Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
This play took place Saturday when the Cincinnati Bengals played the Arizona Cardinals. The Bengals won, 23-16, and the highlight was a stupendous touchdown scored by Bengals receiver Jerome Simpson. As he neared the goal line, Simpson avoided Cardinals linebacker Daryl Washington by doing a front flip over him into the end zone.
I’ve never seen anything like it, and here it is:
The Rationally Speaking blog run by Massimo Pigliucci has long been critical of “scientism,” a term whose meaning has been unclear, but one that Dr.3 Pigliucci has applied with abandon to the New Atheists, whom he sees as philosophically unlettered. I’ve paid a visit to the site this weekend, and found two things to comment on, so please don’t accuse me of being on jihad against that blog.
The first issue, which I want to discuss today, is a guest post called “Scientism as scientistic belief“, by Paul M. Paolini, who’s identified as “an independent writer with an interest in philosophy living in Berkeley, California.” Paolini wants to nail down “scientism” as a group of consistent, classifiable errors of philosophy rather than as a set of unfounded propositions about science. So, for example, he introduces five claims often identified as “scientistic”:
– Observation is the only source of genuine knowledge.
– Eventually, all fields of knowledge will be sciences.
– Human progress and scientific progress are identical.
– One day all humankind will hold the scientific worldview and no other.
– The question of how we should live can and should be answered by science.
but then dismisses them because these are simply individual propositions that can be falsified, not things that have an identified philosophical commonality. As he says,
If we were to identify scientism with belief in such propositions, then the charge of scientism would merely be the charge of having certain beliefs that are false, and what it is that is supposed to be wrong with having such beliefs, beyond falsity, is left unspecified. To put this another way, identifying scientism with certain beliefs renders the charge of scientism merely of the form: such-and-such is believed and such-and-such is false — which gives no indication of the significance of using the word ‘scientism’ to begin with.
I’m not sure why Paolini dismisses some of these as simple falsifiable claims: the first, for example, is really a worldview, and several of the claims taken together could also constitute a worldview. And when philosophers and theologians go after “scientism”, they are (though the term is ill-defined) going after a fallacious worldview based on science, such as the first one above.
But Paolini doesn’t like that. As he says:
The thinker may be wrong in her belief, but even so her belief does not entail anything that could be considered scientism in any sense. This suggests that scientism does not reside in the content of relevant beliefs but elsewhere.
This, of course, suggests that Paolini wants to find some general problem that can be identified as scientism, a problem that characterizes all “scientistic” worldviews.
His solution is this, which at first sounds not too shabby:
We may sharpen this account with the notion of a scientistic belief; here I use the word ‘scientistic’ as simply an adjectival form of the noun ‘scientism.’ We shall say that a belief is scientistic just in case it is falsely justified by a pro-science belief; that is, if a belief appeals to a pro-science belief that does not in fact warrant it, then that belief is scientistic.
He then gives three examples of “scientistic inferences”:
Below, while the premises are pro-science beliefs that may or may not be scientistic, the conclusions are scientistic beliefs that may or may not be overtly pro-science.
[Premise] Science is the greatest authority on human knowledge.
[Conclusion] If science says that consciousness does not exist, non-scientists should simply accept it.[P] Science has been far more successful than the humanities in improving human life.
[C] Resources should be directed away from the humanities toward science.[P] Science provides the truth about reality while religions do not.
[C] The scientific worldview should be preferred to any religious worldview.
Paolini, then, sees “scientism” as something like “a form of fallacious inference that involves exaggerated respect for science” (this is my take).
I suppose there’s some merit to this, but I see it as superfluous. If “scientism” is just “flawed reasoning,” his words, then why don’t we call it “flawed reasoning?” After all, “scientism” could then devolve to just a single instance of flawed reasoning, and is not any kind of worldview, which is how everyone who uses it (perjoratively) means it. And if “scientism” means “systematically flawed reasoning based on too much respect for science,” then we must also have a new term, “religionism”, meaning “systematically flawed reasoning based on too much respect for religion.” And we could also have “philosophism,” fallacies based on too much respect for philosophy. Religionism, of course, is pervasive, but we don’t see Pigliucci, or anyone else, accusing the faithful or repeatedly committing this logical error.
Here’s a genuine instance of “religionism”:
[P] Religious people often reject evolution because it contravenes their faith.
[C] If we tell religious people that evolution does not contravene their faith, and respect their faith at the same time, they’ll eventually accept evolution.
Here’s an instance of “philosophism”:
[P] Jerry Coyne says that plumbing is a kind of science, if one broadly construes “science” as “a combination of reason and empirical investigation.”
