On Physics and Angels

Through Pharyngula today, I was reading up on the Florida debate about their new science standards. (See: Proposed science standards debated in fla.)

The "science standards" article contained a statement from David Campbell, one of the authors of the new standards, that I found interesting:

Campbell also stated, "Biology without evolution is like physics without movement, like chemistry without the periodic table. It's the glue that holds our subject together."

This immediately called to mind something that I learned in graduate school about the philosophy of 'eliminativism'.

Before Newton presented his laws of motion, one of the dominant theories was that things in motion tended to slow down unless something kept them moving. This is what we see in the real world. You push something across the floor, or even throw it through the air, and it slows down.

What is it that kept the planets moving across the sky?

Well, something had to be pushing them. Specifically, they were being pushed by angels.

Newton eliminated that idea - everything moves at a constant velocity in a straight line unless acted on by some force.

Biology needs an intelligent designer the way astronomy needs angels.

Silencing Atheists

I am interested in seeing a writeup of the full story concerning My Space and their alleged disposition to silence atheist points of view (see My Space: No Place for Atheists).

The standard response from religous leaders to atheism has been to silence it. We have seen this in its censorship of "The Golden Compass" and the books on which it represents. We have seen it in their efforts to resist any depiction of atheists or atheism in a positive light. We see it now in pressure to prevent any representation of atheism in My Space, controlled by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, the same company that runs Fox News.

I am not an investigative reporter and I do not have the resources to investigate this issue in detail. Hopefully, somebody with more resources than I will give it a go.

Would, perhaps, some news organization be willing to investigate the issue and report on their findings?

I suspect we would have a long wait ahead of us if we expect to hear an unbiased account on Fox News.

And, of course, the other media conglomerates whose job it is to put eyeballs on advertisements are simply going to look at the fact that most eyeballs belong to people who have grown up in a culture that denigrates and demeans atheists as a matter of national policy (e.g., the Pledge of Allegiance and the national motto), and are unlikely to want to offend anybody.

So, what's the way out of this vicious circle, where denigrating and discriminating against atheists becomes profitable, and those profits are put to work promoting the denigration and discrimination of atheists?

An 'Academic' Creationist Journal

The New Humanist has an article announcing a creationist "academic peer-reviewed journal" (Creationists start an 'academid' journal)

What took them so long to think of this little trick?

Much of the lives of these people depend on an ontological fallacy - that they can bring something into existence simply by declaring that they have done so (a nice piece of magic normally attributed to witches and warlocks).

Obviously, their use of the term 'academic journal' does not match the common usage. This trick is like calling a one dollar bill 'a million dollars' and then going out and expecting to buy a million dollars worth of merchandise with it.

All of the reasons why these articles would not qualify for any real academic journal still apply - their premises are false or unproved, their inferences are invalid, and they include no falsification criteria (ways of demonstrating that their view is mistaken).

Ultimately, this is another form of sophistry and deception that at least this group of creationist seem to adore and against which they have no moral qualms. Regardless of any moral prohibition on making things up, they are once again making things up, and surrounding them with sophistry in order to market them to a public that they have made worse off.

These are the products of parents who raise their children to be sophists and liars, and not have the respect for truth and reason that any moral person would have.

The Badness of Religion

Over at An Apostate's Chapel there is a post on What's So Bad About Religion.

The article, in attributing badness to religion, makes some mistakes.

For example:

. . . acting on the basis of false beliefs can lead to ill-conceived, even harmful, behavior and decisions.

This is true, and I have made this claim myself. We seek to fulfill our desires, but act so as to fulfill our desires given our beliefs. False beliefs often thwart our desires (by recommending actions that will not, in fact, fulfill our desires).

However, this is not always the case.

For example, it may well be the case that a person in a stressful situation, who believes that he has a 5% change of survival, actually has a 5% chance of survival. However, if he believes that he has a 50% chance of survival, the extra effort might actually increase his chance of survival to 10%. This is a case in which a false belief can be better than a true belief.

There is also the case that it is better to use a simple (though less accurate) model of a system than a highly complex, though more accurate, model. Our understanding of the universe around us is Newtonian - that is the system we use to explain and predict the events we experience every day. However, it is not accurate. Still, even though Newtonian claims are false, they are close enough to the truth, and the benefits we gain from speed and simplicity far outweigh what we lose in terms of accuracy. Again, an example in which it is better to go with false beliefs than true.

