PZ Myers, renowned athe­ist, God-​​hater and evilu­tion­ist, get­ting involved in a reli­gious war.

It’s still a couple of months before this years ceph­alo­pod­mas, but already my hopes are raised that this may be the year the Great Cthulhu stirs from his ancient slum­ber to con­sume us all. See; he sends forth his min­ions from the depths to strike fear into the very hearts of men.

One thing I’m not clear on though; is it still an octopus? ;)

PZ posts a pic­ture of a ceph­alo­pod every Fri­day and, given my obses­sion with the order, it’s a con­stant battle for me not just to mir­ror those posts every week, but I res­ist; after all, if people really want to see pic­tures of ceph­alo­pods every Fri­day, they prob­ably already read his site.

This week I just couldn’t res­ist though. Just look at him:

This might just be as cute as the ceph­alokit­ten. And I don’t say that lightly.

Both PZ Myers and Richard Dawkins have been scammed into giv­ing inter­views for a cre­ation­ist pro­pa­ganda movie. When they were approached, the movie was appar­ently titled Cross­roads, and had the fol­low­ing synopsis

It’s been the cent­ral ques­tion of human­ity through­out the ages: How in the world did we get here? In 1859 Charles Dar­win provided the answer in his land­mark book, “The Ori­gin of Spe­cies.” In the cen­tury and a half since, bio­lo­gists, geo­lo­gists, phys­i­cists, astro­nomers and philo­soph­ers have con­trib­uted a vast amount of research and data in sup­port of Darwin’s idea. And yet, mil­lions of Chris­ti­ans, Muslims, Jews and other people of faith believe in a lit­eral inter­pret­a­tion that humans were craf­ted by the hand of God. This con­flict between sci­ence and reli­gion has unleashed pas­sions in school board meet­ings, courtrooms and town halls across Amer­ica and beyond.

Now that the movie is ready for release we dis­cover that it’s actu­ally titled Expelled: No Intel­li­gence Allowed and that it’s the usual reli­gious attack on sci­ence, com­bined with the now famil­iar claim that the only reason any­one believes in “Dar­win­ism” is that there’s some secret police force root­ing out the dis­sent­ers and ruin­ing their careers before they can speak out:

Unlike some other doc­u­ment­ary films, Expelled doesn’t just talk to people rep­res­ent­ing one side of the story. The film con­fronts sci­ent­ists such as Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delu­sion, influ­en­tial bio­lo­gist and athe­ist blog­ger PZ Myers and Eugenie Scott, head of the National Cen­ter for Sci­ence Edu­ca­tion. The cre­at­ors of Expelled crossed the globe over a two-​​year period, inter­view­ing scores of sci­ent­ists, doc­tors, philo­soph­ers and pub­lic lead­ers. The res­ult is a start­ling rev­el­a­tion that free­dom of thought and free­dom of inquiry have been expelled from publicly-​​funded high schools, uni­ver­sit­ies and research institutions.

What’s the bet­ting that their claim to not just rep­res­ent one side of the story isn’t entirely accur­ate? The way they got inter­views with at least two of their enemies doesn’t exactly demon­strate a com­mit­ment to the truth.

PZ expresses sur­prise that they felt the need to lie to him to get the inter­view; after all, he’s not exactly known for being shy about arguing with the faith­ful. I’m temp­ted to sug­gest that the cre­ation­ists, and espe­cially their well oiled PR machine, have got so used to lying whenever sci­ence is so much as men­tioned, that they just for­got there was any other way to com­mu­nic­ate. Actu­ally, though, I sus­pect they had good reas­ons to lie. PZ might have been will­ing to show up if he’d known the real reason for the inter­view, but he’d also have been much less will­ing to be led in the inter­view, much more on his guard and much less likely to acci­dent­ally say some­thing that could be used to make him look bad. But quite aside from that, I just don’t think PZ was their main event. It’s no insult to the man — reg­u­lar read­ers will know I have noth­ing but respect for him — but to the cre­ation­ists he’s a bonus item; they were after Dawkins, who’s well known for not debat­ing, or giv­ing inter­views to creationists.

It’ll be inter­est­ing to see what the movie’s like; I doubt it’ll get a cinema release in the UK, but I’m sure I’ll man­age to track it down some­how. I don’t hold out any hope that any of the sci­ent­ists’ inter­views will have been used com­plete, and the under­hand method they used to to get them doesn’t allow me to believe that even the spirit of what they said will be left intact, but it might at least be good com­edy to see just how ter­ribly their words have been twisted.

