Chris Rodda's Liars for Jesus available free online

After witnessing the despicable pseudo-historian David Barton on "The Daily Show," inadequately rebutted by Jon Stewart, author Chris Rodda decided to take action.  She's giving away her book, Liars for Jesus, which carefully documents the historical revisionism of Barton and others, online as a PDF.

You can download Rodda's book here.  You can also purchase a paper or Kindle copy of the book from Amazon.com.

Rodda depends on income from her book, but felt it was important enough to give it away.  I suspect she'll see an increase in sales along with the free distribution.

UPDATE:
Rodda's book seems to be selling well:

Paperback:

• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,815 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #7 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Church & State

Kindle:

• Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #2,451 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
  • #1 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Church & State
  • #1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Religion & Spirituality > Religious Studies > Church & State
  • #3 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > History > Americas > United States > Colonial Period

Review of CMI's "Voyage That Shook the World"

John Lynch and I have co-authored a review of the Creation Ministries International film on Darwin which will be appearing in vol. 30 of Reports of the National Center for Science Education and which may be found on their website.

My previous blogged review of the film is here.

I gave a little more background on the film here.  John Lynch has said more about it here, here, here, and here, mostly about the deception used to get interviews by prominent historians.

Origin of the term "woo"

Earlier today on Twitter, Adam Bourque (@A_Damn_Bourque) asked if anyone knew the origin of the term "woo" as applied to the paranormal.  I know I've heard the term used for at least a decade (or two or three?), but after seeing that neither the Skeptics Dictionary entry on "woo woo" nor threads at the JREF Forums had an etymology, I decided to take a look at Google Books.

"Woo" wasn't a good search due to the homonym, and "woo woo" led to lots of matches in stories of children imitating fire engine sirens, but adding "astrology" and "occult" as additional terms led to some useful matches.

On my first pass, the oldest reference I found was in Nicholas Evans' novel The Loop (1999), p. 244:

And anyway, being a woman in the macho world of wolf research was hard enough without everyone thinking you'd gone woo-woo, the term her mother used to scorn everything from astrology to vitamin pills.  And in truth, although Helen didn't doubt there were more things in heaven and earth than could be seen with the aid of a microscope, on the woo-woo scale she was definitely at the skeptical end.

 Hey, it's even a book with a skeptical character!

Next, by adding "astrology," I found a slightly earlier nonfiction reference, Kate Bornstein's My Gender Workbook (1998), p. 121:

Don't get me wrong, I believe in a lot of woo-woo stuff.  I'm a double Pisces with a Taurus Moon.  I was born in 1948, the Year of the Rat.  I use several I-Ching software programs on my computer, and I've been reading tarot cards for nearly thirty years.

Not a skeptic, in that case.

Then, by adding "occult," another earlier nonfiction reference by sociologists of religion, James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton, in Perspectives on the New Age (1992), p. 3:

I also found that the characterization of New Age psychism as being "woo-woo" and "airy-fairy" was true of only some of the more public New Age channels.

But then, pay dirt--a source going back to May 1844 that looks like a likely candidate for the origin of the term, in The North British Review, vol. 1, no. 11, p. 340, in a review of (or excerpt from?) Report by the Commissioners for the British Fisheries of their Proceedings of 1842, "Our Scottish fishermen" (pp. 326-365):

When beating up in stormy weather along a lee-shore, it was customary for one of the men to take his place on the weather gunwale, and there continue waving his hand in a direction opposite to the sweep of the sea, using the while a low moaning chant, Woo, woo, woo, in the belief that the threatening surges might be induced to roll past without breaking over.  We may recognize in both these singular practices the first beginnings of mythologic belief--of that religion indigenous to the mind, which can address itself in its state of fuller development to every power of nature as to a perceptive being, capable of being propitiated by submissive deference and solicitation, and able, as it inclined, either to aid or injure.

Though this isn't enough to be certain, this looks like a very likely origin of the term.

Thanks to Adam for prompting this search.

UPDATE: Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas points out a 1986 St. Petersburg Times story:

Are cookbook publishers that desperate? … This season they present us with two "new and unique" horoscopic cookbooks - A Taste of Astrology by Lucy Ash and Cosmic Cuisine by Tom Jaine - adding another dimension to star-inspired cookbooks.
Both authors are British (of undisclosed signs) but they are, most uncannily, on much the same woo-woo wavelength. They do not suggest casing out a potential romantic partner according to sign language.

In the comments below, I point out two older cases of "woo woo" I've found in ghost stories as a sound:

Groff Conklin's 1962 The Supernatural Reader, p. 101 has these two sentences, but the page context isn't available from Google Books: "Someone else giggled, and from the darkness beside the building came a high-pitched, 'Woo-woo!' I walked up to Sam and grinned at him."

Cecil John Richards, Wind Over Fowlmere and Other Stories, 1953, p. 116: "...going 'woo-woo woo-woo-woo' in its deep gruff voice just over my head. ... And then Hargreaves led us once again into the realm of the supernatural."

UPDATE (May 7, 2010): Anton Mates found and posted this news item from 1984 at Josh Rosenau's blog and in the comments below:

THE NEW AGE SOUND: SOOTHING MUSIC BY SINCERE ARTISTS
Philadelphia Inquirer, The (PA) - Sunday, October 21, 1984

So who is this New Age audience? Mostly upscale folks in their 30s and early 40s, the ones weaned on Baba Ram Dass and Woodstock and hallucinogenics, macrobiotic diets and transcendental meditation.
.....
George Winston, who practices yoga and who currently has three albums on the jazz charts (his five Windham Hill recordings have reportedly sold more than 800,000 copies; his LP December has just been certified gold), has jokingly called this crowd the "woo-woos." In a 1983 interview in New Age Journal, Winston, asked if he knew who comprised his audience, answered that there were some classical fans, some jazz, some pop and "all the woo-woos." 

"You know," he added, "there's real New Age stuff that has substance, and then there's the woo-woo . A friend of mine once said, 'George, you really love these woo-woos, don't you?' and I said 'Yes, I do love them,' and I do. I mean, I'm half woo-woo myself."

Chinese astronomy and scientific anti-realism

On the last day of my class on Scientific Revolutions and the law, one of the students in the class, Lijing Jiang, gave a presentation titled "To Consider the Heavens: The Incorporation of Jesuit Astronomy in the Seventeenth Century Chinese Court."

Her presentation was about how Jesuit missionaries in China brought western astronomy with them, and how it was received.  This added a very interesting complement to the course, as much of the early part of the semester was about the Copernican revolution (using Kuhn's book of the same name).  Part of what happened early on in astronomy was a division between cosmology and positional astronomy, with the former being about the actual nature of the heavens, and the latter being about creating mathematical models for prediction, to be used for navigation and calendar-setting that incorporated features not intended to represent reality (like epicycles).  These two types of astronomy didn't really get reconnected (aside from the occasional realist depiction of epicycles in crystalline spheres) until Galileo argued for a realist interpretation of the Copernican model.  And that didn't fully catch on until Newton.

In China, calendar reform was very important as they used a combination of a lunar month (based on phases of the moon) and tropical year that had to be synchronized annually, and an unpredicted eclipse was considered to be a bad omen.  The Chinese had gone through many calendar reforms as a result of these requirements, and they considered that theories needed to be revised about every 300 years (in other realms as well, not just astronomy).

The Jesuits happened to bring Copernican astronomy to China in the late 16th/early 17th century, with a goal of impressing and converting the Emperor.  They got their big chance to make a splash in 1610, when the Chinese court astronomers mispredicted a solar eclipse by one day, which the Jesuits predicted correctly in advance.  But this turned out in a way to be poorly timed, as the Counter-Reformation decided to start cracking down on Copernican heliocentrism after 1610, making it a formal doctrinal issue in 1616.  The Jesuits in China thus switched to the Tychonic system which was geometrically equivalent to the Copernican model but geocentric.

Multiple factors persuaded the Chinese to maintain a relativistic, anti-realist understanding of positional astronomy beyond the Scientific Revolution.  In addition to Taoist and Buddhist views of life involving constant change and their past experience with calendars suggesting revisions every 300 years, the Jesuits presented another example of apparent arbitrariness in cosmological model selection, and they continued to stick with the Tychonic model as the western world switched to heliocentrism.

You can read Lijing Jiang's blogging at Science in a Mirror, where she may post something about her presentation in the future.

Matthew LaClair vs. Texas Board of Education

Matthew LaClair, who exposed his proselytizing U.S. history teacher/youth pastor in 2006, now hosts his own radio show, "Equal Time for Freethought," on WBAI 99.5 FM on Sundays at 6:30 p.m. ET in the New York/New Jersey/Connecticut area.  The show is also online via streaming audio.

This coming Sunday, April 25, Matthew will be debating a conservative member of the Texas Board of Education about their recent changes to the curriculum (e.g., removing Thomas Jefferson).

If you happen to miss the show, it will subsequently be available in the online archives.

