Guest post: Was Carl Sagan a militant atheist?

April 27, 2012 • 4:15 am

Does a popular astrophysicist erode his credibility by publicly criticizing religion? This was, of course, an issue in yesterday’s post on Neil deGrasse Tyson. It behooves us, then, to consider a similar figure from an earlier time: the astrophysicist and science popularizer Carl Sagan.

Cosmos, the famous 13-part series with Sagan as presenter (written by him, Ann Druyan and Steven Soter), is now 32 years old. The original run was short: from September 28 to December 21 of 1980. Around ten years later, Sagan added some 2-minute addenda to bring the episodes up to date.

The series was enormously popular, although I have to confess that I didn’t watch it. I have watched the clips below, which, although a bit histrionic for my taste, nevertheless surprised me with the boldness of Sagan’s attack on faith. And that didn’t seem to have quashed his enormous popularity.

As Wikipedia notes:

 As of 2009, [Cosmos] was still the most widely watched PBS series in the world. It won an Emmy and a Peabody Award and has since been broadcast in more than 60 countries and seen by over 500 million people. A book was also published to accompany the series.

Reader JJE, who is watching the series, was quite impressed with how strong Sagan’s attack on religion was—at least for those times. He wrote an email to me about it, and I asked him to do a guest post, which I’ve put below.

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Pursuing questions courageously

by J.J.E.

The internecine battles currently being waged between Gnu atheists and their accommodationist brethren and sistren continue to divide supporters of science who otherwise are natural allies. One front in this war is the issue of what and how we scientists, science teachers, and science boosters should communicate.

As much as I’m tempted to rehash old arguments and call out particular heroes and villains in this struggle, I’d like instead to promote the Gnu strategy from perspective I think most of can agree upon: in recent years, there have been few science advocates who have had the talent, success, and perspicacity of Carl Sagan. More importantly, Sagan’s arguments and methods remain sound and, I argue, will withstand the test of time.

I submit that, for the most part, we can all agree that Sagan’s many contributions to science advocacy were varied and effective. Among many other accomplishments, he was a long-time advisor to NASA, wrote many popular books and the novel Contact, co-authored many scientific papers, and perhaps most notably, co-authored and narrated the science program Cosmos. I am primarily using the widespread admiration of Sagan’s work as a bit of common ground between Gnus and accommodationists. But I want to avoid recruiting Carl Sagan the man as a Gnu for two reasons: 1) sadly, he’s not around to represent his own views; 2) his arguments and methods now have a life of their own and stand or fall on their own merits.

Below are several excerpts from Cosmos and The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark that illustrate what I think anyone who cares about the truth should be willing to do: pursue questions courageously. While Sagan communicated this bedrock scientific principle throughout his work, I want to draw special attention to how he dealt with religion and superstition.

On nearly every topic, Sagan was very measured and very careful. And while he was certainly not as confrontational as some atheists, those who would use him as a talisman against Gnu Atheist methods should make no mistake: Sagan didn’t shy away from criticizing religion when its flaws impact science. Before turning this over to Carl Sagan, I implore his successors (like Neil deGrasse Tyson, who will be featured in the remake of Cosmos) to take Sagan’s arguments seriously and heed his exhortation to pursue questions courageously, even if it may make some people uncomfortable. Without further ado, Carl Sagan:

The following excerpts are from Cosmos Episode 7: The Backbone of Night and Episode 10: The Edge of Forever.

The idea that the universe is knowable brings science into conflict with the gods:

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There might be a way to know the world without the “god hypothesis” [JAC: note how he, like Dawkins, frames it as a hypothesis]

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The suppression of ideas and the embrace of mysticism by Platonists and their Christian successors set back human civilization:

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God as an explanation causes an infinite regress:

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To pursue origins questions courageously, we must also question god:

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The quotes below are taken from a UK edition of The Demon Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan (ISBN: 0747251568, Headline Book Publishing, 1997).

Gods compared to aliens, p108:

The gods watch over us and guide our destinies, many human cultures teach; other entities, more malevolent, are responsible for the existence of evil. Both classes of beings, whether considered natural or supernatural, real or imaginary, serve human needs. Even if they’re wholly fanciful, people feel better believing in them. So in an age when traditional religions have been under withering fire from science, is it not natural to wrap up the old gods and demons in scientific raiment and call them aliens?