I don’t often dis­agree with him, but I thought PZ over­re­acted a bit to this art­icle at the Guard­ian. All it really seems to be say­ing is that Athe­ism is becom­ing a cul­tural phe­nom­ena in much the same way that some reli­gions have in the last 20 years, which while so obvi­ous as to not need say­ing, is actu­ally true. As far as I can see there is no sug­ges­tion that athe­ism is a reli­gion in any tech­nical sense or that it has no more claim to ration­al­ity than one; the dis­cus­sion is restric­ted to ana­lys­ing it as soci­olo­gical phe­nom­ena (or actu­ally sug­gest­ing that such ana­lysis should be done.) Of course athe­ists are a diverse, inde­pend­ent lot, and don’t like to be lumped together as a “move­ment” if they can help it (I cer­tainly don’t con­sider myself to be part of one,) but it is undeni­able that cer­tain athe­ists (Dawkins included) are try­ing to get the “mes­sage” out, and in doing so, they’re bound to attract this kind of com­par­ison with reli­gious people doing the same thing, even though the “mes­sage” in ques­tion doesn’t bear com­par­ison in the same way.

So while, I thought the art­icle was fairly harm­less, and even slightly inter­est­ing, the com­ments were a dif­fer­ent mat­ter. The very first one is… well, hard to describe; it’s like a brain dump of someone who’s des­per­ate to believe in some­thing, any­thing bey­ond the mater­i­al­istic world­view, but doesn’t really under­stand the argu­ments, so he just spews out as many as he can fit in a single com­ment, in the hope that one of them is con­vin­cing. Need­less to say, he doesn’t suc­ceed. Nor­mally, I try to avoid fisk­ing because it makes me feel nit-​​picky; I’d rather address the sub­stance of someone’s argu­ment or pos­i­tion, than hope that knock­ing enough little holes in it will have the same effect. But, in this case, I hon­estly, don’t think there is any sub­stance to the argu­ment, so I’m going to just go ahead and deal with the points one by one as they were spewed out onto the page.

When you think of the great and var­ied minds pos­sessed by the like of Plato, Augustine, Coper­ni­cus, Shakespeare, New­ton, Picasso, Ein­stein, and then you com­pare them with the shrill and ‘aggress­ive’ voice of Richard Dawkins in his book The God Delu­sion you cant help think­ing of a poor man’s Mr Spock: the cold absence of intu­ition; the dic­tat­or­ship of a crude intel­lect over the greater arts of consciousness.

Ah — the old ad-​​hominem attack; “I don’t like his tone of voice, there­fore he must be wrong. Or at least unen­lightened. Or, well, some­how inferior to actual clever people.” And then a cri­ti­cism of Dawkin’s use of reason to answer hard ques­tions. What’s so wrong with the absence of intu­ition? Why on earth would we expect intu­ition to be of any use at all in determ­in­ing the nature of the uni­verse. People can’t even accur­ately pre­dict the tra­ject­ory of pro­jectiles with intu­ition alone, so let’s not pre­tend that it’s some sort of pan­acea to our under­stand­ing of the Uni­verse. Oh, and “the greater arts of con­scious­ness”? What the hell is that sup­posed to mean? Really? Because if you’re sug­gest­ing that there’s a bet­ter way to under­stand how the uni­verse func­tions than rational thought and sci­entific explor­a­tion, then you’d bet­ter have more to back it up than some fancy, arm-​​wavy turn of phrase.

The intu­it­ive genius con­tained in the like of the Inuit, Kala­hari Bush­men, the Cogi of South Amer­ica — the great Nat­ive Amer­ican elder Fools Crow (now sadly deceased). If Richard Dawkins were to look with more sci­entific neut­ral­ity at this phe­nom­ena, and not approach received reli­gion with his pre-​​judged half way house under­stand­ing of the greater phe­nom­ena behind it, he might settle for that less extreme pos­i­tion of agnosti­cism pending fur­ther exploration.

“Intu­it­ive genius”? More ambigu­ous arm-​​waving. Yes, the cul­tures he lists have amaz­ing sur­vival skills in very chal­len­ging envir­on­ments, but those skills are only “intu­it­ive” in so far as they’re not sci­entific; they’re still learned skills. Baby Bush­men don’t spring from the womb mira­cu­lously able to track anim­als in ways that first-​​world minds find utterly incom­pre­hens­ible, they learn to do it, because their entire cul­ture is built around those skills. Now, tell me why we should assume that because someone has learned to be a phe­nom­enal tracker, we should give extra weight to their views on the uni­verse? Did they dis­cover elec­tri­city? EM radi­ation? Get to the moon? Does their “intu­it­ive genius” grant them the abil­ity to treat tuber­cu­losis? No. These people are undoubtedly very skilled, but those skills give them pre­cisely no insight into the nature of the Universe.

