In Umberto Eco's brilliant novel Foucault's Pendulum, three worldly and skeptical book editors whose company specializes in publishing woo-woo nonsense decide to skip the middle-man. Enough with trying to lure in writers with manuscripts about astrology, psychic phenomena, secret societies, and conspiracy theories; given the amount of time the three editors have spent reading all of this stuff, they have the background to out-woo-woo the woo-woos, and write a book themselves that will trump all the rest.
So they do. Their manuscript ties together the Templars, the Masons, ley lines, the Holy Grail, black magic, Atlantis, and psychic super-energy. Their tale is left open-ended, though; the final resting place of the Object of High Magic that has been sought by every secret society in the history of humanity is still being researched, and the Object itself is yet to be found. After all, everyone knows how irresistible a mystery is! When their book is printed, the editors congratulate themselves on having taken advantage of the gullible and credulous, and laugh up their sleeves at how anyone could be foolish enough to buy it.
But then, one of them is kidnapped by the very people they've catered to. A ransom note is delivered to the other two, demanding to know what the solution to the puzzle is. There is no way, the kidnappers say, that you got that far with putting the clues together, and didn't actually figure out where the Holy Grail is. Tell us -- or we'll kill your friend.
And, of course, the more the kidnapped man and his two friends insist that there is no mystery, there is no Holy Grail, no Super-Powerful Magical Device hidden in some sacred spot in the world, that they made the whole thing up, the more convinced the kidnappers are that they're lying. Why would they argue so hard if they didn't have something, something big, to hide?
It's the problem with conspiracy theorists, isn't it? No power on Earth can convince them they're wrong; facts can be spun or made up, and the people arguing against them are either deluded, stupid, or else part of the conspiracy themselves. And the trouble -- like with our skeptical book editors in Foucault's Pendulum -- is that sometimes, you end up convincing someone you wish you hadn't.
Which brings us to the President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.
Ahmedinejad has long belonged to that unfortunately extensive list of world leaders who have a rather tentative grip on reality. He's a hard-line Muslim, is (by all accounts) extremely superstitious, and is a raving Holocaust denier. Now, however, he's made statements that indicate that he's also spent too much time reading websites like AboveTopSecret.
Iran is currently suffering through one of the worst droughts in thirty years, and last week Ahmedinejad issued a statement claiming that hostile countries have used their technology to change the weather and cause the drought. (Source)
"The enemy destroys the clouds that are headed towards our
country and this is a war Iran will win," Ahmedinejad said on Monday of last week. The West, he says, is "using special equipment" to "prevent rain clouds from reaching regional countries, including Iran."
Well, well. I hope you HAARP conspiracists are proud of yourselves. You have spent the last ten years blathering on about how the US military now can control the weather (and, according to some, cause earthquakes, mudslides, and volcanic eruptions), and now you've convinced a hostile world leader that you were right. And not just any hostile world leader; a hostile world leader who (1) hates the United States, (2) is currently trying to develop nuclear weapons, and (3) already showed signs of being a delusional whackjob.
Nicely played, gentlemen. Nicely played. But what are you going to do now?
Of course, saying, "Ha-ha, we made it all up," like the editors in Foucault's Pendulum, isn't really an option, because you still believe it's all true, don't you? So now we have to wait and watch while a nutcase threatens us with war because he believes an elaborate lie concocted by a bunch of other nutcases.
The whole thing is absurd enough that it almost does sound like the plot of a novel. It makes me think that when the aliens from the planet Nibiru actually do arrive here on December 21, 2012, they're just going to destroy the planet on the basis of there being no intelligent life present.
Monday, September 17, 2012
Saturday, September 15, 2012
The ECREE Principle and the Lost Polar Pyramids
I'm often asked why I am so confident in my disbelief of all of the ideas I lump together as "woo-woo" -- ghosts, psychics, Bigfoot, UFOs, conspiracy theories, crystals, homeopathy, and so on.
That question contains two misleading words: "confident" and "disbelief." As I've mentioned before, in the absence of evidence either way, I'm anything but confident. If there is no particular scientific reason that something is impossible -- for example, as in the case of Bigfoot -- I am perfectly willing to sit there not knowing whether it's real, forever if need be. I might doubt a particular sighting of Bigfoot, based upon the circumstances, but I am in no way saying the the whole phenomenon is impossible. As a scientist, any level of confidence in the complete absence of evidence is an absurd stance. I neither believe nor disbelieve in Bigfoot; it is, at this point, a possible, but unproven, assertion, and I am content to leave it that way indefinitely until such time as hard evidence is uncovered.
On the other hand, there are cases in which I lean toward disbelief because the claim is so outrageous (although again, not scientifically impossible) that my sense is that the burden of proof is on the person making the claim, not on me to disprove it. Here, the ECREE Principle comes into play -- Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence. Yes, I know this isn't some kind of scientific law, it's only a rule of thumb, but taken as such, it works pretty damn well, keeping us from demanding the same level of evidence for every claim regardless of its plausibility.
Which brings us to the Lost Polar Pyramids.
