Clickbait title! Here’s a tw**t brought to my attention by Matthew Cobb. Be sure to watch the embedded gif:
A lad tore his shirt, and you won’t believe how his genius mom fixed it!
July 31, 2016 • 2:30 pm
Misconceptions about determinism, illustrated
July 31, 2016 • 1:30 pm
Over at the website Evolving Perspectives, reader Pliny the in between has a new cartoon called “Nuts and bolts of crime and punishment“. It illustrates one of the many misconceptions people have about science-based determinism and its rejection of libertarian free will: that under determinism is useless to try to change anything since everything is preordained by the laws of nature. Well, the last part of that is pretty much correct—save for fundamental indeterminacy due to quantum mechanics—but within that paradigm lies the fact that people’s arguments constitute environmental factors that affect how others behave.
My own example is that you can alter the behavior of a dog by kicking it when it does something you don’t like. (I am NOT recommending this!). After a while the dog, whose onboard computer gets reprogrammed to anticipate pain, will no longer engage in the unwanted behavior.
Well, Pliny also used the kicking example, but on humans rather than dogs (click to enlarge). I thought the guy was a real person, but Pliny told me this:
It’s generic henchman # 7 (first used here). Some might think that he is based on a Fox News hack, but that can’t possibly be true. I only used him here because that expression worked so well for the aftermath of Venn’s aversion therapy 😉
The cartoon, as usual, encapsulates what I try to say, but in many fewer words, and in graphic (and painful) imagery:
Maajid Nawaz on ISIS’s “holy war”
July 31, 2016 • 11:15 am
If you read Graeme Wood’s absorbing Atlantic article “What ISIS really wants,” you’ll know of his thesis that ISIS has adopted apocalyptic medieval Islamic theology with the goal of establishing another Caliphate. That caliphate will arise after a final big battle, presumably with nonbelievers (i.e., the West), prophesied to take place near Dabiq, Syria.
In a new piece at the Daily Beast, “Isis wants a global civil war,” liberal Muslim Maajid Nawaz goes further, observing first that a lot of Muslim violence is perpetrated against other Muslims:
In fact, since the start of Ramadan last month, and till the time of writing on July 27, 2016, there have been 75 attacks in 50 days by various jihadist groups globally. This amounts to attacks in 21 countries at a rate of one-and-a-half per day, leaving over 1,169 dead, not including the injured and maimed. The 21 countries and territories attacked have been Jordan, Iraq, Bangladesh, Syria, Israel, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Libya, France, Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Yemen, Malaysia, Turkey, Mali, Palestine, Cameroon, Saudi, Thailand, and Germany. Sixteen of those are Muslim-majority territories.
What is the point of this? Well, one could say that they’re inching toward the Final Big Battle, but creating these brushfires in Muslim countries, most of whose religionists are Sunnis (ISIS’s own brand of Islam), doesn’t really make sense under that theory. Who is that Big Battle going to be against—will it involve all forms of Islam that aren’t exactly shared by ISIS?
Nawaz has a different take: that ISIS’s goal is not to move toward the one big apocalyptic battle, but to create perpetual civil wars everywhere. Why?
Nawaz claims that about 12 years ago ISIS “adopted a playbook Idarat al-Tawahhush, or the Management of Savagery.” Here’s what the playbook foresees from this civil strife:
This book on jihadist war theory first appeared online around 2004 and was attributed to an ideologue who goes by the nom de guerre Abu Bakr al-Naji. Naji instructed followers to incite ethnic, sectarian, and religious hatred throughout the world so that societies end up dividing along mutual mistrust and a desire for revenge. Naji’s hope was that Sunni Muslims would then largely be blamed—as they now are—as the cause of this intolerance and violence, rendering them hated and left isolated. Naji even highlights the importance of provoking heavy state military responses against Sunni Muslims everywhere, so that entire populations of Sunnis feel suspected and attacked by everyone else around them, and turn in on themselves. The idea is that through such division Sunnis would find no refuge from angry non-Muslims and over-reacting states, except in jihadists who would embrace them. In turn, Sunnis would end up swelling the ranks of jihadists’ militias as they began to protect themselves against reprisal attacks.
Behold, a world divided along sectarian religious lines, the ideal conditions for a “caliphate.”