Translating local knowledge into state-legible science

James Scott’s Seeing Like a State (about which I've blogged previously) talks about how the state imposes standards in order to make features legible, countable, regulatable, and taxable. J. Stephen Lansing’s Perfect Order: Recognizing Complexity in Bali describes a case where the reverse happened. When Bali tried to impose a top-down system of scientifically designed order--a system of water management--on Balinese rice farmers, in the name of modernization in the early 1970s, the result was a brief increase in productivity followed by disaster. Rather than lead to more efficient use of water and continued improved crop yields, it produced pest outbreaks which destroyed crops. An investment of $55 million in Romijn gates to control water flow in irrigation canals had the opposite of the intended effect. Farmers removed the gates or lifted them out of the water and left them to rust, upsetting the consultants and officials behind the project. Pesticides delivered to farmers resulted in brown leafhoppers becoming resistant to pesticides, and supplied fertilizers washed into the rivers and killed coral reefs at the mouths of the rivers.

Lansing was part of a team sponsored by the National Science Foundation in 1983 that evaluated the Balinese farmers’ traditional water management system to understand how it worked. The farmers of each village belong to subaks, or organizations that manage rice terraces and irrigation systems, which are referred to in Balinese writings going back at least a thousand years. Lansing notes that “Between them, the village and subak assemblies govern most aspects of a farmer’s social, economic, and spiritual life.”

Lansing’s team found that the Balinese system of water temples, religious ritual, and irrigation managed by the subaks would synchronize fallow periods of contiguous segments of terraces, so that long segments could be kept flooded after harvest, killing pests by depriving them of habitat. But their attempt and that of the farmers to persuade the government to allow the traditional system to continue fell upon deaf ears, and the modernization scheme continued to be pushed.

In 1987, Lansing worked with James Kremer to develop a computer model of the Balinese water temple system, and ran a simulation using historical rainfall data. This translation of the traditional system into scientific explanation showed that the traditional system was more effective than the modernized system, and government officials were persuaded to allow and encourage a return to the traditional system.

The Balinese system of farming is an example of how local knowledge can develop and become embedded in a “premodern” society by mechanisms other than conscious and intentional scientific investigation (in this case, probably more like a form of evolution), and be invisible to the state until it is specifically studied. It’s also a case where the religious aspects of the traditional system may have contributed to its dismissal by the modern experts.

What I find of particular interest here is to what extent the local knowledge was simply embedded into the practices, and not known by any of the participants--were they just doing what they've "always" done (with practices that have evolved over the last 1,000 years), in a circumstance where the system as a whole "knows," but no individual had an understanding until Lansing and Kremer built and tested a model of what they were doing?

[A slightly different version of the above was written for my Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology core seminar. Thanks to Brenda T. for her comments.  More on Lansing's work in Bali may be found online here.]

Winner's techne and politeia, 22 years later

Chapter 3 of Langdon Winner’s The Whale and the Reactor (1988) is titled “Techné and Politeia,” a discussion of the relationship of technology and politics that draws upon Plato, Rousseau, and Thomas Jefferson to recount historical views before turning to the “modern technical constitution.”  The contemporary “interconnected systems of manufacturing, communications, transportation” and so forth that have arisen have a set of five features that Winner says “embody answers to age-old political questions ... about membership, power, authority, order, freedom, and justice” (p. 47).

The five features are (pp. 47-48):

1. “the ability of technologies of transportation and communication to facilitate control over events from a single center or small number of centers.”
2. “a tendency for new devices and techniques to increase the most efficient or effective size of organized human associations.”
3. “the way in which the rational arrangement of socio-technical systems has tended to produce its own distinctive forms of hierarchical authority.”
4. “the tendence of large, centralized, hierarchically arranged sociotechnical entities to crowd out and eliminate other varieties of human activity.”
5. “the various ways that large sociotechnical organizations exercise power to control the social and political influences that ostensibly control them.” (e.g., regulatory capture)

Winner states that the adoption of systems with these features implicitly provides answers to political questions without our thinking about it, questions such as “Should power be centralized or dispersed? What is the best size for units of social organization? What constitutes justifiable authority in human associations? Does a free society depend on social uniformity or diversity? What are appropriate structures and processes of public deliberation and decision making?” (p. 49)  Where the founding fathers of the United States considered these questions explicitly in formulating our political constitution, the developers of technological systems--which have become socio-technical systems, with social practices surrounding the use of technology--have typically failed to do so, being more concerned with innovation, profit, and organizational control rather than broader social implications (p. 50).

While there are widely accepted criteria for placing regulatory limits on technology--Winner notes five (threats to health and safety, exhaustion of a vital resource, degrading environmental quality, threats to natural species and wilderness, and causing “social stresses and strains of an exaggerated kind,” pp. 50-51)--he suggests that these are insufficient.  He cites a study by colleagues of electronic funds transfer (EFT) which suggested that it “would make possible a shift of power from smaller banks to larger national and international institutions” and create problems of data protection and individual privacy.  But those problems don’t seem to fall under his five criteria, so he suggested, ironically, that “their research try to show that under conditions of heavy, continued exposure, EFT causes cancer in laboratory animals” (p. 51).  Although I’d be surprised to find that EFT by itself had the effect Winner suggests, the recent global financial crisis as shown problems with allowing financial institutions to become “too big to fail” and motivated financial reform proposals (e.g., Sen. Dodd’s bill that would create new regulatory power over institutions with more than $50 billion in assets, including the ability to force such institutions into liquidation--“death panels” for large financial institutions).

In the 22 years since Winner’s book was published, most of his five features seem to continue to be relevant to developments such as the Internet.  With respect to (2),(3), and (4) the Internet has greatly reduced the costs of organizing and allowed for social (non-market) production of goods.  But the mechanisms which ease the creation of small, geographically dispersed groups have also facilitated the creation of larger groups, new kinds of hierarchical authority, and new kinds of centralization and monitoring (e.g., via applications used by hundreds of millions of people, provided by companies like Google, Facebook, and Twitter).  It’s also allowed for new forms of influence by the same old powers-that-be, via techniques like astroturfing and faux amateur viral videos.

[A slightly different version of the above was written as a comment for my Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology core seminar. Thanks to Tim K. for his comments (though I declined to move the paragraph you suggested).]

Against "coloring book" history of science

It's a bad misconception about evolution that it proceeds in a linear progression of one successfully evolving species after another displacing its immediate ancestors.  Such a conception of human history is equally mistaken, and is often criticized with terms such as "Whiggish history" or "determinism" with a variety of adjectives (technological, social, cultural, historical).  That includes the history of science, where the first version we often hear is one that has been rationally reconstructed by looking back at the successes and putting them into a linear narrative.  Oh, there are usually a few errors thrown in, but they're usually fit into the linear narrative as challenges that are overcome by the improvement of theories.

The reality is a lot messier, and getting into the details makes it clear that not only is a Whiggish history of science mistaken, but that science doesn't proceed through the algorithmic application of "the scientific method," and in fact that there is no such thing as "the scientific method."  Rather, there is a diverse set of methods that are themselves evolving in various ways, and sometimes not only do methods which are fully endorsed as rational and scientific produce erroneous results, sometimes methods which have no such endorsement and are even demonstrably irrational fortuitously produce correct results.  For example, Johannes Kepler was a neo-pythagorean number mystic who correctly produced his second law of planetary motion by taking an incorrect version of the law based on his intuitions and deriving the correct version from it by way of a mathematical argument that contained an error.  Although he fortuitously got the right answer and receives credit for devising it, he was not justified in believing it to be true on the basis of his erroneous proof.  With his first law, by contrast, he followed an almost perfectly textbook version of the hypothetico-deductive model of scientific method of formulating hypotheses and testing them against Tycho Brahe's data.

The history of the scientific revolution includes numerous instances of new developments occurring piecemeal, with many prior erroneous notions being retained.  Copernicus retained not only perfectly circular orbits and celestial spheres, but still needed to add epicycles to get his theory any where close to the predictive accuracy of the Ptolemaic models in use.  Galileo insisted on retaining perfect circles and insisting that circular motion was natural motion, refusing to consider Kepler's elliptical orbits.  There seems to be a good case for "path dependence" in science.  Even the most revolutionary changes are actually building on bits and pieces that have come before--and sometimes rediscovering work that had already been done before, like Galileo's derivation of the uniform acceleration of falling bodies that had already been done by Nicole Oresme and the Oxford calculators.  And the social and cultural environment--not just the scientific history--has an effect on what kinds of hypotheses are considered and accepted.

This conservativity of scientific change is a double-edged sword.  On the one hand, it suggests that we're not likely to see claims that purport to radically overthrow existing theory (that "everything we know is wrong") succeed--even if they happen to be correct.  And given that there are many more ways to go wrong than to go right, such radical revisions are very likely not to be correct.  Even where new theories are correct in some of their more radical claims (e.g., like Copernicus' heliocentric model, or Wegener's continental drift), it often requires other pieces to fall into place before they become accepted (and before it becomes rational to accept them).  On the other hand, this also means that we're likely to be blinded to new possibilities by what we already accept that seems to work well enough, even though it may be an inaccurate description of the world that is merely predictively successful.  "Consensus science" at any given time probably includes lots of claims that aren't true.

