World War 2 Didn't Happen!

I used to think that one should do history by facts. Much of history as I was taught it featured the worst in human cruelty, of bloodshed and warfare. This narrative didn't fit into my view of human nature, of politics, of our species' place in a grander historical narrative.

That Germany could seek to eradicate the Jewish peoples, or Russia would send soldiers over the front lines without weapons, or that people would do anything to harm the beautiful countryside of Europe is just awful. That Japan would seek to invade Australia, or that the US would built nuclear weapons - these are the facts I resented but thought I had to believe on the basis of them being fact.

But no more! Thanks to Virginia Heffernan, I am free from those pesky facts, and can choose the narrative of my liking. As she explains:

All the while, the first books of the Bible are still hanging around. I guess I don’t “believe” that the world was created in a few days, but what do I know? Seems as plausible (to me) as theoretical astrophysics, and it’s certainly a livelier tale. As “Life of Pi” author Yann Martel once put it, summarizing his page-turner novel: “1) Life is a story. 2) You can choose your story. 3) A story with God is the better story.”

Now it seems as plausible to me that world war is just a propaganda vehicle of modern day nationalists, who use fictional imagery to distract from the issue at hand. The idea that nations would actually go to war, sacrifice millions of people for pointless ends, and unleash devastating weapons that could potentially destroy the world - that's just not as compelling as one where this is merely a fiction on our society.

It's simply a matter of aesthetics that I choose to believe that war is a fiction. Life is a story, I can choose my own story, and a story without war / genocide is the better story. I'm not bound at all to pesky things like evidence and reason, or have to believe on the basis of fact and theory. Belief is an aesthetic, and believing a story that doesn't involve the slaughter of Jews, the building of the atomic bomb, and my own grandfather signing up as a teenager to help protect Australia is my choice.

It's also how I'm a billionaire, and president of Earth.

Vacuous Nonsense

I got into a bit of an argument with a creationist recently, which is nothing unusual for me. In the ensuring discussion I asked them what evidence there was against evolution. They brought up intelligent design, together with a sarcastic quip that I reject it without having reasons why. The phrase vacuous nonsense comes to mind, though it's easy to demonstrate how intelligent design is vacuous nonsense.

What I find interesting about those who try to defend intelligent design as a science is that they don't operate on anything remotely resembling a scientific definition. My complaint that Intelligent Design makes no specific prediction and thus there's no way to know whether or not a designer was involved. It's an irreconcilable problem as far as ID as a science is concerned. Yet I've found that's not what people see ID as. A better working definition would be:

A designer must have been involved somewhere and somehow in the history of life.

In other words, what ID proponents hear is a denial of any role for Goda designer. It's not a scientific hypothesis in any way, it's touching on something far deeper and more personal. Whether or not current evolutionary theory is sufficient to account for what is seen in nature doesn't make the case for Goda designer any better, as all that would do is be making Goda designer an expression of our ignorance. Yet in the absence of making any predictions about patterns, there's really no way to tell whether designers were involved or not. Intelligent Design is making one big argument from ignorance.


Yet if we look at life as it is, we can and do have intelligent design mechanisms operating in nature. We have artefacts that are the product of intelligent designers, along with an understanding of how such mechanisms work. Even in nature, we have products shaped by intelligent designers. We couldn't account for agriculture as it is without including intelligent hands involved. Likewise with the domestication and modification of animals. And now the era of genetic modification has opened a new way that designers can act in nature.

All of these instances of design in nature are accounted for scientifically, we know the nature of what the designers can and can't do, and how the design happens. How cats and dogs became domesticated, for example, is something that is being scientifically studied. Deliberate cross breeding has been used to feed billions.

Contrast this with the nondescript statement that Intelligent Design proposes - that there was a designer who did something at some stage. Without knowing anything about the nature of the designer and the methods, and without making any specific predictions about how the designer operates, it's a useless speculation. Yes, a designer could have done something, but if we don't know anything about what the designer did or how, then how can we distinguish it from there not being any designer at all?

This is why I think Intelligent Design is vacuous nonsense. It's the pretence that there's something scientific about invoking God to explain life, without having the hassle of trying to substantiate that in any way.

QFT

"It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science." - Charles Darwin

Holy Books And Science

It's common to see believers claim that holy books contained truths that only modern science has discovered - presumably as a way to claim divine intervention because the knowledge would be blind to the ancient authors.

