Matt Dillahunty shows the godless followers of the thread how to hammer on believers.
By the way, there are a few of us, including Matt Dillahunty, who will be at the American Atheists Convention in Des Moines, Iowa on 21-24 April. Who else is going?
(Current totals: 11,893 entries with 1,283,498 comments.)
It’s state representative Mike Beard. Republican. Christian. Moron.
He thinks we don’t have to worry about natural resources.
God is not capricious. He’s given us a creation that is dynamically stable. We are not going to run out of anything.
Nuclear war and the death of a few hundred thousand people? Whatever. Get over it.
How did Hiroshima and Nagasaki work out? We destroyed that, but here we are, 60 years later and they are tremendously effective and livable cities. Yes, it was pretty horrible. But, can we recover? Of course we can.
No, he’s not from the same district as Michele Bachmann. But he fits right in with her.
McGrath is back, straining to refute atheism. This time, his argument is with the claim that faith is blind. Is not, he says! And then proceeds to muddle together faith with belief with morality with science until he’s got a nice incoherent stew, at which time he points to a few floaty bits in the otherwise unresolvable mess and calls that support for his superstitions. It’s pathetic and unconvincing, except perhaps to someone who wants to believe anyway.
Here’s an example of where his whole argument falls to pieces. He wants to claim that faith is simply a reasonable extrapolation from evidence.
The simple truth is that belief is just a normal human way of making sense of a complex world. It is not blind — it just tries to make the best sense of things on the basis of the limited evidence available.
Well, OK, Alister, if you say so…so then where’s your evidence that there is an afterlife, or that god listens to prayers, or that Jesus rose from the dead? If you’re planning to argue that the atheist dismissal of faith as an evidence-free leap of irrationality is incorrect because you do have an evidential foundation, then perhaps you’d be so kind as to shut down the gripes of those damned empiricists by citing your evidence.
Nope, it’s not forthcoming anywhere in his essay. He’s just going to insist that his faith is actually based on evidence…without mentioning what that evidence might be.
However, he does go on to argue that some human convictions cannot be demonstrated with logic or observation; apparently, he wants to have it both ways, where he claims his faith is both based on logic and observation and undemonstrable with logic and observation. He can’t lose! Well, he can, of course, because he’s arguing inconsistently and stupidly, and also because he goes on to justify faith in god by giving examples of undeducible and unobservable beliefs that we accept all the time.
It is immoral to rape people. Democracy is better than fascism. World poverty is morally unacceptable. I can’t prove any of these beliefs to be true, and neither can anyone else. Happily, that has not stopped moral and social visionaries from acting on their basis, and trying to make the world a better place.
But it’s another sneaky side-step! Now he’s conflating moral decisions with verifiable observations. Take his first point: we know that people are raped. We know that unraped people try to avoid being raped, and that raped people will say that it makes them unhappy. These are provable facts. We desire to live in a society where we are not raped, and because we are social animals who empathize with others, in a society where others are not raped, too. Therefore we make a moral decision that rape is wrong. So what if I can’t prove rape is morally wrong; I can show that it has undesirable consequences to individuals and society, and therefore should be discouraged. Those moral and social visionaries reduce undesirable consequences, which is what makes the world a better place.
But this has nothing to do with believing in supernatural entities in the sky!
It reminds me of a common misguided tactic believers sometimes take. They confront some hard-bitten atheistic realist, and challenge him or her by saying they believe in invisible, intangible things, too: they believes their spouse loves them, for instance. The reasoning, apparently, is: “Aha! You believe in an invisible attraction between your spouse and yourself, therefore, my belief that an invisible god-man with holes in his hands and magic powers loves me is perfectly reasonable!” Never mind that the partner is visible, communicating, and capable of action, and may have made many long-term commitments — the theist makes a false equivalence and thinks he’s won a significant point.
That’s McGrath. Incoherent and contradictory, vacuous and vapid, and bumbling along, triumphantly making fallacious arguments that he thinks are irrefutable.
Jebus, but I love “sophisticated theology”. It makes its practitioners look like such hopeless dolts.
Have you ever actually read Leviticus? It’s madness. It’s full of instructions on how to slaughter a goat, what to do if someone spits on you, how to tell baldness from leprosy, and of course, lots and lots of instructions on what you must never ever do. There was something deeply wrong with the people who thought Leviticus 18 was a reasonable set of guidelines — they dwell rather obsessively on nakedness before they get to the one part that all the right-wingers quote.
