Pharyngula::In which I envy the British

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Tuesday, January 10, 2006

In which I envy the British

PZ Myers • 119 Comments (last page)

In my house, we have one 19" television, which is relegated to the basement. We have basic cable (it's part of our deal to get high speed DSL to the house), and we get 40 or 50 channels. We get TBN and PAX, I can watch Benny Hinn and John Hagee just about any hour of the day (not that I bother), and even our local public access channel is clogged with broadcasts of church services. I can safely predict, though, that I will never see this show on my cable.

The Root of All Evil
Professor Richard Dawkins, the world-renowned evolutionary biologist, whose atheism has earned him the nickname of 'Darwin's Rottweiler', takes a personal journey through the world's three great monotheistic religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
Dawkins thinks it is time for science to stop sitting on the fence. In the light of overwhelming scientific evidence that, he believes, shows a supreme being cannot exist, and in a world in which religious conflict and bigotry are increasingly centre stage, Dawkins argues that for the good of humanity, religion needs to be challenged and disproved. Never one to shy away from a debate, Dawkins meets leaders from the Christian, Jewish and Muslim religions to find out how their beliefs fit with modern science's extraordinary knowledge of our world and the wider universe.
In The Root of All Evil Dawkins accuses the religious establishment of preying on people's desire to believe in a greater being; abusing reason and humanity in the process. Ultimately he asks how they can defend what religion has done, and is doing to us?

Can you imagine the shrieks if PBS put that on?

There's a bit of a review in the Sunday Herald.

If this piece of work gets those kinds of results [shaking the middle ground into thinking about the issue], it will be as much because of its tone as its content. Television, like the society from which it broadcasts, has found it expedient to display ever greater tolerance, indulgence and relativism in regard to lifestyle choices, particularly matters of faith. For this reason, Dawkins's eminently reasonable argument may come across as almost radical in its forcefulness.

That's just the thing: the arguments against the nonsense of religion are reasonable and rational, plain common sense, yet people get the trembly vapors in reaction to any criticism of religion. Even those who don't believe get all anxious, worrying that we might alienate that herd of sheep who happen to have the vote over there.

Ophelia Benson is all over it, of course, with quotes from the program. A new blog gets off to a bang with an excellent review of the program (someone who actually watched it last night! I am so jealous.) Dawkins boldly strolled into the lion's den, interviewing an evangelical pastor, Ted Haggard, and showing him up to be an ignorant fool.

One depressing aspect of this programme was watching Dawkins try to talk to the religiously devout. In the US, he meets up with an evangelical pastor, a staunch Republican who claims to have weekly telephone meetings with Bush, himself devout, and who has also hob-knobbed with Blair and other dignitaries. The pastor raises the issue of evolution, and ridicules the notion that the eye happened by "accident". Poor Dawkins must have feared his head would bust, as I did, when he heard this! He replied, incredulously, "Accident?! I've never heard any evolutionary biologist describe evolution as an accident!". The pastor carried on, unfazed, saying that if only Dawkins had read the books that he'd read, spoken with the scientists that he has spoken to, then he might see things differently. To his credit, Dawkins was forthright and said, essentially, that it was clear that the pastor knew nothing about biology, at which point the pastor adopted a slow, deliberate, patronising tone, and told Dawkins not to be arrogant – having just claimed that the bible is correct and unchanging and has the all the answers. He later chased Dawkins off the premises of his religious megaplex, threatening to call the police and accusing Dawkins of calling his children animals (presumably because Dawkins believes in evolution). Words fail me.

Nobody should ever call Dawkins arrogant. On the scale established by American televangelists, by Christians in general, he is a timid model of bashful humility. Pit a man who works for his knowledge, who willingly tests and reviews it continually, against a mob who trusts in revealed knowledge dogmatically, and I'll tell you who the arrogant ones are.

So, anyone know where I can get my hands on a DVD of this program, in NTSC and playable in Region 1? Also, who can I contact about getting the rights to show it—you know that local access channel that shows the Morris church services? I'd love to walk into the city hall and fill out the forms to get this show on the cable.

That Sunday Herald review makes a big deal about the polarizing effect of this kind of thing, and wonders if it is mere preaching to the converted. I don't think so. The thing is that most people are never, ever exposed to this sort of thing in this country—there's a kind of voluntary self-censorship going on—and confronting the issue head-on is exactly what we need. We don't need to convert people to atheism, but we do need to wake them up and let them know that there are legitimate arguments with their unquestioning acceptance of Christian dogma.

