Hokum-Balderdash Assay

Been having technical problems with my blogspirit.com blog for months now. Been wasting too much time trying to get blog entries uploaded and formatted correctly so I've moved ... reluctantly. Experimented with blog.com but like a point and shoot instamatic it just doesn't offer bloggers enough controls. Not that I've explored various other blog hosts, but blogger.com certainly has more manual controls to fine tune the blog. As with blogspirit it offers the blogger full html and css control of the blog skins. That's one of the clinchers. Downside: no blog categories option.

So it's going to be hokum-balderdash.blogspot.com from today onwards.

We don't know and will never know if indeed God punished Sharon by giving him a stroke, but we certainly know that Israel is punishing Robertson for saying it:

Israel is pulling out of a $50 million deal with US TV evangelist Pat Robertson after he said Ariel Sharon's stroke was divine retribution.

...

Mr Robertson was leading a group of evangelical Christians hoping to build the Galilee World Heritage Park.

The centre was expected to cover nearly 35 acres (14 hectares) north-east of the Mount of Beatitudes, where Jesus is believed to have delivered the Sermon on the Mount.

Pat never learns, does he?

In some town in California a handful of parents with the help of Americans United for Separation of Church and State just sued a school for teaching what amounts to creationism. Reading that the school is labeling the class philosophy and not science, I thought the case may not have much chance in prospering, and that the parents and Americans United were too quick on the trigger, perhaps emboldened and inspired by the recent victory in Dover. But after reading the following I say the parents should carry on and raise hell in Frazier Mountain High.

An initial course description sent to parents in December said it would examine "evolution as a theory and will discuss the scientific, biological and Biblical aspects that suggest why Darwin's philosophy is not rock solid."

Pray tell, what is "Darwin's philosophy"? And how do they understand and use "theory" and "scientific"? Are they fallaciously equating evolution the science with a certain philosophy, say, materialism or Social Darwinism?

I'd really like to know who wrote that course description and where the nearest electroconvulsive therapy center is. Perhaps Ms. Lemburg can help me with this.

Looks like OTC cough syrups may just be a waste of money:

Over-the-counter cough syrups generally contain drugs in too low a dose to be effective, or contain combinations of drugs that have never been proven to treat coughs, said Dr. Richard Irwin, chairman of a cough guidelines committee for the American College of Chest Physicians.

...

'[T]he best studies that we have to date would suggest there's not a lot of justification for using these medications because they haven't been shown to work," said Irwin, a professor of medicine at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester, Mass.

I'd offer my personal anecdotes to vouch for that, but critical thinkers out there would lynch me. Yes, yes, yes. Confirmation bias, selective recall, lack of controls, etc., etc.

The Consumer Healthcare Products Association, a trade group for makers of over-the-counter medications, disputed the guidelines and said over-the-counter cough medicines provide relief to millions of people each year.

I sure hope they have good studies to support that claim. I'd like to know how much more effective these various cough relief medications are over sugar syrup (strawberry-flavored please).

Dextromethorphan is in Robitussin, a top-selling over-the-counter cough syrup. It is among Robitussin ingredients that the Food and Drug Administration has found to be safe and effective, said Francis Sullivan, a spokesman for Wyeth Consumer Healthcare, which makes Robitussin.

Sullivan said Robitussin “wouldn't be a top brand if people didn't feel it was efficacious.”

Oh! So this is the way Wyeth determines the efficacy of their OTCs--compare sales figures. Well, while they're at it, why not use testimonials as a gauge as well.

I don't hear Sullivan stating, much less emphasizing, that the level of dextromethorphan in Robitussin has been found to be effective. Can he please address that issue? Of course, Wyeth can, instead, highlight the "safe" part. How about reducing the amount of the active ingredient so they can claim it to be safer than ever? Are those homeopaths I hear in the distance?

As a college student some 15 years ago Lauren Becker worked during summers as a ranger in a state park in the Bible Belt. During the guided tours she would take the hikers down to the base of a 256-foot waterfall--the main attraction of the park. She would then tell them, among other things, that the rocks they were standing on are 300 million years old.