In other words, the beleaguered Sunnis would finally see that their only salvation lies in uniting under the ISIS banner. And that, says Nawaz, is why ISIS is trying hard to incite hatred of the very people they ultimately want to recruit. His example is the provocation of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad to overreact against his own people, which drew Sunni Arabs to the ISIS cause while, says Nawaz, “the international community stood aloof.”
And indeed, why would the international community get involved in Muslim-on-Muslim civil wars? There’s nothing for us in it, except a lot of deaths of Western soldiers and innocent Middle Easterners. Our dithering about what to do in Syria is exactly, says Nawaz, what ISIS wants. And that makes sense. Presumably the violence incited by ISIS in the West will just create more animus towards Sunnis, further spurring their unification under the black flag.
Well, who knows what ISIS wants, or who is really in charge? Nawaz’s views make as much sense as any other theory. But regardless of what ISIS wants, I think Nawaz’s solution—the one he’s trying to enact through his think tank Quilliam—is correct
Too many Muslims still insist that to challenge Islamist extremism breeds anti-Muslim bigotry, while they fail to grasp that it is the Islamists themselves who provoke anti-Muslim hatred thorough their divisive agenda, and by insisting on defining Muslims against others primarily by our religious identity. Our collective task will be to robustly stand against the division caused not just by the far-right who seek to isolate Europe’s Muslims, but to challenge the very same division promoted by the Islamists themselves within our Muslim communities. Only by reasserting the universality of our secular liberal democratic citizenship are we able to protect the multiplicity of identities, as opposed to the exclusionary religion-based identification that Islamists and anti-Muslim bigots thrive on.
No insurgency can survive without a level of ideological support within the community it seeks to recruit from. To isolate the terrorists from their host population must be a priority for us all. One needn’t be black to condemn racism. Likewise, one needn’t be Muslim to condemn any expression of theocratic Islamism.
While Nawaz calls on both Muslims and non-Muslims to “challenge Islamist extremism,” I’m coming around to the view that the crucial people for reforming Islam are liberal Muslims like Nawaz. Reform has to come from within, because it surely isn’t coming from without—not with non-Muslims scared of being labeled as bigots (or getting attacked). All the palaver by Westerners is like so many tinkling cymbals, and powerful Western leaders like Obama are simply too pusillanimous to “condemn theocratic Islamism.” Instead, they claim that ISIS is “not really Islam,” with some even blaming the violence on Western colonialism. Those attitudes, of course, do nothing to solve the problem of terrorism, and bombing won’t help, either. Nawaz’s solution makes a lot of sense, but it’s falling on deaf ears.
Big Think: 3 questions will tell you how religious you’re likely to be
July 31, 2016 • 9:45 am
UPDATE: The Gervais and Norenzayan paper mentioned here should be considered inconclusive in light of later work. Go here for the explanation under “update.”
_______________
I’m not so sure that “The Big Think” (TBT) website deserves its name, as the Thinks there are often pretty small. But this headline caught my attention (click on screenshot to go to the site; h/t reader Ant):
“So what are the questions?”, you’re asking yourself. I’ll give you those in a second. First, a bit of background by the article’s author, Steven Mazie:
People who are more disposed to analytical thinking, the hypothesis goes, are less inclined to believe in a deity.
In 2012, in the journal Science, social psychologists Will M. Gervais and Ara Norenzayan published the results of five studies suggesting this might be the case.
And so the questions, I guess, test whether you think analytically; and if you get them all right, I suppose you’re more likely to be a nonbeliever. (Maddingly, they don’t give you an “atheism score” or a correlation between number of correct answers and the proportion of nonbelievers.)
Well, try these:
1. A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost? ____cents
2. If it takes 5 machines 5 minutes to make 5 widgets, how long would it take 100 machines to make 100 widgets? _____minutes
3. In a lake, there is a patch of lily pads. Every day, the patch doubles in size. If it takes 48 days for the patch to cover the entire lake, how long would it take for the patch to cover half of the lake? _____days
This was the first thing I saw this morning when I woke up and looked at my laptop in bed; and even half asleep I answered all three questions correctly within one minute. I’m clearly a strong atheist! The answers seemed self-evident to someone familiar with math, but of course the questions are designed to prompt intuitive answers that are wrong.