Gods compared to hallucinations (p 125):

Perhaps when everyone knows that gods come down to Earth, we hallucinate gods; when all of us are familiar with demons, it’s incubi and succubi; when fairies are widely accepted, we see fairies; in an age of spiritualism, we encounter spirits; and when the old myths fade and we begin thinking that extraterrestrial beings are plausible, then that’s where our hypnogogic imagery tends.

Skepticism threatens religion and religion discourages skepticism:

But the tools of scepticism are generally unavailable to the citizens of our society. They’re hardly ever mentioned in the schools, even in the presentation of science, its most ardent practitioner, although scepticism repeatedly sprouts spontaneously out of the disappointments of everyday life. Our politics, economics, advertising and religions (New Age and Old) are awash in credulity. Those who have something to sell, those who wish to influence public opinion, those in power, a sceptic might suggest, have a vested interest in discouraging scepticism.

Modern science casts substantial doubt on religion (p 37 of Chapter 2, Science and Hope):

Science, Ann Druyan notes, is forever whispering in our ears, ‘Remember, you’re very new at this. You might be mistaken. You’ve been wrong before.’ Despite all the talk of humility, show me something comparable in religion. Scripture is said to be divinely inspired – a phrase with many meanings. But what if it’s simply made up by fallible humans? Miracles are attested, but what if they’re instead some mix of charlatanry, unfamiliar states of consciousness, misapprehensions of natural phenomena and mental illness? No contemporary religion and no New Age belief seems to me to take sufficient account of the grandeur, magnificence, subtlety and intricacy of the Universe revealed by science. The fact that so little of the findings of modern science is prefigured in Scripture to my mind casts further doubt on its divine inspiration.

But of course I might be wrong.

Religion contains many logical and rhetorical fallacies from (p 199, “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection”):

In addition to teaching us what to do when evaluating a claim to knowledge, any good baloney detection kit must also teach us what not to do. It helps us recognize the most common and perilous fallacies of logic and rhetoric. Many good examples can be found in religion and politics, because their practitioners are so often obliged to justify two contradictory propositions.

Spot the bittern!

April 27, 2012 • 3:49 am

It’s Friday, and your job is to spot the bittern (Botaurus stellaris) in this photo. You may give your answer in the comments below, but DO NOT READ THEM until you’ve given this a good look-see. You can click to enlarge this (twice in succession to make it really big), drag the picture to your desktop and zoom in (it’s high-res), or go to the original photograph by Lisa Lawley, which is huge.

You’re going to have trouble, for natural selection did a great job with this bird’s camouflage.

Oh, and leave your answers on this page, not on the picture pages (two readers have already made this mistake).

h/t: Ollie

A lovely new crab from the Philippines

April 26, 2012 • 10:23 am

National Geographic reports the discovery a lovely new freshwater crab, Insulamon palawanense, which sports a purple carapace and red claws. It was found on the Philippine island of Palawan, and is small (1-2 inches across).

(All photos by Hendrik Freitag.)

The crab’s brilliant hues may simply help the species recognize its brethren, said study author Hendrik Freitag, of the Senckenberg Museum of Zoology in Dresden, Germany.

“The particular violet coloration might just have evolved by chance, and must not necessarily have a very specific function or reason aside from being a general visual signal for recognition,” said Freitag, whose study was published in February in the Raffles Bulletin of Zoology.

I’m a bit dubious about bright colors as “species recognition” signals. That might be the correct explanation, but doesn’t explain why other species are more drab.  Perhaps individuals of this species need brighter colors because there are fewer individuals and need more obvious signals to find each other. But there could be other explanations as well, including mutual sexual selection or aposematism (color warning of toxicity, though that seems unlikely).  But Freitag saying that “it could have evolved by chance” (implying genetic drift) doesn’t comport with the selective explanation—individual recognition of conspecifics—that he offers immediately thereafter.

Large Insulamon males—such as this I. johannchristiani, another of the newfound species—sport a reddish color, possibly to signal their power, Freitag said.

Smaller, less dominant Insulamon males and females are purple, he noted.

