It’s not 2013 yet, at least in America, but I’ll put this post up for the rest of the world as the first of the new year. It’s a cat, of course, hatin’ on a fake cat. One could see it as a metaphor. . .
Happy New Year!
December 31, 2012 • 6:13 pm
Month: December 2012
Kerfuffle! Keith Kloor won’t stop biting the leg of atheism
December 31, 2012 • 1:12 pm
When Keith Kloor first posted on his Discover blog about the perfidy of the New Atheists, lumping me with Dawkins as strident “fundamentalist” atheists, wrongheaded in our dislike of accommodationism, I got a strange feeling about him. He seemed oversensitive, much like Robert Wright or Chris Mooney. In that post, Kloor claimed that atheist stridency was aimed at “making enemies of the whole world,” and that we also hold all religions as equally bad.
Somehow I sensed that Kloor was one of those thin-skinned accommodationists who can’t let well enough alone. Their downfall is always their inability to resist responding to criticism, no matter where it comes from..
Sure enough, after I replied to Kloor, he wrote a second post in response. I didn’t deal with that one because it was lame, citing “authorities” like Saul Bellow and Clifford Geertz to show that religion has substantial value, and suggesting there were things in heaven and earth not dreamt of by us materialists. (Kloor really has a weakness for the numinous.)
In the meantime, P. Z. Myers took out after Kloor at Pharyngula. Kloor’s statement that most ticked off P.Z. was this:
To wave away the persistent questions and yearnings that still drive the religious impulse as merely the last bastion of ignorant superstition is, as I wrote here, “inconsistent with the spirit of science.”
The assertion that religion and science are incompatible has become an article of faith for some–a kind of dogma that I recently discussed in this post. Aside from this being a form of fundamentalism, I also said that I saw no constructive use “in making an enemy of virtually the whole world” by broadly denigrating all religious believers.
Myers offered a withering response:
I’m not waving away the yearnings, they’re real enough, and we all have them. I’m waving away the goddamned answers as inadequate, contradictory, and false.
You do realize, Mr Kloor, that that’s what religion promises? Not more questions (if that were the case, it would be philosophy), but deep cosmic truths, answers hallowed by nothing more than generations of prophets pulling stories out of their asses? It is “inconsistent with the spirit of science” to simply accept those claims unquestioned, to assume that there is some validity to them because you’re afraid that pointing out the flaws might be regarded as “denigrating all religious believers.”
If telling people that they are wrong is denigrating, then my profession of education is dedicated to denigration.
I guess it also makes me a fundamentalist, if your definition of fundamentalis is lacking in reverence for the unsupported authoritarian dogma of religion, and feeling no respect for faith at all.
Thin-skinned as he is, Kloor has now put up a third post, and—oy vey!—promises more of them! Here’s his latest (today) from his Discover blog, a piece called “People who live in glass houses.” I post it in its entirety because it’s short:
To make sure the reader understands what he’s saying, Kloor begins with a picture of a glass house, and then proffers a small rant, now lumping me with Myers instead of Dawkins.
This exquisitely designed house would be perfect for PZ Myers and Jerry Coyne. I’ll expand on that (and more) in the New Year (later this week). Meanwhile, here’s something from Margaret Atwood that reminds us why religion is not so easy to stamp out in the 21st-century:
“I think that the religious strand is probably part of human hard-wiring…by religious strand, I don’t mean any particular religion, I mean the part of human beings that feels that the seen world is not the only world, that the world you see is not the only world that there is and that it can become awestruck. If that is the case, religion was selected for in the Pleistocene by many, many millennia of human evolution.”
You’d that think the atheists who are evolutionary biologists would be able to process this with their super-rational minds. And that they (Myers, Coyne et al) would be smart enough to recognize that one-size-fits all denunciation is likely counterproductive to their goal.
Indeed, for Margaret Atwood is surely an expert on both religion and evolution, and therefore stands as the authority on the evolutionary genetics of faith! Here Kloor promotes Atwood’s tenuous statement as something that evolutionists like Myers and I should acknowledge as truth.
But it’s complete garbage. I’m not going to discuss into the many theories for the origin of religion, but most of them argue not that we have hardwired “genes for god and spirituality,” but that religion is an epiphenomenon of our biology interacting with our culture: something that has piggybacked on humans’ evolved childhood obedience to authority, or on our desire to impute agency to inanimate objects or events. Only a chowderheaded biologist would argue that “religion was selected for in the Pleistocene by many, many millennia of human evolution.” We simply don’t know that! In fact, we know very little about the original source of the religious impulse, except that it can be eliminated relatively quickly (viz., Scandinavia). So if it’s “hardwired,” it’s extraordinarily malleable!
