sincerely trying to be fem-friendly and make positive suggestions and ask for more information and read attentively, take a back seat for a bit, OK? It’s not that hard to do.

The Copenhagen Declaration on Religion in Public Life

One of the outcomes of the Copenhagen gathering of atheists was the formulation of a set of principles. It has now been posted on the web, so it’s time for everyone to discuss, comment, and criticize…have at it!

The recent Gods and Politics conference in Copenhagen adopted the following Declaration on Religion in Public Life. The conference was the first European event of Atheist Alliance International, and was co-hosted by AAI and the Danish Atheist Society.

We, at the World Atheist Conference: “Gods and Politics”, held in Copenhagen from 18 to 20 June 2010, hereby declare as follows:

  • We recognize the unlimited right to freedom of conscience, religion and belief, and that freedom to practice one’s religion should be limited only by the need to respect the rights of others.
  • We submit that public policy should be informed by evidence and reason, not by dogma.
  • We assert the need for a society based on democracy, human rights and the rule of law. History has shown that the most successful societies are the most secular.
  • We assert that the only equitable system of government in a democratic society is based on secularism: state neutrality in matters of religion or belief, favoring none and discriminating against none.
  • We assert that private conduct, which respects the rights of others should not be the subject of legal sanction or government concern.
  • We affirm the right of believers and non-believers alike to participate in public life and their right to equality of treatment in the democratic process.
  • We affirm the right to freedom of expression for all, subject to limitations only as prescribed in international law – laws which all governments should respect and enforce. We reject all blasphemy laws and restrictions on the right to criticize religion or nonreligious life stances.
  • We assert the principle of one law for all, with no special treatment for minority communities, and no jurisdiction for religious courts for the settlement of civil matters or family disputes.
  • We reject all discrimination in employment (other than for religious leaders) and the provision of social services on the grounds of race, religion or belief, gender, class, caste or sexual orientation.
  • We reject any special consideration for religion in politics and public life, and oppose charitable, tax-free status and state grants for the promotion of any religion as inimical to the interests of non-believers and those of other faiths. We oppose state funding for faith schools.
  • We support the right to secular education, and assert the need for education in critical thinking and the distinction between faith and reason as a guide to knowledge, and in the diversity of religious beliefs. We support the spirit of free inquiry and the teaching of science free from religious interference, and are opposed to indoctrination, religious or otherwise.

Adopted by the conference, Copenhagen, 20 June 2010.

Please circulate this as widely as you can among people and groups who advocate a secular society.

I would also add — use it. It’s the result of a formal consensus by a large group of atheists, so even if you disagree with bits and pieces, it’s at least a clear statement of principles that you can use in discussions with public officials. Ask your local politicians if they agree with it, and if not, why. Try to get it read into the public record, too.

Yay! We’re now free to join campus Christian hate groups!

This makes me so happy. I’ve long wanted to join those lovely conservative Christian groups on campus that have until now restricted membership to heterosexual believers, and now I can. The Supreme Court has ruled that universities may refuse to recognize campus groups that violate non-discrimination policies.

Hey, but I didn’t want to join them. I guess the good news is that any organization that tries to claim university affiliation while telling the gay kids at school that they’re hellbound will get slapped down hard and cut off from funding. That’s good news, too!

Oh, and that reminds me — we’re going to have to reboot the UMM campus atheist group again after a year of neglect, while I was on sabbatical. And my daughter, who was the head of it, has moved away to Madison, Wisconsin. So any UMM students who read this blog out there, who’d like to get involved in campus freethought? Email me.

And of course, Christians and heterosexuals are welcome, as are atheists, agnostics, deists, various philosophical weirdos, gay people, asexuals, zombies, and deities major and minor.