A poll on “alternative” (aka useless) medicine

April 26, 2012 • 6:04 am

UPDATE: I don’t think you see the latest results until after you vote (otherwise it just displays an initial state), and you can vote only once.  Therefore, if you just voted, come back and report the latest percentages.

Here’s an update: 84% NO at 11:52 AM Chicago time. GCM.

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I’m gonna cooperate with P.Z. on this one, because it’s an important issue.  The Economist is conducting a poll: “Should alternative medicine be taught in medical schools?”  “Alternative medicine” appears to mean “homeopathy,” and The Economist notes that courses in such alternative therapies, though dwindling, are still taught in UK medical schools.

Woo is slightly outstripping real medicine in the poll, so you might want to make your opinion known.  I’m not going to call readers’ attention to polls very often, and this time there’s no prize for voting, but—unlike the cat/dog/baby poll—this is a serious matter, for lives could be at stake.

As of 8 a.m. Chicago time:

Harvard can’t afford science journals

April 26, 2012 • 4:16 am

Harvard University, where I’m headed to speak next week, has the largest endowment of any university in the world: 27.6 billion dollars (in 2010). But they have a policy of not using that money to finance independent units of the university: their unofficial motto is “every tub on its own bottom.”

I’m not sure whether that applies to the libraries, but the Guardian has a new article implying as much, “Harvard University says it can’t afford journal publishers’ prices.”

Exasperated by rising subscription costs charged by academic publishers, Harvard University has encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls.

A memo from Harvard Library to the university’s 2,100 teaching and research staff called for action after warning it could no longer afford the price hikes imposed by many large journal publishers, which bill the library around $3.5m a year.

The extraordinary move thrusts one of the world’s wealthiest and most prestigious institutions into the centre of an increasingly fraught debate over access to the results of academic research, much of which is funded by the taxpayer.

A lot of the squeeze comes from the rip-off publisher Elsevier, which I’ve discussed before and am boycotting (see this Guardian piece on that boycott):

More than 10,000 academics have already joined a boycott of Elsevier, the huge Dutch publisher, in protest at its journal pricing and access policies. Many university libraries pay more than half of their journal budgets to the publishers Elsevier, Springer and Wiley. . .

See Elsevier’s lame defense of its policy: its price increases have been “among the lowest in the industry for the last several years, averaging around 5%.” Yeah, because their prices are bloated to begin with, and 5% of a higher price still represents a larger dollar increase.

According to the Harvard memo, journal subscriptions are now so high that to continue them “would seriously erode collection efforts in many other areas, already compromised”. The memo asks faculty members to encourage their professional organisations to take control of scholarly publishing, and to consider submitting their work to open access journals and resigning from editorial boards of journals that are not open access.

The profits of these gouging journals are exorbitant, and they’ve gotten away with it simply because they can: libraries were flush, and scientists need the journals.  But the profits are way out of hand:

The memo from Harvard’s faculty advisory council said major publishers had created an “untenable situation” at the university by making scholarly interaction “fiscally unsustainable” and “academically restrictive”, while drawing profits of 35% or more. Prices for online access to articles from two major publishers have increased 145% over the past six years, with some journals costing as much as $40,000, the memo said.

Forty thousand dollars!  I’d love for some reader to give me the name of that journal. It’s absurd.

And it’s unsustainable.  Libraries can’t afford it, and scientists are mad as hell and aren’t going to take it any more.

h/t: JP

Neil deGrasse Tyson: atheist, agnostic, or equivocator?

April 26, 2012 • 3:57 am

Over at The Friendly Atheist, Hemant Mehta has posted this “Big Think” video of Neil deGrasse Tyson discussing whether he’s an atheist or agnostic. Some of Hemant’s analysis, taken from his piece, “When did Neil deGrasse Tyson start using the arguments of Christian apologetics?” is below, and I agree with him. Either Tyson doesn’t seem to know the difference between “atheist” and “agnostic” (if, indeed, there is a difference!), or is deliberately avoiding the characterization of “atheist” because of its pejorative connotations in America.