My inference from this is that we need both visionaries and skeptics, and a division of cognitive labor that's largely conservative, but with tolerance for diversity and a few radicals generating the crazy hypotheses that may turn out to be true.  The critique of evidence-based medicine made by Kimball Atwood and Steven Novella--that it fails to consider prior plausibility of hypotheses to be tested--is a good one that recognizes the unlikelihood of radical hypotheses to be correct, and thus that huge amounts of money shouldn't be spent to generate and test them.  (Their point is actually stronger than that, since most of the "radical hypotheses" in question are not really radical or novel, but are based on already discredited views of how the world works.)  But that critique shouldn't be taken to exclude anyone from engaging in the generation and test of hypotheses that don't appear to have a plausible mechanism, because there is ample precedent for new phenomena being discovered before the mechanisms that explain them.

I think there's a tendency among skeptics to talk about science as though it's a unified discipline, with a singular methodology, that makes continuous progress, and where the consensus at any moment is the most appropriate thing to believe.  The history of science suggests, on the other hand, that it's composed of multiple disciplines, with multiple methods, that proceeds in fits and starts, that has dead-ends, that sometimes rediscovers correct-but-ignored past discoveries, and is both fallible and influenced by cultural context.  At any given time, some theories are not only well-established but unified well with others across disciplines, while others don't fit comfortably well with others, or may be idealized models that have predictive efficacy but seem unlikely to be accurate descriptions of reality in their details.  To insist on an overly rationalistic and ahistorical model is not just out-of-date history and philosophy of science, it's a "coloring book" oversimplification.  While that may be useful for introducing ideas about science to children, it's not something we should continue to hold to as adults.

Scientific autonomy, objectivity, and the value-free ideal

It has been argued by many that science, politics, and religion are distinct subjects that should be kept separate, in at least one direction if not both.  Stephen Jay Gould argued that science and religion have non-overlapping areas of authority (NOMA, or non-overlapping magisteria), with the former concerned about how questions and the latter with why questions, and that conflicts between them won’t occur if they stick to their own domain.  Between science and politics, most have little problem with science informing politics, but a big problem with political manipulation of science.  Failure to properly maintain the boundaries leads to junk science, politicized science, scientism, science wars, and other objectionable consequences.

Heather E. Douglas, in Science, Policy, and the Value-Free Ideal argues that notions of scientific autonomy and a scientific ideal of being isolated from questions of value (political or otherwise) are mistaken, and that this idea of science without regard to value questions (apart from epistemic virtues) is itself a contributing factor to such consequences.  She attributes blame for this value-free ideal of science to post-1940 philosophy of science, though the idea of scientific autonomy appears to me to have roots much further back, including in Galileo’s “Letter to Castelli” and "Letter to the Grand Duchess Christina" and John Tyndall’s 1874 Belfast Address, which were more concerned to argue that religion should not intrude into the domain of science rather than the reverse.  (As I noted in a previous post about Galileo, he did not carve out complete autonomy for natural philosophy from theology, only for those things which can be demonstrated or proven, which he argued that scripture could not contradict--and where it apparently does, scripture must be interpreted allegorically.)

Douglas describes a “topography of values” in the categories of cognitive, ethical, and social values, and distinguishes direct and indirect roles for them.  Within the “cognitive” category go values pertaining to our ability to understand evidence, such as simplicity, parsimony, fruitfulness, coherence, generality, and explanatory power, but excluding truth-linked epistemic virtues such as internal consistency and predictive competency or adequacy, which she identifies not as values but as minimal negative conditions that theories must necessarily meet.  Ethical values and social values are overlapping categories, the former concerned with what’s good or right and the latter with what a particular society values, such as “justice, privacy, freedom, social stability, or innovation” (Douglas, p. 92).  Her distinction between a direct and indirect role is that the former means that values can act directly as reasons for decisions, versus indirectly as a factor in decision-making where evidence is uncertain.

Douglas argues that values can legitimately play a direct role in certain phases of science, such as problem selection, selection of methodology, and in the policy-making arena, but should be restricted to an indirect role in phases such as data collection and analysis and drawing conclusions from evidence.  She identifies some exceptions, however--problem selection and method selection can’t legitimately be guided by values in a way that undermines the science by forcing a pre-determined conclusion (e.g., by selecting a method that is guaranteed to be misleading), and a direct role for ethical values can surface in later stages by discovering that research is causing harm.

Her picture of science is one where values cannot directly intrude between the collection of data and the inference of the facts from that data, but the space between evidence and fact claims is somewhat more complex than she describes.  There is the inference by a scientist of a fact from the evidence, the communication of that fact to other scientists, the publication of that fact in the scientific literature, and its communication to the general public and policy makers.  All but the first of these are not purely epistemic, but are also forms of conduct.  It seems to me that there is, in fact, a potential direct role for ethical values, at the very least, for each such type of conduct, in particular circumstances, which could merit withholding of the fact claim.  For example, a scientist in Nazi Germany could behave ethically by withholding information about how to build an atomic bomb.

Douglas argues that the motivation for the value-free ideal is as a mechanism for preserving scientific objectivity; she therefore gives an account of objectivity that comports with her account of science with values.  She identifies seven types of objectivity that are relevant in three different domains (plus one she rejects), all of which have to do with a shared ground for trust.  First, within the domain of human interactions with the world, are “manipulable objectivity,” or the ability to repeatably and reliably make interventions in nature that give the same result, and “convergent objectivity,” or having supporting evidence for a conclusion from multiple independent lines of evidence.  Second, in the realm of individual thought processes, she identifies “detached objectivity”--a scientific disinterest, freedom from bias, and eschewing the use of values in place of evidence.  There’s also “value-free objectivity,” the notion behind the value-free ideal, which she rejects.  And there’s “value-neutral objectivity,” or leaving personal views aside in, e.g., conducting a review of the literature in a field and identifying possible sets of explanations, or taking a "centrist" or "balanced" view of potentially relevant values.  Finally, in the domain of social processes, Douglas identifies “procedural objectivity,” where use of the same procedures produces the same results regardless of who engages in the procedure, and “intersubjectivity” in two senses--“concordant objectivity,” agreement in judgments between different people, and “interactive objectivity,” agreement as the result of argument and deliberation.

Douglas writes clearly and concisely, and makes a strong case for the significance of values within science as well as in its application to public policy.  Though she limits her discussion to natural science (and focuses on scientific discovery rather than fields of science that involve the production of new materials, an area where more direct use of values is likely appropriate), her account could likely be extended with the introduction of a bit more complexity.  While I don’t think she has identified all or even the primary causes of the “science wars,” which she discusses at the beginning of her book, I think her account is more useful in adjudicating the “sound science”/“junk science” debate that she also discusses, as well as identifying a number of ways in which science isn’t and shouldn’t be autonomous from other areas of society.

[A slightly different version of the above was written as a comment for my Human and Social Dimensions of Science and Technology core seminar. Thanks to Judd A. for his comments.]

Galileo on the relation between science and religion

Galileo’s view of natural philosophy (science) is that it is the study of the book of nature,” “written in mathematical language” (Finocchiaro 2008, p. 183), as contrasted with theology, the study of the book of Holy Scripture and revelation.  Galileo endorses the idea that theology is the “queen” of the “subordinate sciences” (Finocchiaro 2008, p. 124), by which he means not that theology trumps science in any and all matters.  He distinguishes two senses of theology being “preeminent and worthy of the title of queen”: (1) That “whatever is taught in all the other sciences is found explained and demonstrated in it [theology] by means of more excellent methods and of more sublime principles,” [Note added 12/14/2012: which he rejects] and (2) That theology deals with the most important issues, “the loftiest divine contemplations” about “the gaining of eternal bliss,” but “does not come down to the lower and humbler speculations of the inferior sciences ... it does not bother with them inasmuch as they are irrelevant to salvation” [Note added 12/14/2012: which he affirms] (quotations from Finocchiaro 2008, pp. 124-125).  Where Holy Scripture makes reference to facts about nature, they may be open to allegorical interpretation rather than literal interpretation, unless their literal truth is somehow necessary to the account of “the gaining of eternal bliss.”

Galileo further distinguishes two types of claims about science:  (1) “propositions about nature which are truly demonstrated” and (2) “others which are simply taught” (Finocchiaro 2008, p. 126).  The role of the theologian with regard to the former category is “to show that they are not contrary to Holy Scripture,” e.g., by providing an interpretation of Holy Scripture compatible with the proposition; with regard to the latter, if it contradicts Holy Scripture, it must be considered false and demonstrations of the same sought (Finocchiaro 2008, p. 126).  Presumably, if in the course of attempting to demonstrate that a proposition in the second category is false, it is instead demonstrated to be true, it then must be considered to be part of the former category.  Galileo’s discussion allows that theological condemnation of a physical proposition may be acceptable if it is shown not to be conclusively demonstrated (Finnochiaro 2008, p. 126), rather than a more stringent standard that it must be conclusively demonstrated to be false, which, given his own lack of conclusive evidence for heliocentrism, could be considered a loophole allowing him to be hoist with his own petard.