Any time I hear someone mention the word "pyramid," my skepti-senses are automatically activated, because so much patent nonsense has been claimed about them. You have your Pyramids-As-Energy-Collectors crew, not to mention your Egyptian-Pyramids-Were-Built-By-Aliens crew and your Curse-Of-The-Pyramids crew, all vying for the craziest phenomenon to attribute to what honestly are just piles of rocks, albeit very impressive ones. And now, we have the claim that human-constructed pyramids have been discovered in Alaska (Source) and Antarctica (Source).
If you read the articles in question, you'll find that mostly what the writers do is to show you some photographs and say, "Wow! Isn't this weird! Pyramids in the polar regions! They have to be artificial constructs." In the case of the Alaska article, we have testimony from a retired intelligence officer named Douglas Mutschler that he and others detected an "underground pyramid" while monitoring the seismic waves from a Chinese nuclear detonation. The author supports this claim with an aerial shot showing something with a vaguely squarish contour that is so hard to see that in the article, you have to be told where in the photograph to look. In the Antarctic article, all we're given is some photographs with pointy-topped rocky structures, and we're told they're manmade pyramids.
(Let's for the moment ignore the fact that the Alaska article also goes into something the author refers to, with unintentional comic effect, as the "Alaska Bermuda Triangle," a region bounded by Juneau, Anchorage, and Barrow where allegedly planes tend to disappear. This is a whole different argument, involving a whole different set of assumptions and implausibilities -- so we'll concentrate for the time being simply on the "human-constructed pyramids in the polar regions" claim.)
So, back to the ECREE principle. Is the idea of a set of manmade pyramids in Alaska and the Antarctic an "extraordinary claim?" Given the small population of Alaska, and the absence of an archaeological record of large-scale building there, not to mention the nonexistence of a human population in Antarctica, I'd say we have here a pretty outlandish idea. Is it impossible? No. But a fuzzy aerial shot, the twenty-year-old testimonial of one man, and some random pictures of pointy mountaintops, are just not sufficient grounds for accepting that there's something weird going on. As I've pointed out before, there are many examples of purely natural geological formations that have straight lines, right angles, polygonal cross-sections, and so on. If you want me to believe that what I'm looking at is some mysterious artifact of a mysterious culture, built in an entirely unexpected place, what we currently have has not met any sort of minimum standard for evidence. You'd better head on back to your alleged pyramids and bring us back something better if you want the scientific world to sit up and take notice.
But of course, in the case of the Antarctic pyramids, there's a good reason that we might not want to know if they exist, because you H. P. Lovecraft fans probably recall what happened when scientists found an ancient city in Antarctica in "At the Mountains of Madness." Of the two people who survived, one ended up in an insane asylum because of the horrors he'd seen; the rest of the team variously got dissected, had their heads bashed in, or got eaten by Shoggoths. And heaven knows, we wouldn't want that to happen.
But I digress.
In any case, what we have here is an excellent example of why I find most woo-woo claims lacking. It is not, as I mentioned, because I don't think that there are weird things in the world; it's that if you bring a weird thing to my attention, you'd better have a pretty convincing argument to back you up. Otherwise, like our Alaskan and Antarctic pyramid hunters, your story will just get filed in the folder labeled "Maybe, But I Doubt It."
That question contains two misleading words: "confident" and "disbelief." As I've mentioned before, in the absence of evidence either way, I'm anything but confident. If there is no particular scientific reason that something is impossible -- for example, as in the case of Bigfoot -- I am perfectly willing to sit there not knowing whether it's real, forever if need be. I might doubt a particular sighting of Bigfoot, based upon the circumstances, but I am in no way saying the the whole phenomenon is impossible. As a scientist, any level of confidence in the complete absence of evidence is an absurd stance. I neither believe nor disbelieve in Bigfoot; it is, at this point, a possible, but unproven, assertion, and I am content to leave it that way indefinitely until such time as hard evidence is uncovered.
On the other hand, there are cases in which I lean toward disbelief because the claim is so outrageous (although again, not scientifically impossible) that my sense is that the burden of proof is on the person making the claim, not on me to disprove it. Here, the ECREE Principle comes into play -- Extraordinary Claims Require Extraordinary Evidence. Yes, I know this isn't some kind of scientific law, it's only a rule of thumb, but taken as such, it works pretty damn well, keeping us from demanding the same level of evidence for every claim regardless of its plausibility.
Which brings us to the Lost Polar Pyramids.
Any time I hear someone mention the word "pyramid," my skepti-senses are automatically activated, because so much patent nonsense has been claimed about them. You have your Pyramids-As-Energy-Collectors crew, not to mention your Egyptian-Pyramids-Were-Built-By-Aliens crew and your Curse-Of-The-Pyramids crew, all vying for the craziest phenomenon to attribute to what honestly are just piles of rocks, albeit very impressive ones. And now, we have the claim that human-constructed pyramids have been discovered in Alaska (Source) and Antarctica (Source).