Although Lauren had heard that there were people who believed the earth is only 6,000 years old, she'd never actually met any. It was during her stint at the park that she finally came face-to-face with young earth creationists. And not a few of them. For instance, whenever she would talk of the age of the rocks, some mothers would try to prevent their children from hearing about the facts. During one hike a man actually argued that the rocks were only a few thousand years old and the only reason we think they're millions of years old is that the Devil made them look that way to make humans turn away from God!

You can listen to Lauren Becker's story by downloading the December 30 2005 Point of Inquiry podcast. It is a most enjoyable piece and I highly recommend it. (The MP3 file is around 38Mb. Becker's segment is around 10 minutes long, while the entire podcast runs 55 minutes.)

Here are excerpts:

A 300-million-year old rock is the answer resulting from decades of observation, research, field study, laboratory testing, comparative studies, and critical thinking. A 6,000-year old rock is the answer because God said so.

...

The lack of a deity is not an opening for chaos; it is a call for responsibility.... Our species has continuously found meaning, purpose, and comfort in the idea of God or gods. Unfortunately, if we want to know what is actually going on--and our survival depends on understanding reality--religion is utterly bereft of explanatory power....

The discovery that a rock is 300 million years old is the result of lots of questions by lots of people who devise lots of different ways to ask the earth about itself. Much to our delight she is talking. Science is how we listen and the scientific method is how we understand what she says. To deny that a rock is 300 million years old is to deny the process that got us to that understanding. Since this process of inquiry is our best tool for succeeding in the world its denial is a grave threat to our future prosperity. Far from making us stronger faith cripples us because it takes away our greatest advantage--our ability to question, to learn, to adapt, and therefore to live.

(Lauren Becker is a Point of Inquiry contributor and Assistant Public Relations Director for CSICOP.)


Science leads to reliable knowledge because it does not claim to possess absolute knowledge of the world, is based on systematic observation of the world and rigorous testing of claims/hypotheses, and is self-correcting. Unlike religion, science does not delude itself about the understanding it gleans and possesses. This is one of its greatest strength. This is one reason it has been so successful.

On the other hand, rather than being founded on the principle of tentativeness of understanding¹, the search for better and more detailed understanding, and self-correction, most religions are absolutist and dogmatic in character. And as for their supernatural beliefs/explanations, they are untestable. Hence, they can only remain unverified and unverifiable extraordinary claims. Moreover, since the supernatural by definition is not constrained by natural laws people can make the most ludicrious of appeals to the supernatural, people can attribute anything that they cannot understand (even things that they believe are impossible in this world) to the supernatural and make the supernatural cause practically anything they fancy (An aside: Can deities make a round square? Or create married bachelors? Or commit suicide? Can a deity create entities that supersede itself in all aspects, thus creating beings greater than itself? If not then what does omnipotence mean exactly? If God is constrained by, for instance, logic, then there are limitations to a deity's powers. But what then are the implications of the existence of such restrictions?).

If an explanation is valid/correct, then it has the power to predict. Scientific explanations provide deterministic and stochastic predictions. Indeed scientific theories would be useless (and untestable) if they had no predictive power. Supernatural explanations, on the other hand, cannot be tested and don't predict anything. Becker rightly declares that supernaturalism is "bereft of explanatory power." Pat Robertson can declare that if the Christian deity gets pissed with some person--as in Ariel Sharon--then He will in his infiinte wisdom gift him with a stroke or heart attack. Problem is, how can you predict (and test) this if we have no way of knowing God's emotional state or whether the supernatural exists in the first place? What use is the explanation that person K was cured because supplications had been answered by the supernatural, when failure to get well despite a barrage of prayers are explained away with the rationalization that God sometimes refuses to accede to our prayers because he knows what's best? With all bases covered the claim that prayer works is nonfalsifiable.

One of the worst and yet common pitfalls in supernaturalistic thinking is that of producing ad hoc explanations--rationalizations that cannot be tested/falsified. Thus, during the short-lived elation over the supposed survival of 12 American miners a number of people attributed their survival to the supernatural. How did they know that? They didn't; they merely believed. For in order to know one must have good evidence/reasons to support one's belief. I am actually tempted to go all the way and declare that all supernatural explanations are ad hoc explanations.