Lev 18:6 No man shall draw nigh to any of his near kindred to uncover their nakedness; I am the Lord. Lev 18:7 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father, or the nakedness of thy mother, for she is thy mother; thou shalt not uncover her nakedness. Lev 18:8 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father’s wife; it is thy father’s nakedness. Lev 18:9 The nakedness of thy sister by thy father or by thy mother, born at home or abroad, their nakedness thou shalt not uncover. Lev 18:10 The nakedness of thy son’s daughter, or thy daughter’s daughter, their nakedness thou shalt not uncover; because it is thy nakedness. Lev 18:11 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of the daughter of thy father’s wife; she is thy sister by the same father: thou shalt not uncover her nakedness. Lev 18:12 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father’s sister, for she is near skin to thy father. Lev 18:13 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy mother’s sister, for she is near akin to thy mother. Lev 18:14 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy father’s brother, and thou shalt not go in to his wife; for she is thy relation. Lev 18:15 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy daughter-in-law, for she is thy son’s wife, thou shalt not uncover her nakedness. Lev 18:16 Thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy brother’s wife; it is thy brother’s nakedness. Lev 18:17 The nakedness of a woman and her daughter shalt thou not uncover; her son’s daughter, and her daughter’s daughter, shalt thou not take, to uncover their nakedness, for they are thy kinswomen: it is impiety. Lev 18:18 Thou shalt not take a wife in addition to her sister, as a rival, to uncover her nakedness in opposition to her, while she is yet living. Lev 18:19 And thou shalt not go in to a woman under separation for her uncleanness, to uncover her nakedness. Lev 18:20 And thou shalt not lie with thy neighbour’s wife, to defile thyself with her. Lev 18:21 And thou shalt not give of thy seed to serve a ruler; and thou shalt not profane my holy name; I am the Lord. Lev 18:22 And thou shalt not lie with a man as with a woman, for it is an abomination. Lev 18:23 Neither shalt thou lie with any quadruped for copulation, to be polluted with it; neither shall a woman present herself before any quadruped to have connexion with it; for it is an abomination.
Does anyone else imagine some horny, dirty old goatherder sitting in a tent imagining all the things that inflame him, from his hot sister-in-law to the cute and willing goat in the fold (and…oh, god…his hot sister-in-law with the cute goat!), and furiously scribbling down condemnations of every lustful thought that is getting him steamy and bothered? There’s a kind of growing, frantic sexual tension there as he goes from just imagining his dad naked to the real kinky wild stuff.
You have to see the anti-gay verse in context to appreciate the tattoo this wrestler got.
So, does he also have a tattoo that reads, “Neither shalt thou lie with any quadruped for copulation, to be polluted with it”? It’s just odd and revealing that he singles out this one verse to sweat over so much that he has to get it permanently inked into his arm.
I have a recommendation for his left arm, though—something from Leviticus 19.
Lev 19:26 Eat not on the mountains, nor shall ye employ auguries, nor divine by inspection of birds. Lev 19:27 Ye shall not make a round cutting of the hair of your head, nor disfigure your beard. Lev 19:28 And ye shall not make cuttings in your body for a dead body, and ye shall not inscribe on yourselves any marks. I am the Lord your God. Lev 19:29 Thou shalt not profane thy daughter to prostitute her; so the land shall not go a whoring, and the land be filled with iniquity.
Uh-oh. So even if this wrestler avoids the temptation to lie with a man, he’s damned by Leviticus 19:28. Heck, at this point he might as well go get funky and wild with a quadruped.
I like the cartoon, except for the abuse of the word “species”: “specie” is not the singular of “species”! Put some ‘s’s in there!
Obviously, I did it all wrong. I have a digital video microscope in my lab, but what I did was spend about $20,000 on a nice microscope, $1000 on a digital still camera and about $500 on a digital video camera, and $200 on a pair of custom adapters to link them together. The principle is simple enough, though; you’re just mounting a camera on the scope where your eye would be and grabbing images with a standard computer interface. So here’s New Scientist bragging about building a video microscope for £15.
I’ve done something similar in the past, but I can one-up Lewis Sykes: I made my adapter with cardboard and duct tape, instead of going all out and fabricating fancy-pants acrylic rings.
I should confess that there is a little bit of a quality difference between the images I get on my lab scope and the ones you can get out of $30 microscope. As long as you’re not trying to resolve sub-micron details, though, you can probably get by.
As I feared it would, the thread on sexist atheists has bloated up remarkably, and yet more clueless angry men have shown up to tell the women what they can do to be appreciated more, so I’m shutting it down and allowing it to continue here.
Carry on, mansplainers!
This guest post from James Kakalios got me thinking — if anyone wants to take advantage of this prominent platform I’ve lucked into for the purpose of publishing their views, I’d be willing to give them an occasional opportunity. I wouldn’t want to turn the place into wall-to-wall other people (it’s mine, dangit!), but something from some other voice now and then would be OK.
I’m going to set a few rules, though.
No commercials, and this isn’t Craigslist. Don’t send me press releases, either. Opinion pieces and entertaining summaries of your exciting research are fine.
