Tag Archives: Skepticism

Respect my worldview!

Posted by on October 28, 2011 No comments | 2,768 views

You probably have heard that demand from various people? The idea for the post was triggered by this brief Twitter exchange on #skeptics:

Respect!The top reply there is mine, and this little exchange got me thinking. I have no idea who SnBEternally is and what their problem is. They did tell the whole of CSICON to go fuck themselves though, so there’s some animosity at least.

Anyway. So why this demand for respect? First let me clarify what I am referring to here. I do respect people’s freedom of religion, belief and speech. This is not what I’m targeting her. What I am talking about is why should I respect a given belief by default? There are numerous religious and alternative beliefs I simply cannot respect or accept because I’m a secular humanist. I don’t respect the acts of terror performed by fundamentalist Muslims. I don’t respect the hatred displayed by Christian fundamentalists towards gay people and other groups they target. I don’t respect the homoeopath who sell water and sugar for medicine to sick people. I don’t respect the anti-vaccine activist who indirectly cause great suffering for individuals and put the flock-immunity of dangerous diseases of the entire population at risk. I don’t respect the global warming denier who is too fond of their wasteful lifestyle to want to sacrifice it for the common good. I don’t respect the pope for sweeping child abuse under the rug and opposing prevention of the spreading of HIV in Africa. The list of assholes I don’t respect is long. Too long.

But let’s flip the coin and ask: Why do these people crave our respect? I don’t really give a shit if they don’t respect my world view. My world view doesn’t rely on that. It isn’t fixed. I evaluate my world view based on how well it fits with reality. Specifically I rely on scientific evidence when I make up my mind what to believe. If the evidence isn’t present I either make up my mind based on available data, or don’t form an opinion at all. I have no problem with not knowing the answer! This maybe is the key. The religious and the alternative thinking seem to demand an answer regardless of how well the answer applies to observable reality. Where did the universe come from? God made it. How does homoeopathic medicine work? Quantum mechanics does it. (As a physicist, the QM explanations for homoeopathy is complete gibberish to me). So why this craving for respect? The answer is simple I think: validation. Their world view is not self-consistent, self-evident or self-reliant, thus they need external affirmation. That is why they get so annoyed when we don’t provide this. This is also why it is a bad idea to pay too much lip service to these people. The so-called “accommodationism approach”.

Winning Hearts and Minds for Skepticism

Posted by on October 16, 2011 1 comment | 3,380 views

Great talk by Sadie Crabtree from JREF (James Randi’s Educational Foundation) from this year’s Amazing Meeting.

Sadie Crabtree – Winning Hearts and Minds for Skepticism from JREF on Vimeo.

Religion and Critical Thinking

Posted by on May 9, 2011 1 comment | 2,956 views

Reading this blogpost (it’s in Norwegian) got me thinking a bit on the subject of religion and how it relates to critical thinking. Is religious belief irrational? Well, most of us, including maybe most religious people too, will agree that there are variations of for instance Christianity that are irrational or maybe weird or extreme. But what about non-extreme religion, like plain old traditional Christianity? Can we apply critical thinking to that? Yes, by the way, I will use Christianity as the religion I refer to in this post as it is the one that I know best, and the one that is relevant for my culture.

So, what is «Critical Thinking» anyway?

As Wikipedia defines it, critical thinking «generally refers to higher order thinking that questions assumptions». However the definition is not necessarily that precise as you will notice if you read the rest of the Wiki-page. Regardless, I will stick to this definition and append the definition of the scientific method as a way we could question assumptions. In other words, to accept a claim, we should generally require scientific evidence that the claim is true, or rather most likely true. Absolute truths are best left to those bold enough to claim them.

Critical thinking needs to be objective, or as close as it is humanly possible to get. In a scientific context, i.e. as in scientific research, this is usually achieved by collaboration and peer review. On a personal level it is not that simple. Changing ones mind about a subject you already have made your mind up about is not easy and often takes some time. As a critical thinker I find myself in that situation every now and then. I may have made up my mind about a subject based on an assumption, or based on the opinion of the person I first got the idea from. An example is the idea that chewing vitamin C when you’ve got the flu will make it go away faster. I used to believe that, can’t remember where I got it from, but I eventually found out it was not true. It wasn’t that hard to accept, but it didn’t happen instantly. More deeply held beliefs take longer to change as I will come to later.