If you read the articles in question, you'll find that mostly what the writers do is to show you some photographs and say, "Wow! Isn't this weird! Pyramids in the polar regions! They have to be artificial constructs." In the case of the Alaska article, we have testimony from a retired intelligence officer named Douglas Mutschler that he and others detected an "underground pyramid" while monitoring the seismic waves from a Chinese nuclear detonation. The author supports this claim with an aerial shot showing something with a vaguely squarish contour that is so hard to see that in the article, you have to be told where in the photograph to look. In the Antarctic article, all we're given is some photographs with pointy-topped rocky structures, and we're told they're manmade pyramids.
(Let's for the moment ignore the fact that the Alaska article also goes into something the author refers to, with unintentional comic effect, as the "Alaska Bermuda Triangle," a region bounded by Juneau, Anchorage, and Barrow where allegedly planes tend to disappear. This is a whole different argument, involving a whole different set of assumptions and implausibilities -- so we'll concentrate for the time being simply on the "human-constructed pyramids in the polar regions" claim.)
So, back to the ECREE principle. Is the idea of a set of manmade pyramids in Alaska and the Antarctic an "extraordinary claim?" Given the small population of Alaska, and the absence of an archaeological record of large-scale building there, not to mention the nonexistence of a human population in Antarctica, I'd say we have here a pretty outlandish idea. Is it impossible? No. But a fuzzy aerial shot, the twenty-year-old testimonial of one man, and some random pictures of pointy mountaintops, are just not sufficient grounds for accepting that there's something weird going on. As I've pointed out before, there are many examples of purely natural geological formations that have straight lines, right angles, polygonal cross-sections, and so on. If you want me to believe that what I'm looking at is some mysterious artifact of a mysterious culture, built in an entirely unexpected place, what we currently have has not met any sort of minimum standard for evidence. You'd better head on back to your alleged pyramids and bring us back something better if you want the scientific world to sit up and take notice.
But of course, in the case of the Antarctic pyramids, there's a good reason that we might not want to know if they exist, because you H. P. Lovecraft fans probably recall what happened when scientists found an ancient city in Antarctica in "At the Mountains of Madness." Of the two people who survived, one ended up in an insane asylum because of the horrors he'd seen; the rest of the team variously got dissected, had their heads bashed in, or got eaten by Shoggoths. And heaven knows, we wouldn't want that to happen.
But I digress.
In any case, what we have here is an excellent example of why I find most woo-woo claims lacking. It is not, as I mentioned, because I don't think that there are weird things in the world; it's that if you bring a weird thing to my attention, you'd better have a pretty convincing argument to back you up. Otherwise, like our Alaskan and Antarctic pyramid hunters, your story will just get filed in the folder labeled "Maybe, But I Doubt It."
Friday, September 14, 2012
Bad moon rising
A frequent reader and contributor to Skeptophilia sent me a link to a site that I had to look at really closely before I could figure out whether it was a parody or not.
Called The Mad Revisionist, the site offers up an argument that the Moon does not exist. Yes, you read that right; this site is not claiming that the Moon landing was fake, it's claiming that the whole Moon is.
It opens with the following paragraphs:
To the objection that we can see the Moon in the sky: it could be a hologram, or a model, placed there by one of the following: (1) the Illuminati; (2) the CIA; (3) NASA; or (4) the Rosicrucians. I think we can all agree that all of the aforementioned would have their own insidious reasons for fooling us into thinking we're looking at the Moon.
To the objection that all of the scientists agree that the Moon exists: we should automatically be suspicious of 100% consensus and scientific orthodoxy. It means that they're hiding something, and that the Scientific Establishment is determined to squash the views of Brave Mavericks Who Have Discovered The Truth.
To the objection that astronauts have landed there: Oh, please. Haven't we debunked that one before?
To the objection that scientists have seen, and analyzed, lunar rocks: Come on. How do you know they're from the Moon? Because the scientists told you they were, and they're in on the conspiracy. In what may be the best line from the whole site, the author writes, "... if NASA permitted unbiased researchers access to these objects, the fraud would be exposed immediately."
To the objection that the Moon creates tides: Clouds are closer to the alleged Moon than the oceans are; if the Moon could exert that kind of force on something as massive as the oceans, something as comparatively light as a cloud would go flying off into space. Ergo: the tides are caused by something else, which "scientists are still researching."
Then follows a "proof" using Newton's Law of Gravitation that if the alleged Moon's path wasn't perfectly circular, the force between the Earth and Moon would fluctuate to the extent that the Moon would crash into the Earth. As this hasn't happened, the Moon doesn't exist.
There are also several responses to Moon Believers who have written in, and a challenge put out there to anyone who can give unequivocal proof of the Moon's existence. The first one with acceptable proof will, the site says, receive a $100,000 cash prize.
So, what do you think? Parody or serious? I'll give you the answer: it's a thorough, intricate, and brilliantly-constructed parody. Look down at the bottom of the home page, and in tiny letters, you'll find the following:
In any case, whoever the Mad Revisionist is, (s)he has a bow and a sincere doff of the hat from me. Just how long it took me to figure out if it was serious earned some major props -- after all, Woo-Woo Detection is what I do, so the fact that I was fooled for a while is pretty awesome. And I hope that this shout-out gives you some well-deserved site traffic -- and opens a few people's eyes to how absurd the majority of conspiracy theories actually are.