Don’t expect to get paid. You’ll still own your own work, but it will be posted here under the same terms with Seed that my articles are — they can also freely use them, if Seed chooses. You’re doing it for the few hundred thousand page views you’ll get.
Links are OK. Maybe your plan is to write something provocative that will include a link to your blog and drive up your traffic — and that’s fine with me as long as what you send me stands on its own and isn’t too blatantly spammy.
I’m the editor, and I have complete and arbitrary dictatorial power in what I’ll post. You should be familiar enough with the site that you know what kinds of things fit in. If you want to write something that disagrees with me, that’s fine, as long as it’s interesting — but no, your screed in defense of creationism or why Jesus is your Lord won’t get posted, except maybe under “I get email”.
I am also a lazy editor. I won’t fix your typos (sending me something loaded with typos means I simply won’t use it), but on the good side, that also means I won’t change anything you write. It goes up as you send it, with only minimal changes to put it in html format.
Details: Email your article to me, with a request to consider it as a guest post. If it’s already formatted for html, I’ll blow you a kiss, if not, just make sure it’s easily read and not reliant on intricate formatting. Don’t send a book, a few thousand words is the upper limit for a blog article. Tell me exactly how you want it attributed; anonymity is fine, it’s also fine to ask me to include a brief biography with links to your CV or whatever, as long as you write it.
It’ll either appear or it won’t. You’re just taking a chance that it will appeal to me and that I feel like posting it. Don’t pester me with questions about when it’s coming out.
For everyone else: if I do regular guest posts, don’t worry, they won’t be frequent enough to dominate the site; I’m not aiming to change the character of Pharyngula. I’ll probably also take a moment to get into the css file and create a custom format for guest posts so that you’ll be able to easily spot them by their hot pink background and purple text, or something (all right, I’ll try to be tasteful).
And of course, maybe no one at all will be interested. No worries either way.
My parents never got me nice things. Sure, there was that one Tony the Tiger cereal bowl we kids all fought over back in the 1960s, but they never got us one of these.
See? If I’d been born just a little earlier, 14,000 years ago instead of in the 1950s, Dad might have given me the skull of one of his enemies from which to dine on my Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. I was deprived.
This cool paper by Bello, Parfitt, and Stringer describes finds from a cave in Somerset, England which, among many other relics of Upper Paleolithic habitation, included several human skull caps with clear signs of post-mortem modification. My father’s lineage descended from people in that part of the world, so now I’m really miffed — it was an old family tradition, and they just didn’t keep it up.
Anyway, the authors analyzed these curious crania and found cut marks where they’d been defleshed, and percussion marks where the bone had been shaped. They’re fairly thorough in describing the process — it’s almost a how-to — so maybe we’ll get something on Etsy or Make magazine sometime.
The distribution of the cut-marks and percussion damage on the Gough’s Cave cranial sample indicates the skilled post-mortem processing of the head. This included careful removal of soft tissues and controlled percussion. Cut-marks on the areas of insertion of neck muscles and the presence of cut-marks in proximity to the foramen magnum indicate that the head was detached from the body at the base of the skull. This is confirmed by the distribution of cut-marks on the axis and atlas vertebrae, which indicate dismemberment of the neck and head. It is likely that this took place shortly after death, before desiccation of the soft tissues or decomposition and natural disarticulation had occurred. The presence of cut-marks on the areas of insertions of the medial pterygoid muscle (both on the sphenoid and the mandible) indicate subsequent detachment of the mandible from the skull. In the case of the two maxillae, the front teeth showed post-mortem scratches and percussion fractures on the inferior border of their labial surfaces. Although non-masticatory scratches on front teeth are well documented, descriptions of percussion modifications are rare in the literature, making it difficult to interpret their significance. Because of the taphonomic and sedimentological characteristics of the site, it is very unlikely that these modifications were naturally produced by sediment pressure or trampling. Neither can these marks be attributed to post-excavation cleaning or instrument damage. If associated with the processing of the head, it is possible that scratches and breakages were induced by a lever inserted between the occlusal plane of the front teeth, in order to disjoint and separate upper and lower jaws. The distribution of cut-marks on the temporal, sphenoid, parietal and zygomatic bones indicate removal of the major muscles of the skull (masseter and temporalis). The location of cut-marks in discrete areas such as the lingual surface of the mandible, the alveolar process of the maxilla, the root of the zygomatic process on the temporal bone and along the fronto-nasal suture, indicates that the tongue, lips, ears, and nose were also removed. Cut-marks around and inside the eye sockets and on the malar fossae of the maxilla suggest extraction of the eyes and cheeks. Finally, the high incidence of oblique para-sagittal cut-marks on the vault, in areas far from the attachment of muscles, on the squama of the frontal and on the parietals on both sides of the sagittal suture, suggests scalp removal. All these modifications are indicative of meticulous removal of the soft tissues covering the skull. The final stage in the sequence of alterations involved controlled percussion resulting in a systematic pattern of removal of the facial bones and the cranial base with minimum breakage of the vault. The distribution of impact damage and flaking is indicative of carefully controlled chipping of the broken edges in order to make them more regular.