Does this apply to religion?

The main requirement of the scientific method is that the claim or theory is falsifiable or refutable. This means that there is a conceivable way of proving the theory wrong. The main religious claims are generally not falsifiable. You cannot prove that God exist, nor can you prove that he does not exist. The claim is a matter of faith. Therefore such a claim falls outside the reach of the scientific method and thus religion is not a part of science aside from the study of religious belief itself of course. So is it possible to think critically about religion then? Most definitely.

My story about faith

Religious belief is based on a set of dogmas or assumptions which are supported by faith. I.e. you choose to accept them as truth despite any lack of empirical evidence. Most religious people have inherited their faith from their culture and/or their family, and so did I. This is quite evident when you look at the geographical and cultural distribution of the various major religions. This does not necessarily mean that every believer is a blind sheep following the flock. Many are convinced their faith is true based on personal experience which are often of a very emotional nature. Personal experience however is highly subjective and biased to your existing belief system and therefore an incredibly lousy basis for truth.

Others again decide to take one step further and study their religion in detail. That is what I attempted. I was raised a Christian, but as I grew older I found Christianity in practice to be too subjective and inconsistent. I found that people’s personal experience were not trustworthy as confirmation of the religious doctrines. So I decided to study at a Bible College for 2 years. Digging into the matter was exciting at first, but I soon realised that the reality of theology was even more shaky than my plain old trust in the religious authorities I grew up with. The Bible is a complex book with many many contradictions, historical and scientific inaccuracies and physical impossibilities. It has been edited by numerous people with varying ideological and political agendas, and even presents several religions rather than just the two I used to think. The whole historical narrative in the first half of the Old Testament turned out to be highly mythological and is to a large degree proven completely wrong by archaeological and historical evidence. So in other words, the Bible is not the authoritative word of God, but a book compiled by men over about a 1000-1500 years in the bronze age. The New Testament is equally a collection of books and letters with varying agendas and content. They are not in agreement, and have been edited to suit changes in religious practice. The authors of the gospels didn’t even know much about local geography and got a lot of details wrong. We can check these today, but what about all the details we cannot check? Are they also wrong?

Fine, so critical thinking pretty much rules out the authority of Christian scripture. But what about the idea of a God and the moral content of the Bible? Well, as for the moral content of the Bible, that is purely a matter of cherrypicking. It has many good passages and many horribly bad ones. That doesn’t make it irrelevant as a source of good ideas and nice quotes, but it disqualify it as a authoritative text on morals. As for the concept of God, that is a bit trickier. I find it pretty clear that the varying image of God found in the Bible is a pretty unimaginative and inconsistent description of an entity we would call God. I do not believe this God exist. However the philosophical theism or deism is not so straight forward to reject.

In earlier times the existence of a creating God was supposed based on observation of nature. It seemed implausible that it had come to be without someone making it so. This is what is known as the teleological argument (in a nutshell). A couple of centuries with scientific progress has rendered this argument more or less dead with the exception of fundamentalist religious people who argue for creationism and its derivative, intelligent design. Both of which are not science, but religion. This fact drastically reduce the plausibility of and even the need for a God or a theos. A creator has become redundant in science. There is therefore no need to believe in one other than for emotional reasons. God is reduced to some abstract idea of an uncaused cause or some universal force which is irrelevant to human life and existence. Of such an entity I am agnostic, not because I think it is likely to exist, but because I cannot argue that it does not exist. Both Einstein and the philosopher Spinoza talked about this kind of God. Einstein himself has been misquoted numerous times as arguing for the existence of God.

