Month: February 2013

Max Tegmark on evolution and “angry atheists,” and a new rebuttal by Victor Stenger

February 20, 2013 • 7:04 am

In a post last week called “A specious argument for the comity of evolution and faith,” I discussed a misleading HuffPo piece by Max Tegmark, an MIT physicist who claimed that although many American reject evolution, the official positions of their churches often don’t. On that basis he made this claim:

I feel that people bent on science-religion conflict are picking the wrong battle. The real battle is against the daunting challenges facing the future of humanity, and regardless of our religious views, we’re all better off fighting this battle united.

On the same day that Tegmark’s piece was published (Darwin Day!), the stalwart Victor Stenger responded at HuffPo, noting that most evolution-friendly churches, especially Catholicism, accept theistic evolution, which is usually not scientific evolution. (The conflation of theistic evolution with naturalistic evolution as the latter is accepted by scientists, and taught in science classes, annoys me no end. Scientists don’t posit that evolution is guided by God, and there’s no evidence for that guidance.)

Tegmark never learned the first lesson of posting on a blog (yes, his site is a blog): never respond to your critics, for it just makes things worse.  And so he’s just put up at HuffPo a whiny response to all those strident, misguided atheists who criticized his argument:  “Religion, science, and the attack of the angry atheists“.  It’s a self-pitying diatribe against the opprobrium that he got from atheists and fellow scientists—opprobrium he claims was expected from religious people, but not from us.  Here’s part of Tegmark’s response to the “angry atheists,” whom he sees as harmful in three ways (indented parts are Tegmarks’s). I was struck at how poorly written Tegmark’s piece was: it was obviously a thrown-together and reflexive response, one that does him no credit.  Here are our sins:

1) They [“angry atheists’] help religious fundamentalists. 

Tegmark thinks that because more Americans reject evolution than do their churches, pro-evolution scientists should play up the harmony between official church positions and evolution, and not harp on the widespread rejection of evolution by the faithful (indeed, that’s the goal of the ineffectual Clergy Letter Project). That’s worked really well, hasn’t it? Catholicism is a prime example of how easy it is for members of a church to completely ignore its dogma.

I quote the next part in its entirety, as its incoherence is almost funny. (By the way, every time you hear the words “humility” and “modesty” coming from an accommodationist, prepare to grate your teeth.)

2) They could use more modesty:
If I’ve learned anything as a physicist, it’s how little we know with certainty. In terms of the ultimate nature of reality, we scientists are ontologically ignorant. For example, many respected physicists believe in the so-called Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum mechanics, according to which a fundamentally random process called “wavefunction collapse” occurs whenever you observe something. This interpretation has been criticized both for being anthropocentric (quantum godfather Niels Bohr famously argued that there’s no reality without observation) and for being vague (there’s no equation specifying when the purported collapse is supposed to happen, and there’s arguably no experimental evidence for it).

Let’s compare the ontological views of Niels Bohr to those of a moderate and tolerant religious person. At least one of them is incorrect, since Bohr was an atheist. Perhaps neither is correct. But who’s to say that the former is clearly superior to the latter, which should be ridiculed and taunted? Personally, I’d bet good money against the Copenhagen Interpretation, but it would be absurd if I couldn’t be friends with those believing its ontology and unite with them in the quest to make our planet a better place.

What the bloody hell does that mean?  Because Bohr (who did not win the Nobel Prize for the Copenhagen Interpretation, but for studying the structure of atoms and its relationship to quantum phenomena) had a view of what quantum mechanics meant, that makes his view equivalent to the superstition of “a moderate and tolerant religious person”?  I don’t see the Copenhagen Interpretation as in any way equivalent to religious superstition; for one thing, it is subject to some experimental verification (e.g., Bell’s inequality), it is not accepted on faith (that’s why it’s controversial) and, most important, it doesn’t make its adherents do things like instill guilt in children or denigrate gays. One is not enabling bad stuff by befriending someone who accepts the Copenhagen Interpretation.