Galileo also distinguishes between what is apparent to experts vs. the layman (Finnochiaro 2008, p. 131), denying that popular consensus is a measure of truth, but regarding that this distinction is what lies behind claims made in Holy Scripture about physical propositions that are not literally true.  With regard to the theological expertise of the Church Fathers, their consensus on a physical proposition is not sufficient to make it an article of faith unless such consensus is upon “conclusions which the Fathers discussed and inspected with great diligence and debated on both sides of the issue and for which they then all agreed to reject one side and hold the other” (Finnochiaro 2008, p. 133).  Or, in a contemporary (for Galileo) context, the theologians of the day could have a comparably weighted position on claims about nature if they “first hear the experiments, observations, reasons, and demonstrations of philosophers and astronomers on both sides of the question, and then they would be able to determine with certainty whatever divine inspiration will communicate to them” (Finnochiaro 2008, p. 135).

Galileo’s conception of science that leads him to take this position appears to be drawn from what Peter Dear (1990, p. 664), drawing upon Thomas Kuhn (1977), calls “the quantitative, ‘classical’ mathematical sciences” or the “mixed mathematical sciences,” identifying this as a predominantly Catholic conception of science, as contrasted with experimental science developed in Protestant England.  The former conception is one in which laws of nature can be recognized through idealized thought experiments based on limited (or no) actual observations, but demonstrated conclusively by means of rational argument.  This seems to be the general mode of Galileo’s work.  Dear argues that this notion of natural law allows for a conception of the “ordinary course of nature” which can be violated by an observed miraculous event, which comports with a Catholic view that miracles continue to occur in the world.

By contrast, the experimentalist views of Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle involve inductively inferring natural laws on the basis of observations, in which case observing something to occur makes it part of nature that must be accounted for in the generalized law--a view under which a miracle seems to be ruled out at the outset, which was not a problem for Protestants who considered the “age of miracles” to be over (Dear 1990, pp. 682-683).  Dear argues that for the British experimentalists, authentication of an experimental result was in some ways like the authentication of a miracle for the Catholics--requiring appropriately trustworthy observations--but that instead of verifying a violation of the “ordinary course of nature,” it verified what the “ordinary course of nature” itself was (Dear 1990, p. 680).  Where the Catholics like Galileo and Pascal derived conclusions about particulars from universal laws recognized by observation, reasoning, and mathematical demonstration, the Protestants like Bacon and Boyle constructed universal laws by inductive generalization from observations of particulars, and were notably critical of failing to perform a sufficient number of experiments before coming to conclusions (McMullin 1990, p. 821), and put forth standards for hypotheses and experimental method (McMullin 1990, p. 823; Shapin & Schaffer 1985, pp. 25ff & pp. 56-59).  The English experimentalist tradition, arising at a time of political and religious confusion after the English Civil War and the collapse of the English state church, was perhaps an attempt to establish an independent authority for science.  By the 19th century, there were explicit (and successful) attempts to separate science from religious authority and create a professionalized class of scientists (e.g., as Gieryn 1983, pp. 784-787 writes about John Tyndall).

The English experimentalists followed the medieval scholastics (Pasnau, forthcoming) in adopting a notion of “moral certainty” for “the highest degree of probabilistic assurance” for conclusions adopted from experiments (Shapin 1994, pp. 208-209).  This falls short of the Aristotelian conception of knowledge, yet is stronger than mere opinion.  They also placed importance on public demonstration in front of appropriately knowledgeable witnesses--with both the credibility of experimenter and witness being relevant to the credibility of the result.  Where on Galileo’s conception expertise appears to be primarily a function of possessing rational faculties and knowledge, on the experimentalist account there is importance to skill in application of method and to the moral trustworthiness of the participants as a factor in vouching for the observational results.  In the Galilean approach, trustworthiness appears to be less relevant as a consequence of actual observation being less relevant--though Galileo does, from time to time, make remarks about observations refuting Aristotle, e.g., in “Two New Sciences” where he criticizes Aristotle’s claims about falling bodies (Finnochiaro 2008, pp. 301, 303).

The classic Aristotelian picture of science is similar to the Galilean approach, in that observation and data collection is done for the purpose of recognizing first principles and deriving demonstrations by reason from those first principles.  What constitutes knowledge is what can be known conclusively from such first principles and what is derived by necessary connection from them; whatever doesn’t meet that standard is mere opinion (Posterior Analytics, Book I, Ch. 33; McKeon 1941, p. 156).  The Aristotelian picture doesn’t include any particular deference to theology; any discipline could could potentially yield knowledge so long as there were recognizable first principles. The role of observation isn’t to come up with fallible inductive generalizations, but to recognize identifiable universal and necessary features from their particular instantiations (Lennox 2006).  This discussion is all about theoretical knowledge (episteme) rather than practical knowledge (tekne), the latter of which is about contingent facts about everyday things that can change.  Richard Parry (2007) points out an apparent tension in Aristotle between knowledge of mathematics and knowledge of the natural world on account of his statement that “the minute accuracy of mathematics is not to be demanded in all cases, but only in the case of things which have no matter.  Hence its method is not that of natural science; for presumably the whole of nature has matter” (Metaphysics, Book II, Ch. 3, McKeon 1941, p. 715).

The Galilean picture differs from the Aristotelian in its greater use of mathematics (geometry)--McMullin writes that Galileo had “a mathematicism ... more radical than Plato’s” (1990, pp. 822-823) and by its inclusion of the second book, that of revelation and Holy Scripture, as a source of knowledge.  But while the second book is one which can trump mere opinion--anything that isn’t conclusively demonstrated and thus fails to meet Aristotle’s understanding of knowledge--it must be held compatible with anything that does meet those standards.

References

• Peter Dear (1990) “Miracles, Experiments, and the Ordinary Course of Nature,” ISIS 81:663-683.
• Maurice A. Finocchiaro, editor/translator (2008) The Essential Galileo.  Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
• Thomas Gieryn (1983) “Boundary Work and the Demarcation of Science from Non-Science: Strains and Interests in Professional Ideologies of Scientists,” American Sociological Review 48(6, December):781-795.
• Thomas Kuhn (1957) The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought.  Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
• Thomas Kuhn (1977) The Essential Tension.  Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
  Lennox, James (2006) “Aristotle’s Biology,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, online at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-biology/, accessed March 18, 2010.
• Richard McKeon (1941) The Basic Works of Aristotle. New York: Random House.
• Ernan McMullin (1990) “The Development of Philosophy of Science 1600-1900,” in Olby et al. (1990), pp. 816-837.
• R.C. Olby, G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie, and M.J.S. Hodge (1990) Companion to the History of Science.  London: Routledge.
• Parry, Richard (2007) “Episteme and Techne,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, online at http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/episteme-techne/, accessed March 18, 2010.
• Robert Pasnau (forthcoming) “Medieval Social Epistemology: Scienta for Mere Mortals,” Episteme, forthcoming special issue on history of social epistemology.  Online at http://philpapers.org/rec/PASMSE, accessed March 18, 2010. 
• Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer (1985) Leviathan and the Air Pump: Hobbes, Boyle, and the Experimental Life.  Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
• Steven Shapin (1994) A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

[The above is slightly modified from one of my answers on a midterm exam.  My professor observed that another consideration on the difference between Catholic and Protestant natural philosophers is that theological voluntarism, more prevalent among Protestants, can suggest that laws of nature are opaque to human beings except through inductive experience.  NOTE ADDED 13 April 2010: After reading a couple of chapters of Margaret Osler's Divine Will and the Mechanical Philosophy: Gassendi and Descartes on Contingency and Necessity in the Created World (2005, Cambridge University Press), I'd add Pierre Gassendi to the experimentalist/inductivist side of the ledger, despite his being a Catholic--he was a theological voluntarist.]

Dana Perino forgets about 9/11 and the Beltway snipers

Dana Perino says, "We did not have a terrorist attack on our country during President Bush's term."

Sean Hannity ignores it.



Terrorism is a strategy used by a militarily weak group against a militarily strong one, to create fear, dread, and uncertainty among the general population toward some political or ideological end, such as ending military actions by the strong group against the weak. It's not clear to me that Major Hasan's attack at Fort Hood meets the criteria of a terrorist attack, or even a religiously motivated one, though that's somewhat more plausible. His action did share the element of being an attack by the weak against the strong, but he also appears to have had mental issues and an ongoing battle with the military over his desire to get out and not be sent to Afghanistan. There were clear warning signs that were missed or ignored, but it doesn't appear that he was part of a broader plot.

The Fort Hood shootings were a tragedy, and possibly one that could have been avoided. But it certainly isn't an event that provides justification for torture, warrantless wiretapping, the revocation of habeas corpus, and the expansion of "homeland security" to the detriment of our civil liberties. Perino and Hannity want to argue that the Obama administration has made us less safe on the basis of this incident, which makes about as much sense as blaming the Bush administration for the Virginia Tech shootings.