Called The Mad Revisionist, the site offers up an argument that the Moon does not exist. Yes, you read that right; this site is not claiming that the Moon landing was fake, it's claiming that the whole Moon is.
It opens with the following paragraphs:
In 1995, the American Historical Association, in an attempt to stifle revisionist scholarship, marked the 50th anniversary of the defeat of Nazism with a resolution calling on scholars to "initiate plans now to study the significance of the Holocaust." This, however, was not enough of a blow to free academic discourse for the enemies of truth. The president of the AHA, William Leuchtenburg, was asked why the resolution did not go so far as to explicitly recognize the Holocaust as a fact of history. He answered that for a group of historians to say that there had been a Holocaust was tantamount to "an organization of astronomers saying there is a moon."At this point, I was caught in that uncomfortable region of, "No... um, really? You're joking, right?" So I kept reading. The whole thing is quote-worthy, but I'll leave you to explore the site on your own, which is well worth doing, and only give you a few highlights.
While, on the surface, this appears as nothing more than a shameless attempt to trivialize and thereby discredit the work of revisionists, it nonetheless got me to thinking: why did this historian single out the moon? Why would a scholar, so familiar with academic standards of evidence, use such language to imply that the existence of the moon, unlike any other issue, was a given and not subject to proof? What, in other words, was he trying to hide?
It was then that I embarked on my research, which has led me to this day when I can confidently make the following assertion: The Moon does not exist.
To the objection that we can see the Moon in the sky: it could be a hologram, or a model, placed there by one of the following: (1) the Illuminati; (2) the CIA; (3) NASA; or (4) the Rosicrucians. I think we can all agree that all of the aforementioned would have their own insidious reasons for fooling us into thinking we're looking at the Moon.
To the objection that all of the scientists agree that the Moon exists: we should automatically be suspicious of 100% consensus and scientific orthodoxy. It means that they're hiding something, and that the Scientific Establishment is determined to squash the views of Brave Mavericks Who Have Discovered The Truth.
To the objection that astronauts have landed there: Oh, please. Haven't we debunked that one before?
To the objection that scientists have seen, and analyzed, lunar rocks: Come on. How do you know they're from the Moon? Because the scientists told you they were, and they're in on the conspiracy. In what may be the best line from the whole site, the author writes, "... if NASA permitted unbiased researchers access to these objects, the fraud would be exposed immediately."
To the objection that the Moon creates tides: Clouds are closer to the alleged Moon than the oceans are; if the Moon could exert that kind of force on something as massive as the oceans, something as comparatively light as a cloud would go flying off into space. Ergo: the tides are caused by something else, which "scientists are still researching."
Then follows a "proof" using Newton's Law of Gravitation that if the alleged Moon's path wasn't perfectly circular, the force between the Earth and Moon would fluctuate to the extent that the Moon would crash into the Earth. As this hasn't happened, the Moon doesn't exist.
There are also several responses to Moon Believers who have written in, and a challenge put out there to anyone who can give unequivocal proof of the Moon's existence. The first one with acceptable proof will, the site says, receive a $100,000 cash prize.
So, what do you think? Parody or serious? I'll give you the answer: it's a thorough, intricate, and brilliantly-constructed parody. Look down at the bottom of the home page, and in tiny letters, you'll find the following:
DISCLAIMER: All editorial content on this website is strictly not the writer’s/author’s opinion. THE MAD REVISIONIST, located on the moon, is owned and operated by accident. The content of this page is the copyrighted property of THE MAD REVISIONIST. Any illegal copying or circulating of this page, in whole or in part, without the expressed permission of THE MAD REVISIONIST will be taken as a compliment. And no, we're not really offering $100,000. What are you, crazy?Myself, I think the whole thing is pure genius, and points up in a spectacular fashion how completely impossible it is to argue with conspiracy theorists. Because once you think that (1) there's a massive disinformation campaign, (2) the people who are the most knowledgeable on the subject are lying to you, and (3) such general rules of thumb as Ockham's Razor and the ECREE Principle do not apply, you can be convinced of anything (or, more likely, can't be unconvinced of whatever crazy idea you happen to be wedded to -- be it Holocaust denial, UFO coverups, New World Order nonsense, the NASA/Nibiru thing, or whatever).
In any case, whoever the Mad Revisionist is, (s)he has a bow and a sincere doff of the hat from me. Just how long it took me to figure out if it was serious earned some major props -- after all, Woo-Woo Detection is what I do, so the fact that I was fooled for a while is pretty awesome. And I hope that this shout-out gives you some well-deserved site traffic -- and opens a few people's eyes to how absurd the majority of conspiracy theories actually are.