3) They should practice what they preach:
Most atheists advocate for replacing fundamentalism, superstition and intolerance by careful and thoughtful scientific discourse. Yet after we posted our survey report, ad hominem attacks abounded, and most of the caustic comments I got (including one from a fellow physics professor) revealed that their authors hadn’t even bothered reading the report they were criticizing.

Just as it would be unfair to blame all religious people for what some fundamentalists do, I’m obviously not implying that all anti-religious people are mean-spirited or intolerant. However, I can’t help being struck by how some people on both the religious and anti-religious extremes of the spectrum share disturbing similarities in debating style.

Yes, here again we see the false equation between atheists and fundamentalists. Someone should invent a name for this fallacy (can readers suggest one?).

Since when has a tenet of atheism been that one can’t be passionate in one’s views? Given that our job is to fight entrenched superstition, passion is one of our most powerful weapons. I, for one, claim that I not only read Tegmark’s piece carefully, but responded without making ad hominem remarks. Does that make my “debating style” identical to that of, say, William Lane Craig?

Perhaps some atheists or scientists did make such remarks, but isn’t it curious that Tegmark doesn’t give any examples? In the end, his “response” is just silly, and the fallacy of his original argument—saying that America is more evolution-friendly than we think because many churches support evolution (theistic or not)—still stands.

*****

As a palliative, read Victor Stenger’s newest piece, which went up yesterday at HuffPo: “Science and religion cannot be reconciled”, based on his 2012 book God and the Folly of Faith. Perhaps it (and my blurb for his book and piece) are preaching to the choir here, but it’s heartening to know that there’s a stentorian voice out there tellling HuffPo readers the unwelcome truth. Stenger doesn’t mention Tegmark’s articles, so it’s not a “rebuttal” in that sense, but a rebuttal of Tegmark’s message of science/faith harmony.  The truths Stenger imparts include these:

Science and religion are fundamentally incompatible because of their unequivocally opposed epistemologies — the separate assumptions they make concerning what we can know about the world. Every human alive is aware of a world that seems to exist outside the body, the world of sensory experience we call the natural. Science is the systematic study of the observations made of the natural world with our senses and scientific instruments.

By contrast, all major religions teach that humans possess an additional “inner” sense that allows us to access a realm lying beyond the visible world — a divine, transcendent reality we call the supernatural. If it does not involve the transcendent, it is not religion.

No doubt science has its limits. However, that fact that science is limited doesn’t mean that religion or any alternative system of thought can or does provide insight into what lies beyond those limits.

and this:

Most of the scientific community in general goes along with the notion that science has nothing to say about the supernatural because the methods of science as they are currently practiced exclude supernatural causes. However, if we truly possess an inner sense telling us about an unobservable reality that matters to us and influences our lives, then we should be able to observe the effects of that reality by scientific means.

If someone’s inner sense were to warn of an impending earthquake unpredicted by science, which then occurred on schedule, we would have evidence for this extrasensory source of knowledge. Claims of “divine prophecies” have been made throughout history, but not one has been conclusively confirmed.

So far we see no evidence that the feelings people experience when they perceive themselves to be in touch with the supernatural correspond to anything outside their heads, and have no reason to rely on those feelings when they occur. However, if such evidence or reason should show up, then scientists will have to consider it whether they like it or not.

Take that, NCSE, the National Academies, and the AAAS! I am so tired of the completely bogus claim that “science cannot test the supernatural”! Of course it can.

And this:

From its very beginning, religion has been a tool used by those in power to retain that power and keep the masses in line. This continues today as religious groups are manipulated to work against believers’ own best interests in health and economic well-being in order to cast doubt on well-established scientific findings. This would not be possible except for the diametrically opposed world-views of science and religion. Science is not going to change its commitment to the truth. We can only hope religion will change its commitment to nonsense.

My name is Jerry Coyne and I approve of that message.