[C] Since Jerry Coyne doesn’t have a philosophy degree, his claim is ridiculous.
At any rate, by all means adopt Paolini’s term, which seems at least as sensible as any other defintion, but by all means let us also have terms for all forms of flawed reasoning that rest on single worldviews.
As for the three examples given above, I’m not convinced that all of them are examples of flawed reasoning:
[Premise] Science is the greatest authority on human knowledge.
[Conclusion] If science says that consciousness does not exist, non-scientists should simply accept it.
This depends on what you mean by both “knowledge” and “science”. For example, I’m not sure that science, narrowly construed as what scientists do, is the greatest authority on historical knowledge, or knowledge about archaeology. In that case, the premise is wrong, not the reasoning, for I’d turn to a historian rather than a biologist to find out about word “science” in the premise to mean “a combination of reason and empirical investigation,”, then yes, I’d agree that science is the greatest authority on human knowledge.
The conclusion, while it doesn’t follow from the precise premise, is also specious. I don’t know of anyone who says that consciousness doesn’t “exist”, but I know people who say that consciousness is an illusion, and of course illusions are things that can be said to exist as beliefs. So that’s a bad example. But there’s also an error in the premise, which is that science is infallible. Of course nobody should accept anything just because science says so. Scientists have, en masse, been wrong, as in the case of continental drift. Scientific conclusions are provisional. The layperson should probably accept the scientific consensus at any given moment, simply because he doesn’t have either the time or expertise to investigate for himself. But that doesn’t mean that one should regard scientist, or science, as infallible.
P] Science has been far more successful than the humanities in improving human life.
[C] Resources should be directed away from the humanities toward science.
One can’t even begin to evaluate the conclusion here because the premise is unclear. What do we mean by “improve”? Science can improve health, communication, and so on, and humanities can improve our thinking, our empathy, and our feeling of mutuality with fellow creatures. If I had to do away with one of these, it would be humanities, for the simple reason that without science most of us would be dead by 40 and we’d die young from all sorts of preventable illnesses, which would impede us from half a lifetime. Fortunately, we don’t have to make that choice, for I love the arts and literature.
If you’re going to assert the premise, then you have to identify what you mean by “improving human life”. If you can’t come up with a consistent definition and a metric to judge how much science vs. humanities contribute to human improvement, then the premise is simply unclear. If you can come up with a metric—something like Harris’s “well being,” perhaps—then yes, perhaps you can see how much the two fields contribute to human improvement and direct resources accordingly. After all, the humanities are in universities because we all think, for various reasons, that they do improve our lives.
I don’t see this second example as a case of flawed reasoning based on hyper-respect for science.
Let me add that that direction of resources has already taken place: sciences at our university, for example, get far more resources than do humanities. But that’s for the wrong reasons: it’s because scientists can get big grants, and the overhead from those grants supports the university.
[P] Science provides the truth about reality while religions do not.
[C] The scientific worldview should be preferred to any religious worldview.
This is not scientism because the logic is sound, so long as you add to the premise “the truth is to be preferred to falsehood.”
Here’s a real example of what Paolini means by “scientism”:
[P] Science has shown that we can use nuclear fission and fusion to create huge explosions.
[C] We should use those findings to build bombs of enormous destructive capacity.
That’s fallacious because it derives an “ought” from an “is.” But really, how many people accused of scientism engage in this kind of reasoning? Some have accused Sam Harris of committing the ought/is fallacy in his book The Moral Landscape, but in other respects he’s not scientistic, as when he tells us that science can help determine what contributes to well being. Predictably, in a comment on the post, Pigliucci accuses several of the New Atheists, including Dawkins, Harris, and I, of scientism, but I reject the charge, with the provisional exception of Sam’s derivation of “ought” from “is”.
As for me, I maintain that if you define science broadly as I have above, then yes, plumbing is a form of science, for it uses empirical investigation and reason to do things like locate and fix leaks. At the end of a wonderful essay about creationism and his participation in the trial of McLean v. Arkansas, Steve Gould made that very point:
As I prepared to leave Little Rock last December, I went to my hotel room to gather my belongings and found a man sitting backward on my commode, pulling it apart with a plumber’s wrench. He explained to me that a leak in the room below had caused part of the ceiling to collapse and he was seeking the source of the water. My commode, located just above, was the obvious candidate, but his hypothesis had failed, for my equipment was working perfectly. The plumber then proceeded to give me a fascinating disquisition on how a professional traces the pathways of water through hotel pipes and walls. The account was perfectly logical and mechanistic: it can come only from here, here, or there, flow this way or that way, and end up there, there, or here. I then asked him what he thought of the trial across the street, and he confessed his staunch creationism, including his firm belief in the miracle of Noah’s flood.
