Thanks to Blake for mentioning this: you can watch Dawkins’ The Enemies of Reason, part 1, on Google Video right now. Yay!
Pharyngula
Evolution, development, and random biological ejaculations from a godless liberal
Thanks to Blake for mentioning this: you can watch Dawkins’ The Enemies of Reason, part 1, on Google Video right now. Yay!
David Colquhoun, author of DC’s Improbable Science page, has written a fine criticism of the New Credulity (I know, it’s no more “new” than the New Atheism) which he presents as a symptom of an age of endarkenment.
The past 30 years or so have been an age of endarkenment. It has been a period in which truth ceased to matter very much, and dogma and irrationality became once more respectable. This matters when people delude themselves into believing that we could be endangered at 45 minutes’ notice by non-existent weapons of mass destruction.
It matters when reputable accountants delude themselves into thinking that Enron-style accounting is acceptable. It matters when people are deluded into thinking that they will be rewarded in paradise for killing themselves and others. It matters when bishops attribute floods to a deity whose evident vengefulness and malevolence leave one reeling. And it matters when science teachers start to believe that the Earth was created 6,000 years ago.
And, of course, the indefensible has become the unquestionable. We live in a time when governments can use lies to justify foreign wars of opportunity, and the people who are punished are those who dared to question it; when religious kooks can sell 75 million copies of books that predict, and revel in, the imminent bloody obliteration of all non-christians, and the greatest outrage is reserved for the fact that a few atheists have books on the bestseller lists; when science funding is on the wane and science education is being corrupted, and those who struggle to keep biblical bullshit out of the classrooms are called intolerant and unamerican.
A few years ago Carl Sagan could write about lighting candles in the dark, and we all focused on that hopeful metaphor of the candle — we need to keep that flickering light alive. Maybe it’s past time that we recognized the encroaching darkness as the enemy, and that we need to stop looking inwards at our own individual antique light sources, and think about organizing a more powerful and more incandescent means of illumination to directly fight that wretched ignorance. Use those candles to light a fire. We need to blaze; we need to lase.
Richard Dawkins has stirred up a new nest of critics, and they’re actually getting space in the media. This time, it’s an astrologer complaining about those damned skeptics.
Evidently hoping to prove astrologers are know-nothings, Dawkins’ interview started with a lengthy grilling about astronomy – the precession of the equinoxes, sidereal and tropical zodiacs, Kuiper Belt objects. There was the usual objection to astrology dividing people into 12 Sun signs, and my usual reply: that’s eight more than the Myers-Briggs personality test used by commerce. Actually, astrology’s basic personality types number 1,728.
Ooooh, 1,728. That certainly sounds precise and scientific and all that … of course, the real question is whether these carefully enumerated types correspond to actual personality types, and whether date and hour and place of birth impose that kind of disposition on people. And the answer is no. I could add another arbitrary signifier to his list — say, “were you born at or below sea level, or above sea level?” — and double the number of types assigned by astrology to 3,456 (or more if I start subdividing the altitude!), but it’s all utterly meaningless without a mechanism or without replicable evidence.
Like many woo-woo crackpots, there’s no brand of nonsense this fellow won’t try to defend. Obviously, hard-nosed skeptics must criticize the unknown because it doesn’t conform to their paradigms.
Homeopathy and acupuncture are particularly repellent since they work through mechanisms unknown to the laws of physics.
Actually, I think homeopathy and acupuncture are repellent because they don’t work.
Oh, well. Critiqued by theologians, now by astrologers … there really isn’t much difference in the collection of clowns that gather to throw marshmallows, is there?
The atheists, skeptics, and secular humanists of Fresno have formed up and consolidate, and now they’re looking for a name for their group. Since, in the absence of an infusion of God’s creative will, they couldn’t possibly come up with an idea of their own, they’ve started a contest to come up with an appropriate label for their nest of elitist vipers in the bosom of Christendom. Can someone here think of a good name?
I never get stalkers like this. What is the secret of Phil‘s animal magnetism?
(via Depleted Cranium)
Bill Dembski has another triumph under his belt. He has shown that James Cameron’s math in the Lost Tomb of Jesus show was wrong. It seems a little late, given that even the show’s statistician has made a retraction. But of course, Dembski’s got to claim that the analysis is tangentially related to his debunking of evolution, and further, he’s got to make this ridiculous taunt:
Question: You think any of the skeptic societies might be interested in highlighting this work debunking the Jesus Family Tomb people? I’ll give 10 to 1 odds that they won’t. Indeed, how many skeptics now believe that we’ve found the tomb of Jesus? And to think that until just recently the skeptics didn’t even think that Jesus existed.
