Campaign LOLz

October 19, 2010 • 12:33 pm

Democrat Jack Conway is in a tight race with Republican Rand Paul for election to the Senate seat from Kentucky.  What better way to defeat someone in that God-fearing state than to question his devotion to Christianity?

And of course Paul has struck back, asserting that he “keeps Christ in his heart” and accusing Conway of “bearing false witness.”

See the full story in The Washington Post.

And, Christine O’Donnell, debating the issue of evolution with opponent Chris Coons, shows she doesn’t have the slightest idea what’s in the First Amendment.

O’D (at 2:49):  “Where in the Constitution is the separation of Church and State?”  Audience: loud laughter.

If she wasn’t already going to lose, this would have done it, for despite all the ignorance of her supporters, they don’t like to think they’re ignorant.

Footwear for the well-dressed scientist: day 2

October 19, 2010 • 10:02 am

Yes, my darling little bagels, you can’t do smoking hot science without hot footwear. How else can you distinguish yourself from the effete fly-pushers and bean-counters who fill the halls of academe?  This week, everyone’s favorite scientist is featuring boots that will help you walk tall on the road to fame and glory.

Hornback alligator with hand-tooled tops; maker unknown—probably J. B. Hill.  A discreet lift of the pant leg reveals the carved wonders beneath:

Half of the beauty of cowboy boots is in their tops (“shafts”), which can be quite elaborate, with tooling, inlay, fancy stitching, and custom designs.  Women can show off these tops, since it’s appropriate for them to wear their boots over their pants or with skirts.  A man who did that, however, would look like a geek.  So I often wonder why men like me spend so much money on those fancy shafts that never show.  My best guess has come from asking females why they spend lots of money buying fancy undergarments that are always hidden (this is what keeps Victoria’s Secret in business).  It turns out that they’re not anticipating romantic dalliances or even getting hit by a car: they invariably answer this question by saying, “It makes me feel good about myself.”  So I guess that’s true for men and cowboy boots.

Tooling boots is a dying art and takes inordinate skill and lots of time, making the final product pretty pricey.

Frans de Waal on the origin of morality—and atheism

October 19, 2010 • 7:11 am

Yesterday’s New York Times has a long online commentary by renowned primatologist Frans de Waal, “Morals without god.”  Read it: it’s a pretty good explication of the evidence for an evolutionary origin of at least the rudiments of human moral sentiments, giving evidence for empathy, fairness, and altruism in our primate relatives. de Waal also explains why these inchoate sentiments aren’t enough to qualify other species as moral beings:

This is because sentiments do not suffice. We strive for a logically coherent system, and have debates about how the death penalty fits arguments for the sanctity of life, or whether an unchosen sexual orientation can be wrong. These debates are uniquely human. We have no evidence that other animals judge the appropriateness of actions that do not affect themselves. The great pioneer of morality research, the Finn Edward Westermarck, explained what makes the moral emotions special: “Moral emotions are disconnected from one’s immediate situation: they deal with good and bad at a more abstract, disinterested level.” This is what sets human morality apart: a move towards universal standards combined with an elaborate system of justification, monitoring and punishment.

If you’re at all interested in human morality, you need to know the evidence for “morality” in other species. Without that you simply can’t have a meaningful discussion about the origins of ethics.  de Waals’s article is a good short primer on this, and he doesn’t shrink from its implications for religion.  He asserts, correctly, that morality has a biological rather than a divine origin: “. . we do not need God to explain how we got where we are today.” It’s time for people to realize this, especially because the prime defense of religion seems to be its perceived function as a source of morality. de Waal also faults others, like Robert Wright, for arguing “that true moral tendencies cannot exist—not in humans and even less in other animals—since nature is one hundred percent selfish.”