I won’t give you the answers, though the Big Think piece does. Most of you will get them right—if you think about them. TBT goes on to say this:
The study these questions are drawn from was conducted using 179 Canadian college students. After completing the quiz task, the students were asked about their intrinsic religiosity, religious beliefs and beliefs in supernatural entities (including God, angels and the devil). The results followed expectations:
“[A]s hypothesized, analytic thinking was significantly negatively associated with all three measures of religious belief, rReligiosity = –0.22, P = 0.003; rIntuitive = –0.15, P = 0.04; and rAgents = –0.18, P = 0.02. This result demonstrated that, at the level of individual differences, the tendency to analytically override intuitions in reasoning was associated with religious disbelief, supporting previous findings.”
To translate: the more religious the undergrads were, the less likely they were to have demonstrated effective analytical reasoning on the three questions. And the better the students did on the questions, the less likely they were to have strong religious beliefs.
The study’s authors (and Mazie) relate the results to Daniel Kahneman’s classification of “System 1” (intuitive, fast) thinking, and “System 2” (slower, more analytical) thinking. Why, then, are more intuitive thinkers also more religious? Mazie notes:
The authors reason that since “religious belief emerges through a converging set of intuitive processes, and analytic processing can inhibit or override intuitive processing…analytic thinking may undermine intuitive support for religious belief.” Seeing people through the Kahnemanian lens thus “predicts that analytic thinking may be one source of religious disbelief.”
Well, that sounds good, though it’s fancy language for saying, “People who carefully work through their ideas rather than go with what they were taught to be true, or feel to be true, are less likely to be religious.” However, most people get their religious beliefs from their parents and peers, and I’m not sure that counts as an “intuitive process” rather than as simple indoctrination. I think the difference is the tendency to examine carefully what you think is true, and if that’s considered Kahneman-ian System 2, so be it.
Unfortunately, Gervais and Norenzayan had to add a caveat to their paper to make sure that people don’t think they’re anti-religion:
[W]e caution that the present studies are silent on long-standing debates about the intrinsic value or rationality of religious beliefs…or about the relative merits of analytic and intuitive thinking in promoting optimal decision making.
Some day those caveats won’t be needed for, of course, a belief that is thought through and examined from all sides is more likely to be correct. That’s the definition of rational thinking! You could probably do the same test, but correlating the answers with acceptance of homeopathic medicine, and find pretty similar results. But in that case it would be taken to show that the results are NOT silent on the rationality of homeopathic “beliefs.” Once again, we have to tiptoe around religion as opposed to other forms of irrationality. Mazie adds his own caveat, too:
There are many other reasons people might decide not to believe in God, of course, and it would be a mistake to construe religious believers as unreflective, shallow-thinking fools.
Most of us don’t think that anyway: there are smart religious people who hang on to faith for emotional reasons, or because they were taught it and find solace in it, or simply don’t want to dissolve a social network that involves religion. But seriously, are there really lots of reasons people don’t believe in God, or does it all boil down to this: “not enough evidence, and lots of counterevidence”?
Document found in which Shelley declared himself an atheist
July 31, 2016 • 8:30 am
Many of us know that the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was an atheist, and some also know that he was one of the first “out” atheists in Britain. In 1811, while a first-year undergraduate at Oxford, Shelley published an inflammatory pamphlet, The Necessity of Atheism, (You can read it online here.) I couldn’t find out how his name got associated with the pamphlet, as it was published anonymously, but he was found out—and expelled. As Wikipedia notes:
At that time the content was so shocking to the authorities that he was rusticated for contumacy in his refusing to deny authorship, together with his friend and fellow student, Thomas Jefferson Hogg. A revised and expanded version was printed in 1813.
I love that antiquated word “rusticated”, which is still used in India to mean “expelled” (check the link). And its linkage with “contumacy” is delicious. Here’s the pamphlet:
At any rate, Shelley could be seen as the first “New Atheist,” since he argued that the idea of God should be seen one that requires supporting evidence. The frontispiece of my book Faith Versus Fact starts with a quote from the 1813 edition of the pamphlet:
“God is an hypothesis, and, as such, stands in need of proof: the onus probandi [burden of proof] rests on the theist.”
One of the characteristics of “New Atheists”, as I see it, is their framing of religious “truths” as questions subject to empirical and rational examination (i.e., science construed broadly). Although Shelley wasn’t a scientist, I adopted him as an Honorary Scientist (and honorary New Atheist) for making the statement above.