In the world we live in supernaturalistic explanations are completely devoid of utility in understanding and predicting processes and events. They are merely superstitious beliefs or palliatives that provide a false sense of understanding--and it is false because those who propose and believe them have no way of confirming whether these explanations are in fact right or wrong.

Notes:

1. Michael Ruse, "Creation-Science Is Not Science," Philosophy of Science: The Central Issues, ed. Martin Curd & J.A. Cover, NY: W.W. Norton, 1998, p. 40

Was reading a Live Science article when I noticed the following advert on their page:

Ironic. Pathetic.

(PS. The ad may or may not be there if you visit the page. Keep reloading the page and it might surface.)

 

If you haven't been tuning in to Point of Inquiry yet maybe you should. The MP3 files take forever to download with dial-up but certainly worth the wait.

Professor Don Howard in the December 2005 Physics Today article "Albert Einstein as a Philosopher of Science" shows how the scientist who revolutionized physics in the 20th century had extolled philosophy, how Einstein had deemed it important to science, and how he had steeped himself in the philosophy of science.

I don't know about you but 616 just doesn't have the same fear factor as 666.

While many Bible have footnotes saying the number translated from the original Greek could be 616, experts say new photographic evidence of an ancient fragment of papyrus from Revelation indeed indicates the number is indeed 616, instead of 666.

Skeptico asks, "Why does science exclude the supernatural?" As he rightly points out one very important reason is the nontestable/nonfalsifiable character of supernatural claims. We have already heard philosopher Barbara Forrest comment on this matter:

Any claim that depends on the supernatural ... is not falsifiable. [I]n science whatever claim you make has to be grounded in empirical evidence and you have to at least in principle know what kind of disconfirmation would show your theory to be wrong.... And so any position that's grounded in faith and the supernatural is one that by definition not falsifiable.

Geologist Arthur Strahler explains why the supernatural is outside the purview of science:

Religious tenets, which usually involve belief in supernatural entities, are ... beyond the limits of scientific appraisal.

[S]upernatural forces, if they can be said to exist, cannot be observed, measured, or recorded by the procedures of science--that's simply what the word "supernatural" means. There can be no limit to the kinds and shapes of supernatural forces and forms the human mind is capable of conjuring up "from nowhere." Scientists therefore have no alternative but to ignore the claims of the existence of supernatural forces and causes. This exclusion is a basic position that must be stoutly adhered to by scientists or their entire system of evaluating and processing information will collapse. (Arthur N. Strahler, Understanding Science: An Introduction to Concepts and Issues, Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992, p. 13-14)

To get technical about it, science must exclude the supernatural because at its very foundation "science is committed to methodological naturalism (MN)," a position which "does not deny the existence of supernatural entities per se" but "simply assumes for the purpose of inquiry that they do not exist." In the same essay philosopher Michael Martin concludes that science's commitment to MN is warranted because it does not block inquiry, it is not a science-stopper unlike supernatural explanations. (Justifying Methodological Naturalism) 

Coincidentally, Unscrewing the Inscrutable has cogent things to say about MN:

The reason that scientists use MN when they are performing science is quite simply because it works. MN assumes that the natural world is all there is, then observes it and constructs hypotheses and theories that attempt to describe how a given naturally-observed phenomenon works. This is not to say that since MN presupposes a natural world, that there is no supernatural world. The question of whether or not a supernatural world exists just isn't ever addressed by MN. It can't be. That's why it's called "methodological naturalism" and not "methodological supernaturalism".

Intelligently Designed we are not. There are way too many flaws that riddle our physiology. So David Smillie muses maybe we've been Incompetently Designed or Infernally Designed. Or perhaps Incompletely Designed?

There is a third possibility that comes to mind. ID could stand for Incomplete Design. What if the Designer is just beta-testing us to identify the bugs before rolling out Homo sapiens 2.0? Sure, we have lives that are nasty, brutish and short, but the designer doesn't really care and we have to muddle through so He can come up with something better for the next roll-out. And we're powerless to complain, because the Designer has a monopoly. I call this the "God as Microsoft" option.