Sadly, de Waal’s otherwise fine piece is marred by two flaws in the writing and several more in the thinking.  Minor plaints: he begins (and ends) with a tedious analogy between discussions about morality and Hieronymus Bosch’s painting “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” The comparison is supposed to say something about morality, science, and the “state of nature,” but it’s simply confusing.  Also, de Waal once again brings up the fraud case of primatologist Marc Hauser from Harvard.  He uses this to show how creationists jump on such scandals to avoid addressing the substantive claims of scientists.  But there’s no need to make this point, and one senses that de Waal is simply kicking the fallen body of a colleague he never liked. (de Waal has publicly criticized Hauser several times in the past few months.)  This discussion adds nothing to the essay and is unworthy of de Waal.

What’s more disturbing is that after de Waal explains why morality may have evolved, and why it doesn’t come from religion, he goes ahead and takes a few gratuitous swipes at Gnu Atheists:

Over the past few years, we have gotten used to a strident atheism arguing that God is not great (Christopher Hitchens) or a delusion (Richard Dawkins). The new atheists call themselves “brights,” thus hinting that believers are not so bright. They urge trust in science, and want to root ethics in a naturalistic worldview.

While I do consider religious institutions and their representatives — popes, bishops, mega-preachers, ayatollahs, and rabbis — fair game for criticism, what good could come from insulting individuals who find value in religion? And more pertinently, what alternative does science have to offer? Science is not in the business of spelling out the meaning of life and even less in telling us how to live our lives. We, scientists, are good at finding out why things are the way they are, or how things work, and I do believe that biology can help us understand what kind of animals we are and why our morality looks the way it does. But to go from there to offering moral guidance seems a stretch.

Even the staunchest atheist growing up in Western society cannot avoid having absorbed the basic tenets of Christian morality. Our societies are steeped in it: everything we have accomplished over the centuries, even science, developed either hand in hand with or in opposition to religion, but never separately. It is impossible to know what morality would look like without religion. It would require a visit to a human culture that is not now and never was religious. That such cultures do not exist should give us pause.

Well, first of all, most Gnu Atheism consists not of “insulting individuals who find value in religion” but in criticizing the ideas and evidence for religious belief, and explicating the harm that religion has wrought in the world.  (Has de Waal actually read The God Delusion, The End of Faith, or God is not Great?)  Presumably he doesn’t think that open discussion of ideas is equivalent to insulting their adherents—even if the faithful often see it that way.

And hasn’t de Waal considered that even if science doesn’t tell us how to live our lives (but see The Moral Landscape on that issue), there is a richly developed field of secular morality that tells us why and how to be moral without religion?  de Waal is an atheist—I would ask him why he is a moral being (if he is).  What does he see as the meaning of his life, and how does he decide to live it?

As for the impossibility of “knowing what morality would look like without religion,” de Waal should just look at the Netherlands, where he’s from.  Or at Sweden or Denmark.  Yes, those countries were once religious (but so what?), but they aren’t now.  One could consider them, by and large, atheist nations.  And what does morality looks like there? Pretty much like in religious American, except better!  There’s more tolerance of gays and alternative lifestyles, more social support for the ill and indigent.  Any idea that morality falls to pieces without the flying buttress of faith is absolutely falsified by Western Europe.  Surely de Waal knows this.

I’m not sure why de Waal (who has received several types of support from the Templeton Foundation) finds it necessary to bash Gnu Atheists in an article about the evolutionary roots of morality and the superfluity of religious explanation.  At the end he takes one more swipe, claiming that atheist morality would wind up looking religious:

On the other hand, what would happen if we were able to excise religion from society? I doubt that science and the naturalistic worldview could fill the void and become an inspiration for the good. Any framework we develop to advocate a certain moral outlook is bound to produce its own list of principles, its own prophets, and attract its own devoted followers, so that it will soon look like any old religion.

Yeah, right.  I look forward to worshipping St. Hitchens at Our Lady of Perpetual Dickishness, and to receiving infallible proclamations from the chair of His Holiness Pope Cephalopod.  The idea that secular morality would look like religion is ridiculous, and is completely dispelled by the example of modern Europe.

What’s bizarre in all this is that de Waal, despite his own atheism, has surely found a way for himself to be moral without being pseudo-religious, and yet he tells everyone else that they need established religion to secure their ethics.  Can we not assume, Dr. de Waal, that other people may be as savvy and reasoned as yourself, and find a way to live ethically without a god?