Shelley was offered readmission to Oxford if he recanted his views, but he refused. His love life was tumultuous, and he abandoned his pregnant wife to run off to Switzerland with Mary Wollstonecraft, who later wrote the novel Frankenstein. And of course he was one of the greatest lyric poets of his time, producing masterpieces like “Ozymandias” and “Ode to the West Wind“, with its famous last line. He drowned at age 29 while trying to sail his boat through a storm on the Gulf of La Spezia in Italy.
That’s a long introduction, but I do love Shelley’s poetry, especially “Ozymandias”; and his atheism is a bonus. Reader jjh brought to my attention a new discovery about Shelley’s nonbelief published on polymath Graham Henderson’s website. The title is self-explanatory, “Hotel register in which Shelley declared himself to be an atheist: found.”
Henderson explains:
On 19 July 2016, the University of Cambridge made a startling and almost completely unheralded announcement. They were in possession of a page from the register of a hotel in Chamonix: not just any page and not just any hotel. The hotel was the Hotel de Villes de Londres and the page in question was the one upon which Percy Bysshe Shelley had inscribed his famous declaration that he was an atheist, a lover of humanity and a democrat. Not a copy of it….THE page. No reproduction or copy of this page has ever, to my knowledge been made available to the public. Evidence for what Shelley wrote was based almost exclusively on either eye witnesses, such as Southey and Byron, or mere hearsay.
I make the point in my article “Atheist. Lover of Humanity. Democrat.” What did Shelley Mean?” that Shelley’s declaration is exceedingly important to our understanding of his entire literary output. There I wrote,
“I think his choice of words was very deliberate and central to how he defined himself and how wanted the world to think of him. They may well have been the words he was most famous (or infamous) for in his lifetime.” Thus the discovery of this page is a rather momentous occasion; rather like finding a hitherto unknown, handwritten copy of the Gettysburgh [sic] Address.
This famous page, whose discovery was announced this month in the Cambridge News, has an enigmatic history. It disappeared from the hotel register three years after Shelley’s death, and then was found pasted into Shelley’s personal copy of one of his poems—ironically, “The Revolt of Islam.”
Here’s the only picture of the page on the Internet, unfortunately not in high resolution. Below it I’ve enlarged the part of the page on which Shelley declares himself.
I can’t make out the Greek, as the document is not in high resolution, but perhaps a reader can.
Henderson continues:
On the left hand side of the page we see Shelley’s familiar signature – I don’t know why, but I felt quite emotional seeing this. Below it are the initials of Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin: “MWG”. Beside their names we have their country and city of origin: London, England.
Interestingly, Shelley’s signature has been underlined twice – but by whom?
Henderson thinks it was Shelley’s friend Lord Byron who did this. He goes on about the signature:
Under the column heading, “destination”, Shelley writes “L’Enfer” [JAC: French for “hell”]; both for himself and for Mary. We might find this amusing – but it was anything but in those days.
And the Greek inscription given as Shelley’s profession?
The words Shelley wrote in the register of the Hotel de Villes de Londres (under the heading “Occupation”) were (as translated by PMS Dawson): “philanthropist, an utter democrat, and an atheist”. The words were, as I say, written in Greek. The Greek word he used for philanthropist was “philanthropos tropos.”
Be sure to read Henderson’s complementary article, which explains in detail the significance of the words used by Shelley to identify himself. Henderson feels that all three descriptions were meant to be provocative, though it’s not quite clear whom Shelley intended to provoke by writing in a hotel register! Apparently it was meant to be seen by other British tourists who frequented the hotel. And it was, and they were outraged. As Henderson notes in his ancillary post:
The reaction to Shelley’s entry was predictably furious and focused almost exclusively on Shelley’s choice of the word “atheist”. For example, this anonymous comment appeared in the London Chronicle:
Mr. Shelley is understood to be the person who, after gazing on Mont Blanc, registered himself in the album as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Atheist; which gross and cheap bravado he, with the natural tact of the new school, took for a display of philosophic courage; and his obscure muse has been since constantly spreading all her foulness of those doctrines which a decent infidel would treat with respect and in which the wise and honourable have in all ages found the perfection of wisdom and virtue.
It took a lot more guts back then to declare yourself an atheist than it does now. But Shelley was the Hitchens of his day: he simply didn’t give a damn what people thought of him, and delighted in provoking the pious.