UPDATE (November 27, 2009): As a couple people have correctly noted, I should also have mentioned the post-9/11 anthrax attacks as another terrorist act Perino forgot about. Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was another.

UPDATE: Hume's Ghost notes that Perino has said via Twitter that she meant "since 9/11," and correctly points out how absurd it is to discount 9/11 for Bush (as well as these other subsequent events she's ignored), while blaming Obama for Hasan's shooting: "...while there were warning signs about Hasan's fitness for duty that could have been noticed by those around him, this is hardly something that would have been on the President's radar. No one was briefing President Obama that Major Hasan was determined to strike a military base; however, President Bush was briefed that Bin Laden was determined to strike in the United States prior to the 9/11 attacks."

Wikileaks to release over 500K text pager intercepts from 9/11

Wikileaks is releasing over 500,000 U.S. national text pager intercepts from September 11, 2001, over the next two days:

From 3AM on Wednesday November 25, 2009, until 3AM the following day (New York Time), WikiLeaks will release over half a million US national text pager intercepts. The intercepts cover a 24 hour period surrounding the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks in New York and Washington.

The first message, corresponding to 3AM September 11, 2001, five hours before the first attack, will be released at 3AM November 25, 2009 and the last, corresponding to 3AM September 12, 2001 at 3AM November 26, 2009.

Text pagers are mostly carried by persons operating in an official capacity. Messages in the collection range from Pentagon and New York Police Department exchanges, to computers reporting faults to their operators as the World Trade Center collapsed.
This is a significant and completely objective record of the defining moment of our time. We hope that its entry into the historical record will lead to a deeper and more nuanced understanding of how this tragedy and its aftermath may have been prevented.

While we are obligated by to protect our sources, it is clear that the information comes from an organization which has been intercepting and archiving national US telecommunications since prior to 9/11.

The Transparent Society getting closer, it appears...

Richard Carrier on the ancient creation/evolution debate

Richard Carrier, an independent scholar with a Ph.D. in Ancient History from Columbia University, gave a talk this morning to the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix titled "Christianity and Science (Ancient and Modern)." He argued that there was a creation/evolution debate in ancient Rome that had interesting similarities and differences to the current creation/evolution debate.

He began with Michael Behe and a short description of his irreducibly complexity argument regarding the bacterial flagellum--that since it fails to function if any piece is removed, and it's too complex to have originated by evolution in a single step, it must have been intelligently designed and created. He observed that 2,000 years ago, Galen made the same argument about the human hand and other aspects of human and animal anatomy. Galen wrote that "the mark of intelligent design is clear in those works in which the removal of any small component brings about the ruin of the whole."

Behe, Carrier said, hasn't done what you'd expect a scientist to do with respect to his theory. He hasn't looked at the genes that code the flagellum and tried to identify correlate genes in other microbes, for example.

In the ancient context, the debate was between those who argued for natural selection on random arrangements of features that were spontaneously generated, such as Anaxagoras and atomists like Democritus and Epicurus, vs. those who argued for some kind of intelligent design, like Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, and Galen. Carrier set the stage by describing a particular debate about the function of the kidneys between Asclepiades and Galen. Asclepiades thought that the kidneys were either superfluous, with urine forming directly in the bladder, or was an accidental sieve. Galen set out to test this with a public experiment on an anesthetized pig, which had been given water prior to the operation. He opened up the pig, ligated (tied knots in) its ureters, and they started to balloon and the bladder stayed empty. Squeezing the ureter failed to reverse the flow back into the kidney. When one ureter was cut, urine came out. Thus, Galen demonstrated that the kidneys extract urine from the blood and it is transported to the bladder by the ureters. The failure of the flow to operate in reverse showed that the kidneys were not simple sieves, but operated by some power that only allowed it to function in one direction. This, argued Galen, was demonstration of something too complex to have arisen by chance, and refuted the specific claims of Asclepiades.

Galen's 14-volume De Usu Portium (On the Usefulness of Parts) made similar arguments for intelligent design about all aspects of human anatomy--the nerve transport system, biomechanics of arm, hand, and leg movement, the precision of the vocal system, etc. He also asked questions like "How does a fetus know how to build itself?" He allowed for the possibility of some kind of tiny instructions present in the "seed," on analogy with a mechanical puppet theater, programmed with an arrangement of cogs, wheels, and ropes.

Galen also investigated the question of why eyebrows and eyelashes grow to a fixed length and no longer, and found that they grow from a piece of cartilage, the tarsal plate. He concluded that while his evidence required an intelligent designer, they entailed that God is limited and uses only available materials. Galen, a pagan, contrasted his view with that of Christians. For Christians, a pile of ashes could become a horse, because God could will anything to be the case. But for Galen, the evidence supported a God subject to the laws of physics, who was invisibly present but physically interacting to make things happen, and that God realizes the best possible world within constraints.

Which intelligent design theory better explains facts like the growth of horses from fetuses, the fact that fetuses sometimes come out wrong, and why we have complex bodies at all, rather than just willing things into existence via magic? If God can do anything, why wouldn't he just make us as "simple homogenous soul bodies that realize functions by direct will" (or "expedient polymorphism," to use Carrier's term)?

The difference between Galen's views and those of the Christians was that Galen thought of theology as a scientific theory that had to be adjusted according to facts, that facts about God are inferred from observations, and those facts entail either divine malice or a limited divinity. What we know about evolution today places even more limits on viable theories of divinity than in Galen's time. (Carrier gave a brief overview of evolution and in particular a very brief account of the evolution of the bacterial flagellum.)

Galen's views allowed him to investigate, conduct experiments to test the theories of his opponents as well as his own, and make contributions to human knowledge. He supported the scientific values of curiosity as a moral good, empiricism as the primary mode of discovery, and progress as both possible and valuable, while Christianity denigrated or opposes these. The views of early church fathers were such that once Christianity gained power, it not only put a halt to scientific progress, it caused significant losses of knowledge that had already been accumulated. (Carrier later gave many examples.)

Tertullian, a contemporary of Galen, asked, "What concern have I with the conceits of natural science?" and "Better not to know what God has not revealed than to know it from man."

Thales, from the 6th century B.C., was revered by pagans as the first natural scientist--he discovered the natural causes of eclipses, explained the universe as a system of natural causes, performed observations and developed geometry, made inquiries into useful methods, and subordinated theology to science. There was a story that he was so focused on studying the stars that he fell into a well. Tertullian wrote of this event that Thales had a "vain purpose" and that his fall into the well prefigured his fall into hell.

Lactantius, an early Christian writer and tutor of Constantine the Great, denied that the earth was round (as part of a minority faction of Christians at the time), said that only knowledge of good and evil is worthwhile, and argued that "natural science is superfluous, useless, and inane." This despite overwhelming evidence already accumulated of a round earth (lighthouses sinking below the horizon as seen from ships sailing away, astronomical observations of lunar eclipses starting at different times in different locations, the fact that different stars are visible at different latitudes, and the shadow of the earth on the moon), which Lactantius simply was uninterested in.

Eusebius, the first historian of the Christian church, said that all are agreed that only scriptural knowledge is worthwhile, anything contrary to scripture is false, and pursuing scientific explanations is to risk damnation. Armchair speculation in support of scripture, however, is good.

Amid factors such as the failure of the pagan system, civil wars in the Roman empire, and a great economic depression, Christianity came to a position of dominance and scientific research came to a halt from about the 4th century to the 12th-14th centuries.

Carrier compared these Christian views to specific displays at the Answers in Genesis Creation Museum in Kentucky, which compared "human reason" to "God's word." One contrasted Rene Descartes saying "I think therefore I am" to God saying "I am that I am." Galen wouldn't have put those into opposition with each other.

Another display labeled "The First Attack--Question God's Word" told the story of Satan tempting Adam to eat from the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which highlights the "questioning" of Satan for criticism, and argues that putting reason first is Satanic.

Another diagram comparing "human reason" to "God's Word" showed evolution as a 14-billion-year winding snake-like shape, compared to the short and straight arrow of a 6,000-year creation.

Carrier noted, "It doesn't have to be that way. Galen's faith didn't condemn fundamental scientific values; Galen's creationism was science-based."

He then gave numerous examples of knowledge lost or ignored by Christianity--that Eratosthenes had calculated the size of the earth (a case described in Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" series), Ptolemy's projection cartography and system of latitude and longitude, developments in optics, hydrostatics, medicine, harmonics and acoustics, pneumatics, tidal theory, cometary theory, the precession of the stars, mathematics, robotics (cuckoo clocks, coin-operated vending machines for holy water and soap dispensing), machinery (water mills, water-powered saws and hammers, a bread-kneading machine), and so on. He described the Antikythera mechanism, an analog computer similar to WWI artillery computers, which was referred to in various ancient texts but had been dismissed by historians as impossible until this instance was actually found in 1900.