It’s patronizing nonsense, that’s what it is. de Waal should have stuck to the evolution of morality.

A wrongheaded book review

October 18, 2010 • 6:52 am

Science writer John Horgan reviewed Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape in the latest Scientific American. He doesn’t like it, but for a bizarre reason:

One can raise all sorts of philosophical objections to this position, and the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah does just that in a New York Times review ironically titled “Science Knows Best”. My concerns about Harris’s proposal are simpler: I just look at the harm—historical and recent—wreaked by scientists supposedly concerned with humanity’s well-being.

Horgan then recounts some episodes of malfeasance by scientists, including the latest revelations about NIH-funded doctors injecting Guatemalans with syphillis, and doctors taking bribes from pharmaceutical companies to prescribe dangerous psychotropic drugs to children. He blames science for this, or rather the hubris of scientists.  He even raises the canard about science being responsible for the evils of Stalin and Hitler:

Some will complain that it is unfair to hold science accountable for the misdeeds of a minority. It is not only fair, it is essential, especially when scientists as prominent as Harris are talking about creating a universal, scientifically validated morality. Moreover, Harris blames Islam and Catholicism for the actions of suicide bombers and pedophilic priests, so why should science be exempt from this same treatment?

Clearly, some bad scientists are just greedy opportunists who care about only their own well-being. But those who fervently believe their own rhetoric about saving humanity may be even more dangerous. Consider the harm done in the name of Marxism and eugenics, pseudoscientific (not religious) ideologies that inspired two of the most lethal regimes in history—Stalin’s U.S.S.R. and Nazi Germany.

Horgan’s claim here—that if we blame religion for its misuse by bad people then we must also blame science for similar misuses—is very common. I would argue that it’s much more inherent in religion than in science to make its adherents behave badly: as Steven Weinberg said, “With or without [religion] you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”  And codes of conduct are inherent in religion but not in science.

I’m about three-quarters of the way through Harris’s book, and his point is this: if you think about it, you’ll realize that moral judgments should always be about people’s well-being—that no other criterion makes sense. (His argument is not that our past and current moral judgments always come down to well being, for he sees some modern “morality” as mistaken.) Nor does Harris overlook the problems with this view: the difficulty of evaluating and trading off different types of well being (e.g., mental versus physical), the problem of judging societal versus individual well being, and the dilemma of making moral judgments in those many cases where it’s simply impossible to assess well being. While recognizing these problems, Harris doesn’t offer explicit solutions, and for this (and other things) he was criticized by Appiah in The New York Times.  I’m not sure, though, that Harris sees his brief as having to resolve these problems.

Harris also suggests that neurophysiology and brain studies can help us determine what “well being” is on a neuronal level, how people make moral judgments, and whether those judgments arise in the part of the brain that also assesses empirical “truth.”  And, of course, he suggests that science—broadly construed as “empirical study”—can help figure out what promotes or does not promote well being.  This latter claim seems uncontroversial: if we object to abortion because we think that fetuses of a certain age are aware of their surroundings, then science can conceivably provide helpful information.  To this extent, Horgan’s assertion that scientists “should not claim that their investigations of what is yield special insights into what should be” is wrong.  Even if you don’t buy Harris’s argument, science does yield insights that can inform judgments about what should be.

I’ll post a review of Sam’s book when I’m done, but I do recommend that you read it.  We have too blithely dismissed the derivation of “ought” from “is”.  And if our thoughtful moral judgments really do come down to assessing “well-being,” then Sam may be right.  Right now I’m thinking hard about morality, trying to determine whether what seems obviously moral nevertheless could sometimes reduce well-being.  Given the fuzziness of the concept of “well-being”, and the often near-impossibility of measuring it, I may not come up with an answer.

Nevertheless, Horgan’s review is off the mark, ill-tempered, and curiously aligned with the common religious claim that science produced Hitler and Stalin.  It’s especially curious coming from a man who wrote such a trenchant critique of the Templeton Foundation and its blurring of faith and science.  And it’s telling that when Horgan singles out one “misguided” moral judgment by Harris, he chooses this:

I suspect Harris wants to rely on brain scans to measure “well-being” because he doesn’t trust people to simply say what makes them happy. If a Muslim girl says that she likes wearing a veil, as many do, she doesn’t know what’s good for her, Harris might say. Maybe she doesn’t, but magnetic resonance imaging won’t help us resolve these sorts of issues.