“New Agnostics” or “Same Old Ineffectual Wafflers”

My brain has been blasted by the confident inanity of Ron Rosenbaum. He’s a chipper flibbertigibbet who is proudly agnostic (no problem with that) and as dumb as they come (which is a problem). He has written an essay on Slate titled “The Rise of the New Agnostics” which has a few little quirks. No such movement exists, which he admits, it’s strikingly unoriginal to invent a ‘new’ epithet for your nonexistent movement by appropriating a three letter modifier from the “New” Atheists which we all detest and groaningly disavow over and over again, it is a remarkably incoherent manifesto, and he says so many stupid things that I was confused into thinking it was a comedy piece for a while. It’s like he’s ripped off the worst theistic arguments and repackaged them into a mess that he proudly calls agnosticism. John Wilkins, who is a proud agnostic, should be embarrassed by it. More about John in a moment.

Rosenbaum begins with one of the hoariest old cliches around. Groan along with me, please.

…I think it’s time for a new agnosticism, one that takes on the New Atheists. Indeed agnostics see atheism as “a theism”–as much a faith-based creed as the most orthodox of the religious variety.

Picture the first meeting of the New Agnostics, Ron Rosenbaum presiding.

Ron: That New Atheism is just another religion, and I reject religious dogma! Therefore, I have established this new and unique view, the New Agnosticism.

Fred: Errm, Ron…but isn’t the New Agnosticism just another religion, then?

Ron: No, it’s not. We have none of the characteristics of a religion, unlike atheism.

Bill: Wait, Ron, I think Fred is onto something. I’m a true agnostic, and I reject your attempt to shoehorn me into your dogma. I’m leaving your cult to form the New New Agnosticism.

Fred: I’m so confused. Isn’t that another religion? You’ve got a name for it after all…

Walt: Exactly right, Fred! So come join my new group, the Revised Agnostics!

Ron: Splitters! Heretics! Schismatics!

It’s awfully easy to sit there and call anything a religion, so we often get this absurdly circular argument: religion is bad, we don’t like people who say we shouldn’t follow a religion, therefore the non-religion is a religion. I wish people like Rosenbaum — and there are a lot of them — would stop and think for once. Atheism is not a religion, and it’s ridiculous to assert that it is. It’s fine for people to dislike [group that opposes religion] for some reason, but it’s ludicrous to use the argument that it’s because [I dislike religion]. It puts them in the same set! Please try to formulate specific objections.

Now Rosenbaum does have some gotchas that he throws at the New Atheists as reasons why they are wrong other than that they’re “just another religion”. The problem is that they’re either ignorant or hilarious. First, you have to read the funny one. This is the remark that had me wondering whether this was comedic satire. Notice that now science has become a religion:

Let me make clear that I accept most of the New Atheist’s criticism of religious bad behavior over the centuries, and of theology itself. I just don’t accept turning science into a new religion until it can show it has all the answers, which it hasn’t, and probably never will.

Read it again. Savor it. Contemplate it. I’ll understand if you are ready to stop right now — Ron Rosenbaum has declared himself a world-class idiot. To quote Dara O’Briain: “Science knows it doesn’t know everything, otherwise it would stop.”

One other specific issue I have to take with Rosenbaum is that he’s lazy. He’s got one question that he’s absolutely sure will stump the atheists, and justify his rejection of them. It’s an old and distinguished philosophical question, but hardly relevant.

Faced with the fundamental question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” atheists have faith that science will tell us eventually. Most seem never to consider that it may well be a philosophic, logical impossibility for something to create itself from nothing. But the question presents a fundamental mystery that has bedeviled (so to speak) philosophers and theologians from Aristotle to Aquinas. Recently scientists have tried to answer it with theories of “multiverses” and “vacuums filled with quantum potentialities,” none of which strikes me as persuasive.

He’s even phrased it as a direct challenge.

In fact, I challenge any atheist, New or old, to send me their answer to the question: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I can’t wait for the evasions to pour forth. Or even the evidence that this question ever could be answered by science and logic.

Allow me to bounce that right back to him. What is the New Agnostics’ answer to why there is something rather than nothing? If the failure of atheists to be able to answer it (which he affirms by simply throwing out physics as unpersuasive) is grounds for rejecting their philosophy, then why isn’t it equally damning to his New Agnostics?

I can guess. Because the New Agnostics take great pride in answering “I DON’T KNOW” to as many questions as possible. Probably in a Mr Gumby voice, too.