Well, I’m going to go have my breakfast now. In a plain old boring ceramic bowl. You know, this heart-healthy diet I’m on would have a little more pizazz if it were served properly…just a hint.
So I guess they can’t be all bad. Yesterday, I chastised Michio Kaku severely for stepping out of his expertise as a physicist to say something stupid about biology. James Kakalios agreed with me, and sent along a little essay about the subject that also makes the point that expertise is important.
In Defense of Elites
James KakaliosFollowing the recent mid-term elections, the consensus of many pundits is that this past November the American public sent a strong message of “anti-elitism.” The good news is that nothing could be further from the truth.
Americans are certainly not anti-elite, nor are they anti-intellectual. Everyone, after all, wants their doctor, lawyer, or auto-mechanic to be an expert in their field. Few would willingly choose a brain surgeon who was at the bottom of their graduating class, no matter how much fun they may be to share a beer with.
However, Americans are anti-snobbery and have no patience for those whose insecurity compels them to tell us why we’re “wrong” to like what we do, whether it’s NASCAR, fantasy baseball, comic books or Star Wars (OK, the critics may have a point about Episode II: Attack of the Clones). Given the demands of the ever-expanding modern work-week (forget about the jetpack, what I want to know is where’s my four hour work week that was similarly promised to be here in the 21st century!), it is no wonder that that many Americans might devote their limited free time to learning the starting nine players of their local baseball team rather than the nine justices on the Supreme Court.
But there is a real issue that goes beyond a lack of free time. Nearly every week brings another news story of the low regard in which the general public holds intellectuals and scientists. From doubting claims of climatologists concerning the source of changes in the Earth’s average temperature, to persistent attempts by some local school boards to sabotage their children’s education of the principles of Darwinian evolution, the view of many seems to be that “science is just another opinion.”
As a physics professor who is also an avid reader of comic books, I know that it was not always so. Back in the 1950’s and 1960’s, superhero comic books reflected the popular zeitgist and, whether the planet was threatened by invaders from planet X or superpowered master villains, it was typically a scientist that saved the day. Science fiction comic books whose stories took place in the future (sometimes all the way in the year 2000!) often promised that we would live in a gleaming utopia brought to us by scientific advancements.
And in many ways the comic books have been proven correct. Diseases and ailments that were fatal just a few generations ago can now be easily treated, we can peer into the body without the cut of a knife using Magnetic Resonance Imaging, there are few points on the globe that can not be reached by wireless communication, and the computing power of a laptop exceeds that of room-size calculating machines that represented the state of the art in 1950. All brought to us through the efforts of elites.
And this is where the current distrust of scientists becomes a major concern. For there are real problems that need to be addressed, but we can’t handle them without the advice of experts, which are often not respected by both the general public and the scientific community.
The findings and conclusions of scientists and engineers who have devoted years and years to the mastery of their fields of inquiry should be accorded the respect they deserve, and not dismissed for ideological reasons. Few people second-guess the political motivations of their dentist when informed that they have a cavity – why would they do the same with atmospheric scientists when they discuss a hole in the ozone layer? Strong science, elaborated by experts, is the foundation for sound policy.
What happens when experts disagree? More good news — this happens much less than one might think, at least concerning questions of fact (interpretations are another matter). Of course, it is important to realize that not every scientist is an expert in every branch of science (I am concerned here with scientific communication, and not interdisciplinary research). If my cardiologist tells me that I need open heart surgery, I may seek a second opinion before having a difficult and expensive operation — but I won’t consult a dermatologist.
It pains me to say this, but — physics professors are not experts in all fields of science. While we may be able to address, for example, the quantum mechanical mechanisms by which carbon dioxide ignores visible light but absorbs and re—emits infra—red radiation, and can discuss the application of the scientific method, we are not climatologists, and should respect the conclusions of those who have devoted the same time and effort to their field as we have to ours. As the science fiction author Robert Heinlein wrote: “Expertise in one field does not carry over into other fields. But experts often think so. The narrower their field of knowledge the more likely they are to think so.”
Most couples therapists will tell you — miscommunication is a two-way street. Scientists and the general public need to stop talking past each other, so that we can all benefit from the counsel of elite experts. For the problems that we as a nation face are as serious as a heart attack!
James Kakalios is the Taylor Distinguished Professor in the School of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Minnesota, and the author of The Amazing Story of Quantum Mechanics (Gotham, 2010).