As a professional, this man never doubted that water has a physical source and a mechanically constrained path of motion — and that he could use the principles of his trade to identify causes. It would be a poor (and unemployed) plumber indeed who suspected that the laws of engineering had been suspended whenever a puddle and cracked plaster bewildered him. Why should we approach the physical history of our earth any differently?
The Pope’s Christmas Eve Homily ended by importuning his minions to give up reason, be humble, and be “made simple.”
It seems to me that a deeper truth is revealed here, which should touch our hearts on this holy night: if we want to find the God who appeared as a child, then we must dismount from the high horse of our “enlightened” reason. We must set aside our false certainties, our intellectual pride, which prevents us from recognizing God’s closeness. We must follow the interior path of Saint Francis—the path leading to that ultimate outward and inward simplicity which enables the heart to see. We must bend down, spiritually we must as it were go on foot, in order to pass through the portal of faith and encounter the God who is so different from our prejudices and opinions the God who conceals himself in the humility of a newborn baby.
In this spirit let us celebrate the liturgy of the holy night, let us strip away our fixation on what is material, on what can be measured and grasped. Let us allow ourselves to be made simple by the God who reveals himself to the simple of heart.
What he means, of course, is “let us be made simple minded by what we tell you about God.” For that’s what the Vatican is doing by asking people to give up their reason and their naturalism and to just let themselves—as John Haught would put it—be “grasped by the infinite.” What an unspeakably vile thing to ask! But of course it’s in the Church’s interest to ask this, for it’s by the abnegation of reason alone that Catholicism survives.
Beware of anyone who asks you to be “grasped” or “carried away” by anything but reason. For what they’re asking is for you to suspend your disbelief and start accepting hogwash.
I love the part about “the God who conceals himself in the humility of a newborn baby.” Since when were newborn babies humble? They’re always screaming to have their needs met. And if the Catholic God is so humble, why is he, like that newborn baby, always demanding worship and affection, and why does he dispatch to Hell those who don’t tender them?
According to the online Wall Street Journal, this new Hitchens piece,”Forced merriment: the true spirit of Christmas,” was commissioned by the paper but never published. I have no idea when it was written, but I suspect it was December of 2010, for it refers obliquely to his illness.
It’s predictably Scrooge-ish, but also funny, and ends with a First-Amendement criticism of public displays of religiosity and a cute anecdote about how Thomas Jefferson signed his letters at Christmas. A few snippets:
In their already discrepant accounts of the miraculous birth, the four gospels give us no clue as to what time of year—or even what year—it is supposed to have taken place. And thus the iconography of Christmas is ridiculously mixed in with reindeer, holly, snow scenes and other phenomena peculiar to northern European myth. (Three words for those who want to put the Christ back in Christmas: Jingle Bell Rock.) There used to be an urban legend about a Japanese department store that tried too hard to symbolize the Christmas spirit, and to show itself accessible to Western visitors, by mounting a display of a Santa Claus figure nailed to a cross. Unfounded as it turned out, this wouldn’t have been off by much. . .
If you take no stock in the main Christian festival of Easter, or if you are a non-Jew who has no interest in atoning in the fall, you have an all-American fighting chance of being able to ignore these events, or of being only briefly subjected to parking restrictions in Manhattan. But if Christmas has the least tendency to get you down, then lots of luck. You have to avoid the airports, the train stations, the malls, the stores, the media and the multiplexes. You will be double-teamed by Bing Crosby and the herald angels wherever you go. And this for a whole unyielding month of the calendar.
I realize that I do not know what happens in the prison system. But I do know what happens by way of compulsory jollity in the hospitals and clinics and waiting rooms, and it’s a grueling test of any citizen’s capacity to be used for so long as a captive audience.
I once tried to write an article, perhaps rather straining for effect, describing the experience as too much like living for four weeks in the atmosphere of a one-party state. “Come on,” I hear you say. But by how much would I be exaggerating? The same songs and music played everywhere, all the time. The same uniform slogans and exhortations, endlessly displayed and repeated. The same sentimental stress on the sheer joy of having a Dear Leader to adore. As I pressed on I began almost to persuade myself. The serried ranks of beaming schoolchildren, chanting the same uplifting mush. The cowed parents, in terror of being unmasked by their offspring for insufficient participation in the glorious events…. “Come on,” yourself. How wrong am I?. . .