In fact, Harris discusses this very case in his book.  His take is that while some individuals may like wearing burqas (yes, I know that a burqa is more than a veil), others don’t and may wear them out of fear (the Iranians have special police to enforce female dress codes).  Clearly many women try to get around those codes, and equally clearly many of them hate them.  (I experienced this in Turkey when I talked to university students about the wearing of head scarves—currently banned in public universities but always contested.  Nearly all of the students I met, including Muslim women, were opposed to the practice: the Muslim women told me that they don’t like headscarves but if they were permitted in universities they would feel compelled to wear them so that they wouldn’t be seen as “bad Muslims.”)

Harris’s take on burqas is that the compulsion to wear them is bad for general well-being since it oppresses women, and that’s not good for society as a whole.  What he’s objecting to is not an individual’s right to wear the garment, but religious and legal dictates that they must wear the garment—and the effect of those dictates on the health of Islamic society.

You can argue about whether Harris is correct in his take on clothing restrictions, but Horgan gets that take completely wrong.  It’s as though he didn’t even read the book, but is using it as a hobbyhorse to vent some spleen against scientists. And Horgan must surely realize that science has no way of enforcing morality. Even if people like Harris tell the layperson what they see as increasing “well-being”, and hence morality, we scientists can’t force people to behave one way or another.  That’s done either by religion or law, and in both cases the information must be filtered through non-scientists. It’s simply fatuous to claim that researching well-being is going to produce an Orwellian society run by scientists with brain scanners.

The first requirement of reviewing is that one present the book’s arguments correctly and address them honestly.  And at this minimal task Horgan fails miserably.

Ten needless deaths

October 17, 2010 • 9:04 am

That’s ten needless human deaths on top of 30,000 needless goat deaths.  NPR reports today that ten Indians were killed in a bizarre religious episode:

An argument over sacrificing goats during a Hindu festival triggered a stampede that killed 10 people Sunday in a packed temple in northern India, officials said.

More than 40,000 people, many inebriated, had taken their goats to the Tildiha village temple in Bihar state to offer sacrifice and prayers to the goddess Durga on the last day of the Navratri festival.

As the worshippers lined up before the butcher, a scuffle broke out and some people were trampled, Banka district spokesman Gupdeshwar Kumar said.

“People were vying with each other to get their goats sacrificed first, and they had a verbal duel with the butcher,” Kumar said.

Four women and six men died in the stampede, and another 11 were injured, three of them critically, Banka district police director Neelmani said. The injured were being treated in hospitals.

Villager Umesh Kumar, 35, said the temple was so full, “people didn’t have any place to walk around … and there was a commotion when people tried to have their goats sacrificed.”

The district spokesman said some 30,000 goats were sacrificed at the temple on Saturday.

The 10-day Navratri festival honors Durga, the Mother Goddess in the Hindu religion.

The village in Banka district is about 120 miles (200 kilometers) southeast of Bihar’s state capital, Patna.

It’s hard to impute this tragedy to anything other than religion.  People like Robert Wright and Robert Pape can claim (wrongly, I think) that foreign occupation is the overwhelming cause of suicide bombings in the Middle East, implying that maybe those deaths would still occur without religion.  Others claim that the troubles in Northern Ireland resulted from historical/political and not religious divisions.  But it’s hard to see how any of these deaths—human or goat—would have occurred had there not been a need to propitiate gods.

On P.Z. Myers on evidence for a god

October 17, 2010 • 6:42 am

Over at Pharyngula a week ago, P. Z. Myers, echoing an argument by Steve Zara, explained why there was no evidence that could convince him of a god’s existence. I responded, claiming that there was some evidence that could convince me—at least provisionally—that a divine being really existed.  And I proposed an admittedly fanciful scenario that, I thought, might convince P.Z. as well.