If nothing else, it would be good to make more people aware that sneaking into hearing rooms to annoint chairs is embarrassingly insane behavior for the religious to condone.

I just saw the program myself, thanks to BitTorrent. It's very good—especially since I've rarely seen anything that spells out the problems of religion so clearly shown here.

I must also say…Ted Haggard is extraordinarily creepy.

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Comments:

#57603: — 01/12 at 07:45 AM
Whoa Whoa Whoa! Hold on buddy, where did you get the idea that I am a believer? That is an odd conclusion to reach after reading my post, where I compare faith to poison and I refer to believers as "they", not "we". You sure do seem to like going on the offensive every chance you get. If you're so proud of your atheism, I assume it's because you're proud of your ability to think critically. If after reading my post you think I am a theist, you might want to swallow some of that pride.

#57604: — 01/12 at 07:59 AM
“There has to be at least a cursory check to make sure that the miracle reports we've seen so far fall into the patterns we've come to expect: weak hearsay, urban legends, etc.”
Knock yourself out, Mr. Ramsey. But some of us have better things to do. It’s like trying to investigate every UFO abduction report (a modern miracle story), just in case one of them turns out to be true. All that the abductees lack is organization and scriptures, faith and legends (plus some kind of psychological need that motivates their beliefs) they’ve already got. Later generations of intelligent people brought up to believe in abductology could develop their theology and apologetics and argue the toss with the likes of you…

#57612: — 01/12 at 09:58 AM

Me: There has to be at least a cursory check to make sure that the miracle reports we've seen so far fall into the patterns we've come to expect: weak hearsay, urban legends, etc.

Lurker: Knock yourself out, Mr. Ramsey. But some of us have better things to do. It’s like trying to investigate every UFO abduction report (a modern miracle story), just in case one of them turns out to be true.

That's why I said cursory check. There are a lot of quick checks that you can do that don't require any legwork: Is this hearsay? Is this similar to other reports that have been shown to be bogus? Those are easy to see at a glance. A UFO report that just circulates in the usual woo circles is same-old, same-old. One that makes it into the front page of the New York Times instead of the front page of the Weekly World News might be worth more of a look. For us to do those quick checks, however, a few people still have to do the legwork, such as professional debunkers like James Randi, or the critical biblical scholars, or the people who study urban legends.

#57615: — 01/12 at 10:10 AM

As soon as we're prepared to segregate holy claims from the natural world, we're also abandoning all reason.

Who said anything about "holy claims"? My point was that the claims of the Resurrection have a lot more in common with other supernatural claims, both from within Christianity and without, than they do with claims of a discovery of a rare but naturally occuring event.

#57620: — 01/12 at 10:43 AM
No antagonizing intended here Mr Ramsey. But do you do a cursory check every single time you've been alerted to someone claiming a miracle has occured? Do you think it even remotely possible that a miracle can occur?

I appreciate the work of Randi and CSICOP, but generally speaking, I personally don't need a cursory check. Does that make me arrogant or dogmatic or closed minded? If Randi retired in the investigating area, yet continued to speak to crowds...stating repeatedly that miracles don't occur... would that make him suddenly arrogant and dogmatic and closed minded?

Isn't there a point where we can just say enough is enough? And might that be where people like Richard Dawkins are now?

#57625: — 01/12 at 12:06 PM
To these friends, I would ask: If the Big Bang explains the origin of the universe, if you agree that the Earth formed 4.6 billion years ago by natural processes, and that all life forms including humans evolved over time, what is there left of any importance for a "creator" to have created?

1. an origin is not the same thing as an Ultimate Cause (which I believe is what most Christians would agree they mean by God).
2. In light of 1., the answer to your question is: everything.

However, having said that, it's quite possible most posters here have little or no use for philosophy.

In which case, take it or leave it.

#57637: — 01/12 at 02:33 PM
"No antagonizing intended here Mr Ramsey. But do you do a cursory check every single time you've been alerted to someone claiming a miracle has occured?"

The closest thing I've had to that recently is someone tell me that she's had things go as God told her they'd go, and when she mentioned that it took her longer than expected, one of my thoughts was that I was seeing confirmation bias in action.

So, yes, I'd say so. It just doesn't take much effort.

"Do you think it even remotely possible that a miracle can occur?"

"Miracles don't happen" is a conclusion resulting from inductive reasoning. No conclusion from inductive reasoning is 100% assured, period, so it is trivially true that a miracle is "remotely possible," just as it is remotely possible that the sun will suddenly explode in the next eight minutes. Realistic, no? But you asked about absolute probabilities, not plausible ones.