Saturday in Dobrzyn
July 31, 2016 • 7:30 am
Instead of putting up Readers’ Wildlife today (don’t worry, I’m saving every submission I get), I’ll post some pictures of what happened yesterday. Nothing really “happened” except the usual peaceful domesticity that pervades the place, but for new readers, and those who like these photos, I’ll document the day.
When I awoke, Hili and Cyrus were sleeping together on the couch. Hili went out briefly after breakfast, but spent almost all day beside me on the smaller couch where I was working. I thus got plenty of Cat Fix.
Here’s where I’m staying: a house named “Smultronstället” from the Swedish (Andrzej and Malorzata lived in Sweden for many years). The literal translation is “the place where the wild strawberries grow,” but in Sweden it’s an idiom for “the place you like to go.” There are extensive grounds that run down to the wide Vistula river, and about 3,000 cherry trees. The cherry harvest ended right before I arrived. The nearby village of Dobrzyn is tiny, with about 3,000 residents (one per cherry tree).
Hili’s breakfast included a foil tube of Japanese “cat’s snack” sent by Hiroko, the woman who made and embroidered my lovely cat shirt. We previously had squeezed the tube, containing a meaty or fishy paste, into a bowl, but Hiroko said that was doing it wrong, and gave instructions for feeding Hili that were pure poetry: “Let a cat lick those snacks from the small cut end of the pack. You can give it little by little.” She added a link showing the proper feeding technique.
Hili really enjoys those snacks!
Malgorzata and Andrzej on the front steps with Cyrus, who is now in fine shape and has become much less nervous since he was adopted.
Cyrus the d*g:
Lunchtime, or, as it’s known in Poland, “second breakfast.” As I’ve said, Poles are like hobbits, eating four or five meals a day. I call them “first breakfast” to “fifth breakfast.” We have diluted cherry juice (for me), bread, fresh vegetables from the garden of Elzbieta (Leon’s staff), two kinds of cheese, and Polish ham and sausages (two kinds of sausages). Yum! Cyrus is standing by should a scrap come his way.
The cherries didn’t ripen simultaneously this year, so after the harvest there were still many lingering on the trees. 30 metric tons were harvested and sold to the wholesaler for only 1.30 zlotys per kilo (that’s only 33 U.S. cents per kilo, or 15¢ per pound). Nearly all of the cherries are sour cherries suitable for pies and jams, but that’s fine with me as it provides me with plenty of cherry pies.
It wasn’t worth the pickers going back to the orchard after the harvest was over, as the price is too low to justify further harvest. There are thus plenty of trees that look like this:
In the afternoon we went picking for both dinner (see below) and Sunday’s pie. I was instructed to look for the ripest cherries, which are nearly purple:
One basket of ripe pie cherries:
We instructed Hili to guard the cherries while we relaxed:
Can you spot the cat? If Hili didn’t have white markings, she’d be hard to see!
In the afternoon we took a walk with Cyrus down to the river. On the way back, Andrzej played fetch with Cyrus’s ball, a game they both love. Later in the day I played fetch with Cyrus using some of the uneaten apples that litter the garden (see above). Cyrus actually nommed part of an apple while bringing it back: the first time he’s been known to eat fruit.
I volunteered to pit the cherries for dinner. The pitter is an ingenious plastic device that simultaneously pits the cherries, plunges the pits and some juice into the tub below, and ejects the pitted cherries down a chute, under which we put a bowl for collection. It’s a great invention.
The pitted cherries were cooked and made into what Malgorzata calls “nursery food”: noodles, cherries, yogurt, and a wee bit of sugar. (This was invented by Malgorzata as a much simpler version of pierogi, or Polish dumplings, which are sometimes filled with cherries and served with sour cream.) It was a fine dinner, and for my second course I had cherry pie.
The last piece! But another pie will be made today.
I got to drink the cherry juice, too. You haven’t lived until you’ve quaffed a glass of pure, undiluted cherry juice exuded by the pitted fruit. Tonight I’m going to add a bit to my beer (I favor “Zubr” [bison] beer) to see if I can replicate the taste of Belgian fruit beers.
Self portrait in my room with a carved Polish chair:
In the evening we paid a visit to the future home of Leon and his staff, Elzbieta and Andrzej (yes, another Andrzej). Sadly, Leon wasn’t in attendance but we’ll visit soon when he is. They all bought a lovely piece of land not far from Dobrzyn, and, as I posted before, just bought an old wooden house in southern Poland that they’ll have disassembled, moved here, and then reassembled on the property. They’ll sell their city flat in Wroclawek and will move here; Leon will then be able to roam free.