 

 
And Noah's Flood was in fact a Ctrl-Alt-Delete.  

Biologist PZ Myers' thoughts on science and religion:

It is self-evident that scientists are not necessarily derisive of religion, and also that science as an abstract concept can't be derisive at all. However, I do think that the processes of science are antithetical to the processes of religion-—personal revelation and dogma are not accepted forms of evidence in the sciences-—and that people can encompass both clashing ideas is nothing but a testimony to the flexibility of the human mind, which has no problem partitioning and embracing many contradictions. There are also many scientists who are capable of suspending disbelief and reading fantasy novels with pleasure; that doesn't mean that magic is a valid way of manipulating the world.

I really think we (not me, of course, but the general "we" of all of us ladies and gentlemen fighting creationism) go too far in trying to present science as compatible and even friendly to religion. It's not. The whole philosophy of critical thinking and demanding reproducible evidence arms its proponents with a wicked sharp knife that is all too easily applied to religious beliefs, which rely entirely on credulity. While individuals may be happy to sheathe that knife during the church service, filling the pews with ranks of critical individuals while preaching absurdities is a risky business. Why do you think I can't go to church? It's because I'm sitting there with a demanding and hair-trigger critical faculty, thinking "baloney!" at almost every platitude from the preacher, struggling against the urge to stand up and shout "Show me the evidence!" at the pulpit. Even if I keep that urge in control, it's not a comfortable time. The religious know that a well-educated populace with a good background in science would mean church attendance would fade away, especially for the more stridently evangelical/fundamentalist (AKA "insane") sects.

Myers' points are well taken. On the matter of critical thinking and religion, however, I will split hairs and instead of "religion" I would further focus the critique by saying that what really does not and has not stood up to critical/skeptical inquiry is supernaturalism/theism. Societies throughout history have posited deities and imagined various types of realms beyond the natural world, but there has not, through the millennia, been any evidence for these claims. Though hundreds/thousands of supernatural entities and any number of supernatural scenarios have been proferred various peoples through the entire history of humanity, the evidence that will vindicate the religionists--those who believe their claims are indeed factual--has not been presented nor discovered. Moreover, the supernatural (as with Flying Macaroni Beasties) is an extraordinary claim, something that is so removed from what we (scientifically) know of the universe we live in that it is reasonable to doubt it and to demand evidence for its reality.

Some people may be swayed by the argument that something must've caused the universe to exist and therefore there must've been a deity to cause it. That sounds like a pretty solid argument. However, the logic therein is impeccably flawed. That the universe must have been caused does not imply that it must have come into existence via supernatural means. The conclusion does not by necessity follow from the premiss. Empirically, since all phenomena whose causes are known have causes which are natural--there is not one phenomenon which is incontroveribly known to be supernaturally caused--we are forced to assign an exceedingly low probability to the claim/hypothesis that some phenomenon X is supernaturally caused. Because all known causes at work in the cosmos are natural, it is way saner and safer to bet that what gave birth to our universe was also a natural event.

There is no evidence to support the anthropomorphic characteristics which various religions attribute to their deities. Nor is there evidence for the theologies these religions posit. Why then believe in any of them? One may find comfort in believing that some paternal/maternal superfigure is watching over us and that our loved ones are not truly gone forever, that we will all be reunited somehow in some preternatural paradise. But as with the comforting and narcissistic thought that no calamity nor accident will befall us and our loved ones, reality does not abide by our beliefs. Imagining and believing our fantasies and wishes may attenuate our anxieties about living and dying, but they will not change reality one bit.

Given the above, there continues to be no reason for a critical thinker to believe in supernatural claims; there are good reasons to be very skeptical of them. In the fact-fiction scale, until that day supernaturalists can provide support, then shelving their claims in the mythology section somewhere between Apollo and Zeus is a sensible thing to do.

It is indeed mind boggling how something that is so farfetched and devoid of evidence could possess the minds of so many so tenaciously, while something for which there is an avalanche of empirical support--evolution for instance--would elicit doubt and disdain. Sapience is not the most striking characteristic of Homo sapiens, is it?