If we accept Steve Neumann’s “Atheist Positivity Challenge,” and refrain from going after the “low-hanging Christians” (i.e., megachurch pastors, Ken Ham, etc.) for a month, can we still criticize atheists? Even the low-hanging ones, like Andrew Brown?
I will make this short: Brown has embarrassed himself again at the Guardian (that’s equivalent to saying, “Andrew Brown has posted again at the Guardian“)—this time with a piece called “Why creationism matters—and irks so many people.” In it, he tries to figure out why people are so down on creationism but not on other equal bits of nonsense, like homeopathy or climate-change denialism, that are far more harmful. Indeed, I myself have pointed out that creationism is one of the lesser irrationalities of both religion and faith-based pseudoscience like homeopathy. But Brown mucks up what could have been a good piece for another journalist, for he has to get in some osculations of religion and criticism of anti-creationists —even though he’s one himself.
Here’s the format of a typical Brown piece.
I. Simple declarative sentences outlining his topic.
II. A bunch of waffling and incoherent prose that have nothing to do with his topic.
III. A conclusion that doesn’t have to do with his topic but sucks up to religion or attacks atheists.
Indeed, that’s the format here:
I. His thesis statement:
Why does creationism matter so much? Scientifically, of course, it’s nonsense. Evolution is actually true. But why should this particular bit of nonsense get so many people so very upset?
II. The questions are good ones, and he does make some stabs at answering it, but then gets lost in a thread about cultural relativism and the “fragile collective enterprise of civilization.” But, to give him credit, he does cut close to the bone when he says:
[Rejecting creationism above other inanities] is also attractive to everyone who supposes that we will all in time grow out of religion, and even grow out of the desires and perspectives from which religion springs.
For these people, Darwinian evolution comes freighted with moral meaning: it is the knife that cuts our last bonds to childishness and faith. To reject it is then especially immoral in a way that disbelieving or misunderstanding quantum physics wouldn’t be.
Brown doesn’t say whether he’s one of “these people,” but I doubt it.
But the concentration of vocal atheists on creationism might also have something to do with the fact that many who attack creationism are evolutionists, like Dawkins and I, or scientists in other fieldds, like the late Victor Stenger and Ken Miller. We happen to have public voices, and we don’t know a lot about homeopathy or astrology.But of course there is a whole genre of people on the internet who attack noncreationist pseudoscience and spiritual medicine: Science Based Medicine and Doubtful News, to name but two.
Still, because creationism, unlike homeopathy or astrology, rests on religion, and because its embrace is critical to many people’s religious belief, it’s an especially tempting target for secularists. Many people have said that they lost their faith after they came to see evolution as true. But my own attacks on creationism come from another motive: evolution is true and, when properly understood, is simply fantastic. To think that simple, naturalistic processes can mold complex organisms like the bucket orchid or complex behaviors like the honeybee dance is almost beyond belief. I, for one, would like to infect people with that sense of wonder, and of course that has been Dawkins’s main goal throughout his life, as evidenced by the title of his autobiography. Dispelling homeopathy is best done by doctors like Orac, and astrology by skeptics like Sharon Hill.
But then, as always Brown goes off the rails, for he says that disbelief in evolution doesn’t really matter. Here’s how he ends, not with a bang but some wet osculations of spirituality:
III. Brown (my emphasis)
But the interesting thing about some research presented at the weekend by Amy Unsworth of the Faraday Institute, is that it suggests that most people who reject evolution don’t think it matters much either way. The overwhelming majority of those who think that science and religion are incompatible are not believers but atheists. Very few English people who identify as creationists believe in a young earth: this is partly because most are Muslims, and Muslim creationism has no strong attachment to a literal reading of the Genesis story. For most people, creationism is not a biological explanation, but an assertion that there is something special about humans which sets us apart from all other animals. We are the only species that can argue about creationism or conceive of God.
This doesn’t mean that evolution is false, or that there needs to be a supernatural explanation for supernatural belief. But a completely naturalistic account of how spirituality arose in the world can’t say anything about what spirituality might reveal. Eyes also have evolved but that doesn’t mean there is nothing to see.