Although, actually, some of us do have pretty good answers to the question, and it’s apparent that Rosenbaum hasn’t even tried to look them up before posing with his challenge. He could have looked up Sean Carroll, who gives a characteristically thoughtful and rather philosophical answer.

Ultimately, the problem is that the question — “Why is there something rather than nothing?” — doesn’t make any sense. What kind of answer could possibly count as satisfying? What could a claim like “The most natural universe is one that doesn’t exist” possibly mean? As often happens, we are led astray by imagining that we can apply the kinds of language we use in talking about contingent pieces of the world around us to the universe as a whole. It makes sense to ask why this blog exists, rather than some other blog; but there is no external vantage point from which we can compare the relatively likelihood of different modes of existence for the universe.

Or perhaps he could have looked up Victor Stenger, who is a bit more blunt.

What this example illustrates is that many simple systems are unstable, that is, have limited lifetimes as they undergo spontaneous phase transitions to more complex structures of lower energy. Since “nothing” is as simple as it gets, we would not expect it to be completely stable. In some models of the origin of the universe, the vacuum undergoes a spontaneous phase transition to something more complicated, like a universe containing matter. The transition nothing-to-something is a natural one, not requiring any external agent.

As Nobel Laureate physicist Frank Wilczek has put it, “The answer to the ancient question ‘Why is there something rather than nothing?’ would then be that ‘nothing’ is unstable.”

Of course, those guys are mere physicists. Nothing they could say would be at all persuasive.

Rosenbaum goes on a mad scramble to drop names in a scattershot fashion, including such luminaries as Eagleton, Berlinski, and Plantinga, which ought to dazzle you right there, but unfortunately among all the twits he also dug up a friend, John Wilkins. John is a nice guy, but he does have an ugly blind spot when it comes to atheists, despite being one himself (oh, he will hate me for that). It might be because we Affirmative Atheists have been poking him in the eye with this stuff for so many years. Anyway, Rosenbaum wrote to Wilkins and asked him to do his homework for him, and list some of the nasty habits of the New Atheists.

For now my objections to the “New” Atheists (who are a vocal subset of the Old Atheists, and who I call Affirmative Atheists) are the same as my objections to organized religion:

1. Too much of the rhetoric and sociality is tribal: Us and Them.

Oh, that is just too much. I can guess John actually will be a bit embarrassed about the fact that Rosenbaum is using his argument to justify setting up a new tribe, Usagnostics, in opposition to Themtheists and Thematheists.

It’s a silly argument in the first place. Whenever we take a position on anything, it immediately opens up the possibility of opposition and segregation into multiple camps. We don’t like brussels sprouts; They love the slimy little things. Tribes are what people do, naturally and spontaneously. The question is always about how they deal with other tribes — shall we execute Brussels Sprouts Eaters, or is it sufficient to merely deport them, or shall we just have an information campaign and make fun of the crazy people who eat the awful green balls?

John throws out another canard. We’ve been over this so many times…

4. Knowability: We are all atheist about some things: Christians are Vishnu-atheists, I am a Thor-atheist, and so on. [Which is why the “are you agnostic about fairies?” rejoinder is just dumb.] But it is a long step from making existence claims about one thing (fairies, Thor) to a general denial of the existence of all possible deities. I do not think the god of, say John Paul II exists. But I cannot speak to the God of Leibniz. No evidence decides that.

“Are you agnostic about fairies?” is a good question, because it highlights what people actually think. John gives the right answer; he doesn’t believe in fairies. Most people say the same thing. The point is that it is not only possible, it is reasonable to reject major categories of belief. John also gives the right answer about the Catholic god, which is just as phantasmal as fairies, and he also gives the very same answer about deist or pantheist gods that all the New Atheists give. Neither I nor Dawkins nor Larry Moran nor any atheist I’ve ever talked to will say that we have evidence that the remote and abstract God of Leibniz does not exist.

I know he hates it when we say this, be Wilkins is awfully hard to distinguish from any other atheist, except for the fact that he insists on the label “agnostic”. If it makes him feel any better, he can always call the rest of us agnostics, too. We’ll humor him.