It's a bad argument for a number of reasons - mainly that it doesn't actually show divine authorship (see Shermer's last law). But one general criticism would be that people are reading into it what fits; I've heard a number of interpretations of Genesis in line with modern scientific findings.

Isn't it convenient that one can find the evolution of eyes in Genesis 1, or the evolution of colour vision in relation to fruit-eating in Genesis chapter 3! Neither Genesis 1 nor Genesis 3 explicitly nor implicitly state either claim, but as a metaphor it works nicely. I still remember the first time I read Genesis 1 thinking it was a very fuzzy description of the evolutionary process.


What seems apparent is that we're reading into these books what makes sense to us, always happening after scientific findings but never making any specific predictions themselves. Why didn't people derive from the bible that revelation about fruit on our evolution? Why didn't the evolution of eyes in context to the Cambrian explosion come out of Genesis? Where is the Big Bang theory in Genesis?

That we can fit symbolism with our empirical understanding doesn't show much at all beyond our capacity to weave narratives. What would be impressive is if these holy books were used as research paradigms, whereby experiment and observation were derived from an understanding of the works, and we learnt new things about the universe through the success of experiment and observation. But the holy books aren't science texts, they are mythic narratives. Hence it is much easier to say the narrative fits with the data than it is to predict data from the narrative.


We are in the scientific age, after all, and the fruits of science as an epistemology is there for all to see. So for a holy book to sit with modern knowledge should be befitting of the all-powerful all-knowing creator, so the retrofitting of divinely-given knowledge with science seems a mere formality. One other thing it allows some to do, it seems, is since X must have been divine authorship then the entire holy book is divine authorship and reject the science that outright contradicts their holy book. I've heard creationists bring up the bible predicting jet streams in order to bolster their creationist position. Jet streams!

In a discussion, such claims have the added bonus of adding confusion. I wouldn't know for the most part what's in The Bible or the Koran, whether or not the Koran gets it right on embryology is something that would be lost to me. While I don't doubt the sincerity of the person making the argument, it's a red herring to even go down this path. Whatever the Bible or Koran say, or any other holy book for that matter, as books of science I can only take them seriously when they're used as research paradigms that yield new information about the universe. Retrofitting existing knowledge just isn't the same...

Engaging In Scientism

Perhaps I trust science too much. I know that science is a provisional enterprise, but it's hard not to take achievements like the computer or the eradication of smallpox as grounds to take a position that science is a very reliable methodology for determining how the world works.

Of course I accept that not all truths are scientific. 2+2=4 is true, but not scientifically true. All bachelors are unmarried by definition, not empirical measure. And no I don't think there's no truth in art. I do mock a priori philosophy, but I quote Hume when I do so and that makes it OK, right?

But on a whole, I think I do put a lot of trust into the power of the scientific method as a grounding for epistemology. Given how much of our modern world is shaped by the products of science it's understandable. So I think it's perfectly reasonable to expect empirical evidence when someone is trying to talk about nature; that conjectures about how things work are backed by more than the mere assertion. If this is engaging in scientism, then scientism is surely a desirable label.

And when the label is used against anyone who uses evidence and reason, the label becomes worthless.

QFT

"There is no such thing as the scientific world. There is, rather, just the world, and what we are trying to do is describe how it works and describe our situation in it." - John Searle

Accommodationist

I often come across people who reject scientific facts and theories that don't fit into their own worldview. So when this worldview stems from an adherence to dogma, thus the reasons for rejecting science are because of a doctrinal presupposition, it seems only fair to say that science and religion are in conflict. After all, people are rejecting science for religious reasons.

As far as I can tell, the accommodationist sees it differently. Instead of the conflict being between science and religion, it's that the doctrinal presuppositions are a case of misinterpreting religion. After all, people who adhere to those same doctrines support science and its discoveries.

Partly my worry about the accommodationist position as I see it is that it's asking people to comment on the validity of another's approach to religion - that we're in effect needing to be mini-theologians and tell other people how to do their religion. And I'm really not sure to what extent we can do this. What's to say they're doing religion wrong? From the insider perspective, their view might be more consistent than the view I'm offering. And from the outsider perspective, the preference of a particular view is correlated to its compatibility with the outsider view.