But the old guy is truculent, and has responded with another post, “Eight reasons why you won’t persuade me to believe in a god.”  I can’t disagree with his assertion that he’ll never believe in a god no matter what, but I do take issue with the reasons.  He gives eight of them, and I’ll respond briefly below.

First, though, I find it curious that an atheist would assert, a priori, that nothing could make him believe in a god.  While some atheists may assert simply that there is no god, most of us claim that we see no evidence for a god, and that’s why we don’t believe. But to make a statement like that presumes that there could be some evidence that would make you accept God’s existence.  That’s why I think that Richard Dawkins, in The God Delusion, puts himself at between 6 and 7 on his belief scale that ranges from 1 (“I know there is a God”) to 7 (“I know there is no God”).  (6 is “very low probability of God but short of zero.”) Unless Dawkins is stuck at 7, presumably there is some evidence that could convert that low probability into a high one.

Granted, I haven’t seen any evidence for God, and my own belief is close to 7.  But the existence of God is still a theoretical probability, and it seems prudent to say that we don’t know for sure.  That is, we don’t know “for sure” in the same sense that we don’t know for sure that infectious diseases are caused by microorganisms.  It’s unscientific, I think, to assert that “there’s no evidence that will ever convince me otherwise,” because there’s always the remote, remote possibility that we’ll find out that we were wrong.  Perhaps it’s not viruses that cause cold symptoms, but something else that just happens to be there along with viruses.  I am almost certain that that isn’t the case, but I can’t say that there’s nothing that could show it.

This doesn’t mean that, for example, we can’t be pretty damn sure that it’s the HIV virus that causes AIDS, and base our research on that knowledge.  But we should always at least be open at first to  alternatives—even if we don’t take them seriously because they seem fanciful.  Just as all truth in science is provisional, so too must be our rejection of theoretical possibilities like God.  To me, the proper stance is, “I haven’t seen a smidgen of evidence for God, so I don’t think he exists.  But I suppose it’s a theoretical possibility.”  P.Z. doesn’t seem to accept God as even a theoretical possibility.

On to his eight arguments, which I address individually:

1) The question “Is there a god?” is a bad question. It’s incoherent and undefined; “god” is a perpetually plastic concept that promoters twist to evade evaluation. If the whole question is nebulous noise, how can any answer be acceptable? The only way to win is by not playing the game.

Yes, believers often twist and turn to avoid giving specifics about their god, or claim that we can’t know anything about him, but I think a reasonable and widely accepted concept of God is this:  “A non-material being who is omnipotent, omniscient, and good.  This god, who knows all our beliefs and intentions, can do anything he wants to on Earth.”  If you wish, you can add to this the claim that God has from time to time affected things on Earth. I don’t think you can “win” by saying, “There simply cannot be a god of any sort.”  You can “win” in the sense of stating the truth of what you think, but it’s not going to “win” in the sense of making atheism more palatable to fence-sitters. (Note that I’m not arguing that we should lie about what we think to make converts to atheism.)

2.  There’s a certain unfairness in the evidence postulated for god. I used the example of a 900 foot tall Jesus appearing on earth; there is no religion (other than the addled hallucinations of Oral Roberts) that ever proposes such a thing, so such a being would not prove the existence of any prior concept of god, and will even contradict many religions. It’s rather like proposing a crocoduck as a test of evolution.

Evidence for an omnipotent and omniscient God need not correspond precisely to the characterizations of him given in human-composed scriptures.  What I would require is simply evidence for an omnipotent and omniscient being (see below).  If that evidence happens to conform to, say, Christian accounts of scripture, then I’d be more inclined to say that (despite prior evidence that the New Testament is not the word of God), the being corresponds to the Christian concept of a deity.  I don’t see why evidence for the kind of god I defined above (weak though my definition may be) must correspond to some existing religion to be convincing.

3. Many of the evidences proposed rely for their power on their unexplainability by natural mechanisms. There isn’t much power there: the vast majority of the phenomena that exist are not completely explained by science. For instance, I don’t understand every detail of Hox gene regulation (no one does), and I don’t understand all of the nuclear reactions going on inside a star (maybe someone does), and pointing at an elegantly patterned embryo or at our Sun will get me to happily admit my ignorance, but my ignorance is not evidence for a god.