You get the idea — I’m not going to try to take apart every word in Rosenbaum’s disjointed agglomeration of poorly thought out nonsense. But I will leave you with one little phrase from the article that tells you everything you need to know:

Having recently spent two weeks in Cambridge (the one in the United Kingdom) on a Templeton-Cambridge Fellowship…

Goodnight, Ron Rosenbaum.

I guess I won’t ever be visiting the Maldives

It’s a tiny little island nation in the Indian Ocean, and it sounds like an interesting place. Unfortunately, the people there make it a hellhole.

In the Muslim-majority nation of Maldives, a man stunned an audience during questions and answers period in a lecture given by an Islamic cleric, by stating that he had chosen freedom of conscience not to follow Islam. The man, Mohamed Nazim, was promptly attacked, taken into custody, and has been threatened with death and beheading, or other punishments for choosing his freedom of conscience. Maldives media are reporting that it is the first time in many hundreds of years that a Maldivian has publicly renounced Islam, since Sultan King Hassan IX converted to Christianity in 1552 and was deposed.

Religion is an evil mind-rot with varying degrees of infection, but I think the worst of them all has to be Islam. What a nasty little superstition it is.

Here’s a real twist, though: The Maldives is on the UN Human Rights Council. I like the idea of an international tribunal like the UN, but this is the kind of insanity that makes it a joke.

Nazim was taken into police custody for expressing his conscience, where he received “Islamic counseling” and threatened with execution. The fact that he has now reverted to Islam in the face of such dire oppression does not change the fact that he’s got to be the bravest atheist alive.

Here’s a video of the odious Zakir Naik addressing Mohamed Nazim’s question. Theologians are all the same: he tries to turn it into an argument that god must exist, because otherwise there is no reason to have morality. Naik is a moron.

He does back off from insisting that Nazim be put to death, saying that there’s a difference between leaving the faith and advocating against the faith; the latter warrants killing the apostate, but not necessarily the first.

The Evolution 2010 meetings are taking place in Portland, Oregon as you read this (unless, of course, you’re reading this in The Future, in which case they’re all done) and Jen McCreight is attending and presenting there. She attended a symposium on communicating science which, unfortunately, turned out to be one-sided atheist bashing and the promotion of theistic accommodation — no dissenting views were offered, despite the fact that us ungodly assertive atheists are such a prominent part of the voice of evolution that they needed to discourage attendees from listening to us.

I get this impression that scientific organizations are so afraid of the Dawkins-like trumpet of atheist voices that they’re actively maneuvering to exclude their point of view from sessions like this, when all it does is reduce them to tepid tedium, lacking all fire and passion. They should at least throw in one token assertive atheist to spark some interesting discussion. Heck, Jerry Coyne is right there right now, although it sounds like he’s more interested in sampling great Thai food, the clever guy.

Should skeptic organizations be atheist organizations?

Skeptic organizations often face a nagging dilemma: should they be openly skeptical about religion? There are a couple of very good reasons why they should make criticizing religious claims a secondary issue, and one extremely bad reason that represents intellectual cowardice and a betrayal of skeptical principles. I’m going to come down on the side of accepting that skeptics groups can make accommodations to religious individuals in general, but that they must not avoid confrontation with religious ideas in particular.

What are the good reasons for shying away from religious conflict? One is division of labor. There are endless weird claims of the paranormal and supernatural that are begging for the application of critical thinking, from astrology to dowsing to ESP to ghosts to telekinesis to zero point energy, and while religion is a gigantic sinkhole of ignorance and absurdity, there are atheist organizations that deal specifically with that subset of human folly — it’s entirely reasonable that a skeptics’ group might decide to distinguish themselves from atheists’ groups by focusing on a different set of phenomena. The James Randi Educational Foundation and the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science are and ought to be differentiable. We’ve all also got limited time; I think tarot cards are complete bunk, but I haven’t spent any effort on ripping them up, just because I’ve got other targets I find more interesting. We need many people and many organizations to address the whole wide ecosystem of kookdom, and they can’t all do all of them.