So why, exactly, are we supposed to accept the “scientific” conclusions of a novelist—granted, a good novelist—in the absence of evidence? It would behoove Kloor, since he’s writing for a science site, to stop touting people like Atwood as experts on the evolution of human behavior.
As for our one-size-fits-all denunciation of religion, Kloor still hasn’t absorbed the fact that almost no New Atheist denounces all religions as equally bad. Fundamentalist Christians and Catholics are far worse than Quakers. Scientologists are far more harmful than Unitarian Universalists. Insofar as religions accept the supernatural, they’re all bad in contributing to the denigration of reason, but they’re not equal in their pernicious effects on society. Some proselytize more than others, or try harder make their religious views into public law. Kloor should just quit purveying lies about what New Atheists believe, get back to writing about science, and stop embarrassing the Discover website.
I’m done with Kloor; he lacks the originality of thought to interest me, and his deliberate misrepresentation of New Atheists is intellectually dishonest. Let him put up as many posts as he wants promoting accommodationism, and let him cite as many famous people as he can to show the virtues of faith. All it will do is make him look foolish—at least in the eyes of scientists.
One last point: I find it curious that atheists like Kloor spend a lot more time going after fellow atheists than after religion. That could only be justified if atheists were hurting science more than religion does, but that’s surely not the case. And we’re far less harmful than even moderate Christians. You don’t see atheists throwing acid in the faces of schoolgirls, terrifying children with thoughts of hell, or trying to regulate people’s sex lives.
UPDATE: I was right; Kloor has just put up another post (his second today) accusing P. Z. and me of “atheism fundamentalism.” He even uses the old Chris Mooney tactic of saying that our reaction to him is proof that he’s “hit a nerve”!
Amazing photo: Soyuz approaches the International Space Station
December 31, 2012 • 10:53 am
The Russian-built Soyuz spacecraft is on a mission (it began Dec. 19) to visit the International Space Station and do experiments (read about it here). This stunning picture comes fr0m today’s Twitter feed of Commander Chris Hadfield—a tweet from space! The caption:
Earth, Moon and Soyuz: Kevin Ford took this picture as we approached Station last week. Science fiction into fact.
Quote of the week: Peter Atkins on woo and faith
December 31, 2012 • 9:10 am
This is from an article (reference below) that I offered to send to readers, and many took me up on it. The quote is from pp. 99-100, and remember that for Atkins the “paranormal” includes religion.
True scientific revolutions are utterly distinct from the revolutions proposed by those who hanker for the paranormal. Real scientists have no time for the reports of such phenomena. Indeed, they scorn the reports and regard all practitioners as contemptible charlatans. Although such scornful attitudes are seen by some as politically incorrect, and at worse a conspiracy of the scientific establishment to trample underfoot the green shoots of unorthodoxy, there is good reason to believe that all claims of authentic paranormal observations are hogwash. First, there are no authenticated, reliable observations of phenomena that cannot be explained by the principles of conventional science. Second, whereas true scientific observations are like a canvas stretched over a frame of theory, purported paranormal phenomena are isolated pimples of whimsical speculation that are not grounded in a coherent corpus of knowledge. Third, were purported paranormal phenomena ever to be authenticated, they would devastate the whole structure of science, for most of them strike at two of its great foundations, the conservation of energy and causality. It is simply silly to assert in opposition to this remark that because there is a conspiracy among scientists to preserve these two pillars of rationality, intellectual police are sent to exterminate the first sign of the paranormal. If either foundation were overthrown by careful experiments on elementary particles, then there would be a Nobel prize for the overthrower; but to suppose that these two principles are best tested in the equivalent of the gambling halls of Las Vegas is frankly absurd.
One aspect of the paranormal versus real science should not go unremarked. As in other forms of obscurantist pursuit, such as religion, it is so easy to make time-wasting speculations. The paranormal is effectively unconstrained whimsicality. Original suggestions in real science emerge only after detailed study and the lengthy and often subtle process of testing whether current concepts are adequate. Only if all this hard work fails is a scientist justified in edging forward human understanding with a novel and possibly revolutionary idea. Real science is desperately hard work; the paranormal is almost entirely the fruit of armchair fantasizing. Real science is a regal application of the full power of human intellect; the paranormal is a prostitution of the brain. Worst of all, it wastes time and distorts the public’s vision of the scientific endeavour.
This is a man who is fed up with theology—as we all should be. I was talking to a famous secularist the other day, who will remain unnamed, who told me that theology was intellectually worthless because it had no real object of study: theologians simply analyze the thoughts of other theologians, immersed in a never-ending (and never progressing) stream of intellectual pablum.