He couldn’t help himself. Literally—for, like the rest of us, he has no free will, and his brain is wired up to purse his lips every time he approaches the rump of faith.
But really, Brown is talking about England; what he says is certainly not true of America, where creationism is a much bigger problem than it is in Britain. Most creationists in the US are young-earth creationists, especially when it comes to humans. And that “something special” that sets humans apart is frequently a quasi-biological claim: the claim that evolution could not explain things like human consciousness or morality. To argue that those have been inserted by God is indeed a scientific claim. Contra Brown, they are biological “explanations.” In fact, most people who do accept evolution in the US (about two-thirds of them) believe that God did intervene in the process at some point. Such people are creationists in an important sense creationists, for they don’t fully accept naturalistic evolution, and require God’s intervention in the process.
And if most British evolution-denialists are Muslims, as Brown says, then they reject human evolution because the Qur’an, their own scripture, tells them that Allah created humans as a special act. Lots of Muslims have no problem with evolution—except when it comes to humans. Their human exceptionalism is a scientific claim, and a false one.
The worst part is the last two sentences, where Brown touts “what spirituality might reveal.” What does he mean? Does it reveal truths about the universe? If so, what are they? Or do they reveal things similar to what my own “spiritual” experience of taking LSD in college showed: the Big Truth that “the walls are fucking brown!”
So do tell us, Mr. Brown: what IS there to see when we adopt the spirituality you’re touting?
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You are probably asking yourself, “Professor Ceiling Cat, why do you bother attacking this mushbrained columnist?” My answer is the same one that George Mallory gave when asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest. The difference between Mallory and me is that I wind up on top.
And for those British readers who ask this question, I respond with my own: “Why haven’t you people gotten rid of Andrew Brown yet?”
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“Why haven’t you people gotten rid of Andrew Brown yet?”
Probably because he’s a nobody who occasionally writes for a newspaper that hardly anybody reads.
The reason that the Guardian has not got rid of him? Click-bait. That thread has 1600 comments on it. (Note that this is on the blog/online “commentisfree” part of the Guardian website, not the main parts.)
Indeed, I can only remember seeing a piece by Brown once in the actual paper. He is basically an on-line troll.
I respond with my own: “Why haven’t you people gotten rid of Andrew Brown yet?”
Be careful about what you wish for, the last couple of times this question was asked, the Australians shipped Ken Ham off to the US and the New Zealanders did likewise with Ray “Banana Man” Comfort.
“I’m not suggesting that children be exposed solely to the shuddersome knowledge of vast, entropic dimensions behind and beyond known spacetime, from which will skitter and ooze and swoop vile, deathless, gibbering, vulgar ungods that might notice humanity only long enough to devour our skins and spinal columns as they defile the very atoms of our world. I just think we should teach the controversy.”
–H.P. Lovecraft
Yith!
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Yuggoth!
I read this piece of Brown’s at 6am today, and found it incomprehensible. It doesn’t really seem to even be about the stated topic. He jumps around every sentence or two, jabbing his toothpick at some fresh target. The predictable conflation of the spiritual and supernatural realms is a real irritation. I get the impression that he knows that the Albatross is coming. Note to Professor Ceiling Cat: have tried every email combo I can think of, but yours continues to elude.
Have you tried Google?
Google his name and one of the first hits will reveal his U of Chicago address.
Creationism matters because it promotes poor understanding of a very important question, which is “What are we?”
Misunderstanding the answer to that question results in further misunderstanding of psychology, the mind/body problem, and other important issues related to how people treat and relate to each other.
How many of the world’s problems result from humans trying to make policy for humans without much understanding of what humans are?
I strongly agree! You’ve said it very well.