Another good reason is operational: skeptical organizations tend to work on existing phenomena and individuals, with little effort spent on vague historical claims. They will argue that many psychic and supernatural claims are little more than cheap magic tricks, and they will track down and expose charlatans who are bilking people right now with claims about spoon-bending or talking to the dead; there are so many of those at work right now, that showing that some weird Jewish rabbi living 2000 years ago was just doing trivial sleight-of-hand and psychological manipulation is both less interesting and less directly testable, even if the skeptics are pretty darned sure Jesus was a con man. Nebulous assertions that Jesus loves us are untestable and uninvestigable, but you’ll notice that if there is specific claim of a weeping madonna statue, skeptic Joe Nickell isn’t shy about demolishing it.

These are eminently reasonable rationales for not pressuring skeptical organizations to join ranks with and become inseparable from atheist groups. There is also at least one awful reason I sometimes hear: that skeptics should avoid criticizing religion because it might alienate some of their fellow travelers. That’s unconscionable, and implies that they aren’t really interested in critical thinking, but in simply growing an organization without regard to its purpose. A couple of examples popped up recently.

Pamela Gay is an astronomer and a reputable and credible skeptic, and a well-known science educator. She’s not a skeptic in all things, though: she’s also a Christian. This is not a problem, because there is no such thing as a ‘pure’ skeptic who applies critical thinking to every single aspect of their lives, so of course she can be a member in good standing of the skeptical community — but let’s not pretend that she’s applying skeptical values consistently. Again, this is not a problem for her, shouldn’t be a problem for us, but it does become a huge problem when people start demanding special exemptions from criticism for religious thought.

So I was appalled when I read Seth asking “Why are we lying to Pamela Gay?” Seth doesn’t get it. Seth wants us to be especially nice to people who believe in Jesus.

He tells an anecdote. Pamela Gay appeared on an edition of Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe, which, as you may know, is a podcast that is very conversational and freely wanders about various topics in skepticism (you all listen to it, right? It’s excellent). In this episode, they joked about a claim that junk DNA encoded the soul. Seth thinks that was wrong, because Pamela Gay is there, and so all the participants on SGU should self-censor and not discuss souls at all.

Bear in mind, Pamela Gay is on the phone at this moment. She is in the room. And her cohost from Astronomy Cast and the Host of the show she is a guest on are mocking the idea of the soul.

Now, granted, they are superficially mocking the idea that the soul resides in junk DNA. But in reality, they are mocking the entire idea of a soul, because neither of them believe that such a thing exists.

Pamela, however, does believe that a soul exists. And she considers herself a skeptic, and these guys go out of their way to say that they consider her a skeptic too.

And yet, they have no problem mocking her beliefs. It probably didn’t occur to them that there was anything hurtful about mocking her beliefs. Because skeptics, in general, don’t have any problem mocking religion.

To me, there’s a dishonesty inherent in this behavior. As I’ve mentioned before, there’s a real coming of age novel feeling to this sort of thing. The religious skeptics are told that they are part of the club, told that they are ‘one of us’, but no one seems to see a problem in treating them like outsiders anyway.

I ask you — if they had a dowser on the line, should skeptics then avoid criticizing the frequently disproven claims of dowsers? That might hurt the poor water-witch’s feelings, you know. What’s so special about an unsupportable, unevidenced, ludicrous belief that a person has an invisible magic essence independent of their brain that we should insist that skeptics must pretend to respect it? What’s so privileged about belief in general that the mere statement that someone says they believe in something means we should stumble all over ourselves running away from the possibility of challenging it? Seth really doesn’t understand what skepticism means.

He worsens his position, too, by claiming that everyone on SGU was lying when they accepted Gay as a skeptic while thinking that souls are a load of bunk. No, I think Gay is a skeptic about most things, just as I am, and just as Steve Novella is, but she is clearly not a skeptic about religion. I don’t see a problem with that, and I certainly don’t see anything dishonest about it. What would be dishonest is to call ourselves skeptics and then privilege a whole class of beliefs about the supernatural as unquestionable, or to hide away our actual opinions about certain subjects. Seth even turns this into a dichotomy, completely oblivious to the irony of what he is asking.