I fully agree that we shouldn’t go imputing God to everything we don’t understand.  That’s the basis of the intelligent design movement.  But there are some kinds of evidence that may be extremely unlikely to ever be explained by natural processes.  To take Hume’s view, when the probability of that evidence adducing a god exceeds the probability that it’s either a trick or due to some unexplained natural process, then I think it’s okay to provisionally accept a god.  And I do think that there are some circumstances when the balance of probabilities would fall this way. (I emphasize again that acceptance of God would be provisional, subject to revision if you later find a more mundane explanation.)

Here are two sorts of evidence.  In one, a man appears on earth (let’s say he claims to be Jesus returning) who is able to perform all sorts of “miracles.”  Let’s say, for instance, that he heals amputees and all manner of illnesses and mutilations, claiming that he’s channeling God’s power.  These healings are fully documented by physicians.  And the being can also do other stuff that doesn’t seem to have a natural explanation, like turning water into wine at long distance (this, of course, would be supervised not just by chemists, but by magicians).  You could of course impute these results to space aliens, but even aliens have to work through understandable natural mechanisms.  If they don’t, then they’re equivalent to gods.

Here’s another: a rigorous double-blind experiment provides strong evidence that prayer works. (That is, the people prayed for are almost always healed, while those who are not recover at control rates.) But it works only when praying to God and Jesus, not Allah or Vishnu or anyone else.   Is that not evidence for an omniscient and omnipotent being?  Granted, we know that prayer doesn’t work, but it could have.

Just because some unexplained stuff will eventually receive a natural explanation does not prove that all unexplained stuff will.

4.  Often when people try to convince me that I’m wrong on this, they add increasingly elaborate, detailed intricacies to an invented scenario, piling up improbabilities until they’ve got an event so wildly unlikely to be as close to impossible as possible, and then, aha, I’m expected to admit that if that happened, I’d have to be convinced that the extremely unlikely explanation of a deity must be the best explanation. But I’m not arguing from probabilities at all; personally, I’m ridiculously improbable, being the product of random recombinations of complex strands of DNA and a personal history full of accidents and coincidence, but I’m not god, nor do I think any other peculiar set of accidents amount to a god.

It’s not clear to me why the personal improbability of P.Z. Myers has anything to do with evidence for God.  That God-evidence would perforce appear improbable if we assume a natural explanation, but in a different way from the existence of P. Z. (After all, if P.Z.’s parents copulated, the probability that they’d have any child is high, and we know that it’s improbable that that child would have a combination of genes specified in advance.) But I am specifying in advance that anyone able to grow limbs, restore eyes, and cure all incurable cancers by uttering a few words is evidence for a god.

Besides, here P.Z. avers that there might be some evidence that would convince him of a god’s existence: “I’d have to be convinced that the extremely unlikely explanation of a deity must be the best explanation.” This is an admission that there might be some evidence that would convince him, improbable though it may be.

5.  These elaborate proof-scenarios also have another problem: they haven’t happened, yet people believe in god anyway. We have millennia of history of devoted god-belief, but now you’re trying to tell me that loud voices from the heavens, flocks of angels, healed amputees, and personal messages direct from a manifested Jesus would be sufficient to convince me of a deity’s existence? Well, if that’s our standard of proof, then all existing religions have been disproven.

I don’t understand this at all.  I don’t care whether people already believe in God based on flimsy evidence.  That’s why I’m an atheist.  What I’m saying is that there could be much stronger evidence for a god, even if we don’t have it.  And yes, our standard of proof would be high, and would disqualify all existing religions.  So what?

6.  One other odd feature of the proposed evidence for god is that it is all so petty and superficial. Remember, this omnipotent god we’re talking about has been called “the ground state of all being” and is supposed to be omnipresent and essential to the maintenance of the universe, so I expect the evidence for god to be rather more fundamental. No one seems to think to invent a property of nature that is supernatural; even the terms are self-contradictory. But shouldn’t a god be as ubiquitous and consequential as bosons? Despite calling some particles “god particles”, though, the fact of existence makes them natural and immediately disqualifies them from godhood.