There are other beliefs that are simply neutral. The proposition, "A god exists", by itself, tells us nothing about what we should or should not do. It is a neutral belief. There are other false beliefs (many not having to do with religion) that are far worse than this one, and far more worthy of our attention.

False beliefs about global warming, for example.

In short, this proposition tells us something wrong with some religious beliefs, but not what is wrong with religion.

Consider . . . a man who was suffering from mental illness heard the voide of God telling him to slaughter his family.

We seem to be being told that, in a purely atheist community, in which nobody believes in God, that nobody suffering from a mental illness will slaughter their whole family. Actually, I doubt that this is the case. In an atheist society, mentally ill individuals will not interpret their voices as 'the voice of God'. Instead, they will interpret those voices as an intuition, or even 'see' evidence, of a conspiracy against the common good.

And if the mentally ill person says, "I believed my family was genetically inferior and I needed to kill them before they further corrupted the genetic fitness of others," would the writer see this as evidence of "what is wrong with belief in evolution?"

I doubt not.

The conclusion does not follow from the premises. The author merely sees a connection because the author has adopted the position that there is something wrong with religion, and is seeking evidence - the way that a person who believes that God exists will seek evidence, grasping on to whatever will support the desired conclusion.

I do no write in terms of "what is wrong with religion."

I write in terms of specific arguments and propositions. "This argument is invalid", "That proposition is false".

Many religious propositions are false (and all religious propositions that are strictly religious are false). Of those false claims, some are far worse than others, and a person does not have to be religious to have false beliefs.

Many religious arguments are invalid. Of those invalid arguments, some are worse than others, and a person does not have to be religious to have an invalid argument.

What I am asking for here is simply some focus on specific propositions and arguments and avoid the sweeping generalities. At the same time, I would like to see less of a tendency to accept an argument as valid merely because, if others accept it (and they might), those others will share the reader's animosity towards some target group.

Fighting the Next Pandemic

Even if somebody is not fighting religion, it is still possible for them to be doing some good in the world.

Okay, nobody actually thinks that fighting religion is the only way to do good. Yet, I fear that my focus is sometimes too narrow, and it is time to broaden one's perspective to include other concerns.

I recently watched a video on TED. This one is having to do with stopping the next pandemic - how a private organization investing $100,000 did more to stop the last pandemic than the World Health Organization.

Larry Brilliant Wants to Stop Pandemics

It explains what steps can be taken to help stop the next pandemic.

Early detection, early response.

Brilliant didn't mention anything about prayer, particularly prayer in public schools, as being an effective counter-measure. One thing he said that was not so brilliant, that in wiping out life-threatening small pox, that "God rewarded the physicians for all their hard work," in wiping out the disease.

God had nothing to do with it. The physicians with all their hard work deserve all the credit. But I would not exchange a world without this disease for a world that that lacked a few absurd religious sentiments.

One disease gone. Another (polio) just about gone.

That's good work.

Anti-Atheist Bigotry and the Media

In a posting, Bigotry Should Disqualify a Presidential Candidate, vjack correctly noted that anti-atheist bigotry is not met with the same level of condemnation - that it, in fact, often meets with some level of praise - than other forms of discrimination.

However, he incorrectly assigns the blame to the press for its failure to report that statements against atheists are as bigoted as similar statements against others.

When I speak about anti-atheist bigotry, I am referring to over-generalizations that say that atheists are an inferior group of people - dishonest, untrustworthy, unworthy of holding public office - merely in virtue of the fact that they do not believe in God. Anti-atheist bigotry occurs in the form of falsehoods and sophist arguments meant to denigrate evidence where it is clear the speaker used a desired conclusion (atheists are bad) to filter his evidence.

Expecting the press to correctly recognize and report anti-atheist bigotry in this country today is like expecting the press to correctly recognize and report racism in the 1920s. Reports are not separate and distinct entities from the culture in which they live. They pick up their values from the culture and, more importantly, only those who appeal to the culture win customers, which translates into revenue, which is how they stay in business.

The successful boycott against "The Golden Compass" series delivers an important warning against any member of the media who dares to defend atheists against prejudice. In the free market, only anti-atheist bigotry will get funded.

Media outlets that correctly point out anti-atheist bigotry exist. They are not successful because there is no market for this message.

How do we create a market for that message?

