“Tom Johnson” aka Wally Smith … exposed

He’s been back. The sock puppeteer who made up lies about the Gnu Atheists and spread them through a collection of false identities on the internet has been at his old tricks again — the long tawdry story is not something I’m going to go over again, though. Since he has been conjuring up sock puppets again, despite the public embarrassment of being caught red-handed in the past, and despite private rebuke from his faculty superiors, Ophelia Benson has spilled the beans on the lying puke, Wally Smith. You can now read some of the writings he has published under his own name and see exactly where his original account of abusive atheists came from. They don’t correspond very well.

I don’t think I’ll be trusting Wally Smith’s professional work any more than I do his internet skullduggery.

Oh, no! My human physiology course will never be able to compete!

We’ll be getting to human reproduction sometime near the end of the term, but I don’t think we’ll have any demonstrations like this:

More than 100 Northwestern University students watched as a naked 25-year-old woman was penetrated by a sex toy wielded by her fiancee during an after-class session of the school’s popular “Human Sexuality” class.

The woman said she showed up at the Feb. 21 lecture in the Ryan Family Auditorium in Evanston expecting just to answer questions, but was game to demonstrate. The course’s professor on Wednesday acknowledged some initial hesitation, but said student feedback was “uniformly positive.”

It’s unusual, but seems like an entirely reasonable exercise given that class’s subject matter and the willingness of the volunteer.

What most impresses me, though, is that Northwestern administrators are not freaking out.

And Northwestern defended the class and its professor.

“Northwestern University faculty members engage in teaching and research on a wide variety of topics, some of them controversial and at the leading edge of their respective disciplines,” said Alan K. Cubbage, vice president for University Relations. “The University supports the efforts of its faculty to further the advancement of knowledge.”

Commendable.

If you still want the entertaining spectacle of someone freaking out, though, look no further than the crazies at the Illinois Patriarchy Institute.

Twitter Trolls

You may not have noticed, but a certain insane troll best known for repetitive spam to multiple blogs and fora, and who makes frequent references to Depeche Mode and decapitating certain atheists (including yours truly), has been relatively absent from blog comments for a while. That’s because he has discovered Twitter, and is happily spamming that service instead.

If you have noticed — it’s become a bit of a joke that if I reply to anyone on twitter, they immediately get a flood of spam from the obsessive crank, so you may have — here’s a summary of tools to clean up your twitter feed. You might find it handy.

I actually prefer that he infest twitter, since all I have to do is block his account once, and all of his noise disappears instantly, and because everyone reports his spam to one central authority which may at some point do something to throttle him.

Htargcm Retsila

I am astounded. Alister McGrath wrote something that was correct!

Reason needs to be calibrated by something external. That’s one of the reasons why science is so important in the critique of pure reason — a point that we shall return to in the next article.

Of course, it’s only two sentences embedded in a great gross tangle of wrong, and he does accompany it with a threat to screw it all up in his next essay, but let’s give him credit for finally, after years of pretentious mumbling, managing to say one thing I can agree with.

It is exactly right. I’ve had the experience of putting together beautiful theories to explain phenomena I’ve seen in the microscope, simple, clean, elegant explanations that would be efficient and sufficient…if only the biology actually worked as I deduced. And then I’ve done an experiment or made an observation or read a paper with new data, and immediately had to discard my lovely logical construct. This is routine and expected. Science is built on a foundation of empiricism.

And it’s not just science. I remember looking for a used car in my teenaged years, and finding a sweet-looking used machine in my price range, and I could imagine cruising the town and picking up chicks with it…and then my father the auto mechanic had me turn the engine over and explained to me what all those strange grindy sputtery noises meant, and I looked in the rear view mirror and noticed that James Dean wasn’t sitting in the driver’s seat, and a lot of lovely fantasies came crashing down under the oppressive weight of reality. Dammit.

A much smarter man than I also had something to say about it.

Science is organized common sense where many a beautiful theory was killed by an ugly fact.

TH Huxley

It’s what most mundane science is about. It’s not the sudden eurekas that drive the process, but the regular, repeated check and recheck and double-check and triple-check, plodding forward by constantly comparing our logic and expectations against the actual terrain.

I’m glad McGrath noticed. So why does he get everything else exactly backward?

McGrath asserts that the Gnu Atheists are prisoners of “mere rationality”, that we’re trapped in the “dogma of the finality of reason”, and even claims that we’re just rehashing discredited 18th century philosophy that claims a sufficiency of logic and reason to discern the nature of the universe. It’s utterly bizarre that at one point he can notice that foundation of science in reliance on empirical evidence, and then go on to complain that these Gnu Atheists, who he generally likes to accuse of scientism and overly demanding of mere evidence, are now a gang of armchair pontificators who insist on the primacy of reason alone!

It’s simply not true. Gather a mob of unruly atheists to confront theologians like McGrath, and we are not chanting demands for them to expand on their logical ‘proofs’ for the existence of gods (those freakin’ bore us), we’re more likely to be chanting “evidence, evidence, evidence” and pointing out that their fantasies are built on weak to nonexistent foundations.