#57651: — 01/12 at 06:35 PM
There has been a couple of questionable statements on this thread:

"Now, science can prove that something isn't supernatural (at least to the rational observer), but it can't prove that something is supernatural."

It doesn't have to. This is a god of the gap argument.

Incidentally, there are many violations of validated physical laws that can only have supernatural origins, like causality, sum of probabilities, energy conservation et cetera. None has ever been observed.

"Arguing that a miracle can't happen because it is contrary natural law is begging the question."

No. If the theory is validated and understood there can be no violations. This is not a tautology, but a natural consequence of the concept of scientific theories.

"miracles are improbable, not impossible."

No. This is a philosophers view of the world. A scientist would say that it is impossible because:

1. There are no models, of gods for example, who can give you a probability for miracles. So the probability doesn't exist. (Usual frequentist probability, the only verifiable and indeed verified sort.)

2. There are no observations that allow you to conclude that the probability exists, and how to model it, see 1.

3. Even if you had input from other (natural) theories that would allow you to make assumptions of (supernatural) theories (and of course such relations can't exist), the huge amount of time with no miracles observed makes the frequencies so low that the models would not be realistic (physical). You can't verify the models, so they are not falsifiable.

Which of course all supernatural ideas are. Your assumption would make them falsifiable, thus no longer supernatural. Again, this is not a tautology, but a natural consequence of the concept of scientific theories.

"an Ultimate Cause"

This idea has been falsified a long time ago. There are plenty of cosmologies that has no need for 'a first cause', for example Hawkings 'no boundary proposal'. The existence of such realistic theories, even if no one are not proved to coincide with our universe, falsifies this religious/philosophical idea.

#57652: — 01/12 at 06:47 PM
I got too used to say no:

"even if no one are not proved to coincide with our universe" should of course be "even if no one are proved to coincide with our universe".

So, while I am back:
""Miracles don't happen" is a conclusion resulting from inductive reasoning."

This is of course wrong, for reasons I described above.

Incidentally, I really don't like the confusion of inductive reasoning witb the scientific method. Inductive reasoning is merely a tool to suggest hypotheses. You must close the gap to reality by making theories and try to falsify them. If you think otherwise you are stuck somewhere in the 18th or 19th century.

Whenever I see a philosophical reasoning applied on what could and should be science, I know the conclusion will be wrong. (By induction, of course.

#57661: Boeciana — 01/13 at 08:40 AM
Sirs,

To those demanding verified miracles: what about modern canonisation processes, where claimed miraculous healings are investigated by doctors etc and only acknowledged if no possible natural explanation (indeed, no possibility of a natural explanation) can be found? E.g., in the case of the miracle which led to St John Ogilvie's canonisation, there were eight or nine years of investigation into the healing of a Glaswegian man with advanced stomach cancer. Canonisation processes have been pretty rigorous about this sort of thing for the last 750 years or so.

#57667: — 01/13 at 12:06 PM
Boeciana, having never actually seen the paperwork involved in a canonization, I can't say for sure how the Church comes to the conclusion that a miracle has taken place, but I can say two things. One, the Church is starting from the premise that miracles do indeed happen and that they are not rare ocurrences. This I think instantly taints the process because everyone involved readily believes in miracles and has no problem reaching the conclusion that one has taken place. Two, just because science cannot explain something does not make it a miracle. The Heimlich maneuver would probably have qualified as a miracle 500 years ago, to say nothing of CPR and other medical practices that are commonplace today. And then there are the many unknown workings of the human body and mind. The mere suggestion to a sick person that there's people praying for him can have a placebo effect which science still cannot explain, but which has been documented. None of these "miracles" require a supernatural explanation, just a more scientific understanding of the world around us.

#57668: Boeciana — 01/13 at 01:21 PM
SergiPOE,

You are right that the Church assumes that miracles happen, but she does not assume that they are frequent - whence, e.g., (as Dawkins pointed out, although he failed to discern the implications) of the n-thousand claimed healings at Lourdes, only 66 have been declared miracles.

I do not think, however, that the Heimlich manoevre or CPR would have been considered to be miracles, because there is a clear physical cause and effect involved. Witchcraft, maybe, I suppose, but not miracles. Man filled with tumours waking up the next morning with none - that's trickier.

There is also the difficult question of whether a miracle may involve a natural mechanism set in motion (or accelerated) by a supernatural cause, or, well, not. Dunno, meself...

Pax et bonum!