It will take something like the Civil Rights movement for atheists - something where those who are opposed to this bigotry (not 'atheists', but 'those who are opposed to bigotry') are willing to go to the effort to visibly protest these denigrating statements and those who make them.

It means protesting in a way that the fact that the press cannot refuse to report that the speech was anti-atheist bigotry because the press must cover the protest.

As long as people sit back and simply mumble complaints into their blogs, we will continue to be a culture where only the press that refuses to correctly report (or even recognize) anti-atheist bigotry will be successful.

[Standard caveat: the only legitimate response to words are words and private actions, so the protests must take the form of words and private actions. However, private action does include the right to some very loud and protests.]

Telecom Immunity

According to an article in the Washington Post, Senat Opens Debate on Wiretap Measure:

...Vice President Cheney said in a speech yesterday that Congress "must act now" to renew the expiring surveillance law and provide telecommunications companies with protection from lawsuits alleging they violated personal privacy rights while helping the government after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks."

But the question still remains: What type of help were they providing the government after 9/11?

For example: Did this help involve spying on political adversaries of the administration for the sake of helping them pass legislation beneficial to their campaign contributors?

If not, what is to prevent some future administration from 'selling' their warrantless wiretapping power to the highest bidder - allowing it to be used to help some 'friend of the President' get the edge over some political or economic rival?

The simple act of requiring that the government make its case to a court - an independent third party - will help to ensure that the government is actually using the power to wiretap to protect the country, rather than protect the President (at the expense of the country) - or to profit the vice-President (at the expense of everybody else).

FISA votes near

The Senate will soon be voting on legislation to alter the FISA law.

The Bush Administration wants more warrantless wiretapping, and a group of telecom companies want immunity from violating laws that prohibited them from providing material to the government without a warrant.

The importance of requiring a warrant is that, without it, there is no way to make sure that the Administration is actually spying on our nation's enemies, and not their own enemies. Nixon, for example, felt justified on using the government's wiretapping capability on anybody who criticized his administration. That was why the FISA court was created to start with - because of Nixon's decision to spy on political opponents and rivals.

It certainly needs to be defeated.

Fred Phelps and the Duty to Think

So, it appears that the reason Heath Ledger died is because he made Brokeback Mountain, and God killed him as punishment. (ht Possommomma)

The problem is that people like this vote.

The right to vote implies a duty to think.

A duty to think implies a duty to ask, "What if I am wrong?" And if the consequences of being wrong are that others are unjustly harmed, then the morally responsible person then asks, "How do I make sure that I am not wrong?"

Phelps and his kind draw their conclusions, then they select the evidence, pointing to whatever might support their conclusion as 'proof' while ignoring anything against it.

The morally responsible person seeks to remove bias. He thinks in terms of control groups and study groups. He looks for statistical differences between the two, for relationships between independent variable and dependent variables, and then tests the relationships he suggests by seeing if they support other observations.

People who use this method - people who ask, "What if I am wrong?" and then try to make sure that they are not wrong by using this method, are (at least in this regard) so massively morally superior to the likes of Phelps.

Indeed, this is one further piece of evidence that scripture is not the work of any morally perfect divine being. This is not too difficult for a primitive tribesmen of several thousand years ago to understand. Yet, they were not told of these simple moral responsibility.

As such, we have moral degenerates such as Phelps believing that the morally vaccuous rantings of primitive tribesmen gives him moral guidance, refusing to exercise or even to comprehend the moral responsibility to think.

Slavery and Religion

I was hoping that somebody would look into the issue of religion and slavery.

With the release of the movie "Amazing Grace", a lot of religious people have been declaring how it was religion that freed the slaves - as if the South before the Civil War was a bastion of free-thought and atheist thinking (or, at least, was overrun by some anti-Christian philosophy).

In fact, the defenders of slavery used the Bible to defend their institution - which they could easily do, since scripture contained so many references to God not only allowing, but in some cases commanding, the owning of slaves.

It was almost like the Bible was written by a bunch of primitive tribesmen, and not some benevolent being with perfect moral knowledge. Otherwise, how would he have gotten the part about slavery so wrong?

Anyway, Kelly at the Rational Response Squad has provided at least some of the evidence against the theist attempt to rewrite history in Dinesh D'Souza Spreads Dishonest Propaganda…Again.

I would like to see some independent verification of the authenticity of these quotes - somebody in the know who can verity their authenticity. But the first step - the step of collecting some of this information, has at least been done.