Elzbieta and Andrzej in the flower and vegetable garden they planted while clearing the land. Note the cucumbers, which are delicious. Their and Leon’s property runs back to the woods you can see to the left.
The tumbledown shack on the property that will be demolished to make room for the wooden house:
This is the house that will be moved to the property above (I’ve posted it before):
A picture Elzbieta took showing the fog on their property two days ago:
Good night!
Sunday: Hili dialogue
July 31, 2016 • 6:30 am
It’s the Lord’s day, and throughout Poland good Catholics are getting ready to go to mass. (I’m writing this 6 hours before it’s posted). It’s a lovely sunny day in Dobrzyn, and yesterday’s high was only 29° C, which is a cool 84° F. That seems almost Arctic to someone who’s lived under the Heat Dome the past week. And it’s quite cool at night—perfect for sleeping.
It’s the last day of July (31st), and tomorrow we’ll have August. It’s a holiday in Poland today: Treasury Day, although Malgorzata says it’s a worthless holiday since it was established only in 2010. On this day in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain under the “Alhambra Decree,” and, in 1941, Göring, under orders from Hitler, ordered SS General Reinhard Heydrich (later assassinated) to draw up plans for the “final solution” (Endlösung). On July 31, 1954, an Italian team made the first ascent of K2, the world’s second highest mountain. This day in 1970 was “Black Tot Day,” the last day in which sailors in the British Navy got their daily allotment of rum, a custom that began in 1655 and was formalized in 1740. What a pity that it’s gone! Finally, exactly ten years ago today, Fidel Castro handed over the presidency of Cuba to his brother Raúl. Fidel, who is clearly ill, has almost disappeared.
Notables born on this day include Friedrich Wöhler (1800), Primo Levi (1919), John Searle (1932), and J. K. Rowling (1965 ♥). Those who died on this day include Franz Liszt (1886) and Gore Vidal (2012). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili has found a new beast on her property:
Hili: This hedgehog is in love with our garden.A: You shouldn’t pay any attention to it.Hili: That’s just what I’m trying.
In Polish:
Hili: Ten jeż zakochał się w naszym ogrodzie.
Ja: Nie powinnaś zwracać na niego uwagi.
Hili: Właśnie próbuję.
Leon has also spotted another mammal on the grounds of his future home (see next post):
Leon, Oh, my friend, a hare!
ID advocates mock determinism, insist on libertarian free will and human exceptionalism
July 30, 2016 • 12:00 pm
The boys over at the Discovery Institute (DI) spend a lot of time mocking me online, but I rarely pay attention. And when I do, I’m sort of flattered, and for two reasons: they think that what I write here is important enough to attack, and because when those creationist mushbrains go after me, I know I’m doing something right. I despise their ignorant brand of creationism, “Intelligent Design”, whose advocates claim that some unspecified designer, rather than evolution, is responsible for living creatures. It’s an open secret, though, that for them the designer is the Judeo-Christian God (not Allah!), and so they can’t help going after me when I criticize religion.
You’d think that they’d keep their religious motivations secret, for, after all, Intelligent Design was rejected by the courts because it was descried for what it is: a gussied-up form of traditional creationism “designed” to get religion snuck into public school biology classes—like a Trojan Horse with Jesus inside. But they’re so bursting to tell us the Good News that they can’t properly conceal their motives.
The two people who seem obsessed with going after me (if I were PuffHo I’d call them “haters”) are Michael Egnor, a creationist Catholic neurosurgeon whose name allows many puns, and David Klinghoffer, the only Orthodox Jew in the DI.
Egnor’s new post, “Without free will there is no justice“, excoriates me for my determinism, using as an example my recent post on Manson “girl” Leslie Van Houten. (In that post, I argued that after 45 years in jail, and every sign that she’s reformed, Van Houten should be released. Keeping her in jail is not good for either her or society). And Egnor’s piece reminds us that there are still many people who accept libertarian free will.
Egno piece is a good example of how many people misunderstand—deliberately or out of ignorance—how “agency” works. In the case of Abrahamic religionists, most (except for Calvinists) have to believe in libertarian free will, the kind where, if you could rewind history at a “decision point”, with everything absolutely identical to before, you still could have done something differently from what you did. Without that ability to choose between “right” and “wrong,” Christianity, Judaism, and Islam collapse, for what kind of God would reward or punish you in the afterlife if you couldn’t have “chosen otherwise”? And, of course, in Islam and Christianity you’re also rewarded for accepting Jesus as your savior or Mohammed as your prophet.