And then there’s this:

The New Atheism seems to think Christianity refuses to have anything to do with reason — a delusion that can only be sustained by refusing to read the many Christian writers who take it seriously, such as Thomas Aquinas and C.S. Lewis.

That’s wrong. I’ve mentioned this a few times: I’m very impressed with the logical abilities of theologians, who construct the most intricate, elaborate, methodical apologetics imaginable (I don’t include C.S. Lewis among them, though — that man conjured up flimsy, weak appeals to mindless sentiment and inanity). The gripe isn’t that they’re stupid or incapable of rationality, it’s that they build fantastical castles in the clouds and expect you to ignore the absence of testable, observable support.

Although, come to think of it, I do agree that dedicating your life to constructing elaborate rationalizations while never questioning or testing the premise of the divine origin of a badly written book is rather stupid.

McGrath reverses everything, though, and tries to argue that the scientists who constantly question their hypotheses and measure them against empirical reality are the prisoners of mere rationality, while the dogmatists who build a cage of improbable extrapolations from flawed and limited ancient texts are wandering about free. He’s literally engaging in double-speak and reversal of meaning.

For Christian writers, religious faith is not a rebellion against reason, but a legitimate and necessary revolt against the imprisonment of humanity within the cold walls of a rationalist dogmatism. The Christian faith declares that there is more to reality than reason discloses – not contradicting reason, but simply transcending it, and escaping from its limitations.

As I have said several times now, science and the Gnu Atheism are not about using reason to discern reality, but using observations of reality itself as the yardstick for determining the validity of our modeling of the universe. Reason is important, but not sufficient.

It is revealing that McGrath is willing to argue that abandoning reason is a virtue, while still failing to bring up any empirical evidence that his imaginary magical explanations actually reflect anything particularly relevant about the universe.

Tonight! At the Twin Cities branch of the U of Minnesota!

Just a reminder that I’m making the long drive into Minneapolis after class today just so I can say I occasionally exercise my responsibilities as the faculty advisor to CASH. I’ll be one of several sitting on a panel to answer your random questions, which could be loads of fun. Stop in and say howdy or get rude with me or something. Pester those godless UM students, too.

Unfortunately, this will be a bit of a blitz for me. I’m giving an exam to my physiology students tomorrow morning at 8a.in the f’.m., so I’ll have to hop in my jalopy and hurtle back home immediately afterwards.

Oh, and here’s a review of my last visit to the Twin Cities, which ended with me getting trapped in an ugly blizzard. That will not happen this time. My students would be devastated if I failed to show up to give them their test.

The sad saga of Jeremy Stangroom

Mr Stangroom has developed an obsession — an obsession with civility. It’s an unfortunate condition that leads to tunnel vision, an infatuaion with the superficial, and most alarmingly, an increasing incivility on the part of the proponent of civility. I fear it can only end in an implosion of self-loathing.

He has a philosophy blog in which his latest project is to document instances of incivility among those pesky Gnu Atheists. No one else is deserving of the hall monitor treatment but atheists, I guess, and among those he’s been singling out Ophelia Benson, Jerry Coyne, and most especially Russell Blackford are particular targets. It’s not very impressive, though: every couple of days, Mr Stangroom announces one more example of rudeness by a Gnu. If we were really as incivil as his deep concern would warrant, you’d expect it to be easy to produce a deluge of horrors to make a prim young man blush. Right now, it’s more like an occasional slow drip to which Stangroom is frantically gesturing while shouting that we’re all gonna drown.

Of course, now he has discovered…me. That should help increase the flow of rude examples to something more noteworthy. This post of mine is the first to give the poor man the vapors.

Mr Stangroom does have one little problem now if he’s going to come after me. I’m proud of my rudeness; every time he points at something awful I wrote some time back on my blog, I’ll just squint at it, reread it, smirk, and say, “Yep, that was a good one. Coulda been a bit stronger.” I get the impression he thinks the Gnus will all slink away in shame when their crude assertiveness is waved beneath their noses, but hey…I think being rude to the snotty stupidity of religion is entirely appropriate and the least that it deserves. So?

I don’t think Mr Stangroom read the post he cited very carefully. He might want to look at the conclusion again.

I have zero sympathy for intelligent people who stand before a grandiose monument to lies, an institution that is anti-scientific, anti-rational, and ultimately anti-human, in a place where children are being actively miseducated, an edifice dedicated to an abiding intellectual evil, and choose to complain about how those ghastly atheists are ruining everything.

Those people can just fuck off.

Mr Stangroom lives in a world where millions of people believe in witches and demons, where education is poisoned by superstition, where religion spreads its pious wings and gets praised by politicians, and his crusade is against the atheists who aren’t polite enough for his sensibilities. He will save the world with courtesy.

You know what you can do, Jeremy.

You can fuck off.