I’d also add that creationism-vs.-evolution disputes are themselves symptoms of a much broader dispute between the principles of science and the principles of religion. This is why, when Harris mentions Mooney and Kirschenbaum’s accommodationist criticisms of “combative New Atheists” turning people away from accepting evolution, he explains what the real issue is:
“The first thing to observe is that Mooney and Kirschenbaum appear confused about the nature of the problem. The goal is not to get more Americans to merely accept the truth of evolution (or any other scientific theory); the goal is to get them to value the principles of reasoning and educated discourse that now make a belief in evolution obligatory. Doubt about evolution is merely a symptom of an underlying condition; the condition is faith itself – conviction without sufficient reason, hope mistaken for knowledge, bad ideas protected from good ones, good ideas obscured by bad ones, wishful thinking elevated to a principle of salvation, etc. Mooney and Kirschenbaum seem to imagine that we can get people to value intellectual honesty by lying to them.”
My own addition would be that this bigger dispute keeps manifesting in different forms, such as a tendency to turn into a wide-eyed (and often pontificating) romantic instead of a hard-nosed scientist when discussing the “higher”, “human” faculties like morality, culture, art, music, philosophy, literature, aesthetics, society, history, and religion itself.
To be fair, not all these subjects are affected all of the time. However, to pick a couple of examples, it’s remarkable that numerous psychologists resisted incorporating evolutionary biology into their understanding of human subjects for so long, and most of the public still believe that the catharsis theory of “letting off steam” and discharging unpleasant emotions is valid despite the number of tests utterly refuting it.
There are whole books on the subject of mistakes in reasoning – systematic biases such as confirmation bias to maintain appearances, the Lake Wobbegon effect, self-deception – that humans make, and surely our intellectual priority is to reduce their incidence. A large part of that goal, therefore, is to resist pseudoscience when it tries to gain influence disproportionate or in total defiance of its (lack of) veracity. And they sometimes proudly show off their anti-science credentials!
This is a highly simplified way of putting it, but creationism and other pseudosciences are both symptoms of meagre thinking and active promoters of it. The interdisciplinary nature of science in particular means other fields suffer when the conclusions of one or two are resisted, as you so succinctly put it.
To reduce the incidence of systematic biases, that is, not books reducing them!
And it’s not just art and culture and the other things you’ve listed that are affected by this romantic rejection of evidence.
It’s methods of education – one of the most important activities in our society. Huge swathes of the education establishment are determined to shut their eyes to psychological research about how people actually learn best, from a romantic commitment to Rousseauian beliefs that have never been more than speculation and wishful thinking. The results for many children have been disastrous – particularly for the disadvantaged.
We need to start teaching kids in schools the psychology of cognitive biases, etc – but Creationists will always be adamantly opposed to this, for obvious reasons.
It’s particularly ridiculous because the understanding of natural selection’s role in shaping organisms has been a universal help in progressing the field of biology and human anatomy. The adaptationism is what makes it so useful in identifying functions and operations from cellular organelles up to the behaviours of whole swarms within ecosystems.
And that’s supposed to suddenly stop short when it comes to understanding humans? I don’t think so.
Even culture, the supposed antithesis to biological design, must at some point have originated from and owed its features and general (if not specific) designs to a biological grounding. It certainly didn’t drop out of the sky or pop into existence by magic, even though it does have a level of analysis of its own (just as biology is when compared to chemistry).
Good point, Steve. Think we should start some kind of petition to convince Andrew Brown he’d be much happier in the states.
Creationism matters so much because of the attempts, dishonest ones, to teach it in science classes. It also matters because behind attempts to suppress the teaching of evolutionary biology, is the absurd assertion that accepting the fact that species arise as a result of an evolutionary process will result in moral decay.
There is no deceitful endeavor to pass off homeopathy or astrology as science in the schools nor any claim that failing to accept either will result in anarchy.
I came here to pretty much write that exact comment!
It’s a very subtle bigotry: not arguing against people indoctrinating their children with nonsense.