So why are we lying to Pamela Gay? Why do some atheist skeptics feel the need to pretend that they believe that skepticism really does have room for religion, or at least religious people? Wouldn’t it be better and more respectful to present ourselves honestly and openly?

Alternately, if people want to be inclusive of religion, they’re going to have to stop telling jokes like that.

So those are our alternatives: demand perfect purity from all skeptics, or shut up about the foolishness of religious belief. Neither are going to happen. I’m particularly disgusted and amused by the claim that it would be “more respectful to present ourselves honestly and openly” while demanding that we stop mocking the absurdities of religion. The SGU crew were being honest and open, and Seth is asking that they conceal their views; Pamela Gay was also free to chime in and present her evidence for the soul and explain why it was not unreasonable to believe in the truth of the Christian version of an afterlife. It would have made for a very lively discussion, it would have been honest and open, and Gay’s views would have been exposed as entirely unskeptical.

Gay herself also replied in in the comments to that post.

I’ve been having dialogues with several prominent skeptics about how if skeptics are going to be inclusive (which many moderates want), than the language needs to change. You’re right, it is unfair that it’s alright to openly mock religions while asking theists to be speakers. As you say, people need to be honest – either make the skeptics movement an atheists only group, or change the use of language. Pick one, and be honest about it.

That is astonishingly clueless. Gay is asked to speak because she is smart, has interesting things to say about science and education, and I thought because she was a credible skeptic on matters in her discipline. Now she wants to demand that skeptic organizations accommodate her every weird idea? Wrong. No one gets to do that. I don’t get to say to CFI or JREF that I’ll speak at a meeting as long as they promise ahead of time that they will not dare to challenge me on anything — I expect a good argument on all kinds of issues from an audience of skeptics.

Here’s a third alternative. The skeptic movement will be inclusive and allow anyone to participate, and participation means your ideas will be scrutinized and criticized and sometimes mocked and sometimes praised. It is the very nature of the beast. If you want to claim special privilege for your ideas and insist that they may not be exposed to the light and harshly dissected, then you’re right — you aren’t a skeptic. Join a church instead.

But wait, we aren’t done. Pamela Gay turned around and wrote her own post about the separation between science and belief, and I’m going to come right out and say it: it was incredibly stupid. It’s a great example of how religious belief can poison science education.

Several years ago I had some students come to me with an exam written by another professor. They had been studying cosmology, and the final question on the exam was, “How do you believe the universe will end?” The word believe was the word on the exam. There were no further details to the question. It didn’t constrain the students to discuss only the theories taught in class. It actually asked, “How do you believe the universe will end?” This was back in the days before dark energy, before the 1998 discovery that the universe is accelerating apart. Back then we taught that the universe could be open — expanding apart forever — or that maybe it is closed and will someday collapse in on itself. I think we all hoped for a flat universe (that would certainly have made the math a lot easier). This professor had read the students’ answers and given 0/20 points when they described instead of one of these three scenarios the second coming of Christ. With that badly worded question, and those 0/20 grades, a professor placed a wall between himself and his students, preventing them from being willing to listen to the scientific facts that describe how a universe without interference will continue to evolve. To him there was no debate, they weren’t allowed to believe in the second coming of Christ, at least not if they wanted to get a good grade.

This is an impossible situation for a student, and not even a rational one for a scientist. Sitting here as an astronomer, I have to acknowledge we could live in a universe that hasn’t yet collapsed to the lowest energy level, and it might tear itself apart doing so someday. I have to admit, we could live in a multi-verse where our universe and another will someday merge, destroying the reality we know. Or, as a person not wearing a teacher hat, I can admit there could be a God that decides to hit the cosmic endgame button (but I won’t teach that in a science classroom). While all these things could be possible, with people believing in the possibility of each, I know based on evidence that, if left alone to continue doing what it’s doing, our universe will expand forever and suffer a rather horrific energy death. Do you see the distinction? Given evidence, and a scientific scenario, I can know a true outcome. But there is still room to believe in non-contradictory possibilities.