Another example was the Archimedes Codex, where Christians scraped the ink from the text and wrote hymns on it, and threw the rest away. The underlying writing has now been partially recovered thanks to modern technology, revealing that Archimedes performed remarkably advanced calculations about areas, volumes, and centers of gravity.

Carrier has a forthcoming book on the subject of this ancient science, called The Scientist in the Early Roman Empire.

A few interesting questions came up in the Q&A. The first question was about why early Christians didn't say anything about abortion. Carrier said it probably just wasn't on the radar, though abortion technology already existed in the form of mechanical devices for performing abortions and abortifacients. He also observed that the ancients knew the importance of cleanliness and antiseptics in medicine, while Jesus said that washing before you eat is a pointless ritual (Mark 7:1-20). Carrier asked, if Jesus was God, shouldn't he have known about the germ theory of disease?

Another question was whether Christianity was really solely responsible for 1,000 years of stangnation. Carrier pointed out that there was a difference between Byzantine and Western Christianity, with the former preserving works like those of Ptolemy without condemning them, but without building upon them. He said there are unerlying cultural, social, and historical factors that explain the differences, so it's not just the religion. He also pointed out that there was a lost sect of Christianity that was pro-science, but we have nothing of what they wrote, only references to them by Tertullian, criticizing them for supporting Thales, Galen, and so forth.

Another questioner asked how he accounts for cases of Christians who have contributed to science, such as Kepler, Boyle, Newton, and Bacon. Carrier said "Not all Christians have to be that way--there's no intrinsic reason Christianity has to be that way." But, he said, if you put fact before authority, scripture will likely end up not impressing you, being contradicted by evidence you find, and unless you completely retool Christianity, you'll likely abandon it. Opposition to scientific values is necessary to preserve Christianity as it is; putting weight on authority and scripture leads to the anti-science position as a method of preservation of the dogma.

It was a wonderfully interesting and wide-ranging talk. He covered a lot more specifics than I've described here. If you find that Carrier is giving a talk in your area, I highly recommend that you go hear him speak.

You can find more information about Richard Carrier at his web site.

Charles Phoenix's retro slide show--in Phoenix

Tonight and tomorrow night at 8 p.m., Charles Phoenix will bring his Retro Slide Show Tour to the Phoenix Center for the Arts at 1202 N. 3rd St.

I've not seen his show before, but I've enjoyed his blog's slide-of-the-week feature and plan to go see this.

Here's the official description:

A laugh-out-loud funny celebration of '50s and '60s road trips, tourist traps, theme parks, world's fairs, car fashion fads, car culture and space age suburbia, will also include a selection of vintage images of the Valley of the Sun.

Click the above link for more details or to buy tickets.

Where is the academic literature on skepticism as a social movement?

Here's all I've been able to find so far, independent of self-descriptions from within the movement (and excluding history and philosophy of Pyrrhonism, Academic Skepticism, the Carvaka, the Enlightenment, British Empiricism, and lots of work on the development of the enterprise of science):

• George Hansen, "CSICOP and the Skeptics: An Overview," The Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research vol. 86, no. 1, January 1992, pp. 19-63. I've not seen a more detailed history of contemporary skepticism elsewhere.
• Stephanie A. Hall, "Folklore and the Rise of Moderation Among Organized Skeptics," New Directions in Folklore vol. 4, no. 1, March 2000.
• David J. Hess, Science in the New Age: The Paranormal, Its Defenders and Debunkers, and American Culture, 1993, The University of Wisconsin Press.

I note that Paul Kurtz's The New Skepticism: Inquiry and Reliable Knowledge (1992, Prometheus Books) puts contemporary skepticism in the lineage of several of the other forms of philosophical skepticism I mentioned above, identifying his form of skepticism as a descendant of pragmatism in the C.S. Peirce/John Dewey/Sidney Hook tradition (and not the Richard Rorty style of pragmatism). But I think that says more about Kurtz than about the skeptical movement, which also draws upon other epistemological traditions and probably doesn't really have a sophisticated epistemological framework to call its own.

There's a lot of literature on parallel social movements of various sorts, including much about advocates of some of the subject matter that skeptics criticize, and some of that touches upon skeptics. For example:

• Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, "The Construction of the Paranormal: Nothing Unscientific is Happening," in Roy Wallis, editor, On the Margins of Science: The Social Construction of Rejected Knowledge, 1979, University of Keele Press, pp. 237-270.
• Harry Collins and Trevor Pinch, Frames of Meaning: The Social Construction of Extraordinary Science, 1982, Taylor & Francis.
• Ronald L. Numbers, The Creationists: From Scientific Creationism to Intelligent Design, 2nd edition, 2006, Harvard University Press.
• Christopher P. Toumey, God's Own Scientists: Creationists in a Secular World, 1994, Rutgers University Press.

The Toumey book doesn't really have anything about skeptics, but is an anthropological study of creationists in the United States which describes the connection between "creationism as a national movement" and "creationism as a local experience" that seems intriguingly similar to the skeptical movement, especially in light of the fact (as I mentioned in my previous post) that national skeptical organizations are independent of established institutions of science that provide the key literature of the movement and at least implicitly assume that the average layman can develop the ability to discern truth from falsehood, at least within a particular domain, from that literature.

In some ways, the skeptical movement also resembles a sort of layman's version of the activist element in the field of science and technology studies, based on positivist views of science that are the "vulgar skepticism" dismissed in this article:

• Michael Lynch, "Expertise, Skepticism and Cynicism: Lessons from Science & Technology Studies," Spontaneous Generations vol. 1, no. 1, 2007, pp. 17-24.

I think if contemporary skepticism wants to achieve academic respectability, it will need to develop a more sophisticated view of science that comes to terms with post-Popper philosophy of science and post-Merton sociology of science; my recommendation for skeptics who are interested in that subject is to read, as a start:

• Philip Kitcher, The Advancement of Science: Science Without Legend, Objectivity Without Illusions, 1995, Oxford University Press.

There's an enormous relevant literature on those topics, an interesting broad overview is:

• R.C. Olby, G.N. Cantor, J.R.R. Christie, and M.J.S. Hodge, Companion to the History of Modern Science, 1990, Routledge.

I welcome any new revelations about sources of relevance that I've missed, particularly if there is other academic work specifically addressing the history, philosophy, sociology, and anthropology of the contemporary skeptical movement--three sources ain't much.

UPDATE (September 27, 2014): Some additional works I recommend for skeptics:

• Harry Collins, Are We All Scientific Experts Now?, 2014, Polity Press.  A very brief and quick overview of science studies with respect to expertise.
• Massimo Pigliucci, Nonsense On Stilts: How to Tell Science from Bunk, 2010, University of Chicago Press. A good corrective to the overuse of Popper, easy read.
• Massimo Pigliucci and Maarten Boudry, Philosophy of Pseudoscience: Reconsidering the Demarcation Problem, 2013, University of Chicago Press. Good collection of essays reopening the debate many thought closed by Larry Laudan on whether there can be philosophical criteria for distinguishing the boundary between science and pseudoscience.

More Scientology exposure from the St. Pete Times

The St. Petersburg Times has published another three-part exposé on the Church of Scientology based on interviews with former high-level members. (The first three-part series from June is discussed here; I missed the second three-part series from August about new defectors; all three series may be found on the SP Times website here.)

Part 1 (October 31): "Chased by their church: When you leave Scientology, they try to bring you back"

An overview of this new, third series of exposures based on information from former high-ranking members of the Church of Scientology such as Mark "Marty" Rathbun and Mike Rinder.

The story of how the church commands and controls its staff is told by the pursuers and the pursued, by those who sent spies and those spied upon, by those who interrogated and those who rode the hot seat. In addition to Rathbun, they include:

• Mike Rinder, who for 25 years oversaw the church's Office of Special Affairs, which handled intelligence, legal and public affairs matters. Rinder and Rathbun said they had private investigators spy on perceived or potential enemies.

They say they had an operative infiltrate a group of five former Scientology staffers that included the Gillham sisters, Terri and Janis, two of the original four "messengers" who delivered Hubbard's communications. They and other disaffected Scientologists said they were spied on for almost a decade.

• Gary Morehead, the security chief for seven years at the church's international base in the desert east of Los Angeles. He said he helped develop the procedure the church followed to chase and return those who ran, and he brought back at least 75 of them. "I lost count there for awhile.''

Staffers signed a waiver when they came to work at the base that allowed their mail to be opened, Morehead said. His department opened all of it, including credit card statements and other information that was used to help track runaways.

• Don Jason, for seven years the second-ranking officer at Scientology's spiritual mecca in Clearwater, supervised a staff of 350. He said that after he ran, he turned himself in and ended up locked in his cabin on the church cruise ship, the Freewinds. He said he was held against his will.

Part 2 (November 2): "Scientology: What happened in Vegas"

How ex-members Terri and Janis Gillham, who had been Sea Org "messengers" for L. Ron Hubbard and whose legal guardian had been Hubbard's wife Mary Sue, had their mortgage business in Las Vegas infiltrated by spies working for the Church of Scientology to keep tabs on what they were up to. Mark Fisher, Scientology head David Miscavige's aide de camp for seven years, was spied on by the man he thought was his best friend.

