Interesting video from skydivephil called «Debunking the Kalam Cosmological Argument of William Lane Craig». This is not just debunking the silly argument “Nothing can come from nothing — uhm — except — uhm — God …”, but looking at the nature and physics of the Big Bang and explaining why the argument makes no sense in a (modern) scientific context.
Via Skepchick and Pharyngula
I have decided to write a few blog-posts on the topic of Science and Skepticism. I have recently been debating people from the alternative movement (read New Age) lately, and have a few thoughts on various subjects related to this, and also the type of subject I’m more used to discuss, religion.
The title “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection” I have stolen from Carl Sagan, an astrophysicist well know for both his popularization of science and for his skepticism. The title refers to his covering of the subject in his book The Demon-haunted World, a book on pseudoscience (a book I have read a few times and can absolutely recommend). More on his take on the art of baloney detection here.
Anyway, what I want to write about is not necessarily the well known list of logical fallacies, but rather a specific way of thinking that seems to be common amongst those who think “alternatively”. First, let me define what I mean by thinking alternatively. I am not referring to a person who thinks out of the box, or is curious, or just like to philosophise about life, the universe and everything. I am talking about those people that reject reality and substitute their own to put it in Mythbuster-terms. Science have established a set of techniques, or rules if you wish, by which we evaluate scientific theories, organize them, and test their validity. It has a built-in fault-correction mechanism and a fraud-correction mechanism. It is otherwise known as The Scientific Method.
So what is it exactly I’m getting at? Well, science consists of people, and people are driven by different things. So are scientists. Many have a certain theory or hypothesis they want to prove, or some idea they want to be right for various reasons. This makes for a potential pitfall, namely that of bias. Especially in more fringe types of science, people tend to be driven by a desire to prove something specific right. Examples are research into the paranormal and attempts at proving various dualistic mind-body concepts. There are also a lot of people who desperately wish to get famous by for instance finding a new theory of relativity, or a new string theory and such. The New Age movement and the alternativers thrive on these fringe sciences and the outright crackpots you also find there. These alternative thinking people tend to look for some kind of scientific validation of their ideas, and anything will do. Otherwise they will openly reject science as a valid way of gathering information about the world. They are in other words inconsistent and selective to the extreme.
Recently I have been debating someone who is convinced people can have parapsychological abilities like clairvoyance and such. He is convinced this is proven (no less) by quantum mechanics, arguably the most popular scientific theory to be abused by New Age. It is very tempting for the more informed of that crew to pick apart the philosophical problem surrounding quantum uncertainty, a topic called the Quantum mind-body problem. Some have suggested a dualistic interpretation of this, but this is the far end of the spectrum and highly speculative. There are much better suggestions which are in line with the otherwise very successful ways of interpreting nature. In any case, these fringes of philosophical interpretation of science is gasoline on the fire for what is otherwise known as quantum mysticism. To many of these people science is a symbol of closed-mindedness and an insufficient tool to interpret reality as they see it. However when they find something they can use, they glorify it and use it for all its worth and then some. But again, they will out of hand reject any other piece of science that might balance any fringe theories. Without exception, every time I have seen any New Ager or a creationist embrace something appearing to be science at first glance, it has proven to be either highly speculative fringe science or outright crackpots with an agenda.
So why can’t you New Agers and alties out there decide whether you accept science or not? And when and if you do choose to accept science, why do you always cherrypick and the insist that cherry is the only possible true cherry? No matter how rotten it may be? Either accept science and its methodology or stick to the mysticism.
Related links:
Sam Harris has made an excellent albeit a bit short TED talk about science and moral questions:
He naturally got a lot of negative critique for this talk. He is not claiming that science can dictate morals exactly, what he is saying is that there are moral truths to be known. The fact that science has no complete explanation for reality, does not prevent the existence of scientific truths, as does not the lack of a scientific model for morals prevent there from being any moral truths.
Sam Harris has posted a response to the critique here:
Moral confusion in the name of “science”
Yesterday a test run of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN produced the first collisions and collision data after 20 years of construction and preparations. They produced collisions in ATLAS, ALICE, CMS and LHCb. The beam was running at injection energy, so no acceleration. Next steps will be to crank up the power. This is looking promising so far, and I hope it all runs well. People were really excited here at the Institute of Physics in Oslo yesterday when they followed the unexpected test run online. Too bad I wasn’t there myself at the time, so I didn’t get to see the live feed.
Full CERN Press Release: press.web.cern.ch
This excellent YouTube video takes care of the accusation we sceptics often has thrown after us that we need to be more open-minded. This always bugs me because my inquisitive mind is very open to new ideas. I’ve spent most of this year learning quantum physics for fucks sake. Being open-minded is however not the same as naivety…
Enjoy the video 