Thus I find the accommodationist view hard to justify in supporting it. It's not to deny that there are those who have compatible religious beliefs, but that those compatible religious beliefs are compatible with those incompatible beliefs. A presuppositional commitment that necessitates an incompatibility won't go away because others don't take that presuppositional commitment.

Experience Or Experiment?

Our perceptual experience is a major part of understanding the world. Yet sometimes our perceptual experience can give seemingly contradictory accounts with previous experience, as well with the accounts of others. One interesting thing about our nature is that we have the capacity to turn perception onto itself and perceive how we perceive. As a result, science is now beginning to be able to explain what it is we perceive as a matter of brain function. The first-person recollection is able to be explained by experiment. But since the first-person experience is all we have, how are we to trust what the scientists say when what they're saying profoundly disagrees with our perceptions?

A thought experiment:

What should we trust more, our first-person experience, or the results of scientific experiment? Consider the hypothetical situation of someone who has an out-of-body experience, from there internal perspective they see themselves leaving their body and floating through the room. They are able to float through the door and into the corridor outside. The experience ends and they're back in their body. Standing in front of him is a neuroscientist utilising an electromagnetic device. The scientist explains that while the person was strapped into his chair, the scientist operated this machine, that sent electric stimulations to the brain's right angular gyris, a part of the temporal lobe. The person didn't have an OBE, just the illusion of it.

In this situation, what is more likely? The internal perspective gives a vivid account of experience, yet from a causal perspective the experience was a brain activity. Of course, this isn't a hypothetical situation, the technology exists already and this account parallels a paper published in Nature back in 2002. The experience seems at odds with the explanation, but the explanation has a causal role. Are we meant to dismiss that the scientist was there inducing the hallucination any more than when a brain tumour causes sexual thoughts towards young girls or that a stroke in the right occipital lobe leaves someone seeing phantoms rising out of the floor on their left-side?

Darwin Myth

There's a myth going around that Darwin repented on his dead bed, something so prevalent given how utterly irrelevant the argument is. If Newton renounced gravity, it wouldn't mean that apples ceased to fall straight down. So the patterns in nature of what Darwin spoke of will still be there regardless of whether Darwin renounced them. If you shoot the messenger, the message remains.

So if it were true it would be irrelevant, that it's not true makes it all the more pernicious. But why should the argument work at all? Perhaps it's in the courage of others convictions that we find confidence. Experiments have shown that individuals are more willing to trust "experts" on the basis of confidence even if they're not very successful as predictors. Likewise, the science of evolution is not very well understood outside of scientific circles and most people are subject to authoritative statements by relevant experts. It's not hard to see that if Darwinism doesn't even have the support of Darwin, then what does it have left? And we are story-telling creatures. A story about a man who was opposed to God repenting on his death-bed might be a quite powerful one to the right audience.

For whatever reason it persists, it's important to remember that it's quite simply not relevant to the truth of evolution whether Darwin believed in it or not. The point of this exercise is making a argument from authority, and even though biology has moved on since Darwin he's still the great scientific authority.

Morning Scepticism: Conflict

When it's said there's no conflict between science and religion by way of citing religious scientists, does that mean that citing instances where scientists reject science on the basis of their religion as conflict? Surely the latter case is more compelling because the relationship in the former is a passive one, while the latter is a causal one. It seems the only real reason to prefer one view over the other is a strategic one, to get those who would be sympathetic to such a view on board. Even if when arguing on religious terms, it's hard to see why to prefer one view over the other. Those who argue for a conflict often times refer to their holy books as justification.

The Sock Goblin Cometh

I was a self-identifying sceptic, a cold-hearted reductionist materialist set on dehumanising nature and pushing science as more than merely a profession of what scientists do. The a priori rejection of the immaterial, I thought, was vindicated by its empirical success. After all, we have cars and computers and cats in all different shapes and sizes. I don't care much for cats for they haven't been selected to be tasty, but that's another issue^[1].

I haven't abandoned science, even if it's demonstratively little more than applied collective belief^[2]. Because despite Thomas Kuhn showing that shifts in paradigms were nothing short of religious conversions^[3], and Stephen Hawking admitting that no theory is better than another^[4], it's hard to deny that there's something to the methodology. The moon landing may have been a hoax, but to stage the hoax would have required sufficient technology. So either way science is vindicated^[5]. But the a priori dismissal of the non-material is an untenable position.