Part 3 (November 3): "Man overboard: To leave Scientology, Don Jason had to jump off a ship"

After leaving the Church once and returning, Don Jason was put aboard the Freewinds, a Scientology ship, and monitored constantly. He managed to get off the ship in the Bahamas by effectively zip-lining down a cable with a home-made device, and getting on a plane to Milwaukee by way of Tampa and Atlanta. Someone from the Church booked the seat next to his, and Rathbun (still in the Church at the time) met him at Tampa, and then bought a ticket on his flight, to try to talk him into returning.

State Press defends Ravi Zacharias

ASU's State Press columnist Catherine Smith authored an op-ed piece promoting last night's appearance of Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias. This was at least her second such op-ed; a prior one was published on September 17.

My letter to the editor, below, didn't get published, but another critic's letter did get published.

Here's mine:

Catherine Smith quotes Ravi Zacharias as stating that "irreligion and atheism have killed infinitely more than all religious wars of any kind cumulatively put together." This statement not only demonstrates Zacharias' innumeracy, it shows that he continues to make the mistake of attributing killing in the name of political ideologies like Stalinism and communism to atheism. I agree that Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot killed more than religious wars, but it wasn't their atheism that caused that killing. Those killed by religious wars, the Inquisition, and witch trials, however, were killed in the name of religion. Out of fairness, there were no doubt political issues involved in many wars over religion as well, but if you take claims of religiously motivated killing at face value, the death tolls for those killed in the name of religion far exceed the death tolls for those killed in the name of irreligion.

Zacharias has a history of attacking atheism with misrepresentations in his books, as documented in Jeff Lowder's "An Emotional Tirade Against Atheism" and Doug Krueger's "That Colossal Wreck," both of which may be found on the Internet as part of the Secular Web (http://www.infidels.org/).

I first heard of Zacharias back around 1991, when I sat behind someone on an airplane flight who was reading his book (reviewed by Krueger, linked above), A Shattered Visage. The parts I read were truly awful, about the quality of M. Scott Huse arguments against evolution (a step below Kent Hovind and Ken Ham). I didn't bother to attend, but would be interested in hearing any reports of how it went.

UPDATE (November 24, 2017): Steve Baughman has published an exposure of Zacharias' claims to have credentials he does not possess, and to have had academic appointments that did not exist.

UPDATE (September 26, 2020): Ravi Zacharias died of cancer earlier this year, but not before being caught in an online relationship scandal.

UPDATE (February 11, 2021): Ravi Zacharias International Ministries has publicly released a report on an investigation into abuse charges against Ravi Zacharias, and it found a significant pattern of predatory sexual abuse and a rape allegation.

The woman googled “Ravi Zacharias sex scandal” and found the blog RaviWatch, run by Steve Baughman, an atheist who had been tracking and reporting on Zacharias’s “fishy claims” since 2015. Baughman blogged on Zacharias’s false statements about academic credentials, the sexting allegations, and the subsequent lawsuit. When the woman read about what happened to Lori Anne Thompson, she recognized what had happened to that woman was what had happened to her.

As far as she could tell, this atheist blogger was the only one who cared that Zacharias had sexually abused people and gotten away with it. She reached out to Baughman and then eventually spoke to Christianity Today about Zacharias’s spas, the women who worked there, and the abuse that happened behind closed doors.

Richard Carrier to speak in Phoenix

Richard Carrier will be speaking to the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix on Sunday, November 8 at around 10 a.m.--it will likely be packed, so showing up for breakfast or just to get a seat at 9 a.m. is advised. Richard will be speaking about Christianity and science, ancient and modern, and you can get a bit more information about his talk at his blog.

The Amazing Meeting 7: Sunday paper sessions, Million Dollar Challenge

This is the sixth and final part of my summary of TAM7, covering the last day's events on Sunday, July 11. Part 1 is here, part 2 is here, part 3 is here, part 4 is here, part 5 is here, and my coverage of the Science-based Medicine conference begins here.

Sunday's continental breakfast was served while an old James Randi television appearance on the Oprah Winfrey show from 1986 was shown. This brought back some old memories--I think I have the show on videotape in my archives, as I think we showed it at a meeting of the Phoenix Skeptics. Randi appeared with a faith healer ("Amazing Grace"), a psychic (Joyce Keller), and an astrologer (Irene Hughes), which led to some entertaining and ridiculous exchanges of words. Randi showed his footage that exposed Peter Popoff using a wireless transmitter and receiver to fake the "word of knowledge," and did some spoon bending. Joyce Keller claimed she was entitled to his $10,000 prize, and Oprah mistakenly claimed that Randi had brought his own spoons, which she corrected herself about after a commercial break.

This was followed by the Sunday refereed papers, which were again organized and moderated by Ray Hall, professor of physics at California State University, Fresno and at Fermi National Labs.

Don Riefler, "Teaching Critical Thinking in a Therapeutic Setting"
Don Riefler, Direct Care Supervisor at the Jessie Levering Cary Home for Children in Lafayette, Indiana, gave a talk about strategies he's used to teach critical thinking to underprivileged/institutionalized children at the Cary Home, complete with positive reinforcement in the form of candy distributed to members of the audience who gave good answers. He discussed several categories of common "thinking errors" which included both logical fallacies and heuristics that lead to problems when overgeneralized. As part of his teaching, he has kids conduct ESP experiments with Zener cards, which he uses to teach them about erroneous inferences they draw about their skills. This provoked the first critical question (from regular ScienceBlogs commenter Sastra), asking whether his referral to "success" and "failure" in the Zener test suggests to kids that it's a matter of effort. (I neglected to record his response.) In answer to a question of how he deals with religion he said that he avoids it and shuts down talk of religion or ideology.

David Green, "Patently Ridiculous: The Perfect Sommelier"
David Green, a Senior Patent Examiner at the Canadian Intellectual Property Office, gave a talk that was essentially a sequel to a talk he gave at TAM5. He spoke about "The Perfect Sommelier," a product that claims to "align tannin molecules with magnets to age wine faster." He compared how the patent application for this product was handled in the U.S. vs. Canada.

In the U.S., patent examiners made two objections to the application, first, that it was obvious or already known, and second that the "subject matter is inoperable--the theory of operation cannot be correct." The first objection failed, since the invention was sufficiently different from prior art in various ways (such as having magnets at both ends of the bottle, not just at one end). And, based on the Longer ("lawn-jay") test, under which the description of the invention must be accepted as true unless there's a reason to doubt it, it passed on the second as well, and was granted two U.S. patents. Green said that it essentially comes down to a he-said/she-said debate, and the patent office has to be biased towards issuance of the patent.

In Canada, the same objections were made as in the U.S., along with a third. David Green had read a Swift article about a test of the product, so the third objection was a rejection on the basis of double-blind research evidence showing that the product doesn't work, published in the Journal of Wine Research. That study concluded that "no evidence was found to suggest that The Perfect Sommelier improves the palatability of cheap red wine." The manufacturers responded to the first two objections in the same way they did in the U.S., but for the third, they asserted that their evidence in the form of testimony overrides the double-blind research.

And then they abandoned their patent claim in Canada.

The reason they did this, Green explained, is because of "U.S. file wrapper estoppels"--that what you do in a foreign patent application can affect your patent in U.S. court. If they had continued with their claim in Canada and been denied--or if they had failed to file a response to the objections--that could have impacted their U.S. patent.

What this demonstrates, Green argued, is the importance of doing solid investigations and research on such products, and getting them published and spreading the information around (e.g., online), so that patent examiners can find it. It can make the difference between a nonsensical product getting a patent or being denied a patent.

At this point I took some time to chat with Ray Hyman, and came in a little bit late for the next presentation.

Adam Slagell, "Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt: The Pillars of Justification for Cyber Security"
Adam Slagell, Senior Security Engineer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, spoke about claims made for security and security products that we should be skeptical of. He pointed out that there's no such thing as perfect security, and there are always tradeoffs to be made between security and usability/convenience/etc. He spoke a little bit about TSA "security theater," pointing out the gaping flaw in the "no fly lists" that comes from the separation of checking ID and boarding pass at the security checkpoint from checking your boarding pass at the gate. He also questioned the point of shoe removal, which led to the first comment on his talk from Ian, an airport security officer at Gatwick, who argued that forcing shoes to go through the X-ray machine does close a genuine vulnerability. (Ian also argued that the liquid restriction makes sense, though he didn't respond to Slagell's point that you can carry multiple 3-ounce containers and combine their contents with those of your associates after you go through screening. Most interestingly, Ian said that airport metal detectors go off randomly in addition to when they detect metal.)