One of my many reasons for not being a Christian is my objection to compulsory love. How much less appealing is the notion of obligatory generosity. To feel pressed to give a present is also to feel oneself passively exerting the equivalent unwelcome pressure upon other people.
I don’t think I have been unusually unfortunate with my family and friends, but I present as evidence my tie rack. Nobody who knows me has ever seen me wear a tie except under protest, and the few that I do possess of my own volition are accidental trophies, “given” to me by the maitre d’s of places where neckwear is compulsory. Yet somehow I possess a drawerful of new, unopened examples of these useless items of male apparel.
And this is the part of Christmas I dislike most;
Compulsory bad taste isn’t a good cultural sign either. In their eagerness to show loyalty, entire families compose long letters of confessional drool, celebrating the achievements of the previous year and swearing to surpass them in the next.
* * * * *
Form Christmas letters seem to me the epitome of bad taste, for their composers can’t even be bothered to write a personal note—except, perhaps, for a few scrawled words of greeting at the bottom. And they’re depressingly jolly, usually extolling the achievements of the writers. Once, when I had a particularly bad year, I wrote a mock form Christmas letter, adorned with pictures of holly and candy canes and describing, in great detail, all the real disasters that had befallen me in the previous twelve months. It did not go down well.
I have before me a specimen of the genre, written to my father by one of his old Army buddies. We got one every year, and our whole family used to look forward to them, for they were unwittingly hilarious. This one is from 1981, and I’ve saved it all these years. It’s divided into three parts: “Jane” (about his wife; names changes to protect the guilty), “Our wonderful vacation,” and “Generalities.”
Here are some excerpts from the “generalities” section, with names and locations again changed:
The Lincoln sat in the garage from October 12 to February 2nd. [The fellow was obsessed with his Lincoln, its care, and its longevity.] Had the radiator off, had it cleaned, and put in new plugs, points, and condenser. Needed a good rest. The day before Jane came back from Ohio, I went to Church, washed both cars, wrote 2 letters, washed 14 shirts, 4 pair trousers and 14 pair socks.
In June had a pleasant visit with Tim Kirby and his son of St. Louis. Was to his wedding in 1948. His son has a 1958 Ford Retractable Skyliner. WOW what a car. In August Janet Marcos and her daughter Sarah were here for a short visit. We were “invaded” by 17 Filipinos in 2 cars as they were there on there [sic] way to New York. I painted the 47 2 X 4’s and 44 posts of my yard and also painted the front gable ends of the garage.
We are both on a “weight loss’ program and should be slimmed down by May 1st. The autos continue to operate O.K., the Lincoln on the 21st year, 124,986 miles and the Ford on the 13th year with 176,235 miles.
So it went on for two single-spaced pages. And those were the “generalities”—I wonder what the “specifics” were! You can see why we enjoyed getting this letter every year, always culminating with its inevitable reading of the Lincoln’s odometer.
h/t: Llwyddythlw
A new Associated Press-GfK poll, carried out December 8-12 of this year, manages to unwittingly combine two superstitions: belief in Santa and belief in angels. It’s a very strange poll, but here are the salient results:
Remember that all of those kids who believed in Santa put away that mental toy at about age 9, but those 77% of Americans who believe in angels are all adults (those polled were over 18 years old).
So much for the contention of sophisticated theologians that Americans don’t really believe in the tenets of faith (and angels are barely mentioned in the Bible!), but simply see their religion as a pretty story, or, as Tim Padgett asserts, a “lovely idea” that inspires good works.
Here are the last three tributes to Hitchens proffered by our readers.
I wanted to save the first one for the last day because it’s so lovely, elegiac and creative. Reader Andrew Hackett composed a piece of music, “in memoriam: c e h” and made a video of himself playing it on the organ. It’s very moving, and Andrew explains it a bit:
The sustained pitches in the uppermost part represent his initials: C, E, and H (“H” is the letter used in German to denote what we would call B-natural. They reserve “B” for what we would call B-flat). The piece is organized into three harmonic areas: F-major, A-major, and F-major again. This is a reference to atheist composer Johannes Brahms, who did something similar in his third symphony. The acronym “F-A-F” stands for “frei aber froh” (free but happy), an appropriate reference for a piece dedicated to a committed freethinker. The piece leaves off, however, before the third and final section is really able to re-assert “F-major.” We have to make do with an abrupt and unstable 6-4 triad, which would normally herald continuation to some kind of resolution. I think this is an effective and poignant analogue for the way Hitchens left us. This procedure is made all the more unsettling by the intrusion, into the “F-major” sonority, of “B-natural” (or “H”, for “Hitchens”) – the raised fourth. That “H” hangs there for a moment, then departs.