They won’t be interested because the author is Dembski, a man with no credibility. They also won’t be interested because it’s a dead issue; none of the skeptics I know or read were at all impressed with Cameron’s methods or interpretations, and certainly didn’t make any declarations that Jesus’ tomb had been found. I saw the program, and I thought it was crap from beginning to end. I think the universal consensus was that Cameron was a laughingstock and the whole sorry episode was a joke. But now Dembski thinks he has accomplished something by debunking a claim we rejected months ago?
I have this mental image of Dembski strutting around the dusty roads of Texas and finding a dead horned toad, partially consumed by birds, dessicated and defleshed and clearly long deceased. He gives it a kick, and then pompously declares that he has slain the ferocious dragon that had the godless skeptics cowed. And he writes a paper about it.
UFO ‘studies’ have come a long way since the days of Billy Meier, when you could just throw a pie plate or a hubcap into the air and take a polaroid, and presto … proof of flying saucers! Now in these days of Photoshop and CGI, you can get much more elaborate and realistic images — none of those silver blurs anymore. DJ Chubakka introduced me to a weird world of modern UFO enthusiasts.
Nowadays you can read the markings right off the hulls of the spaceships.
Chris Mooney makes a point about the supernatural thriller genre.
Indeed, nearly five years ago I wrote a column entitled “Conversion Fantasies” in which I made the following point: In movies and TV series about the paranormal, the sterotypical “skeptic” figure always seems to convert into a believer by the end. And why does this occur? Well, because in fiction, the author can control the laws of nature, and in these fictional narratives (which show an abundant lack of creativity), the supernatural always turns out to be real.
I think an excellent example of this trend is the Scooby Doo cartoon. Way back when I was a young’un, they always ended the same way: the Scooby Doo gang would always discover that the monster/spectre/alien was actually Old Man Cargill, dressed in a costume, trying to keep visitors away so they wouldn’t discover his secret uranium mine, and they always led him away in handcuffs at the end, while he muttered, “If it weren’t for those darned kids, I would have gotten away with it.” I know, the cartoon was cheesily and cheaply animated, the plots were boring and predictable, and the characters were annoyingly trite, but at least they had a consistent message that the supernatural wasn’t real.
That changed last time I saw it — the ghosts were “real”. It was very strange: it was a badly done cartoon, waning in popularity, and instead of trying to reinvigorate it by, say, coming up with creative plots, or getting better artwork, or making the characters more interesting, they chose to throw away the one novel element of the show. The supernatural resort is often the act of lazy hacks.
I’m not going to be quite as down on the supernatural in fiction as Mooney is — I do like a good cheesy horror flick now and then — but I agree with him that the conversion narrative always seems to run in one direction only, and it’s gotten a bit tired. How about a movie where a confirmed, praying, ghost-fearing, gullible person sees the evidence and is enlightened, and sees at last the sufficiency of natural mechanisms? I don’t just mean discovering it’s Old Man Cargill under the sheet, but gets their whole worldview shaken up and realizes that hey, looking for material causes works.
That would be a hard one to write, I suspect, and me and Chris Mooney don’t represent a very big share of the market.
Poor Deepak Chopra is crying again at the nastiness of the blogosphere’s reaction to his idiocy.
I’m pausing at the end of a long series of posts on the mind outside the brain to reflect on science, bad manners and objectivity. Bad manners are the norm in the blogosphere, and no one who dips into that world should bring along a thin skin. Salt air stings but it’s refreshing at the same time. There’s a raffish lack of respectability to blogs, however, that drive away good people and good minds. Insulting boors abound here, and it’s easy enough to go elsewhere and enjoy a civilized debate.
Oh, no—this article about Craig Schaffer in America’s Finest News Source reminds me of me.
Eddy said he has tried repeatedly to pull Schaffner back from the precipice of lucidity.
“I admit, science might be great for curing diseases, exploring space, cataloguing the natural phenomena of our world, saving endangered species, extending the human lifespan, and enriching the quality of that life,” Eddy said. “But at the end of the day, science has nothing to tell us about the human soul, and that’s a critical thing Craig is missing. I would hate for his soul to be lost forever because of a stubborn doubt over the actual existence and nature of that soul.”
