Nauseating Napoli

Shame on you, South Dakota. Watch this clip of SD’s abortion politics; on the one hand, you have to respect people who have been providing abortion services to the state for years, like Dr Miriam McCreary (now criminalized), and the few representatives, like Elaine Roberts, who have opposed the law, but you also have to see that sexist asshat, Bill Napoli, ramble on about how he might make exceptions for religious virgins who had been brutally raped.

He’s probably going to get reelected, when in a just world he ought to be embarrassed to be seen in public without a bag over his head.

I hadn’t heard this part of Napoli’s argument before, either: he justifies the law banning abortions by appealing to fuzzy sentimentality about the way America used to be.

If a young man got a girl pregnant out of wedlock, they got married.

How biblical of Mr Napoli. Rape a girl, and if she gets pregnant, the whole community turns out to punish her some more by making her marry her rapist. Face it, this really is about treating women as chattel.

Sarkar vs. Nelson…any news?

I’m wondering how the Sarkar-Nelson debate in Austin went down—any attendees want to let me know? I ask because I just now read the discussion paper by Nelson that supposedly represents his side of the argument, and rarely have I seen such a shallow and pointless position advanced with any seriousness, by anyone other than the most fatuous sort of creationist.

The paper goes on much too long for what is actually a trivial point—but then, that’s what BS artists do when they don’t have anything of substance: they go on and on. Here, though, is one key paragraph and figure that basically sums up his main point.

Take a look at Figure 2. Yes, that’s your puny fund of physical knowledge, circa
March 2006, to which both the naturalist and the design theorist have equal access. But
notice that the design side has a distinct epistemological advantage. The ID theorist
possesses a richer possible ontology of causes. It doesn’t matter if, at the end of time,
there never was anything corresponding to ‘intelligence’ as an ontologically distinct type
of cause. In that case, the design theorist would simply have carried around a useless
notion. Since the design theorist has free access to every physical cause for which there’s
any good evidence, however, he’s not losing anything by allowing for the possibility of
design.

i-c9f8d0c1d25c4b092a16c4bf2cb09c41-nelson_model.gif

This is just so silly, both misrepresenting the status of the argument and playing pointless hypothetical games. He’s basically claiming that because ID includes an explanation that is not part of the scientific toolkit, it has a chance of encompassing some unidentified phenomena that will not be explained by science, and is therefore superior. To which I say, baloney.

  • The argument that we should accept some random, unsupported idea because of the possibility it might be true is a familiar one: it’s the root of the worst argument for theism ever, Pascal’s Wager. It is not sufficient justification for an idea to merely claim it is possible that it is true, given sufficiently elaborate assumptions.
  • His diagram falsely weights his preferred assumption. If we’re cataloging all possible explanations, or even merely all known causes (the box on the left), we’re talking about a huge volume of information, all of which is specified to varying degrees, from all the step-by-step minutiae of a series of gene sequences to fuzzy guesses and generalities…and it’s the detailed and testable explanations that are the central part of science. On the design side, all Nelson is adding is an exceptionally poorly specified concept—”intelligent causation”—with absolutely no information provided about either the nature of the intelligent agent or its mechanisms of action. It’s awfully presumptuous of Nelson to deign to call such half-assed, poorly codified blather an ontology.
  • Science is a most pragmatic process. We pursue what is doable and that which we can infer from the current body of knowledge. Nelson is completely ignoring the practical aspects of science to advocate an idea which has no theoretical foundation and no applicable research program, all for a hugely hypothetical abstraction. If it’s a “useless notion”, why bother with it?
  • At best, what ID therefore does is add the thinnest possible membrane, sheer to the point of invisibility and entirely untestable and untouchable, to the top of Nelson’s huge box of “our knowledge of physical causes”, and justifies its addition solely by claiming that it is possible that it might be true. What he then glosses over is that this miniscule and improbably remote possibility, which is lacking any empirical justification, is the sine qua non of the Intelligent Design movement. Yeah, sure, a designer of some sort might have intervened at some point in the history of life on earth, and I’ll give that hypothesis the level of attention warranted by the evidence for it, i.e. none, yet what Nelson must explain is why he’s part of a whole institute with dozens of fellows and a PR budget of millions arguing for this one insignificant, negligible idea.