The naturalistic explanation of spirituality says EVERYTHING about what spirituality might reveal: nothing. As someone finishing up Sam Harris’s latest, I’m very much taken with what spiritual practice can do for the heart and the spririt, but it is an artifact of the brain not a supernatural third eye. The audience for Sam’s and PCC’s arguments is not the true believer and not for the willfully ignorant. It’s for the open-minded uninformed and for the fence-sitting believer seeking truths. Mr. Brown ain’t either – keep talking right past him; this conversation can save minds.
Andrew “So Fucking” Brown?
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OMG I can’t believe I missed that!
Gotta expect to get pretty brown, at least your nose, when you spend so much time osculating rumps.
Do we really need ANYONE to dispel astrology?
😀
I always thought basic reason did it rather well, in that, what’s the likelihood that me a European born on March 23rd is going to get the same ‘reading’ as someone born in a Sudanese refugee camp on the same day?
Should we both really not be making big decisions this week?
Are you sure? March 23 makes you an Aries 🙂
Thanks for this no holds barred debunking of Andrew Brown’s fantasies.
Why, oh why can’t we have voices like yours heard in Guardian, and other venues? What happened with the idea of presenting balanced views and letting the other side to speak their mind as well? Especially, when the other side happens to be the only side that actually makes sense!
And for those British readers who ask this question, I respond with my own: “Why haven’t you people gotten rid of Andrew Brown yet?”
Be fair, we’ve got a monarchy and an established church to deal with first.
I hope that “Why haven’t you people gotten rid of Andrew Brown yet?” doesn’t get misinterpreted along the lines of “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”
Creationism (or it’s close synonyms like ID) is a frequently used issue by the religious right to inject faith based ideas into science education. There is also faith based nonsense behind some climate denialists (i.e., ghod would not allow humans to screw up the planet).
While homeopathy is not explicitly linked to a particular set of religious beliefs, it’s adherents certainly try to get it accepted into (real) medical school curricula under the weasel term, “Integrative Medicine”. The folks at Science Based Medicine (to which the Good Professor provided a link) refer to this practice as, “Quackademic Medicine”. The tactics used by adherents of homeopathy and other pseudo-medicine to get their topics taught on a par with science are quite similar to those used by creationists.
Astrology is different, in that no group tries to get it accepted as conventional science or suggest it be taught in astronomy classes.
And for those British readers who ask this question, I respond with my own: “Why haven’t you people gotten rid of Andrew Brown yet?”
This question should be addressed to Mr. Alan Rusbridger, editor in chief, The Guardian. The rest of us haven’t a clue as to why he still has a job.
That in itself is dangerous because you can treat the animals horribly and rape the earth because it’s yours and your rich daddy (god) gave it to you.
I think the reason fundamentalist Christians contest the Theory of Evolution so fiercely (instead of, say, radiometric age dating) is because they feel that this is what can take their god away from them, in a way no other scientific theory could.
Douglas Adams summed it up best: “I was extremely doubtful about the idea of god, but I just didn’t know enough about anything to have a good working model of any other explanation for, well, life, the universe, and everything to put in its place. But I kept at it, and I kept reading and I kept thinking. Sometime around my early thirties I stumbled upon evolutionary biology, particularly in the form of Richard Dawkins’s books The Selfish Gene and then The Blind Watchmaker, and suddenly (on, I think the second reading of The Selfish Gene) it all fell into place. It was a concept of such stunning simplicity, but it gave rise, naturally, to all of the infinite and baffling complexity of life. The awe it inspired in me made the awe that people talk about in respect of religious experience seem, frankly, silly beside it. I’d take the awe of understanding over the awe of ignorance any day.” (https://atheists.org/community/douglas-adams-interview)
So if they have this dim feeling that the Theory of Evolution is the most powerful tool in our box – maybe we have it too, and are therefore harping on it so much?
whoa.
Stenger is dead??
Yes.
A week or two ago.
Creationism should be attacked because any people who believe it also attach themselves to all other sorts of woo, probably most harmfully, the antivax movement. After all, what is the one way to get an exemption from vaccines in America?