#57669: — 01/13 at 02:31 PM
"an Ultimate Cause"

This idea has been falsified a long time ago. There are plenty of cosmologies that has no need for 'a first cause', for example Hawkings 'no boundary proposal'. The existence of such realistic theories, even if no one are not proved to coincide with our universe, falsifies this religious/philosophical idea.

Again, this is to interpret cause (as opposed to origin) in a purely physical sense. All of these cosmologies require pre-existing laws of physics. They do not explain themselves--and this is self-evident as you assume and implicitly refer to a specifics set of physical laws to posit the cosmology in the first place. In Hawking's example, general relativity.

#57676: — 01/14 at 08:28 AM

Torbjorn Larsson: No. If the theory is validated and understood there can be no violations.

What you are saying is that a scientific theory can never be falsified. This is nonsense. If you want nonfalsifiable propositions, look at math, not science.

This is not a tautology, but a natural consequence of the concept of scientific theories.

No, this just shows that you do not understand that science is inherently tentative.

"miracles are improbable, not impossible."

No. This is a philosophers view of the world. A scientist would say that it is impossible because:

1. There are no models, of gods for example, who can give you a probability for miracles. So the probability doesn't exist. (Usual frequentist probability, the only verifiable and indeed verified sort.)

This is the equivalent of saying that if the probability of something cannot be calculated, then it must be zero. This is completely wrong.

I really don't like the confusion of inductive reasoning witb the scientific method. Inductive reasoning is merely a tool to suggest hypotheses.

Nonsense. It is also a tool for further testing of them.

You must close the gap to reality by making theories and try to falsify them.

Which is using inductive reasoning to test hypotheses.

Of course, inductive reasoning is not the totality of the scientific method, but it is a large part of it, and its scope within science is far larger than you claim.

#57677: — 01/14 at 09:40 AM
Boeciana,

It may seem unfair to demand that natural causes is looked for first. But the reason we do that is beacuse in a tremendous amount of cases over a long period of time that has sufficed.

One can say that the system is now set up in a way that supernatural causes would need a tremendous amount of evidence . ('Extraordinary claims need extraordinary evidence' and all that.) But that follows from the above.

Imagine that we had somehow observed early on that a large amounts of events was caused by beings or phenomena living outside our universe, for example by breaking the energy constance in a certain way. Then we had had a much different type of science to deal with.

#57678: — 01/14 at 09:49 AM
John,

"All of these cosmologies require pre-existing laws of physics. They do not explain themselves--and this is self-evident as you assume and implicitly refer to a specifics set of physical laws to posit the cosmology in the first place."

I think you are confusing the physics with our way of doing physics here. These cosmologies contains the physics laws. If the laws are different, other and sometimes different cosmologies appear.

So the first cause is eliminated in the universa I dsicussed - there is no start of a causal chain that you can point at and say "There it all starts!". That is as close as I can describe how they work since I am no expert.

#57679: — 01/14 at 10:36 AM

Torbjorn Larsson: It may seem unfair to demand that natural causes is looked for first. But the reason we do that is beacuse in a tremendous amount of cases over a long period of time that has sufficed.

This is a very good point. It is also an example of inductive reasoning.

Still think "inductive reasoning is merely a tool to suggest hypotheses"?

#57680: — 01/14 at 10:48 AM
J,

"What you are saying is that a scientific theory can never be falsified. This is nonsense." "No, this just shows that you do not understand that science is inherently tentative."

No. You were discussing well established consequences of theories ('laws'). Things like energy conservation or lorentz invariance will never be falsified.

New theories must make predictions that can be falsified, of course - they are tentative, as well as new observations that hasn't been verified. There is indeed no guarantee that an established theory will not be falsified some day. Established theories are merely extremely unlikely to be falsified.

"This is the equivalent of saying that if the probability of something cannot be calculated, then it must be zero. This is completely wrong."

The probability isn't zero, it doesn't exist.

The probability I speak of is the frequentist probability. It is a requirement for that probability to have a model (or observations, but we are not discussing them yet) to base the existence on. If you don't have that (or observations) you can't predict that there are such a probability. One can't take it for granted, as you do.

"Nonsense. It is also a tool for further testing of them. ""You must close the gap to reality by making theories and try to falsify them."" Which is using inductive reasoning to test hypotheses."

As you say, this is nonsense. And it is what I mean by the confusion. You can't prove that all swans are white by starting to observe swans outside your window. However exhaustive you try to be there you can't observe all swans - even if you can start claiming they are the only type of swans right outside your window.