This goes to the  distinction between “natural” and “supernatural,”  a distinction that, as Russell Blackford has shown, is blurry at best.  Any evidence that we have for a God would have to be natural: that is, it would have to manifest itself as occurrences in the real world. Every bit of evidence for a god that we could ever have would be natural.  But those “natural” events could be caused by omnipotent and omniscient beings—”supernatural” beings, if you will.

And again, here P.Z. implies that there could be evidence for a god—it would just have to be, for him, “rather more fundamental” than the usual miracles adduced by the faithful.

7.  The case for the non-existence of god is not simply a negative one, drawn from the absence of evidence, which can be corrected by throwing in evidence for a miracle. We are atheists because we have a scientific understanding of how the universe works, and the phenomena we observe do not seem to require divine intervention to function. So sure, show me a tap-dancing Jesus poofing loaves and fishes into existence with a snap of his fingers…and I’ll ask how his existence influences chemistry, how the silly bearded man matters in the last few billions of years of evolution, and why he isn’t publishing in the physics journals, where his omniscient insight into the machineries of the world might be better appreciated. Even there, though, I’d question whether adding tap-dancing Jesus to the long list of existent phenomena really helps us understand anything.

Although P.Z. says the “case for the non-existence of god” is not negative, the reason he gives is purely negative: we don’t need to invoke the intervention of supernatural beings to explain nature.  And indeed, as Laplace claimed, “we have no need of that hypothesis.”  That’s strong negative evidence for the nonexistence of at least an interventionist god, and a good reason not to believe in such a theistic deity.

And about that tap-dancing Jesus—well, if there were really strong evidence for a tap-dancing Jesus of the miraculous sort, that is evidence for a god, and that would be some sort of “understanding.”

8.  There are always better explanations for unexplained phenomena than god: fraud and faulty sensory perception cover most of the bases, but mostly, if I see a Madonna appear in a field to bless me, the first thing I’d suspect is brain damage. We have clumsy, sputtering, inefficient brains that are better designed for spotting rutabagas and triggering rutting behavior at the sight of a curvy buttock than they are for doing math or interpreting the abstract nature of the universe. It is a struggle to be rational and objective, and failures are not evidence for an alternative reality. Heck, we can be fooled rather easily by mere stage magicians; we don’t need to invent something as elaborate as a god to explain apparent anomalies.

Fraud and “faulty sensory perception” can be addressed and controlled for.  The “faulty sensory perception” business can be countered by multiple independent documentation of “miracles”—documentation far better than the Vatican uses when naming saints.  I’m certain, for instance, that we can rule out whether the regrowing of limbs on amputees can be due to “faulty sensory perception”—or even “fraud.”  For some types of evidence it’s bit harder to rule out fraud, but I’d assume that enlisting a legion of magicians would help.  In the end, we could conceivably have a phenomenon for which fraud and faulty perception are less plausible than a god, and Hume’s criterion would be satisfied.

Now I’m under no illusion that I’ve responded fully to P.Z.’s claims, or even have provided the most obvious counterarguments.  As Pigliucci points out incessantly, I’m not a trained philosopher. And I cannot claim that P.Z. is wrong—he may really be completely immune to any sort of evidence for a god.  All I can say is that I am not, and that there are conceivable events that could convince me.

Let me hasten to add that I’ve never seen any good evidence for a god, nor do I anticipate that there will be any.  I see no evidence in the world for an interventionist, theistic god (the only kind of god that can provide evidence), much less an omniscient and a good one.  And it just seems so obvious that gods were constructed by humans.  I fall close to 7 on Dawkins’s God Scale.

I’m writing this post simply to continue a conversation that I don’t think has yet run its course, and to make the point that being open to some kind of evidence is required if we’re a certain kind of atheist: the kind who says, “I don’t believe in gods because I see no evidence for them.”  If you make a statement like that, then you must perforce admit that there is some type of evidence for gods that you’d accept.