I’m not going to go into that “less extreme pos­i­tion of agnosti­cism pending fur­ther explor­a­tion” argu­ment again. Look through the last couple of week’s archives. Suf­fice it to say, there’s no reason to believe in God, so I don’t believe in God, so I’m an athe­ist. Show me evid­ence, and I might change my mind.

60% of cut­ting edge sci­ent­ists per­sist in fail­ing to cat­egor­ise them­selves as athe­ist at all. Where 40% might choose to fol­low his lead, another 40% con­fess to a faith not at all at odds with the find­ing of phys­ics, bio-​​chemistry or cos­mo­logy. This ratio remains largely unchal­lenged over the past 100 years. The con­clu­sion from sci­ence is clear; in no way can it be said it debunks the ‘spir­itual’ mind.

“Lots of clever people believe it, so it must be true.” You really call that an argument?

In fact there are sig­ni­fic­ant prob­lems with any such claim, and they spring first and fore­most from cos­mo­logy: take the small but unavoid­able mat­ter of the cos­mic con­stant and the uncan­nily pres­ci­ent anthropic principles.

Back­wards think­ing. Of course we’re a “good fit” to the Uni­verse, we arose and evolved within it. To argue that the Uni­verse must have been designed to give rise to us, pre­sup­poses that we were the desired res­ult, to then argue that we must have been the desired res­ult because the Uni­verse is designed for us is cir­cu­lar reasoning.

And not least from bio-​​chemistry — we have yet to suc­cess­fully com­puter model the emer­gence of life on Earth from their ini­tial build­ing blocks without some form of ‘inform­at­ive infla­tion’ hypothesis.

God of the Gaps. Do you prom­ise that when we do suc­cess­fully com­puter model the emer­gence of life on Earth from their ini­tial build­ing blocks, you’ll shut up? Or do you plan on find­ing some­thing else we can’t yet explain scientifically?

This pos­its an equally mys­ter­i­ous ‘self organ­isa­tion’ as the only means for mat­ter to over­come the 2^nd Law of Ther­mo­dy­nam­ics in order to kick start evol­u­tion. Indeed this is not unlike Plato’s ideal ‘desir­ing’ some kind of ‘rep­lic­a­tion’ of poten­tial form.

It’s been said before; if you think abio­gen­esis viol­ates the 2^nd law of ther­mo­dy­nam­ics, then you don’t under­stand the 2^nd law of ther­mo­dy­nam­ics. The 2^nd law of ther­mo­dy­nam­ics says that heat will not flow from colder body to a hot­ter one. How does that have any­thing to do with the ori­gin of life?

So in a sense when Richard Dawkins strays from his per­sonal remit of min­im­al­ist ‘sci­ence pop­ular­iser’ onto the time hon­oured ter­rit­ory of meta­phys­ics it is faintly remin­is­cent of that Edward Wood­ward char­ac­ter in 70’s hor­ror clas­sic The Wicker Man. Like Ser­geant Neil Howie, Richard Dawkins fairly blun­ders around the realm of intu­ition totally obli­vi­ous to what is tak­ing place around him. While there may be no unsa­voury res­ol­u­tion implied there is per­haps a strong implic­a­tion of Bob Dylan’s Bal­lad of a Thin Man, to para­phrase: ‘some­thing is hap­pen­ing there, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr Spock.’

Or, to para­phrase in a slightly dif­fer­ent way; “There’s more to life than you know, and you look fool­ish for not see­ing it, but I’m not going to give you any spe­cif­ics, because if you can’t already see it, you’re too fool­ish to under­stand any­way.” Or, to put it another way; “The Emper­ors new clothes sure do look nice.”

PS: For any­one who has read Dawkin’s The God Delu­sion, in the spirit of fair play, might do well to also read Alistaire McGrath’s more meas­ured reply The Dawkin’s Delusion.

Read it. Thought it was a load of uncon­vin­cing drivel, that amoun­ted to noth­ing more than “You’re not a uni­corno­lo­gist, so you can’t tell me there’s no such thing as uni­corns, and any­way, you can’t prove there’s no such thing as uni­corns, so stop not believ­ing in them.”