Food: Charleston

February 19, 2013 • 12:01 pm

Here are a few holiday snaps of the meals I had in Charleston, South Carolina—one of the loveliest cities I’ve had the privilege of visiting. I also have a bunch of pictures of the town itself, which I hope to put up later, but here’s what I ate.

Upon arrival, I immediately had a late lunch at Jestine’s Kitchen, an unprepossessing place that has superb fried chicken. It’s accompanied here with homemade pickles, collard greens, whipped sweet potatoes, the local paper and, of course, sweet tea.  The yardbird was great. I believe Anthony Bourdain featured this place in one of his recent restaurant shows. Click all photos to enlarge them.

Jestine's

I had a semi-fancy lunch the next day at Slightly North of Broad (Broad is a street in Charleston), a restaurant usually abbreviated S.N.O.B. But it’s not snobbish at all: it serves upscale Southern food in a pleasant, unstuffy atmosphere.

SNOB

The menu, heavy on local seafood and fancified southern food, and not too expensive:

SNOB menu

To start off with, since the day was warm: a locally-brewed “White Thai” wheat beer made with spices. Just the ticket.

SNOB white Thai beer

Steamed local clams in garlic and white wine, with fennel, tomatoes and toasted baguette. Yum!

SNOB clams

And the best dish of all: shrimp and grits, a Carolina favorite. The grits were creamy (I think they contained cream), a perfect foil for the many large shrimp, which were interspersed with pieces of homemade andouille sausage and country ham.  This is the Risotto of America, and was absolutely delicious, if filling!

SNOB shrimp grits

The next day, after a long walk around the city, I had a late lunch (I often eat one large meal per day while travelling) at Cru Café, another restaurant that does “modern” Southern food (they call it “gourmet comfort food”). Thank goodness that, in Charleston, “modern” or “gourmet” doesn’t equal “small portions.”

Because I booked the kitchen table (really a copper counter that overlooks the kitchen), but had to wait 25 minutes, they comped me a drink and an appetizer: delicious roasted corn flan with jalapeño peppers. Excellent.

Cru corn flan

And then the appetizer I ordered: duck salad with carmalized walnuts, arugala, and fried onion slivers on top.  A substantial appetizer that could also be ordered as a main dish. Note the sweet tea: the table wine of the South.

Cru Duck salad

The main course: homemade meat loaf, barbecue style, with mashed potatoes and homemade cole slaw with horseradish.  It was excellent as well, though a bit dry. You can imagine how full I was after consuming this and the two courses above. This was not a small dish.

Cru meat loaf

I wish I’d had room for dessert, as they were homemade as well, and looked great. Before the chef cut a slice of Orange Blossom Cake with coconut frosting, he made two squiggles of sauce on the plate, which, as a biologist, I had to photograph:

Cru dessert

Afterwards a quick walk through the touristy Charleston Market, once the place that house slaves went to buy groceries for their white owners. Now it’s a fancy mall selling geegaws (and some decent stuff, like local handwoven sweetgrass baskets).  There was some food on offer, too, like this (I didn’t try the famous okra chips):

Okra chips

And a panoply of hot sauces:

Hot sauce

I greatly enjoyed my three major meals in Charleston, as well as the BBQ dinner (with mustard sauce) that one of the seminar organizers at the College of Charleston got me to eat in my hotel before my debate (I can’t remember her name, but she was very gracious).  I know from reading about the city that it’s rapidly becoming a foodie paradise, and I wish I’d stayed longer to sample the fare. But I’m sure I’ll be back.

Later this week I’ll post some pictures of this beautiful city—a city voted the prime tourist destination in the world by the readers of Condé Nast Traveler Magazine last year. I can’t quite agree with that ranking (Paris is stiff competition for food and scenery, and beats Charleston hands down for art), but Charleston is up there with New Orleans and New York City as my favorite tourist destinations in the U.S. If you have a chance to go there, do so!