Thursday, September 13, 2012
Nye vs. Ham, and the futility of debating creationists
Most of you probably heard that last month, Bill Nye made a short film called Creationism is Not Appropriate For Children, lambasting creationists for holding back the progress of science in America, and for brainwashing children:
So far, other than Purdom's Ph.D., none of this is particularly surprising. After all, we knew that Nye was a scientist, and we know that anyone working for Answers in Genesis has already decided that a Bronze-Age document written down in pieces three-thousand-odd years ago supersedes all of modern science. But now, Ken Ham, CEO of Answers in Genesis, has jumped in... and (brace yourself for the shock) he also claims that Nye doesn't understand science:
But now, the people at Answers in Genesis have thrown down the gauntlet and challenged Nye to a debate. Dr. Georgia Purdom, the aforementioned creationist molecular geneticist, stated in an interview in the Christian Post that a debate between Nye and Ham "could be held at a public university, using an impartial moderator. I would think that someone as polished and charismatic as Mr. Nye would relish the opportunity to debate a creationist. In addition, since Nye will soon be hosting a new science program, I would think he would like to see the publicity generated by his participation in a major public debate."
And here's where I sat up and took notice.
There is no way in the world Nye should accept this offer. Evolutionists have nothing to gain by debating with creationists, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with being afraid we're going to lose. (Note that this hasn't prevented me, more than once, from doing just that; in fact, I was once a panelist on a debate between young-earth creationists, intelligent-design proponents, and evolutionists.) The reason that Nye would be a fool to accept this challenge is that it implies that there is something to debate -- that scientists and creationists actually accept the same ground rules, the same methods, the same standards for evidence. When you start out from the standpoint of saying, "I believe what this book says because this book says it, it's the word of god," you have trumped any other argument right from the get-go. You have abandoned the principles of scientific induction and the basis of logical argument. A "debate" with you would be about as productive as a discussion between two people who are speaking mutually unintelligible languages.
It's easy enough to get needled by the arrogant certainty of the creationists, by their steadfast blindness to mountains of evidence that would be absolutely convincing in any other field. It's tempting to think, "If I just present it a different way, they'll understand." The fact is, any debate with creationists only serves to legitimize their views -- and to further convince the public that there is doubt in scientific circles that evolution occurs. As such, Nye should respond to Purdom, Menton, and Ham with one of his characteristic little smiles, and say, "No, thanks. But do let me know if you ever come to your senses. Then we can talk."
Evolution is the fundamental idea in all of life science, in all of biology... it's very much analogous to trying to do geology without believing in tectonic plates. You're just not going to get the right answer... Once in a while, I get a person who says, "I don't believe in evolution." And I say, "Why not?" Your world just becomes fantastically complicated if you don't believe in evolution. Here are these ancient dinosaur bones... here is radioactivity, here are distant stars that are just like our star except at a different point in their life cycle. The idea of deep time, of billions of years, explains so much of the world around us. If you ignore that, your world view just becomes crazy, it becomes untenable. And I say to the grown-ups, if you want to deny evolution, if you want to live in your world that is inconsistent with everything we observe in the universe, that's fine. But don't make your kids do it, because we need them. We need scientifically literate voters and taxpayers in the future, we need engineers.Well, of course the creationists weren't going to take that lying down. First, Dr. David Menton and Dr. Georgia Purdom of Answers in Genesis crafted a video responding to Nye, claiming (without any apparent sense of irony) that Bill Nye doesn't understand science. (If you watch their video, note that Purdom has a Ph.D. in molecular genetics, which I'm not sure isn't the thing about all this that appalls me the most. How someone could achieve doctoral level work in molecular genetics without accepting evolution seems to me not just astonishing, but nearly impossible.) Purdom explains that she teaches her young daughter about evolution "so that she can see the problems with it, which include a complete lack of a genetic mechanism which allows organisms to gain genetic information and go from simple to complex over time."
So far, other than Purdom's Ph.D., none of this is particularly surprising. After all, we knew that Nye was a scientist, and we know that anyone working for Answers in Genesis has already decided that a Bronze-Age document written down in pieces three-thousand-odd years ago supersedes all of modern science. But now, Ken Ham, CEO of Answers in Genesis, has jumped in... and (brace yourself for the shock) he also claims that Nye doesn't understand science:
Bill Nye has an agenda to teach children not to believe in God, to teach them that they came from evolutionary processes, that they came from slime over millions of years. In fact, Bill Nye doesn't really understand science... He says that we shouldn't teach children evolution, because we need engineers... What does engineering have to do with evolution? Bill Nye wasn't a scientist, he studied mechanical engineering, and he worked for Boeing at one point. I hope he didn't apply his evolutionary principles to any of Boeing's airplanes, because if he did I wouldn't want to fly on one. I wouldn't want to fly on anything that was built by chance and random processes. What does he think, that all the parts are just laid out on the runway, and they just come together or something?... Bill Nye is implying that if we want to teach children creation, that it's really a form of abuse... I'll tell you what is abuse, what is inappropriate for children, it's when you take generations of children, and teach them that they're just animals... Who determines right and wrong? You do. Who determines good and bad? You do. What is marriage? Whatever you want to make it. It's people like Bill Nye who are actually damaging the kids. Creationists are telling children that they're special, that they're made in the image of God, and giving them a basis for knowledge, that we can trust the laws of logic, that we can trust the laws of nature... (Nye) doesn't teach children how to think critically, he doesn't teach them how to think about science, he wants to teach them what to think. If evolution was true, it would be totally obvious to kids. The way to convince kids about evolution is that you've got to do what Bill Nye the Humanist Guy wants to do. You protect them from hearing anything about creation, you totally indoctrinate them, you brainwash them, you don't teach them to think critically at all.And once again, my general reaction was: *yawn*.
But now, the people at Answers in Genesis have thrown down the gauntlet and challenged Nye to a debate. Dr. Georgia Purdom, the aforementioned creationist molecular geneticist, stated in an interview in the Christian Post that a debate between Nye and Ham "could be held at a public university, using an impartial moderator. I would think that someone as polished and charismatic as Mr. Nye would relish the opportunity to debate a creationist. In addition, since Nye will soon be hosting a new science program, I would think he would like to see the publicity generated by his participation in a major public debate."
And here's where I sat up and took notice.
There is no way in the world Nye should accept this offer. Evolutionists have nothing to gain by debating with creationists, and it has nothing whatsoever to do with being afraid we're going to lose. (Note that this hasn't prevented me, more than once, from doing just that; in fact, I was once a panelist on a debate between young-earth creationists, intelligent-design proponents, and evolutionists.) The reason that Nye would be a fool to accept this challenge is that it implies that there is something to debate -- that scientists and creationists actually accept the same ground rules, the same methods, the same standards for evidence. When you start out from the standpoint of saying, "I believe what this book says because this book says it, it's the word of god," you have trumped any other argument right from the get-go. You have abandoned the principles of scientific induction and the basis of logical argument. A "debate" with you would be about as productive as a discussion between two people who are speaking mutually unintelligible languages.
It's easy enough to get needled by the arrogant certainty of the creationists, by their steadfast blindness to mountains of evidence that would be absolutely convincing in any other field. It's tempting to think, "If I just present it a different way, they'll understand." The fact is, any debate with creationists only serves to legitimize their views -- and to further convince the public that there is doubt in scientific circles that evolution occurs. As such, Nye should respond to Purdom, Menton, and Ham with one of his characteristic little smiles, and say, "No, thanks. But do let me know if you ever come to your senses. Then we can talk."
Wednesday, September 12, 2012
Could it be... Satan?
In what can only be described as a Great Leap Backward for rationality, the Roman Catholic Church in Poland has announced that it is publishing the world's only monthly magazine focused exclusively on exorcisms. (Source)
The journal, called Egzorcysta, will feature stories about Satanic possession, how to recognize it in others, and how to avoid it for yourself. Its first issue, released on Monday, has articles entitled "Satan is Real" and "New Age: The Spiritual Vacuum Cleaner."
The magazine was apparently conceived as a response to an increasing demand for the services of exorcists in Poland. Father Aleksander Posacki, a professor of philosophy and theology and "a leading demonologist and exorcist," stated to reporters that the number of exorcisms has risen dramatically, and links the increase to the fall of communism.
"The rise in the number or exorcists from four to more than 120 over the course of 15 years in Poland is telling," he said. "It's indirectly due to changes in the system: capitalism creates more opportunities to do business in the area of occultism. Fortune telling has even been categorised as employment for taxation. If people can make money out of it, naturally it grows and its spiritual harm grows too."
His colleague, Father Andrzej Grefkowicz, has stated that there is a "three-year waiting list for exorcists in Warsaw."
To which I can only respond: you have to wait three years to get an exorcism? You'd think that if they really believed that Satan was possessing someone, and working through them to commit evil, they'd get someone right on it. "Let's see... is your daughter making things float around? Yes... Has she puked up any pea soup lately?... I see... Is she able to turn her head a full 360 degrees? Mmmm-hmmmm... I understand... Well, we'll send someone down. Can you pencil us in for November 12, 2015?"
Of course, the main problem I see with all of this is that I have never heard of credible evidence that any of it -- Satan, possession, exorcism, and the rest -- has the least basis in reality. What's always been puzzling to me, and that I've never heard any True Believers adequately explain, is why (if Satan is out there looking for souls to inhabit), he doesn't pick likelier targets. Odd how the people who get possessed, and who end up in the hands of an exorcist, are virtually always Catholics themselves. You would think that a scoffing atheist like myself would be a perfect victim, given the apparent weakness of my own Eternal Spirit. But I've never heard of a single case of a rationalist nonbeliever being possessed.
Which in my mind places demonic possession squarely in the realm of either (1) mental illness, or (2) hysteria brought on by fear. In the first case, treating the problem using exorcism borders on criminal neglect -- to take some poor schizophrenic, and to try to cure his illness by mumbling some prayers and pouring holy water on his head, is in the same category as the Christian Scientists who waste time praying over someone with appendicitis. In the second case, I have no doubt that exorcisms sometimes "work" -- in the sense that if your "demonic possession" was caused by your panicked fear that there was an evil entity trying to control you, then an authority figure performing a ritual and telling you that the entity had departed would undoubtedly help you to feel better. It's a little like the nocebo effect -- the scientifically documented phenomenon in which people who believe that voodoo curses are real become ill if a practitioner tells them that they have been cursed.
The whole thing is profoundly bothersome. I find it amazing that we sit here in the 21st century, with our incredible access to science, technology, and rational thought, and are still hearing stories about demons and Satan and witches (take a look at this BBC story about people in Ghana who are permanently exiled to "witch camps," away from their families, if they're accused of sorcery). I know that things have improved -- far more people are rationalists, and have a good understanding of science, now than did even thirty years ago. But when I read this sort of thing, I realize that we still have a very long way to go.
The journal, called Egzorcysta, will feature stories about Satanic possession, how to recognize it in others, and how to avoid it for yourself. Its first issue, released on Monday, has articles entitled "Satan is Real" and "New Age: The Spiritual Vacuum Cleaner."
The magazine was apparently conceived as a response to an increasing demand for the services of exorcists in Poland. Father Aleksander Posacki, a professor of philosophy and theology and "a leading demonologist and exorcist," stated to reporters that the number of exorcisms has risen dramatically, and links the increase to the fall of communism.
"The rise in the number or exorcists from four to more than 120 over the course of 15 years in Poland is telling," he said. "It's indirectly due to changes in the system: capitalism creates more opportunities to do business in the area of occultism. Fortune telling has even been categorised as employment for taxation. If people can make money out of it, naturally it grows and its spiritual harm grows too."
His colleague, Father Andrzej Grefkowicz, has stated that there is a "three-year waiting list for exorcists in Warsaw."
To which I can only respond: you have to wait three years to get an exorcism? You'd think that if they really believed that Satan was possessing someone, and working through them to commit evil, they'd get someone right on it. "Let's see... is your daughter making things float around? Yes... Has she puked up any pea soup lately?... I see... Is she able to turn her head a full 360 degrees? Mmmm-hmmmm... I understand... Well, we'll send someone down. Can you pencil us in for November 12, 2015?"
Of course, the main problem I see with all of this is that I have never heard of credible evidence that any of it -- Satan, possession, exorcism, and the rest -- has the least basis in reality. What's always been puzzling to me, and that I've never heard any True Believers adequately explain, is why (if Satan is out there looking for souls to inhabit), he doesn't pick likelier targets. Odd how the people who get possessed, and who end up in the hands of an exorcist, are virtually always Catholics themselves. You would think that a scoffing atheist like myself would be a perfect victim, given the apparent weakness of my own Eternal Spirit. But I've never heard of a single case of a rationalist nonbeliever being possessed.
Which in my mind places demonic possession squarely in the realm of either (1) mental illness, or (2) hysteria brought on by fear. In the first case, treating the problem using exorcism borders on criminal neglect -- to take some poor schizophrenic, and to try to cure his illness by mumbling some prayers and pouring holy water on his head, is in the same category as the Christian Scientists who waste time praying over someone with appendicitis. In the second case, I have no doubt that exorcisms sometimes "work" -- in the sense that if your "demonic possession" was caused by your panicked fear that there was an evil entity trying to control you, then an authority figure performing a ritual and telling you that the entity had departed would undoubtedly help you to feel better. It's a little like the nocebo effect -- the scientifically documented phenomenon in which people who believe that voodoo curses are real become ill if a practitioner tells them that they have been cursed.
The whole thing is profoundly bothersome. I find it amazing that we sit here in the 21st century, with our incredible access to science, technology, and rational thought, and are still hearing stories about demons and Satan and witches (take a look at this BBC story about people in Ghana who are permanently exiled to "witch camps," away from their families, if they're accused of sorcery). I know that things have improved -- far more people are rationalists, and have a good understanding of science, now than did even thirty years ago. But when I read this sort of thing, I realize that we still have a very long way to go.
Tuesday, September 11, 2012
Unexplainable malarkey
A regular reader and frequent contributor to Skeptophilia sent me a link yesterday, with the message, "Oooh, look! Another company has discovered that it can sell bogus woo-woo stuff using your favorite words - frequency, field, energy, and vibration!"
Many of you probably recall how pissed off I get when people use scientific words and can't even be bothered to look up the actual definitions. It's even worse when they use said misused scientific words to rip people off, although clearly some of the responsibility lies with the consumers, because after all, they could also bother to look up the actual definitions if they wanted to -- caveat emptor, and all of that sort of thing.
So, anyway, when I clicked the link, and it brought me to a site called "Unexplainable Frequencies," I knew this one was gonna be good for a few faceplants. Here's the banner headline on the homepage:
Many of you probably recall how pissed off I get when people use scientific words and can't even be bothered to look up the actual definitions. It's even worse when they use said misused scientific words to rip people off, although clearly some of the responsibility lies with the consumers, because after all, they could also bother to look up the actual definitions if they wanted to -- caveat emptor, and all of that sort of thing.
So, anyway, when I clicked the link, and it brought me to a site called "Unexplainable Frequencies," I knew this one was gonna be good for a few faceplants. Here's the banner headline on the homepage:
- Manifestation
- Wealth
- Visualization
- Astral Projection
- Lucid Dreams
- Spirit Guide
- Chakra Work
- Remote Viewing
- Psychic/ESP
- Christ Consciousness
- IQ Increaser
Monday, September 10, 2012
Curiosity finds a shoe, a finger, and various aliens
It was only a matter of time.
Ever since NASA's roving Mars explorer Curiosity sent its first photographs back to Earth, I've been waiting for some wingnut to use one of them to "prove" something -- that aliens live there, that a superintelligent race had visited there before, or possibly that the US has had a working base there for thirty years, and President Obama visited there when he was a teenager.
Enter the British YouTube aficionado who goes by the handle StephenHannardADGUK. (I'm assuming his actual name is Stephen Hannard, which seems likely, so I'll refer to him by that name for the remainder of my post, and my apologies if this is incorrect.) Hannard has analyzed the Curiosity photographs, examining them down to the last detail, and even applying various filters to them to see if anything is hiding, up there on the dusty Martian surface. And lo, seek and ye shall find! Hannard discovered:
An alien poking his head out of a burrow!
UFOs!
A fossilized human finger!
A shoe!
What is NASA saying about these photographs? Predictably, they deny that anything weird is going on. The "UFOs" are dead pixels in the camera's imager, which have lost function and therefore create a white dot on the image that was accentuated by Hannard's use of filters. As for the grinning alien, the fossilized finger, and the shoe, those are... rocks. Just plain old Martian rocks.
Hannard and others, however, beg to differ. After telling us what we're looking at, Hannard concludes with, "What are these objects?... as always, you decide." In other words, you're free to disagree, as long as you don't mind being a Credulous Fool Who Believes Everything NASA Says. Of course that's what NASA spokespeople would say. They're paid to cover stuff up, especially the top-secret covert stuff that's been going on out there on Mars.
Um, yeah. That's why they've (1) sent a roving robot up there to take photographs of everything it can, (2) had it beam those photographs back to Earth, and (3) made those photographs public. So if NASA is acting as a covert-operations unit, it might want to rewrite its protocol manual, because right at the moment its methods of maintaining secrecy kind of suck.
Also, if these really are evidence of the presence of aliens (or humans, for that matter) on Mars, I'd really appreciate it if they'd do a better job of cleaning up after themselves and not leave shoes and severed fingers all over the place. The Earth has gotten mucked up enough with litter and pollution, let's not start doing the same to Mars, okay?
Anyhow, that's the news from the world of Ridiculous Outer Space Alien Conspiracies. As usual, I'm pretty certain that my missive from the world of rationality won't convince anyone who isn't already convinced, but I feel compelled to post it anyway. Just call me a Missionary of Skepticism, proclaiming my message to anyone who will listen, lo, even unto the Grinning Alien Groundhogs of Mars.
Ever since NASA's roving Mars explorer Curiosity sent its first photographs back to Earth, I've been waiting for some wingnut to use one of them to "prove" something -- that aliens live there, that a superintelligent race had visited there before, or possibly that the US has had a working base there for thirty years, and President Obama visited there when he was a teenager.
Enter the British YouTube aficionado who goes by the handle StephenHannardADGUK. (I'm assuming his actual name is Stephen Hannard, which seems likely, so I'll refer to him by that name for the remainder of my post, and my apologies if this is incorrect.) Hannard has analyzed the Curiosity photographs, examining them down to the last detail, and even applying various filters to them to see if anything is hiding, up there on the dusty Martian surface. And lo, seek and ye shall find! Hannard discovered:
An alien poking his head out of a burrow!
UFOs!
A fossilized human finger!
A shoe!
What is NASA saying about these photographs? Predictably, they deny that anything weird is going on. The "UFOs" are dead pixels in the camera's imager, which have lost function and therefore create a white dot on the image that was accentuated by Hannard's use of filters. As for the grinning alien, the fossilized finger, and the shoe, those are... rocks. Just plain old Martian rocks.
Hannard and others, however, beg to differ. After telling us what we're looking at, Hannard concludes with, "What are these objects?... as always, you decide." In other words, you're free to disagree, as long as you don't mind being a Credulous Fool Who Believes Everything NASA Says. Of course that's what NASA spokespeople would say. They're paid to cover stuff up, especially the top-secret covert stuff that's been going on out there on Mars.
Um, yeah. That's why they've (1) sent a roving robot up there to take photographs of everything it can, (2) had it beam those photographs back to Earth, and (3) made those photographs public. So if NASA is acting as a covert-operations unit, it might want to rewrite its protocol manual, because right at the moment its methods of maintaining secrecy kind of suck.
Also, if these really are evidence of the presence of aliens (or humans, for that matter) on Mars, I'd really appreciate it if they'd do a better job of cleaning up after themselves and not leave shoes and severed fingers all over the place. The Earth has gotten mucked up enough with litter and pollution, let's not start doing the same to Mars, okay?
Anyhow, that's the news from the world of Ridiculous Outer Space Alien Conspiracies. As usual, I'm pretty certain that my missive from the world of rationality won't convince anyone who isn't already convinced, but I feel compelled to post it anyway. Just call me a Missionary of Skepticism, proclaiming my message to anyone who will listen, lo, even unto the Grinning Alien Groundhogs of Mars.
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