I speak of course of a phenomena we've all experienced: missing socks.

In my cold-hearted nature-denying materialist dogma I would have come up with any number of explanations to explain those missing socks. Maybe they'd fallen down the side of the washing machine, or gotten into any number of small cracks. or perhaps it's a question of memory, that I wasn't good at keeping track of socks that got thrown away over long periods of time. Or perhaps a tumour was growing in my brain that made me think I had more socks than I really did. I'd come up with any number of these materialistic accounts, yet none of them seem sufficient to explain the phenomenon.

But I can't run from the undeniable truth any longer. The epistemology and pointed out a flaw in the ontology^[6], and thus the only tenable position is a rejection of my a priori commitments on empirical grounds. Missing socks are the proof of the supernatural agents that haunt our world. These supernatural agents are the sock goblins - scourge of socked civilisations.


I'm sure you materialist dogmatists out there are wondering why supernatural? Surely if there are agents acting in our world then they're as natural as us. But natural beings that would be large enough to carry the socks wouldn't be able to get into the building. A dog using a lock-pick? That's crazy talk. Next you're going to say the Intelligent Designer that made us in their image was an alien! Quite clearly it has to be supernatural because the materialist framework has physical limits that would have to be violated. Thus supernatural.

And why an agent? Because an agent explains the fine-tuning of the missing garments. It's not underwear or shirts that go missing too. Explanations like disintegration or wormholes opening should give an indiscriminate pattern. But the pattern fits the socks so precisely that any materialist explanation needs to account for that. An agent is the only plausible explanation for the phenomenon of missing socks.


This opens up a metaphysical research problem, one that shows the limited boxed nature of the reductionist agenda, and can embrace the holism that fits the sense of narrative much better. For example, the sock goblin could answer the question of why there is something rather than nothing. The universe exists for us... to make socks. After all, the laws of physics are exactly the way they are to allow for the existence of socks^[7]. This should also give us a purpose in life, that we are on this planet in order to make socks.

Morality can best be explained this way too. Clearly we need to be good so that we live in a society where socks can be freely manufactured and bought. And what is more good than providing tender warmth than giving socks on Christmas? Our survival as a shoe-wearing society is intricately tied to the very reason for the universe in this view.

Even outside of the sciences we find validation, namely in the eyewitness reports of people throughout history. In England, these were reported as "little people", categorised as fairies and gnomes. In Finland, reports of elves and their magical powers are prevalent. Is it any surprise that these beliefs existed in countries where socks were worn? Such stories don't exist in African and Australian tribal societies where there was a barefoot culture. Why these descriptions don't specifically mention socks could best be attributed as the sock goblins hiding their intentions, after all it's no good in revealing the desire for socks in a time when resources are scarce.


In short, the discovery of the sock goblin should radically transform our world-view^[8]. If anyone isn't close-minded in their dogmatic atheism they will accept that the sock goblin offers an answer to the most confounding and profound questions, of which must be lacking. From such a humble observation as missing socks, we have stumbled on a greater truth that gives our existence meaning and purpose.

And if you are one of those close-minded reductionist materialists, prove there are no sock goblins. If you're so confident in your Faith, then surely you can prove the non-existence of Sock Goblins. But you can't, and you won't, because you know in your heart that Sock Goblins are real, and you're just rebelling in your sandel-wearing denial of the Truth. Let's face it, to be a materialist is just another faith position - something you would know if you would only look in your sock drawer.

---

[1] - And what is it with dogs? What panadaptationist breeder thought it a good idea to select for butt-sniffing?
[2] - If science was about measuring nature, why is it most things scientists learn from textbooks, and graded on that knowledge? Checkmate!
[3] - Geocentrism is just one revolution away from being back in favour.
[4] - Philosophy is dead! Long live model-dependant realism.
[5] - Unless an evil demon is tricking me into thinking that there's such thing as the moon.
[6] - And let's not even begin on the problem of induction.
[7] - If the weak nuclear force weren't as it is now, then stars couldn't form and there would be no such things as socks.
[8] - This is so significant that it must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science.

Morning Scepticism: Fundamentalism

I've often heard that even though there are fundamentalists who are at odds with scientific knowledge in their beliefs that there's no real conflict between science and religion. It's just that those fundamentalists are engaging in bad theology, interpreting their holy book in a way that isn't warranted. Fundamentalists charge non-fundamentalists also with an interpretation error, interpreting the holy book in such a way as to diminish any authority it may have.

