Philosophers and the tone argument

A recent issue of the philosophy journal, Synthese, focused on creationism and intelligent design; the articles I’ve read from it have so far all been anti-creationist, or at least recognize that creationism is in deep conflict with science. It’s all interesting stuff, anyway.

But there’s a problem. This issue was assembled with two guest editors, Glenn Branch and James Fetzer, and represents well the consensus view on ID and creationism. The editors-in-chief, however, published a disclaimer in the print edition.

Statement from the Editors-in-Chief of SYNTHESE

This special issue addresses a topic of lively current debate with often strongly expressed views. We have observed that some of the papers in this issue employ a tone that may make it hard to distinguish between dispassionate intellectual discussion of other views and disqualification of a targeted author or group.

We believe that vigorous debate is clearly of the essence in intellectual communities, and that even strong disagreements can be an engine of progress. However, tone and prose should follow the usual academic standards of politeness and respect in phrasing. We recognize that these are not consistently met in this particular issue. These standards, especially toward people we deeply disagree with, are a common benefit to us all. We regret any deviation from our usual standards.

They actually used the tone argument! What’s also remarkable is that this is an academic journal, and if you read the papers, you’ll discover that no one is called a poopyhead, there is no broken crockery, and no rhetorical blood is spilled. It’s a gang of philosophers, for christ’s sake, people who can look on a flaming nitwit like Ray Comfort and ruminatively ponder the cognitive framework and perceptual concept-space of the crocoduck icon. Apparently, some creationists, like Francis Beckwith, were deeply offended at the criticism of their nonsense and screamed “libel!” at the journal, and the editors-in-chief covered their butts by disparaging their authors in print, instead.

One of the papers singled out for its wicked “tone” was the article by Barbara Forrest…and already your eyebrows should be rising. She’s one of the nicest people we’ve got combating creationism, who, while fierce, always goes after the wackos with a smile and good old Southern gentility. Here’s the abstract for her article. The rest of the article politely eviscerates the epistemology of intelligent design, but the tone is not at all excessive.

Intelligent design creationism (ID) is a religious belief requiring a supernatural creator’s interventions in the natural order. ID thus brings with it, as does supernatural theism by its nature, intractable epistemological difficulties. Despite these difficulties and despite ID’s defeat in Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District (2005), ID creationists’ continuing efforts to promote the teaching of ID in public school science classrooms threaten both science education and the separation of church and state guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. I examine the ID movement’s failure to provide either a methodology or a functional epistemology to support their supernaturalism, a deficiency that consequently leaves them without epistemic support for their creationist claims. My examination focuses primarily on ID supporter Francis Beckwith, whose published defenses of teaching ID, as well as his other relevant publications concerning education, law, and public policy, have been largely exempt from critical scrutiny. Beckwith’s work exhibits the epistemological deficiencies of the supernaturally grounded views of his ID associates and of supernaturalists in general. I preface my examination of Beckwith’s arguments with (1) philosopher of science Susan Haack’s clarification of the established naturalistic methodology and epistemology of science and (2) discussions of the views of Beckwith’s ID associates Phillip Johnson and William Dembski. Finally, I critique the religious exclusionism that Beckwith shares with his ID associates and the implications of his exclusionism for public policy.

That’s the worst the evolution advocates could do? I think it’s obvious that the decision to publish a disclaimer actually wasn’t motivated by a concern about the tone at all, but was actually a surrender to the ranting ideologues of the creationist movement. All we can conclude from it is that the management at the journal is craven.

Brian Leiter is calling for a boycott until the editors-in-chief apologize, which is a rather mild demand. Branch and Fetzer have made a very strong criticism of the journal:

We are both shocked and chagrined that a journal of SYNTHESE’s stature should have sunk so low as to violate the canons of responsible editorial practice as the result of lobbying by a handful of ideologues. This tells us — as powerfully as Forrest’s work — that intelligent design corrupts. We regret the conduct of the Editors-in-Chief and the unwarranted insult to the contributors and ourselves as Guest Editors represented by the disclaimer. We are doing our best to make the misconduct of the Editors-in-Chief a matter of common knowledge within the philosophy community in the hope that everyone will consider whatever actions may be appropriate for them to adopt in any future associations with SYNTHESE.

Shame on Synthese. Let’s all hope the journal staff see their way to correcting their colossal mistake.

John Wilkins is maintaining and updating a list of comments on the boycott.

Christian barbarians

The destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan by the Taliban was a clear example of the destructive power of religious intolerance — it takes a religious mind to turn the demolition of art into a virtue. Now we have another example of extremism attacking art: Catholic fundamentalists in France have destroyed Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ.