Pawprints 1: tracks of ancient cats

February 19, 2013 • 9:08 am

This week I’ve fortuitously come across three cases of domestic cats leaving their traces in ancient history. I’ll post one daily until Thursday.

Many of us have cats who walk across our computer keyboards and turn what we’re typing into gibberish. Well, nothing is new under the sun.

Here, originally from Eric Kwakkel’s Medieval Fragments website, is what happened to one cat-owning scribe in the fifteenth century (from Twitter, via Matthew Cobb):

Picture 1

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On morality and moral responsibility: a final response to Uncle Eric

February 19, 2013 • 7:17 am

I wasn’t going to prolong my interchange with Eric MacDonald about “ways of knowing,” as I think we’ve both made our disagreement clear (and let me emphasize again the affection and respect I have for the man), but I want to make a few points connected with Eric’s latest response to me at at Choice in Dying: “Is there a science of morality?”

As I interpret it, Eric sees that there are indeed “moral truths” that can be discerned through reason and empirical observation (but not through “science”), while I maintain that what we call “moral truths” aren’t really “truths” in any meaningful sense, but guidelines for behavior that either evolved or were socially constructed to meet certain ends.

Eric starts by taking apart a recent post at Rationally Speaking (presaging a book to be called The Moral Arc of Science) in which Michael Shermer defends the view that morality can be grounded through science. Here’s Eric’s take on Shermer’s claim that the conquest of polio is an objective moral good:

Now, no doubt much moral good went into the achievement of the result, but whether the result itself is a moral good we may question. It is a social good, certainly, and the outcome of much moral good by individuals. But the actual reduction of numbers of polio cases from 350,000 to 222 is not, by ordinary measures, what we think of as a moral good. It is a social good which is the outcome of a great deal of hard work and dedication by many people, many of whom were driven by moral considerations.

I would argue that, in the end, what we see as moral goods are really social goods, and we should jettison the notion of morality in favor of understanding what we really mean by saying an act is “moral.”

I further argue that we’ll find that, at bottom, morality consists of a series of behaviors designed to achieve certain social aims—or that evolved largely as a way to promote individual welfare through cooperation of individuals in small ancestral groups.  It’s likely that much of our “moral intuition” is based on evolution, and that evolution occurred in circumstances that no longer obtain. Ergo we must reexamine our “intuitive” morality. If we find that any of our evolved “moral” ideas are inimical to society—as, perhaps, is the xenophobic idea that we should treat members of our society better than members of foreign societies—we should get rid of them.

This does not mean that I think that morality is somehow objectively determined through reason and evidence. That’s because one first has to determine what one means by “social goods,” and that is often a matter of preference that can be immune to evidence.

Is abortion immoral? Try deciding that one objectively! But if we first construct the subjective dictum that “It is all right to abort a fetus before birth if that is the mother’s preference” (my own view of the situation), then we can say that abortion is moral. My view rests on the fact that fetuses are not sentient, and therefore have fewer “rights” (indeed, if they have any) than does the mother. But how can one argue objectively about what rights fetuses possess?  How can one argue that “if it’s inconvenient for a mother to have an unwanted child, it is not immoral to abort the fetus,” and maintain that this is an objective truth? Against that claim we have all the faithful (and others) who argue, immovably, that a fetus is a potential human being, and thereby has rights.  That is not subject to objective adjudication.

As I argued before, we should figure out why we think things are moral, and then adjust our “morality” to see if it meets the goals of having a code of behavior. Is it really bad to torture someone if there’s a 50% probability that that torture will save the lives of many others? That strikes many as innately immoral, but why? Getting us to think about such issues was, I believe, Sam Harris’s goal in writing The Moral Landscape. We shouldn’t automatically defer to our innate feelings of morality, but rather should delve deeper into the reasons things strike us as “moral” or “immoral”.