What you must do is to see if there are some way of falsifying your sassumption. Yes, you can observe a colored swan. How do you do this? Well, perhaps colors are the same over entire populations? At least, this is the simplest falsification test to start with.

You start to survey different populations all over the world by looking at a few from each. And you will find black swans (in China, I believe) which falsifies your theory.

Note that the theory was proposed by induction from limited observations, while the falsification test was performed by limited observations together with a reasonable test hypothesis.

#57681: — 01/14 at 10:54 AM
"It is also an example of inductive reasoning."

No. We don't say that it will ever suffice. What we say is that the scientific method as applied to natural causes has been enough so far, and that we will continue to think so until that assumption is falsified. Again, confusing induction with falsification.

#57682: — 01/14 at 07:58 PM

Me: This is the equivalent of saying that if the probability of something cannot be calculated, then it must be zero. This is completely wrong.

Torbjorn Larsson: The probability isn't zero, it doesn't exist.

The probability I speak of is the frequentist probability.

Except that you wrote this:

A scientist would say that it is impossible because:

1. There are no models, of gods for example, who can give you a probability for miracles. So the probability doesn't exist. (Usual frequentist probability, the only verifiable and indeed verified sort.)

Boiling this down means that you regard something as impossible if its probability cannot be expressed as a frequentist probability. Now as you said, if the problem cannot be expressed in frequentist form, the frequentist probability doesn't exist. However, to say that something is impossible means that the probability of it happening is zero, even if the probability cannot be expressed as a frequentist probability. For example, the probability of the proposition "0 = 1" exists, and it is zero, period. So then, if I substitute that proposition into the proposition "Something is impossible if its probability cannot be expressed as a frequentist probability," then I get "The probability of something is zero if its probability cannot be expressed as a frequentist probability." Earlier, I loosely expressed this result as "If the probability of something cannot be calculated, then it must be zero." Even in a more carefully expressed form, the result is still wrong.

This may not be what you think you concluded, but the only way I can see you avoiding that conclusion is if you are using "impossible" in a looser sense to mean having a negligible probability rather than a probability of exactly zero.

You can't prove that all swans are white by starting to observe swans outside your window. However exhaustive you try to be there you can't observe all swans - even if you can start claiming they are the only type of swans right outside your window.

What you must do is to see if there are some way of falsifying your assumption. Yes, you can observe a colored swan. How do you do this? Well, perhaps colors are the same over entire populations? At least, this is the simplest falsification test to start with.

Agreed. And this leads to my point. A statement like "Miracles don't happen" is much like the statement "All swans are white," in that it can be absolutely refuted by one counterexample, but never confirmed completely. The only way to test the proposition "Miracles don't happen" is to see if one can find a miracle, which is essentially what someone like James Randi does.

What we say is that the scientific method as applied to natural causes has been enough so far, and that we will continue to think so until that assumption is falsified. Again, confusing induction with falsification.

There is no confusion. Obviously, inductive reasoning and falsification are not the same, but they go hand-in-hand. Conclusions based on inductive reasoning are falsifiable, and one tests if they continue to hold true by attempting to falsify them. As the attempted falsifications fail, the evidence for the conclusion mounts, and other observers can look at the amounted evidence and use inductive reasoning to come to the same conclusion.

#57698: — 01/28 at 03:35 PM
I have missed to answer this. The discussion is cold, but for posterity:

"This may not be what you think you concluded, but the only way I can see you avoiding that conclusion is if you are using "impossible" in a looser sense to mean having a negligible probability rather than a probability of exactly zero."

As I said earlier, what it means is that if you don't have that it takes to predict a frequentist probability (or observations to do so) you can't predict that there are such a probability. One can't take it for granted, as you do. It's parsimonious too, but that is a coincidence.

What it means is that you must _first_ observe something to conclude that it's possible - everything can't happen. If it's not a possible event from an existing theory, of course, but when you _can_ predict a frequentist probability.

"As the attempted falsifications fail, the evidence for the conclusion mounts, and other observers can look at the amounted evidence and use inductive reasoning to come to the same conclusion."

That is completely backwards as an effect of your confusion and conflation of inductive reasoning and the scientific method!

No one use inductive reasoning to verify or falsify hypotheses. In fact, you can't do it that way.

You say it yourself, the induction suggests some hypotheses. One goes on to use the scientific method to verify/falsify them aposteriori. The verification/falsification are the test that says something about reality, while induction is a purely hypothetical conclusion from some preexisting data.

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Tuesday, January 10, 2006

In which I envy the British

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