Which view is right might be a matter for theologians, historians, philosophers, and those claiming divine revelation, but for those outside the belief argue on the basis of political preference. That is to say the non-fundamentalist view is right because the fundamentalist view is detrimental to education, to morality, to science, to history, to a sense of culture and pluralism. They're right because it's better for us pro-secular types that they're right, yet this argument is hardly convincing.

Morning Scepticism: Pseudoreligion

When science is done wrong, it's called pseudoscience. It's pseudoscience because it's theoretically or empirically unfounded and making scientific claims that don't sit within the body of knowledge that is collectively referred to as scientific knowledge. Now it's often said that like bad science, there is bad religion. That is religion done right is a good thing while religion gone wrong is the problem. That sounds reasonable, except by what standard does religion become a pseudoreligion? With science, there's the strength of the claim proportional to the evidence and the commitment to methodology. I really don't see a parallel when it comes to religion going wrong.

The only way it makes sense to me is that religion gone wrong is akin to describing the atomic bomb as science gone wrong. The science is just fine, it's just the negative consequences that came from its use.

Morning Scepticism: Evo Psych

There seems to be two different kinds of criticism levelled at evolutionary psychology. The first is a criticism that evo psych proponents make "just-so" stories after the fact, based on assumptions about the potential environment our ancestors lived in. While some of these assumptions might be accurate, the level of accuracy touted is overstepping the bounds of what the inquiry can offer. The second kind of criticism is that evo psych is defiling humanity, forcing people into stereotypes, and used to justify sexism and racism. That second kind of criticism makes the first kind of criticism harder. So instead of striving for good science, the battle becomes over what does it mean to be human - and in such a reductionist way too...

QFT

"In science, "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms." - Stephen Jay Gould

Morning Scepticism: Truth By Consensus

When it is said the earth orbits the sun, the fact is so pervasive in our society that to deny it is to deny knowledge itself. Yet when it comes to other facts of this nature that don't have a communal consensus, it's dogmatic to hold them as true no matter how strong the case. The earth can orbit the sun, not because the science says so, but because most people do. But because many people deny evolution, to hold evolution as true is to be labelled dogmatic. Yet the fact that many people don't hold something so well-supported as being true means there's more reason to actively try to educate people on the matter, yet by doing that is to be perceived as being a fundamentalist.

Morning Scepticism: Authority

While anyone theoretically can pick up a book and learn about a particular topic, we are stuck having to rely on experts who have spent decades training and researching that topic. For the most part this is good, because those scientists can push into new territory and see things that can only come with a sufficient understanding. But for us laypeople, we're stuck taking someone's word for it. In this semi-detached state we find ourselves in, we are given a part of the story, something that should be enough to make a compelling case. But in the absence of the knowledge that makes it so compelling, it really shouldn't be surprising that so many people reject particular scientific ideas that don't fit comfortably with them.

Morning Scepticism: Unfavourable Support

The argument over global warming is one of science versus anti-science. The scientific issue as it stands is well supported by those who are experts in various aspects of climate science, so to be against it is being unscientific. It doesn't matter if there are tree-hugging lefties who have no idea of the science and are arguing a political agenda, to be against global warming is to be against science and those political ideologues are incidental to the scientific validity. No matter if its a communist or even a terrorist who thinks global warming is true, it's a scientific issue and the beliefs of non-scientists should not matter one bit.

Morning Scepticism: Scientism

Being a defender of science seems to inevitably bring the accusation of scientism - the notion that all truths are scientific. Because to engage in scientism, one defends the notion of gravity despite the testimony of levitation, or insists that the mind is a physical construct despite reports of Out of Body Experiences, or even that evolution is true even though there are creation myths that tell a very different story.

Morning Scepticism: Big Bang

Like evolution denial, the Big Bang is something similarly mocked by creationists. The parallel of "from goo to you" is "nothing created everything", "how can chance build an eye?" becomes "how can chaos cause order?" Yet I wonder just how many take into account the predictive success of the theory, which should be the main criteria for rejecting a scientific hypothesis. Any idea taken on face value can be ridiculed into absurdity but when it comes to science one must engage with the question scientifically, hence why no matter how absurd the notion of a Big Bang sounds that it persists in academia.