In the end, that exercise will, I think, result in deep-sixing the idea of morality in favor of, as one reader suggested, characterizing behaviors as “good or bad for society.” Maybe we think it’s bad to torture not because it’s inherently wrong, but because a society in which any torture is permitted would be dysfunctional. That’s something that can, in principle, be subject to empirical study.

And so I think there’s a lot of good in Sam’s neo-utilitarian approach, despite its many problems. (Two of these are deciding how to measure well being and how to adjudicate different forms of well being). What we call “morality” can be put on a scientific footing, but ultimately must rest on subjective judgments about the good and the right. Most of these judgments (indeed, perhaps the vast majority) will, I think, come down to “well being” or “social goods” when examined closely. But subjective judgments cannot produce “moral truths.”

Finally, Eric takes issue with my idea that we should dispense with the idea of moral responsibility:

I would be remiss here, however, if I did not also address one of Jerry’s central concerns, which he expresses in the following terms:

I am starting to think that we should dispense with the idea of “moral” and “immoral” acts for two reasons. The first is because morality is implicitly connected with free choice, that is, with “free will.” If one can’t choose one’s acts freely, that one can’t decide to be “moral” or “immoral.” Rather, as a consequentionalist, I’d replace “morality” with what it really means for most people, “the effects of an act on an individual or society.” Thus an “immoral act” might better be seen as “an act that reduces societal well being.”

In response to this what more can I say than that I disagree with the claim that we can give no sense either to freedom or to moral responsibility? This is a fundamental disagreement which is not susceptible to scientific proof, at least at present, in very much the same way that consciousness is unamenable to scientific explanation. Besides this, defining immorality in terms solely of a reduction to social well-being seems to me inadequate to what we normally mean when we speak of morality, which is as or more important in the context of individual relationships than it is on the scale of whole societies. Indeed, one of the besetting problems of utilitarianism is that it seems unable to deal with the more immediate concerns of individuals, and, indeed, in its classic form, would legitimate actions which most people rightly take to be immoral.

I stand by my claim that, in light of determinism of human behavior (which leads to my rejection of dualistic free will), we should reject the idea of “moral responsibility” and replace it with the simple notion of “responsibility.”

Consider this: a man who kills someone because of a brain tumor that causes aggression (viz., Charles Whitman), is deemed to be not morally responsible.  But someone who robs a gas station and kills the cashier is deemed morally responsible. But if neither person has a free choice about their behavior. If both behaviors are the ineluctable results of genes and environments, then why is one person seen as morally responsible and the other not?  It’s not that one person could have chosen to act differently while the other couldn’t.  Neither could have chosen to act differently. And if you can’t choose freely, if your behaviors are determined, then what sense does the notion of “moral responsibility” make?

Now you might say that we need the concept of moral responsibility as a sort of social glue. I don’t believe that, for I think the simple notion of “responsibility” will suffice. If you’re responsible for something bad, sanctions must be applied, no matter whether you had a real and free choice. Those sanctions are leveled for rehabilitation of the offender, protection of society, and to serve as an example to deter others. The notion of “morality” has nothing to add; indeed; it complicates matters by implying the false idea that offenders could have made a different choice. (I hasten to add that the sanctions applied to the victim of a brain tumor will differ from those applied to someone who kills because he came from a terrible environment and was abused as a child.)

Finally, I want to point out that Eric implicitly admits that there can be no objective standards of morality:

It may be true that moral philosophy does not reach assured conclusions in the way that science does; but it may, for all that, be the nature of the human condition that these things are undecidable in a strict sense, yet, at the same time, be such that the continuing discussion of morality is the way in which morality’s objectivity, as an aspect of our understanding of being human, is maintained. Absolute moral conclusions are probably, simply as absolute, immoral, because morality, given the nature of being human, cannot arrive at absolute principles that are valid for everyone. . .

Well, if absolute moral conclusions are impossible because there are no moral principles “that are valid for everyone,” then how can there be “moral truths”? After all, scientific truths, while always provisional, remain valid for everyone. Antibiotics work irrespective of your ethnicity, nationality, or religion.