Actu­ally, hav­ing just been through that again, I notice a lot of use of the word “intu­ition.” That smacks of post-​​modernism and their ridicu­lous “other ways of know­ing”. I guess I should never have expec­ted any­thing sensible.

Fun­da­ment­al­ists: believe 2+2 =5 because It Is Writ­ten. Some­where. They have a lot of trouble on their tax returns.

“Mod­er­ate” believ­ers: live their lives on the basis that 2+2=4. but go reg­u­larly to church to be told that 2+2 once made 5, or will one day make 5, or in a very real and spir­itual sense should make 5.

“Mod­er­ate” athe­ists: know that 2+2 =4 but think it impol­ite to say so too loudly as people who think 2+2=5 might be offended.

“Mil­it­ant” athe­ists: “Oh for pity’s sake. HERE. Two pebbles. Two more pebbles. FOUR pebbles. What is WRONG with you people?”

(props to Stephen Wells.)

Ori­gin­ally pos­ted at The Prim­ate Diar­ies, and linked to from Pharyn­gua.

PZ has stepped up to the plate, with a numbered list of Christianity’s sins against sci­ence. The one that sticks in my throat the most from his list (although they all more or less get to me,) is his num­ber 1, theft:

Athe­ists know this one on a daily basis: Tor­nado demol­ishes home, tear­ful sur­vivor comes before news cam­eras and “thanks God” that she was spared. Foot­ball player scores goal, drops to knees and praises god for his touch­down. Can­cer patient goes into remis­sion, lies in bed sur­roun­ded by his expens­ive, highly trained med­ical team, calls it a mir­acle. What reli­gion does is steal human accom­plish­ment and bestows it on a fickle ima­gin­ary being. Mod­ern medi­cine is not a product of reli­gion, it’s the highly refined out­come of years of empir­ical sci­ence, yet people still babble about mir­acles and prayers.

It’s not so much a sin against sci­ence as it is a sin against human­ity. Sure med­ical sci­ence is an area of human achieve­ment that is often appro­pri­ated by the reli­gious as a mir­acle, but it’s far from the only one; works of art, strength of will, even basic kind­ness are fre­quently spoken of as though they come dir­ectly from God rather than the actual per­son or people involved in the act. A corol­lary to this is a sin that PZ missed (pre­sum­ably because it doesn’t really apply to science):

guilt: Not only does reli­gion take credit for all of it’s adher­ents suc­cesses, but it pushes all the respons­ib­il­ity for their fail­ures right back onto them (not for­get­ting the fail­ures of their all ancest­ors, ever). How many sports­men do you hear cri­ti­cising God for not giv­ing them the skill or determ­in­a­tion to score a win­ning goal when they’ve lost? How many down-​​and-​​outs curse God for not turn­ing their life around and giv­ing them the drive to make some­thing of them­selves? None. Of all the fea­tures of Chris­tian­ity, it’s that utterly unequal (and after the fact) appor­tion­ing of blame and credit that angers me the most.

As a (some­what) aside, Mike The Mad Bio­lo­gist has an inter­est­ing point by point response to PZ from the per­spect­ive of his own beliefs, which is well worth a look. I do, how­ever want to take issue with his example of “good faith”:

Most move­ments that have led to pro­found change were not for­gone con­clu­sions, and require incred­ible faith – that is, an irra­tional belief that right would will out in the face of extens­ive oppres­sion – to sus­tain them (e.g., the civil rights move­ment). In ret­ro­spect, many such move­ments appear inev­it­able, but it cer­tainly didn’t look that way to those engaged in those move­ments at the time. So, some ‘faiths’ are not bad.

If change was not a fore­gone con­clu­sion — and I’m inclined to agree — if it didn’t look inev­it­able at the time, then I don’t see how you can talk about those people as hav­ing faith that right would out. It seems to me that they had was hope that they could over­come the odds and a con­vic­tion that it was worth put­ting it all on the line in the attempt. In fact surely, if they had faith that right would out, then they’d have been less inclined to make a stand; why risk everything when you have faith that things will turn out OK? No — what those embattled agents of social change had is the oppos­ite of faith: they had the know­ledge that things wouldn’t just turn out alright, and that it takes the voice and the actions and the sac­ri­fice — some­times the ulti­mate sac­ri­fice — of people of con­vic­tion to even stand a chance of chan­ging the world for the better.