Therefore, Egnor must argue that determinism must be wrong as an explanation of human behavior, for it not only fails to explain true libertarian free will, which for some reason he thinks we have, but also nullifies the possibility of “justice.” To Egnor, “justice” absolutely requires us to have libertarian free will, which allows us to assign moral responsibility to people. As many believe, true moral responsibility requires the libertarian you-could-have-done-otherwise form of free will. But I’ve argued that can still have responsibility without libertarian free will, and can still have good reasons for punishing and rewarding people. What’s not justified is retributive punishment—punishment based on the assumption that you could have done other than what you did, and therefore should be punished for having chosen wrong. My own view is that we’re responsible for our acts, but not morally responsible.
Egnor, of course, has no evidence for libertarian free will, and we have lots of evidence against it (neuroscience, psychology experiments, and, most important, the laws of nature). So Egnor simply asserts that what his faith teaches him is also scientifically true:
We are free agents, influenced by our genes and our environment, but are free to choose the course of action we take. Determinism is not true, denial of free will is self-refuting (If we are not free to choose, why assume Coyne’s opinion has any truth value? It’s just a chemical reaction, determined by genes and environment), and our intellect and will are immaterial powers of the soul and are inherently free in the libertarian sense of not being determined by matter.
We are not meat robots. If we were meat robots, why would anyone listen to Jerry Coyne?
Well, Dr. Egnor, maybe they should listen because the two pounds of meat in my skull is better programmed than are the two pounds of Egnorian head-meat. That is, my meat emits statements that comport better with what rational people observe in the Universe than does Egnor’s faith-ridden meat.
But wait! There’s more!
Justice, which is a principle appropriate to man, presupposes moral culpability, and thus presupposes libertarian free will. Coyne’s system of human livestock management is not a criminal justice system at all.
This is called begging the question: assuming what you need to prove.
Egnor even tries to reject determinism of human behavior by citing quantum mechanics, which shows how desperate he is:
If you “accept science,” you don’t accept determinism, which has been ruled out in physics by an ingenious series of experiments over the past several decades. It is the consensus of physicists that nature is non-deterministic, in the sense that there are no local hidden variables. Coyne’s rejection of the overwhelming evidence that nature is non-deterministic is a rejection of science, just as his denial of free will is a rejection of common sense and reason.
This presupposes either that quantum-mechanical uncertainty gives us free will, which can’t be true (I won’t insult your intelligence by explaining that again), or that the “Bell’s inequality” experiments showing the lack of local realism on the level of particles show that all forms of natural law determining human behavior are out the window.
You can read the rest of Egnor’s article if you wish, and find out how my view of determinism’s implications for punishment is “totalitarian” and “offensive tripe.”
The problem, as I said, is that Egnor has no evidence for libertarian free will except his faith in a God who gave us the ability to override physical law. The funny part is that he admits that yes, determinism can sometimes play a role in justice; but he just won’t go one neuron further and admit that it is completely behind all human behavior.
Egnor:
Of course Van Houten chose to kill, just as millions of law-abiding people choose not to kill. Our choices are always influenced by genes, environment, etc., but that does not mean that we don’t choose. A bad upbringing, bad genetics, brain disease, immaturity, ideological dispositions, and a host of other factors can make it easier or harder to choose a certain course of action, but that course of action is still chosen.
That’s a great example of question-begging. But wait—there’s still more!
In some situations the influences on our choices are so strong that the law declares us not legally responsible for our choices — for example, if we have a psychiatric or neurological disorder that renders us incapable of distinguishing right from wrong. But that does not mean that we did not choose. It means that the law does not hold us accountable for our choice in circumstances in which we cannot understand or comply with the moral standard on which the law is based.
Remember, Egnor isn’t espousing compatibilism here, but pure dualism. He’s immune to reason, for he’s marinated in his Catholicism, but other people may be susceptible to ideas that come from your own meat.It’s those people who compatibilist philosophers should be addressing instead of just sitting in their philosophy-department offices, devising ingenious arguments about how you can have determinism and free will too. What they should be arguing is that we can’t have both determinism and traditional religion.