There are only 12 views and no comments on YouTube as of 6:30 this morning Chicago time, for the piece is being introduced here. Go have a listen, leave a comment if you feel so moved, and spare a thought for Hitchens and his family. Thank you, Andrew.
Reader kdward contributed this photograph, which he describes as “It’s me, balancing God is not Great in one hand, and my infant daughter in the other.” The picture reminds me of the lyrics of the Stephen Stills song, “We Are Not Helpless,” which go: “The new order is upon us now/It is the children/Who have the wisdom to be free.”
I have no photographs to give to honour Hitchens. However, when I heard that he had cancer, I thought at that time (Dec 2010) that one of the best ways for him to become immortal was to become part of the lexicon. We already have a hitchslap, and a hitchling, but at that time I considered a good possibility would be a razor; after all, we all know of William of Occam, don’t we?
Hitchens’ Razor: What can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
I have conducted extensive research (ie: Googled for it) and have not found the phrase used anywhere as an official razor, but would it be nice if it came to be? Whenever the faithful or trolls leap into the fray with some baseless assertion, just cutting it short with a “That violates Hitchens’ Razor” would save a lot of time and effort.
So end our readers’ tributes to Hitch. As I expect many of you have been doing, I’ve spent quite a few hours over the last two weeks watching videos of Christopher in debate, giving talks, or taking down pompous talking heads on television. I could recommend my favorites, but suggest instead that you just find a random one and follow the YouTube links. You will be impressed: for someone who talked so often, he rarely repeated himself, and everything he said sounded fresh. We have nobody to replace this man, but, thank Ceiling Cat, he left us a legacy of not only his writings and the example of his courage, but also the visual record of his eloquence and incessant fight for the truth.
And thanks to all the readers who took the time to create and send me their own tributes to Christopher Hitchens.
Many years ago, I decided that if ethnic groups and other minorities could have their own holidays, so could individual people, i.e., me. So I declared the holiday of Coynezaa, a six-day revel extending from Christmas through my birthday (Dec. 30). (Curiously, this holiday always coincides with other people’s festivities.) And when I visit friends, I surreptitiously enter the holiday on their calendars, also adding a note in late November that Coynezaa is coming up in a month, so perhaps they should be buying presents now. (The idea, of course, is that, like Chanukah, Coynezaa presents should be bestowed every day during the entire holiday.) Sometimes this importuning even works!
I don’t think it’s gonna work this year, but here are a couple of photographic gifts from our readers, which I tender with hopes that all readers have a happy Coynezaa.
Photographer Cameron Way has contributed this image to celebrate the season. Click to enlarge for maximum LOLz.
We follow your blog and I heard you were looking for a Last Noms image. I’ve created one. The cat in the middle is ours and so are two others.
Here’s a photo contributed by reader John Danley (go here if you don’t understand what this is about):
This will be the last collective tribute to Hitch, although there are a few miscellaneous items I’ll post soon, and a special musical tribute tomorrow. As you might have expected, most of the tributes to the man involved amber restoratives, and I’ve put the remaining ones here.
From Hempenstein, an old college pal of mine, who recommends Mclelland’s Islay as “very smooth and an exceptional value”:
Here’s to you, Hitch, for a life well-lived; your unshakable courage on top of eloquence and wit. I am proud to be able to say that I met you once briefly and that we shared a few words over a then-recent event of mutual interest.
From Karl H:
From Karl P.:
From Sigi:
The thing I will miss most about Hitchens is his venerable erudition: the vast intellectual resources that he could instantly draw on, the unabashed confidence with which he formulated his thoughts, and the jaunty way he made it all seem effortless — not to mention his truly admirable mastery of the English language. All of these qualities I greatly admire in people, and what better way to express the passing of such a person than a set of empty bookcases? And an amber restorative, of course; that goes without saying.
Stan sent two photos, the first of Hitch having his famous conversation with Mason Crumpacker at the Texas Freethought C0nvention.
Attached are a couple of pictures from the Texas Freethought Convention. I attended the convention but didn’t take either of these pics. They were taken by a member of our local Houston Atheist Meetup group, the largest such group in the country. When Hitchens came into the dining room where we were all seated, it moved many of us to tears, including me. He looked frail and walked slowly, but when it came time for him to speak, it was clear that his mental faculties were still razor sharp. Mason Crumpacker was really something, as you have pointed out already.
From Grania Spingies, who didn’t have any whiskey but did the best she could:
Finally, one that doesn’t involve alcohol, from Ivar Husa:
