Panic and Alarm (and Why This Is About Science Fiction)

Posted on Thursday 27 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Salon: I lost my dad to Fox News: How a generation was captured by thrashing hysteria

Sad case study of a man whose father disappeared into the paranoid, outraged worldview of Fox News. Like certain kinds of religious extremists, Fox partisans seem to be people whose discomfort with the modern world results in a retreat into fantasy and a denial of reality.

My father sincerely believes that science is a political plot, Christians are America’s most persecuted minority and Barack Obama is a full-blown communist. He supports the use of force without question, as long as it’s aimed at foreigners. He thinks liberals are all stupid, ignorant fucks who hate America.

…

He consumes a daily diet of nothing except Fox News. He has for a decade or more. He has no email account and doesn’t watch sports. He refuses to so much as touch a keyboard and has never been on the Internet, ever. He thinks higher education destroys people, not only because of Fox News, but also because I drifted left during and after graduate school.

My fascination with cases like this one is, in fact, consistent with this blog’s science fictional theme. Science fiction, ultimately, is about how people react to change; about how human beings think about themselves in relation to the rest of the universe; about how human experience would be different if the world or the universe itself were different. As a literary form it arose out of the realization, beginning a couple of centuries ago, that change was something experienced within a single lifetime, in relative contrast to the entire previous history of the race, and was something that people reacted to quite differently. And the rate of change just keeps increasing – scientific (bosons, extrasolar planets, nanotubes, genomic sequencing), technological (bionic limbs, stem cell therapy, the internet, the iPhone), and social (black president! Gay marriage!). It’s no surprise that some people just check out and reject it all (except maybe for the technological part, which they accept and use unironically, since the technology follows from the sciency stuff) and take refuge in religion or paranoid politics. It’s so much simpler to think in terms of black (people who are different from you) and white (people who are like you), or that the answers to all the important questions reside in selective passages from one or another single book, trumping anything the race has learned or experienced in the past three millennia. Those attitudes strike me as blinkered and deeply self-centered, as if an adult was content to never expand upon the knowledge and beliefs of his or her 6-year-old self, and resented the idea that he or she should. Science fiction, in contrast, at its best and most sophisticated, takes an adult’s self-awareness about one’s place in the world, an openness to finding out what one doesn’t already know, a willingness to consider alternatives to the way things have always been done, and a denial that anything is sacred or immune from re-examination and questioning. We keep exploring. There are always new places to explore, new things to learn, old things to unlearn, and new ways to expand human options and increase overall human understanding and well-being.

I take this mode of science fiction as the exploration of the consequences of these progressive, humanist values. My fascination with the Fox news guy is that he represents the antithesis of these values, and I’m curious about how people end up in such dead-end traps of ideology and dogma. Part of the answer, I think, is the cultural fragmentation enabled by the internet; another part is the psychological biases that all humans are prey to, as I’ve been reading about this past year in McRaney and Bering and others, and which one can try to overcome or bypass simply by being aware of them. I’m sure there other issues in play.

I’ve been negligent in this blog about discussing science fiction itself, much, and how, as I said, it promotes mental flexibility and a resistance to dogma. That’s still part of my long term plan.

Posted in Culture, Philosophy, Psychology, Religion, Science, science fiction | Comments Off on Panic and Alarm (and Why This Is About Science Fiction)

Why the World Is This Way Rather Than That Way

Posted on Thursday 27 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Good quote from Sean Carroll (from his post debate reflections about theistic vs naturalistic worldviews. (via)

If we would presume to contemplate theism from an intellectually honest perspective, we would try to decide what kind of universe we would expect to live in if theism were true; then we would do the same for naturalism; and finally we would compare those expectations to the real world. But when we do that we find theistic expectations failing to match reality over and over again. Now, I know perfectly well (from experience as well as from cogitation) that you can never make headway with theists by claiming “If God existed, He would do X, and He doesn’t” (where X is “prevent needless suffering,” “make His existence obvious,” “reveal useful non-trivial information to us,” “spread religious messages uniformly over the world,” etc.) Because they have always thought through these, and can come up with an explanation why God would never have done that. (According to Alvin Plantinga, our world — you know, the one with the Black Death, the Holocaust, AIDS, Hurricane Katrina, and so on — is “so good that no world could be appreciably better.”) But these apologetic moves come at a price: they imply a notion of theism so flexible that it becomes completely ill-defined. That’s the real problem. Craig’s way of putting it is to suggest that God is “like the cosmic artist who wants to splash his canvas with extravagance of design.” That’s precisely why naturalism has pulled so far ahead of theism in the intellectual race to best model our world: because it plays by rules and provides real explanations for why the world is this way rather than that way.

Posted in Physics, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Why the World Is This Way Rather Than That Way

Uganda, Scott Lively, Arizona, Mark Regnerus, Gay Denialism, and the connection between them

Posted on Tuesday 25 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

You wouldn’t necessarily think there’s a connection between antipathy toward homosexuality and with being Christian (*footnote below), and I have no particular animosity against Christianity any more than other religions (all of which I find unpersuasive and obsolete, if not oppressive), yet again and again the hostility toward gays, especially in recent weeks and months, turns out to be religiously inspired –- by Christianity. It is hard for me to find much respect for a religion whose most outspoken representatives devote their lives (they have nothing better to do?) to marginalizing if not criminalizing people like me.

The most prominent current example is the horrific law in Uganda that criminalizes homosexuality with life imprisonment — a law inspired by US evangelist Scott Lively, and his ilk, apparently frustrated that they couldn’t get such laws passed in the US. (Lively also helped Russia with its “anti-gay propaganda” laws.)

Today Towleroad points to Lively’s latest rant: Scott Lively is Nuts (I’m not providing a direct link to Lively’s site).

If you can stomach reading it, the man directly responsible for fomenting hate that led to anti-gay laws in Russia and Uganda, bemoans that homosexualism results in a loss of critical thinking skills, which is why homosexuals – and heterosexual supporters – somehow manage to confuse bigotry as “intolerant” or “hateful.”

As Huffington Post’s Michelangelo Signorile points out,

It’s widely known that Scott Lively, the American evangelist who published a book erroneously claiming that homosexuality gave rise to the Nazis, sowed the seeds of hate in Uganda beginning years back. … Matt Barber and Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel/Liberty University recently praised laws like those in Nigeria and Uganda that criminalize LGBT people. A new coalition of these groups has now formed to push homophobia across the globe. So while we’re hopefully beating back this law in Arizona, with anti-gay forces claiming it’s about religious freedom and not about discrimination, keep in mind that their goal — as they travel to places like Russia, as Brian Brown of the National Organization for Marriage did last year, supporting that country’s “gay propaganda” law — is to see homosexuality criminalized and punished around the world. And as Bryan Fisher of the American Family Association told me in an interview, that is exactly what they’d like to bring back to America as well.

Then there’s the discredited Mark Regnerus psychological study of children with gay parents, a study still being used (this week!) in legal challenges by opponents of same sex marriage — a study that was inspired and funded by religious organizations already hostile to the notion. New York Times:

Among those at the Heritage meetings was Luis E. Tellez, president of the Witherspoon Institute, a religious-conservative research center in Princeton, N.J. His organization seized the baton, signing up Dr. Regnerus, who was known as a skilled quantitative researcher, mainly on adolescent sexuality and religion, and as a Roman Catholic and opponent of same-sex marriage.

What a surprise he came up with the conclusions he did. Of course, the only people who found the study persuasive were those who shared his bias. In contrast,

Professional rejections of Dr. Regnerus’s conclusions were swift and severe. In a friend-of-the-court brief to the Supreme Court last year in two same-sex marriage cases, a report by the 14,000-member American Sociological Association noted that more than half the subjects whom Dr. Regnerus had described as children of “lesbian mothers” and “gay fathers” were the offspring of failed opposite-sex marriages in which a parent later engaged in same-sex behavior, and that many others never lived with same-sex parents.

“If any conclusion can be reached from Regnerus’s study,” the association said, “it is that family stability is predictive of child well-being.”

There were only two lesbian couples who’d raised children within committed relationships in his study, and no gay couples at all.

Today, Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern identifies another, far more abstruse tack.

Gay Denialism is the New Homophobia.

Stern reacts to an article (in a philosophical religious magazine called First Things) by one Michael W. Hannon, who argues that gays don’t exist, only gay sex acts, and since gays don’t exist, they deserve no legal recognition. Why would Hannon think that? Because he’s

an advocate of “Christian chastity” looking to turn the “tragedy” of all non-procreative sex — with a recurring focus on homosexuality — into an “opportunity” to promote his cause. His only aim is to free Christians from the sinful shackles of sexual orientation; his message is not one of hatred, but of love, peace, and faith.

Spare me his Christian love! Stern comments,

Given that Hannon’s ultimate argument rests in his personal exegesis of biblical text, I’m not sure why he takes such great pains to lecture gays on the various theoretical reasons that their identity is an illusion. His interpretation of his religion commands him to revile homosexuality; since he begins with this conclusion, the majority of his cogitations are essentially irrelevant.

—-
Footnote:

*There are two or three other general reasons people seem to object to homosexuality. One, a (rather childish) squeamishness about people who do things one finds personally distasteful. Many people get past this reflexive attitude that people who are different from them are therefore inferior by the time they become adults, but not everyone.

Two, an existential panic on the part of parents that their kids being gay would preclude them having grandchildren. This is an attitude honed by the elementary logic of natural selection, of course; members of a population indifferent to having offspring, and their offspring having offspring, would not, to the extent this attitude is genetic, last long in the population.

A third would be the deep-seated biological protocols of species survival, which homosexuality would seem to (but in practice does not always) violate. This too, ironically, is an instinct built by evolution, a concept those who express this objection most strongly no doubt don’t “believe” in.

(So evolutionary speaking, why does homosexuality exist? An unsolved question, though with several potential explanations. Humans are not simple reproductive machines, optimized to generate offspring above all else, would be the general answer.)

All of these issues, especially the last, I ponder discussing in later posts.

Posted in Religion, The Gays | Comments Off on Uganda, Scott Lively, Arizona, Mark Regnerus, Gay Denialism, and the connection between them

Josh Barro

Posted on Tuesday 25 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Just became aware of reporter and (Republican, gay) commentator Josh Barro, triggered by news that he’s leaving Business Insider for the New York Times, though it turns out I’d read a piece by him before a few weeks back: There Are Two Americas, And One Is Better Than The Other.

Today came across a series of posts from around the same time (last December) in which he specifically addressed Phil Robertson, and why he doesn’t sweat the “haters”.

This is Why Phil Robertson is Wrong About the Gays
When You Defend Phil Robertson Here’s What You’re Really Defending
Here’s Why I Don’t Sweat the Haters

My inbox is full of “love the sinner, hate the sin” defenses of Robertson’s 2013 remarks. But Robertson doesn’t love gay people. He thinks they’re, well, “full of murder.” His views on gays are hateful, inasmuch as they are full of hate.

As a side note, it’s remarkable how often these things come as a package. Robertson’s sincere doctrinal view about the sinfulness of homosexuality comes packaged with animus toward gays and retrograde views about blacks and non-Christians. It’s almost as though social conservatism is primarily fueled by a desire to protect the privileges of what was once a straight, white Christian in-group, rather than by sincere religious convictions.

Posted in Religion, The Gays | Comments Off on Josh Barro

A Better World

Posted on Sunday 23 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Jerry Coyne links this item at Prospect by Daniel Dennet: If I ruled the world.

His prescription for a better world: educate the children.

I would like my first step on ascending to the dictatorship to be decreeing high quality, non-ideological education for boys and girls in every community on the globe. If we could just liberate the world’s children from illiteracy, ignorance, and superstition, their curiosity would lead them to solutions that were both locally informed and sensitive while also tuned to a fairly realistic view of the global context into which these solutions must fit.

But he admits this can never work. Because: parents.

The disastrous attempts to separate children from their families in the recent past in order to give them ‘proper’ educations should convince us that there is simply no way of imposing an educational system on children in different cultures against their will and the will of their elders that isn’t both inhumane and ineffective. Notice that I did not say that knowledge should never be imposed on people. If it were effective, if it ‘took’ readily enough, I would be as much in favour of imposing knowledge on children as I am of imposing vaccination on them. We’re all in this world together, and benighted attitudes don’t put only the benighted at risk.

Posted in Culture, Religion | Comments Off on A Better World

Debates about Science, Creationism, Accommodationism

Posted on Friday 21 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Slate: The Myths of Anti-Creationism

This is the latest round in a fascinating debate in recent days between William Saletan of Slate and Sean McElwee in Salon. Can you be a creationist and also be a scientist? McElwee says no; to be a creationist to have made up one’s mind and become committed to a particular belief despite the evidence, and thereby resistant to any possible additional evidence. That is not science, which is always provisional and open to new evidence.

Saletan disagrees, basically on practical grounds. The fact of the matter is that millions of people in the US (and a couple other countries, like Turkey) believe the world was created just some 10,000 years ago – despite, or most likely in benign ignorance of, mountains of evidence indicating otherwise – and yet manage to lead functional lives as office workers, engineers, lawyers, even doctors. But probably not as scientists.

(There’s an interesting sidebar about whether creationist beliefs are related to myths about vaccines. Wouldn’t be surprised.)

I would say in principle McElwee is right – a creationist scientist’s thought processes should be suspect – but in practice Saletan is probably right. Creationism is just one example of how religious ideas continue to flourish: people compartmentalize their religious beliefs away from the necessarily rational means they must have to engage the world on a daily basis. You can work a job, raise kids, live and die, and never care about what the evidence indicates about the size of the universe, the age of the earth, or the mysteries of quantum mechanics. Creationism is just one example, of many many, religious beliefs about the world without a shred of real world evidence in their support. To most people, that doesn’t matter. To a scientist, it *should* matter.

There’s a parallel debate recently about ‘accommodationism’ between Jerry Coyne and others, including Phil Plait. This is about whether, at any level, science and religion are compatible. As with the above debate, they’re both probably right, but within different contexts; but I’m not exploring that issue here.

Coincidentally, today, here is a new essay by a real scientist, Sam Harris, who is actively interested in new evidence and open to changing his mind:

The Pleasure of Changing My Mind

Because,

I don’t want to be wrong for a moment longer than I have to be.

Also coincidentally, physicist Sean Carroll is about to participate in a debate, tonight, with Christian apologist William Lane Craig, about God and cosmology. I doubt I’ll have a chance to watch it, but I’m sure the best bits will be posted and blogged around the web.

Posted in Religion, Science | Comments Off on Debates about Science, Creationism, Accommodationism

Wishful Thinking vs What We Know About How the World Works

Posted on Friday 21 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Physicist Sean Carroll’s site is always interesting to dip into – he has a long list of posts from the past decade under his ‘Greatest Hits’ tab – and here is one from 2011 about Physics and the Immortality of the Soul.

This is an iconic example of the difference between what most people believe, or feel, and what the evidence of the world tells us if we bother to think about it.

Given what we do understand about rocks and planets and dairy products and the Solar System, it’s absurd to imagine that the Moon is made of green cheese. We know better.

We also know better for life after death, although people are much more reluctant to admit it. Admittedly, “direct” evidence one way or the other is hard to come by — all we have are a few legends and sketchy claims from unreliable witnesses with near-death experiences, plus a bucketload of wishful thinking. But surely it’s okay to take account of indirect evidence — namely, compatibility of the idea that some form of our individual soul survives death with other things we know about how the world works.

Claims that some form of consciousness persists after our bodies die and decay into their constituent atoms face one huge, insuperable obstacle: the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely understood, and there’s no way within those laws to allow for the information stored in our brains to persist after we die. If you claim that some form of soul persists beyond death, what particles is that soul made of? What forces are holding it together? How does it interact with ordinary matter?

Posted in Physics, Religion, Thinking | Comments Off on Wishful Thinking vs What We Know About How the World Works

The Passing of Blind Obedience to Decaying Creeds

Posted on Monday 17 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Traditional religionists are in panic, it seems, from advances in social policy concerning same-sex marriage (which we proponents call “marriage equality”) and other things like legal euthanasia (is your right to die your decision – or the government’s?). Here is Adam Lee summarizing this issue, and by the way challenging a rival blogger who had mentioned his earlier post (without linking it) and then deleted comments concerning it, rather than posting a public response.

Clearly, religious apologists feel the world, which they once thought they owned, is slipping away from them; that they’re losing their privileged status as the sole arbiters of morality. You can understand their anger and desperation in this light.

Naturally, the apologists are eager to cast this as a rebellion against goodness itself. The truth is that their view, which is based on blind obedience to decaying creeds, is being replaced with something better: a morality that’s based on reasoned debate and human well-being. The churches and their advocates still command significant power, but they can no longer just assert that something is God’s will and expect to receive deference. If that prospect frightens and upsets them, perhaps it’s because they don’t have any backup arguments to offer.

Posted in Religion | Comments Off on The Passing of Blind Obedience to Decaying Creeds

Prothero and Vick on that debate

Posted on Thursday 13 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

Donald Prothero summarizes the Nye-Ham debate.

http://www.skepticblog.org/2014/02/12/hearts-and-minds/

Tristan Vick explains why he didn’t watch the debate, but sides with those who think it was a good idea.

http://www.advocatusatheist.blogspot.jp/2014/02/why-i-didnt-watch-bill-nye-vs-ken-ham.html

We have to debate Creationists, if anything, to share the accumulated information, the bulwark of human knowledge, and give them something tangible to think about. Otherwise, how will they ever learn anything? They are all trapped inside massive echo chambers of faith.

He also notes that the questions the Creationists asked weren’t serious inquiries.

These Creationists weren’t curious to know how or why things work in the world. They merely wanted to know how their religious beliefs could be considered wrong by those who thought and felt differently. Every single one of the 22 questions posted reflect back on how they perceive their cherished beliefs, beliefs they cling to, it had nothing to do with them wanting to learn about this or that thing or some such as it relates to the real world.

That’s the big reason their version of the way they see the world simply will not last. Because their version doesn’t wish to concern itself with the way the world really is. There is a detachment here, and this lack of curiosity, this lack of desire to understand, will cause them to fall behind the curve of progress and eventually they will have no choice but to leave their failed beliefs behind or adapt them into something new, something most likely bizarre, in order to stand the test of time.

Posted in Evolution, Religion, Science | Comments Off on Prothero and Vick on that debate

How God Works

Posted on Thursday 13 February 2014 by Mark R. Kelly

No One Cares About Your Damn Religion

Have you ever noticed how God always agrees with you? Not as often with your neighbor, your congressman, your family or even the pope. But he (or she, or it,) definitely agrees with you. Other people just aren’t enlightened enough to realize that. Yet.

Funny how that works.

Was the Christian God cool with slavery? Slave owners sure thought so — and had plenty of Biblical canon to support it. Abolitionists disagreed. Did God want women to vote? Not according to anti-suffragists. Suffragists were convinced otherwise. If society continues this descent into level-headed compassion, fifty years from now people will be claiming that God is pro-fur and factory farming. When one cannot defend a belief in the current context, moving the framework back a few thousand years and putting the blame on God is a pretty good fallback strategy.

Long examination of how the faithful cherry-pick their holy book to justify their prejudices. Obvious, but needs to be said, and said again.

Posted in Atheism, Religion | Comments Off on How God Works