On Saturday, around 1,000 Christian protesters marched through Avignon to the gallery. The protest group included a regional councillor for the extreme-right Front National, which recently scored well in the Vaucluse area in local elections. The gallery immediately stepped up security, putting plexiglass in front of the photograph and assigning two gallery guards to stand in front of it.

But on Palm Sunday morning, four people in sunglasses aged between 18 and 25 entered the exhibition just after it opened at 11am. One took a hammer out of his sock and threatened the guards with it. A guard grabbed another man around the waist but within seconds the group managed to take a hammer to the plexiglass screen and slash the photograph with another sharp object, thought to be a screwdriver or ice-pick. They also smashed another work, which showed the hands of a meditating nun.

I don’t want to hear another word from Catholics about my destruction of a mass-produced cracker. Their extremists use violence and the destruction of private property to deface a work of art in a museum.

It’s not even a particularly anti-religious work — that luminous golden glow is as reverential as the bloody, gory, suffering Christ figures mounted in Catholic churches all around the world.

i-fa3fdc6435bd30ca77f694ac633ad519-pisschrist.jpeg

Feeding the fame whore a little more

Scott Adams once again demonstrates his pointy-headed stupidity with an appallingly irrational rationalization of his sock puppetry. He’s got some new excuses, I will give him that.

Guess what, he may have been naughty, but at least he’s not a mass murderer.

On the scale of immoral behavior, where genocide is at the top, and wearing Spanx is near the bottom, posting comments under an alias to clear up harmful misconceptions is about one level worse than Spanx.

Great. So if ever I’m caught kicking a puppy or lying on the internet, all I need to do is explain that I didn’t kill six million Jews, so you can all forgive me. Of course, I don’t think anyone accused Adams of genocide or suggested that he needed to be locked up for life like a Hannibal Lecter, so that’s all rather irrelevant.

His other excuse is that he needed to create a sock puppet to correct misinformation about himself.

The messenger with a strong self-interest is automatically non-credible, and should be. There are some types of information that can only be communicated by an unbiased messenger. And the most unbiased messenger in the world is one that is imaginary, such as my invisible friend, PlannedChaos.

There is no such thing as an unbiased messenger, but we can still value independent input. The problem with a sock puppet is that it is an effort to create an illusion of independence and less bias, but we know it isn’t — that is, we know it if we’re a little smarter than Scott Adams. PlannedChaos, his pseudonym, is even less trustworthy and credible than Scott Adams himself because PlannedChaos has the same biases as Scott Adams, but is unconstrained by the consequences to his reputation.

Not that Adams seems particularly concerned about his reputation anyway—I think he has fully embraced his inner douchebag and is now simply happy to get people to look at him.

Why sockpuppetry is stupid

Because when you’re exposed, you look like an even more gargantuan idiot and pathetic narcissist. Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, has been discovered to have tried to pad his reputation with a fake ID … he’s used the pseudonym “PlannedChaos” to go around the web praising Scott Adams as a “certified genius”.

You know, it’s a good rule of thumb that if you have to announce that you’re a genius, you aren’t a genius.

I’ve been remarking on Adams’ stupidity for years. He’s a creationist apologist who doesn’t understand science, and the kind of insipid apologist for religion who thinks Pascal’s wager is a good argument. It’s no surprise that he had to cobble up imaginary sycophants to make himself look good.

And then, of course, there’s the classic, standard Adams riposte whenever he’s exposed as a fool. Sure, he said something stupid, he’ll say, but he did it because he’s funny and you are even dumber for taking him seriously. It’s no surprise that that is his response now.

I’m sorry I peed in your cesspool. For what it’s worth, the smart people were on to me after the first post. That made it funnier.

That schtick wore out ages ago.

What next?

I’m not home yet. I’m still in Hawaii, relaxing for a bit after the Society for Developmental Biology conference. After this, though, it’s a storm of events every weekend for quite some time. Here’s my schedule:

21-24 April: Des Moines, IA, the American Atheists national convention.

29 April: Oswego NY, the SUNY Oswego Secular Student Alliance.

7 May: Kamloops, BC, Imagine No Religion conference.

13 May: Philadelphia, PA, the anti-superstition bash.

21 May: Washington, DC, Jamie Kilstein and I are setting Washington DC on fire.

28 May: Morris, MN. I’m staying home and getting some rest. You may think you see a hole in my schedule, but no! Leave me alone!

3-5 June: Dublin, Ireland, World Atheist convention.

6 June: Glasgow, Scotland, Skeptics in the Pub.

7 June: Brighton, England, Skeptics in the Pub.

8 June: London, England, Atheism UK.

Then I get a little break before a few summer events I’ll mention later. I’ve just told you what I’ll be doing every weekend for the next two months, isn’t that enough?

Can prayer help surgery?

The American Journal of Surgery has published a transcript of a presidential address titled, “Can prayer help surgery?“, and my first thought was that that was absolutely brilliant — some guy was roped into giving a big speech at a convention, and he picked a topic where he could stand up, say “NO,” and sit back down again. If he wanted to wax eloquent, maybe he could add a “Don’t be silly” to his one word address.

But a reader sent me a copy of this paper, and I was wrong. The author spent four pages saying “Yes”. It flies off to cloud cuckoo land in the very first sentence, which compares prayer to “chemotherapy and radiation as adjuvant therapies to surgery, working synergistically to cure cancers”, and then justifies it by pointing out that patients do internet searches for alternatives to surgery, and prayer is a popular result. So, right there in the first paragraph, we get the Argument from Extravagant Assertion and the Argument from Google. It’s not a good start.

This was given at a professional conference, though, so he has to talk about the data, and this is where it starts getting funny. He explains that there sure have been a lot of prayer studies lately, 855 in the past 15 years, and with 46 prospective randomized series in the Cochrane database, which he summarizes succinctly:

Equal healing benefit has been demonstrated whether the prayer is Hindu or Buddhist, Catholic or Protestant, Jewish or Muslim.

That’s the way to spin the data into something positive. Unfortunately, this is the happy peak of his foray into actually looking at the data, putting a cheerful universalist twist on the actual results, which he later grudgingly admits are non-existent. When they all show no benefit, that is equal benefit, after all.

Can medical science prove the benefit of prayer to im- prove the result of an operation? I refer you to the latest Cochrane review on this topic.5 This 69-page manuscript is a meta-analysis of 10 prospective randomized studies on intercessory prayer to help the efforts of modern medicine involving over 7,000 patients. Some studies in this meta- analysis showed benefit, while others did not. The conclusion of the authors was that there is no indisputable proof that intercessory prayer lowers surgical complications or improves mortality rates.

That’s the point where he should have stopped and stood down. The science has answered his question, and the answer is no. Unfortunately, this admission is at the top of page two, and he’s going to go on and on. He rants that the studies all basically suck — there can’t be good controls, people would pray for themselves, they didn’t check how devout the prayers were, and of course, that most excellent catch-all refutation, “What happens when the outcome being prayed for is not in accord with the will of God?”

The paper can be summarized so far as an argument that prayer helps because there have been a lot of studies on it, and those studies all show equal benefit, but that benefit is zero, and the studies are all bad science. How can his thesis be saved? Oh, I know: needs more anecdotes.

There is no indisputable proof that prayer can aid in healing. Those who believe do so by faith alone. I’ve seen the power of prayer work together with surgery many times firsthand. An example of this was witnessing my father-in-law miraculously survive an aortic arch dissection, outliving his surgeon by 20 years.

Wait, what? The family prayed, a skilled surgeon saved the patient, so prayer works? And also, from this one story, shouldn’t we just as reasonably conclude that prayer kills surgeons?

The rest of the paper is empty noise about how many patients want to pray and how it makes them feel better emotionally, and how the author is wonderfully open and supportive in praying with his patients. Meandering over the field of anecdote and citing his patients’ wishful thinking does not rescue his premise from the pit of rejection, I’m afraid; the only accurate answer to the question of whether prayer helps in surgery is “No, but people like to think it does.” It certainly doesn’t justify the author’s conclusion.

So, have I answered the question, “Can prayer help surgery?” While there is not conclusive scientific proof that prayer improves surgical outcomes, it certainly can help
relax an anxious preoperative patient and may help enhance the relationship between patient and surgeon. A surgeon must be comfortable with prayer to offer it. Professionalism can be maintained provided the prayer is offered in a non- confrontational manner and reflects the spirituality of the patient. Surgeons who want the best for their patients need to utilize every tool available, and to quote one of my patients, “Prayer is a powerful tool.”

Nah. Let me add a better quote: “The author is a powerful fool.” If he actually escaped unscathed from this address without being splattered by flung rubber chicken and puddin’ cups, my opinion of surgeons will be shattered.

Schroder DM (2011) Presidential Address: Can prayer help surgery? The American Journal of Surgery 201:275-278