Creationism teaches people not to think critically, not to trust science, and this carries over to a distrust of scientists on global warming, modern medicine, homeopathy, blood transfusions and much more. It’d be nice to have a study (maybe one is out there), but I’d bet many of the people who distrust science in one of those areas had the downward spiral start at a young age when they read, “In the beginning…”
I would say, it also teaches people that they can CHOOSE scientific facts. With the widespread social condoning of this type of behavior we shouldn’t be surprised later on that these folks are doing the same with other scientific findings on climate change, vaccines etc.
Q: Why are you discarding the overwhelming evidence of man made climate change?
A: Well, I’ve been discarding the overwhelming evidence for evolution for a long time, and nobody seemed to bat an eye.
I would frame that slightly differently, chrisbuckley80. I think religion trains people to think uncritically, leading them to accept all manner of nonsense, creationism being one form. While there may be a good number of creationists who are anti-vaxers, too, it is my impression that the largest number of anti-vaxers are over on the liberal side of the spectrum and very unlikely to be (young earth) creationists. They are, I think, more likely to be vague spiritualists than fundamentalists.
It would be interesting to see some statistics on this subject. I might be totally wrong.
Anecdotally, the only people I’ve personally been acquainted with who are against vaccinations have been Christians. Of course, I usually don’t bother inquiring to see where in the religious spectrum they fall. I have known a couple of the hippie spiritual types who buy into claims such as diets curing autism, which is usually closely related to the antivax movement, so I could certainly see how it’s possible the views are more prevalent in this group. (However, keep in mind Jenny McCarthy was raised Catholic and being the face of this ridiculous movement has also said she prays to Catholic saints now.)
To your other point, yes I’ll agree religion is the root cause of the fuzzy thinking, not Creationism per se. Religion teaches them Creationism and, as Scientifik points out, that they can pick and choose which facts to believe. In the United States, we’re used to the number one symptom of this kind of thinking being Evolution denial because it hits so close to home with their unfounded beliefs. It’s an odd marriage of right wing fundamentalism with left wing PoMo resulting in the same lack of ability to grasp reality. It would indeed be interesting to see some sort of woo study of the sort that Jerry has posted before with regard to supernatural beliefs, but incorporating these other bad ideas as well.
“…why people are so down on creationism but not on other equal bits of nonsense, like homeopathy or climate-change denialism, that are far more harmful.”
Because these “other bits of nonsense” aren’t trying to undermine and replace the philosophical and methodological paradigms on which ALL science is based.
Climate-change denialists may dispute the data, the models and/or the conclusions, but not methodological naturalism. Homeopaths don’t deny the Germ Theory of disease, only that there is more to treating disease than giving someone a dose of antibiotics
Brown says that, in the UK, the overwhelming majority don’t think that science and religion are incompatible and very few creationists are YEC’s. The same is true in the USA for the mainstream Protestants, RCC’s and liberal Jews.
However,the YEC fundies want to make science and religion compatible by changing science, and their political clout to do this includes control over one of the two major political parties.
Plus, c’mon. Can you really expect atheists NOT to object when grown men solemnly insist that science supports Noah loading an ark with baby, coconut eating dinosaurs?
I wish I had lived my youth in the 60s & 70s in the states. How fun it is! :))
It was all good, but I specially liked “He couldn’t help himself. Literally—for, like the rest of us, he has no free will, and his brain is wired up to purse his lips every time he approaches the rump of faith.” Enjoy.
I think you missed Scientifik’s point, Jerry; the A is what one of the folks he’s referring to in his first para might say in response to that Q.
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Yes, I know, and I already trashed my comment.
This is dire:
“But a completely naturalistic account of how spirituality arose in the world can’t say anything about what spirituality might reveal. Eyes also have evolved but that doesn’t mean there is nothing to see.”
That doesn’t pass the smell test:
“But a completely naturalistic account of how stupidity arose in the world can’t say anything about what stupidity might reveal. Eyes also have evolved but that doesn’t mean there is nothing to see.”
… as expected, since Brown’s smell receptors have wonky wiring:
Aha! That explains the Brown stain on the Guardian whenever he is present.