I’ve read theology for a year now, and have to agree. Theology is the biggest waste of time in the history of human intellect. (I’m talking about academic thought here; if you count “all thought”, then replace “theology” with “religion.”) It makes no progress (except to discard the tenets that science disproves) and reaches no conclusions about either the existence or nature of gods.
Here is a serious question: has theology ever contributed anything to the progress of humanity?
_____________
Atkins, P. 1995. Science as truth. History of the human sciences 8:97-102.
Republicans are greedy jerks
December 31, 2012 • 6:43 am
If you’re an American, you’ll know that unless the Republicans in Congress and President Obama reach a deal, the U.S. will go over a “fiscal cliff” at midnight, triggering huge tax increases for nearly all Americans (an average of $3400 per family) as well as huge spending cuts. They abhor Obama’s proposal to raise taxes on all Americans making more than $250,000, while leaving tax rates on lower incomes pretty much untouched.
As the New York Times reports, the Republicans are recalcitrant, for they want the rich to keep their largesse while the poor and aged take the hit:
In seesaw negotiations, the two sides got closer on the central issue of how to define the wealthy taxpayers who would be required to pay more once the Bush-era tax cuts expire.
But that progress was overshadowed by gamesmanship. After Republicans demanded that any deal must include a new way of calculating inflation that would mean smaller increases in payments to beneficiaries of programs like Social Security, Democrats halted the negotiations for much of the day.
I’m fed up with Republicans, a bunch of greedy jerks whose overriding concern is to avoid reducing the incomes of the very rich. For crying out loud, our tax rates are among the lowest among first-world nations, and those who make more than a quarter million dollars a year can easily afford to pay a bit more. Instead, Republicans, like small children who don’t get their way, are threatening to hurt everyone, and to throw the country into a recession.
Republicans are immoral—at least those who favor a plan that hurts the poor while protecting the wealthy. (It resembles those Catholics who would rather have people get AIDS than use condoms). The poor and middle classes are stretched already, and $3400 a year is a huge bite. How can these people look themselves in the mirror and feel that they’re doing the best for America?
The television news this morning reported that Obama may raise the “rich” level to $400,000 a year, which is ridiculous.
If this country goes down the tubes, blame the Republicans who are guarding their bank accounts—and all the misguided people who voted for them.
Let’s just admit it: the Republican party doesn’t give a damn about the poor, the aged, the dispossessed—and women. This is one reason why America remains so religious.
Most important cats of 2012
December 31, 2012 • 6:23 am
Today I’ll present a few year-end summaries of various matters, but of course the most important involves our friend the felid. Here’s a selection from BuzzFeed‘s: “The 30 most important cats of 2012.”
Many of our friends are at the site, like Venus the chimera cat and the sad Tard, but here are a few that you might not know. Do go over and see them all, though, for there are some good ones, like the cat mother nursing a passel of baby hedghogs. that I haven’t space to show.
Republican cat:
The cat from hell: Alarm Clock Cat. If you have a cat, you’ve experienced this on a lower level:
Girlfriend cat:
Captain Jenkins, piloting his box:
A drunken man singing Seal’s “Kiss From a Rose” to his cat:
Colonel Meow, the furriest cat alive:
And, of course, we can’t leave out the dolorous Henri. Here’s his prizewinning “Paw de deux”:
But my favorite of all, which I forgot to highlight this year, is a series of photographs (also at Buzzfeed) documenting the loving relationship between an 88-year-old Japanese grandmother and her odd-eyed white cat. The photos are by Miyoko Ihara, and they’ve been made into a book, Misao the Big Mama and Fukumaru the Cat, which you can buy online. It’s a great present for ailurophiles. Here are a few from the BuzzFeed site; the whole series on that site will, if you’re a softy like me, warm your heart. And there are many more pictures than the five I’ve shown:
h/t: Grania
Swag!
December 30, 2012 • 11:44 am
Today’s the last day of Koynezaa (actually 11:45 tomorrow evening, for that is 24 hours after the time I was born), and thanks to the many readers who have sent good wishes that I’ve completed another orbit around the sun, and remain alive.
Here are two particularly nice presents I got. The first is a greeting from Hili, the recently adopted tabby of Andrzej and Malgorzata, who run the Polish rationalist website Racjonalista. Every day Hili and Andrzej have a dialogue in which Hili expresses her queenly attitude and superiority to humans. Today Hili’s dialogue was a birthday greeting!
And an anonymous reader sent me some lovely physical swag: pictures, buttons, and a hand-drawn cartoon. Here are two of the buttons, based on Richard Dawkins’s tweet touting this site:
And this is fantastic, though I’m really not that standoffish!
Thanks to all!