Slagell argued that signature-based antivirus products are obsolete, since polymorphic malware and use of packers are extremely effective at eliminating signatures, and observed that companies are starting to create products based on white-listing, only allowing pre-defined sets of software to run on a machine. (At last year's New Mexico InfraGard conference, Anthony Clark and Danny Quist spoke in some detail about different kinds of packers, and offered a set of criteria for measuring AV effectiveness that included use of methods other than signature-detection, such as anomalous behavior detection.) He unfortunately didn't have time to talk about passwords.

Another questioner asked what users behaviors are useful to stay secure, to which Slagell replied that you should keep systems patched and backed up. (There is actually some argument, at least for corporations, to be somewhat selective in patching, since many patches aren't applicable, have other mitigations, and have potential for reducing availability themselves--but there is no substitute for having a vulnerability management program in place.)

Steve Cuno, "The Constructive Skeptic: Rebranding Skepticism at the Grassroots Level"
Steve Cuno, chairman of RESPONSE Agency, Inc., gave an excellent talk last year at TAM6, and he gave another great presentation this time as well. He started by saying that skeptics have a branding problem.

What is a brand? Is it a name and logo? A great slogan? What you say about yourself?

He gave some counterexamples for each of these, including some nice vintage ads (e.g., "They're happy because they eat lard" from the Lard Information Council). AIG had the slogan "The strength to be here." (He didn't mention any of my favorite unintentionally ironic bank slogans.)

He gave an example slogan for skepticism: "Skepticism: Doubt worth believing in." He called all of these proposed brand definitions "brand flatulence: you may like the sound and smell of your farts, but nobody else does."

He gave as his prototypical example of what branding really is the example of Nordstrom's. There's no particular logo or slogan involved, but people think of Nordstrom on the basis of the values that are expressed by the company through its employees and the experience you have as a customer. The essence of creating a brand is creating a positive customer experience.

And the way for skeptics to give skepticism a good name is by self-policing "to deliver positive brand experience."

He suggested that the way to do this is to delay giving yourself a label, and when you do identify yourself with a label, anchor it in something positive. Instead of saying "I don't believe in ...", think through and express what you do support. For example:

• I believe in what the evidence supports.
• I believe in honesty, integrity, equal rights, and treating one another with dignity and respect.
• I believe in and defend the right of all people to believe as they choose.

Do things that are positive. He gave the example of the GLBT protests at the annual April Mormon Church Conference, which, rather than picketing and protesting, engaged in protest by cleaning up parks, visiting shut-ins, and doing positive and helpful things in the name of their cause. The result was to get tons of positive press.

He heartily endorsed TAM7's vaccination support and food drive, and further added that we should play nice. Being controversial and using insults may work for media figures, but not for the grassroots. Be sure that messages are well-timed. And remember that some people just don't care--to quote Will Rogers, "Never miss a good opportunity to shut up."

A summary of Cuno's talk may be found on his blog.

Brian Dunning, "What Were the 'Lost Cosmonaut' Radio Transmissions?"
Brian Dunning's talk was a sequel to one of his Skeptoid podcasts on Achille and Giovanni Judica-Cordiglia, a pair of Italian brothers who built equipment to monitor radio transmissions from spacecraft at an installation they called Torre Bert. They successfully recorded the October 1957 launch of Sputnik I, Sputnik II with Laika the dog in November 1957, and then a few oddities. In February 1961, they recorded what they reported as a "failing human heartbeat," when there was no known flight. In the same month, they recorded a "voice of a dying man," again with no known flight. In May 1961, they recorded the voice of a woman, Ludmila, speaking about how she was "going to re-enter," which they attributed to a secret female cosmonaut mission that resulted in her death.

There are no corroborating reports of these transmissions, despite the fact that the U.S. Defense Early Warning system began in 1959. And there were no female cosmonauts in 1961. The female cosmonaut program wasn't approved until five months after the recording, and the first five women selected for the program a year later. Yuri Gagarin had just launched in Vostok 1 in May 1961, and for the Vostok 2 launch in August 1961, they had to scavenge Gagarin's space suit to make a suit for the second cosmonaut. So there was no way there was a female cosmonaut launch in May 1961.

At the time, the U.S. was flying X-15s. Did the Soviets have some kind of space plane? The Soviet Kosmoplan never got off the drawing board, and its Raketoplan was developed, but wasn't ready for testing until 1962.

A jet fighter? The YC-150 didn't fly high enough. Dunning also ruled out the Mig-21 and high-altitude balloons.

The conclusion--get your own Russian translators. Dunning got four Russians to listen to the recording, and found that it didn't say what was claimed, but instead was almost 99% unintelligible, with the rest being numbers. He also found that the source of the transmission was not moving, but was at a fixed position.

Although he didn't come to a definitive conclusion, he was able to at least eliminate a number of possibilities--sometimes that's the best you can do.

Christian Walters and Tim Farley, "How Are We Doing? Attracting and Keeping Visitors to Skeptical Websites"
Tim Farley was another return speaker, this time with Christian Walters. They talked about how the over 650 skeptical websites should measure acquisition of visitors and take actions to keep them and to obtain high search engine rankings.

First, how you're acquiring visitors can be measured by looking at rankings on search engine result pages (SERPs), Google PageRank, and Yahoo link strength measurements. These measures are all increased by receiving links from other web sources, of which important sites are social media sites like digg, reddit, delicio.us, Facebook, and Twitter.

Another important factor is having good page titles, which include popular search terms. The META keyword tags are no longer so important. By using the Google AdWords Keyword Tool, you can find what popular search terms are. Sometimes they are surprising--for instance misspellings of some terms (like accupuncture) get more search hits than the correct spelling.

It's also a good idea to put the keywords from your title into the URL, rather than use URLs as some blogs do that only have a page ID in them.

The anchor text of hyperlinks to your pages should also contain the appropriate keywords, and so your internal links within a site should make a point of using them.

It's important to describe your site with an XML SiteMap or via RSS feed, which you get for free with blogs. When you link to other sites, you are dividing up your own link strength among the sites you link to, unless you use the NOFOLLOW tag, which you should do when linking to sites you don't want to promote in search engine results. NOFOLLOW is also a good idea when linking to sites that may engage in spam or other abuse, to prevent that abuse from reflecting on your site, as it might in Google search engine results, for example.

The Million Dollar Challenge: Dowser Connie Sonne
Everyone had to leave the auditorium for preparation for the JREF Million Dollar Challenge, with Danish dowser and former police detective Connie Sonne (who has described her alleged powers in an interview with Alison Smith of JREF). Everyone had to sign an agreement to remain silent and not disturb the proceedings before filing back in--and everyone remained quite quiet for the hour or so that it took for the test.

This was a preliminary test, with a 1 in 1000 probability of success by chance, which, if successful, would allow Connie Sonne to go on to the official challenge for the JREF's $1,000,000. The protocol for the test was developed in conjunction with Connie Sonne and both sides approved. She signed paperwork describing the protocol and agreeing that she woudl go ahead with the test.

Connie Sonne claimed to be able to use a pendulum to identify playing cards without looking at them, and she successfully did this when she was able to see the cards. Sets of playing cards, A-10, for each of three suits were placed separately into envelopes. Each of those envelopes for the same suit was placed into a larger envelope, with the suit written on the outside. Banachek ran the test (I thought to myself at the time that this was a likely source of future complaint, given his skill at illusion), opening each of the three suit envelopes, one at a time, and rolling a 10-sided die to indicate which card from the suit Connie Sonne was required to locate. The ten individual card envelopes were spread out in front of her, and she used the pendulum to identify which envelope she believed contained the appropriate card. For the first set, she was supposed to find the 3 of hearts, for the second, the 7 of clubs, and for the third, the ace of spades. The cards she picked were the 2 of hearts, which was in the second envelope of the first set, the ace of clubs, which was in the seventh envelope of the second set, and the 2 of spades, which was in the first envelope of the third set. Banachek opened all of the envelopes from each of the three sets so that she could see that there was no trickery, and she agreed that all was done fairly.

At the subsequent press conference, she continued to maintain that all was fair, but that there was some reason she wasn't supposed to reveal her powers to the world yet.

But by the next day, she decided that she had been cheated somehow by Banachek. Her main point of evidence was that Banachek identified the ace of spades from the third set before pulling the card out of the envelope--but it was the last card of the set to be opened, and he identified it after the end of the envelope had been cut off and as he started to pull it out. The cards were visible inside the envelopes once the ends were opened.

On July 13, she made her accusation of cheating on the JREF Forums:

Hi out there...now I know why Banacheck was "the card handler". I have been cheated. I did find the right cards. And there is one more thing. At the stage, Banacheck said to me BEFORE he even looked in the envelope I had cut...and here is spade ace, the one you looked for!!!! I first hit me now about that ....but maybe you can see it yourself if someone get the video. I don`t care about the money, that wasn`t the reason why I came. So no matter what you think out there......I was CHEATED!!!!!

Connie

It was a typical response to the Randi challenge from an honest proponent of a claim who doesn't understand why the claim failed under test conditions, resolving the cognitive dissonance by placing blame on the experimenter.

That concludes my summary of TAM7--I look forward to attending TAM8 next year.