Tyson clearly conflates (perhaps deliberately) “atheism” with active atheism: that brand of disbelief that organizes movements, writes antireligious books, and prosyletizes. And Tyson, as he says (somewhat self-servingly), is simply too busy to do that—he’s more interested in bringing people to science.  That’s a great thing to do, and Tyson does it superbly, but this explanation leaves a bad taste in my mouth.  I’m not going to tell people what they should call themselves, nor do I require Tyson to be an active atheist, but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck . .

Like Hemant, I’m disappointed.  It only takes two seconds to call yourself an atheist (you don’t have to write a book on it!), and it would do so much to help disbelief become respectable. His distinction between atheism and agnosticism (the former are “in-your-face”; the latter are not) is completely disingenuous: one can be a Republican and not be an “in-your-face” Republican, and so it is with atheists.

Here’s part of Hemant’s take:

Without going into (boring-to-me) philosophy that breaks the categories down even further (“He’s a weak atheist,” “He’s an agnostic atheist”), it sounds like Tyson is just trying to back away from using the A word.

To some extent, I understand that. He doesn’t want to be known to the public as an “atheist scientist” (like Richard Dawkins). He wants to be known as a scientist, period. There’s a huge advantage to that.

But one of the reasons so many of us respect Dr. Tyson is because he tells it like it is (and he’s so effective in the process). I have a hard time believing he just misunderstands the terminology (at least as it’s used by the general public).

He goes on to explain that one of the reasons he’s not an “atheist” is because the atheists he knows are fervent activists, fighting for that cause, debating god’s existence, etc. But again, that’s not what makes someone an atheist. You can be an atheist and never talk about it with anyone. If you don’t believe god exists, you’re an atheist. End of story. What you do with that belief is your business, but you don’t become a “bigger” atheist because you talk about it openly, and you’re not a “lesser” atheist if you don’t come out of the closet.

At the end of the video, he talks about how he wouldn’t join a group for people who don’t enjoy golf… as if all atheists do is sit around and not pray. As if there is no anti-atheist discrimination to fight against. As if we’re not opposing attempts to make this a “Christian nation.”

If people who didn’t play golf were discriminated against, then we’d make a bigger deal about that, too. But people who don’t play golf can still get elected to Congress all across the country. People who don’t believe in god are banned from even runningfor office in several states (at least in the books). . . .

I’ve never said this before, but I’m really disappointed in Neil deGrasse Tyson after watching that video.

I was a bit disappointed even before this (see my earlier post about Tyson’s equivocation about faith and his response to me).

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UPDATE: Here’s one way of distinguishing atheism from agnosticism, and I agree with it:

Once it is understood that atheism is merely the absence of belief in any gods, it becomes evident that agnosticism is not, as many assume, a “third way” between atheism and theism. The presence of a belief in a god and the absence of a belief in a god exhaust all of the possibilities. Agnosticism is not about belief in god but about knowledge—it was coined originally to describe the position of a person who could not claim to know for sure if any gods exist or not.

Thus, it is clear that agnosticism is compatible with both theism and atheism. A person can believe in a god (theism) without claiming to know for sure if that god exists; the result is agnostic theism. On the other hand, a person can disbelieve in gods (atheism) without claiming to know for sure that no gods can or do exist; the result is agnostic atheism.

h/t: Grania

Ehrman replies to Carrier at length

April 25, 2012 • 12:52 pm

I am too jammed at the moment to read Bart Ehrman’s longer response to Richard Carrier, in which Ehrman defends his views on the historicity of Jesus. This was posted today, and several readers have brought it to my attention.  So those of you who are interested in this continuing dogfight, go see “Fuller reply to Richard Carrier” at The Bart Ehrman Blog. It’s not behind a paywall.

I bring this to you as a public service, and as a forum for people to discuss Ehrman’s latest reply. As for me, right now I’d rather look at baby hawks.

Dawkins on “Beautiful Minds” tonight

April 25, 2012 • 10:39 am

Tonight BBC4 profiles Richard Dawkins on a continuing series called “Beautiful Minds,” which you can watch online here (probably only in the UK) at 9 p.m. British Summer Time (4 pm EST in the U.S.). Previous episodes, with paleontologist Jenny Clack and physicist Andre Geim, can be seen here, but only for the next week.

Here’s a snippet of tonight’s program:

I’ll link to the whole show when it’s online.