Had that Professor simply acknowledged that it was a poorly worded question with no right answer, those two girls could have gone on to continue enjoying astronomy. Instead, I ended up with them upset and angry in my office telling me that they couldn’t even look at their astronomy book without getting mad.

Negative emotions don’t exactly aid learning, and what could have been a positive learning environment was completely destroyed by equating scientifically testable hypotheses with beliefs.

First of all, I find the story implausible. There had to be more to a 20 point question than answering flat, open, or closed — there must have been at least an assumption in the class that students had to explain why they gave their answer. As stated, this is a question where students either got a full 20 points for regurgitating a short answer, or got nothing at all. Either this was an exceptionally bad instructor or something has been left out of the story.

The nit-picking over the word “belief” is annoying, but I hear it fairly often. Yes, yes, we know — science doesn’t dabble in beliefs, so it is a poor choice of words. However, this was a science class, something a bit more advanced than freshman ‘rocks for jocks’, so it is safe to assume from that context that the professor was expecting a science-based answer, and any student so delusional to think that they can insert a random fable in as an answer and get credit for it deserves more than just a loss of a few points on an exam. The students had no grounds to be upset other than their own sense of offended entitlement and a belief (that word again) that a science teacher ought to appreciate a supernatural explanation. No. Wrong. And Gay is wrong to try and justify such inanity.

And seriously — the universe is going to end with the second coming of Christ? If the students had answered, “The universe will end in the Smurf Apocalypse, when Gargamel uses his powers to make all the stars explode to make a cosmic Smurf barbecue”, would Gay then be arguing that it is an answer appropriate to the question, and they should be getting credit, and isn’t it awful how that bad professor is driving young Smurf fans away from physics? Not at all. She’d answer as I would if students tried to argue for their Jesus answer: “You aren’t taking the question seriously, and you aren’t demonstrating that you’ve mastered any of the concepts taught in this class, which is the whole purpose of an exam — you deserve no credit for that answer.” I can only assume that Gay’s prior commitment to the bizarre beliefs of a Christian sect have blinded her to the obvious inadequacy of the answer, “Jesus will do it.”

Notice that I don’t have to tell students that they must be atheists to study science, and I don’t; but I can have an expectation that answers given on a science exam will be secular and will reflect the content of the course itself, not the drivel the students were taught in Sunday School. The teacher is not putting up a wall between himself and the students, the students and Gay are, by demanding that their cherished myths be pandered to in a physics class, or they are justified in getting angry at their astronomy books and turning their backs on science. That’s what petulant children do. All too often it’s what Christians do.

Also, please notice that the professor is not generating any “negative emotions”, the students are. All we know from this anecdote is that the mysterious professor saw the answer “Jesus will end the universe” on a cosmology exam, and quite reasonably and appropriately gave them no credit for it. What else was he supposed to do? Give full credit for any random, nonsensical, superstitious belief a student chose to scribble on the exam? Ridiculous. Students are not entitled to credit for understanding science, they must earn it, and those students did not. I am also appalled that Gay fed their sense of privileged outrage on this issue; it is the students working themselves up into an emotional state by insisting that Jesus is a good answer in physics, with a sympathetic Christian professor enabling them.

This is a bigger issue than how skeptics should deal with religion: Gay is turning faith into a special case with special rules in science education. That would be disastrous. It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about skeptical organizations or the science classroom, saying you believe in something does not suddenly make it immune to criticism or insulate it from the requirements of evidence and reason. I don’t care what you believe, only what you can rationally justify, and when you try to short-circuit that by insisting that your supernatural beliefs deserve special protection from criticism and an exalted status in the science classroom, you are doing harm to the enterprise of science and education.

Go ahead, go to church, believe whatever you want. But you don’t get to whimper that skeptics and scientists aren’t allowed to disagree with you simply because it is your belief. Faith is not a get-out-of-jail-free card. It’s an affliction to be overcome.