Conclusion

So there it is, a short version of my critical evaluation of Christianity, the religion I was brought up with. There is obviously a lot more to it than just this, but these are some of the main points. My point was to demonstrate that religion is subject to critical thinking as much as anything else in our life. The fact that the basic idea cannot be proven right or wrong does not disqualify it from critical scrutiny. It is also demonstrated that atheism and agnosticism is not a requirement for critical thinking, it is rather the other way around: Critical thinking often leads to atheism and agnosticism. I am not saying that religious people are incapable of critical thinking, on the contrary. They usually just choose not to apply the critical thinking to their religion, or at least not all of it. I know many intelligent people who are religious, even in science. I would say most people I know that are religious are also smart, and are critical thinkers in many respects, but the attachment to religion is deep and emotional and resists being scrutinised. The change for me took several years. It was not something I came to realise over night. But it eventually had to happen as I grew increasingly uncomfortable with the religion I inherited.

Homeopathy debunked in 1842

Posted by on April 24, 2011 No comments | 2,376 views

Oliver Wendell HolmesAlready in 1842 Homeopathy was debunked. I came over this old essay written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, a poet and physician that lived from 1809 to 1894. His essay Homeopathy and Its Kindred Delusions was two lectures  presented to the Boston Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge in 1842.

The essay gives us a quick introduction to the principles of Homeopathy and its inventor  Samuel Hahnemann’s original written work published in 1806. Even to the educated of his own days the principles he suggested were logically and scientifically unsound as they even more so are today.

Holmes describes the principles and suggest 3 consequences of these principles that ought to be true if these principles were. He picks them apart thoroughly. An examples is his comment on the first principle, namely that “like cures like”, or that a remedy that causes some given symptoms will cure a disease with the same symptoms.

Let us look a moment at the first of his doctrines. Improbable though it may seem to some, there is no essential absurdity involved in the proposition that diseases yield to remedies capable of producing like symptoms. There are, on the other hand, some analogies which lend a degree of plausibility to the statement. There are well-ascertained facts, known from the earliest periods of medicine, showing that, under certain circumstances, the very medicine which, from its known effects, one would expect to aggravate the disease, may contribute to its relief. I may be permitted to allude, in the most general way, to the case in which the spontaneous efforts of an overtasked stomach are quieted by the agency of a drug which that organ refuses to entertain upon any terms. But that every cure ever performed by medicine should have been founded upon this principle, although without the knowledge of a physician; that the Homeopathic axiom is, as Hahnemann asserts, “the sole law of nature in therapeutics,” a law of which nothing more than a transient glimpse ever presented itself to the innumerable host of medical observers, is a dogma of such sweeping extent, and pregnant novelty, that it demands a corresponding breadth and depth of unquestionable facts to cover its vast pretensions.

Then he looks at the absurdity of the claim that the more the remedy is diluted, the more effective it is. This is the most common argument anyone arguing that Homeopathy is humbug will first use. A commonly used dilution is 30C, which means that the dilution is of the order 1 to 100^30, or a one with 60 following zeros. This is of course absurd to anyone with some knowledge of chemistry or physics. As Holmes notes, even a schoolboy can see the flaw in that logic. Homeopaths claim there is some mystical effect that “copies” the information of the remedy unto the dilution. The way this is supposed to happen is purely magical and has no scientific plausible explanation. For more info on the process see here.

Holmes also note that the three basic principles of Homeopathy are derived with no logical connection. The idea that “like cures like” has absolutely no relation to the method of dilution they use, the last original principle, which apparently weren’t even well accepted by Homeopaths back then, is that all diseases have their origin in an itch! In any case, as his main arguments Holmes look at three implications of the argument that “like cures like” and go through them in great detail. The argument are as follow:

I proceed to examine the proofs of the leading ideas of Hahnemann and his school.

In order to show the axiom, similia similibus curantur (or like is cured by like), to be the basis of the healing art—”the sole law of nature in therapeutics”—it is necessary—

  1. That the symptoms produced by drugs in healthy persons should be faithfully studied and recorded.
  2. That drugs should be shown to be always capable of curing those, diseases most like their own symptoms.
  3. That remedies should be shown not to cure diseases when they do not produce symptoms resembling those presented in these diseases.

The arguments themselves are lengthy, and are best read in the original essay. Which is well recommended reading for those who are interested in the subject.

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Science and Skepticism – Part 1

Posted by on April 19, 2011 No comments | 1,894 views

The Fine Art of Baloney Detection

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.

Science - It works, bitchesAnyway, 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.

… and now for the Baloney

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.

 

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