Sahotra Sarkar is trained in philosophy as well as biology. I have to wonder how he responded to such inane and superficial pseudo-philosophical noise…it’s the kind of thing that could make for an awfully boring debate.

In which I respond to optimism about the religious with cynicism

John Pieret quotes a religious apologist, about which I am rather conflicted:

For a Christian, when science is allowed to be neutral on the subject of God, science can only bolster faith. In contrast, and I imagine without realizing it, ID proponents have become professional Doubting Thomases, funded by Doubting Thomas Institutes. When advocates of ID use the vocabulary of science to argue for God’s presence in cellular machinery or in the fossil record, they too poke their fingers through Jesus’ hands. In so doing, ID vitiates faith.

This is the conundrum we face when we get a thoughtful Christian on our side, more or less. It’s great to see them criticizing ID advocates, and pointing out their bad theology; I wouldn’t mind seeing the Discovery Institute’s influence diminish. The problem, though, is that the paragraph above says good things about ID to my mind. Doubt is a wonderful thing, skepticism is a useful tool, and I think the story of Doubting Thomas is a great example, not a caution—if a guy I’d seen die in some grisly fashion showed up at my house, I wouldn’t stop with just checking his wounds, I’d be quizzing him to find out if he really was who he claimed to be while I was driving him to the hospital for a much more thorough examination. And if he tried to tell me, “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed”, I’d just reply “Blessed are the chumps? No way, pal, I want blood samples and an MRI.”

The real problem with the ID advocates is that they aren’t actually Doubting Thomases: they go through the motions, putting on a show of skepticism, while believing without question. If they poked a finger into the wound and found spirit gum and stage blood, they’d announce that they had scientific proof of a resurrection.

So when people claim that ID is conceding the inferiority of faith, I agree completely with them. When they act as if this is an unfortunate outcome, they lose me. ID’s failing is that it hasn’t gone far enough, and I won’t be praising or encouraging people who take a step further back and retreat into the acceptance of ignorance as a virtue. The story of Doubting Thomas makes clear that “faith” is nothing but a synonym for credulity and the avoidance of knowledge.

There’s another John with an interesting post on religion that is a bit weird from my perspective. Wilkins makes a series of suggestions on how conflicted Christian parents should raise their kids. It’s very subversive, I’m afraid, because it’s exactly how this confident atheist raised his kids, and I suspect it’s how that incorrigible agnostic raises his kids—it’s a recipe for undermining religiosity. It’s great! Even if it doesn’t produce atheists and agnostics, at worst it’s going to produce sensible Christians who don’t treat their faith as a tool for magical thinking, indoctrination, and eradicating thought.

That also means it’s a doomed strategy. The people who need John’s suggestions most, the Bible-thumpers and lunatics of the Religious Right, are going to rightly see that it teaches tolerance as a tool of the godless. Sorry, John, your prescription is far too optimistic—it’s only going to appeal to the ones who already practice it. It needs more dire threats, scapegoats, and self-righteousness if it’s going to become popular.

Linkage

I must purge the mailbox of a few worthy links…so here they are.

There are a couple of calls for submissions:

A few carnivals I failed to mention this week:

Freethought Filter is back up and running again!

Darksyde addresses the Fermi “paradox”. I don’t think it’s a paradox at all, and that the answer from his list is the rarity solution.

Berlinski again

Part two of his masturbation session is up; it makes me a little queasy, so I’m not going to link to it directly, but you can get to it via Stranger Fruit. This one begins with The Pompous One redefining science (these guys know ID doesn’t meet the standards of science, so their strategy is to redefine everything else, to lower it far enough that they can clear the bar. In other words, they’re digging a very deep hole) to exclude biology and to make mathematics the One True Science.

And then it gets worse.