Would you like some Scientology with your libertarianism?

A few years ago, I noted that popular and wealthy libertarian investment writer Douglas Casey was making tacit references to L. Ron Hubbard doctrine in his writing.  For example, I noted that he wrote (in an article titled "The New Praetorians" in the March 1996 issue of Liberty magazine):

I have long believed that about 80% of the human race are basically people of good will.  About 17% can be classified as potential trouble sources--PTS's--who will basically bend with whatever wind prevails.  Only 3% are actively destructive sociopaths.  But that 3% tend to gravitate toward politics, the military, the media, the financial system, and other centers of power."

I noted that the term "potential trouble source" (PTS) derives from Hubbard, who also identifies a similar percentages of the population into the categories of PTS and "suppressive persons" (SPs).  In a letter to Liberty which they refused to publish, I noted:

L. Ron Hubbard wrote much about "potential trouble sources" (PTS's) and "suppressive persons" (SP's) whom he claimed made up 17.5 and 2.5 percent of the population, respectively (see Jon Atack, A Piece of Blue Sky: Scientology, Dianetics and L. Ron Hubbard Exposed, 1990, Carol Publishing Group. p. 155).  Hubbard's views on PTS's and SP's are set out at length in his book An Introduction to Scientology Ethics, where his definitions of crimes and suppressive acts make it clear that he is no friend of liberty.  The Church of Scientology has a long history of harassment and barratrous litigation against its critics which continues to this day on the Internet (see Spy, February 1996; Wired, December 1995; Skeptic, June 1995; and the Internet resources linked from http://www.thecia.net/~rnewman/scientology/home.html).

I've further noted that Casey was on the financial committee of Libertarian Party presidential candidate Harry Browne in 1996, along with Michael Baybak.  Baybak is a Scientology OTVIII who played a major role in a sidebar story to Time magazine's famous 1991 "Cult of Greed and Power" article about Scientology, titled "Mining Money in Vancouver."

Finally, I noted that a Scientology-critical website that publishes Scientology service completions shows multiple Scientology courses completed by a Douglas Casey, who may well be the same libertarian investment writer.

My objection is not that Casey is a Scientologist, though I think it is legitimate to criticize anyone who knowingly supports the unethical activities of the Church of Scientology.  Rather, my objection is to his making unfounded claims based on Scientology and Hubbard doctrines without being open about his sources.  It's a common tactic by the Church of Scientology and other cults to use front groups and try to conceal their nature until after they've persuaded someone to participate in a program--the Unification Church calls it "heavenly deception."  I've also wondered to what extent Scientology principles are used in Casey's investment advice, and whether Casey has promoted investment in Scientology-related companies, and whether there were any other Scientologists on Browne's financial committee, but I haven't seen any evidence of those things.

A recent interview with Casey on his own website points out that he is something of an apologist for the Church of Scientology and Hubbard:

L: It actually sparked something of a religion for a time. People were adopting Heinlein's Martian philosophy and starting "crèches" around the country. Do you know if it's true that L. Ron Hubbard, another SF author, founded the church of Scientology as a result of Heinlein betting him he couldn't do it and make it stick?

Doug: There's no way to know the actual facts, of course, other than Hubbard started researching Dianetics just after World War II. But they were friends, after all, and both SF writers. The model for the character of Michael Valentine Smith was supposed to have been Hubbard – there were supposed to be a lot of similarities between the two. The religion racket can be an easy way to make a million dollars, but I don't think that was on Hubbard's mind when he founded Scientology. A surprisingly large percentage of the human potential movement was a direct result of his work. He was sincere in promoting it, notwithstanding a lot of negative PR surrounding the subject.

Hubbard's sincerity may be legitimately questioned by anyone familiar with his biography.  And I'm not sure "a surprisingly large percentage of the human potential movement" being inspired by Scientology (e.g., est, Landmark Forum, Eckankar, etc.) is to its credit.

Last month, the website The Daily Bell published an interview with Casey titled "Doug Casey Revisits the Greater Depression" in which Casey referred to the Roman emperor Tiberius as "a degraded being," another use of Scientology terminology.  This prompted a commenter who identified as an ex-Scientologist to ask if Casey was a Scientologist, and another commenter to point to my website on Casey.  This prompted a response from The Daily Bell:

Doug Casey is the author of numerous hard-money/free-market best-sellers and has established himself as a reliable and prominent libertarian-oriented commentator over years and years.

He may or may not have Scientology connections (we have no idea) but unlike DC we don't see any overt or even covert evidence of specific dogma infecting his commentary - which is concise, to-the-point and in-line with the free-market message that he's been purveying for decades.

Scientology is alleged to be a "bad church." But modern Western governments inflate economies to ruination, cost tens of millions pensions and savings, freely wiretap, prosecute and imprison millions, foment endless authoritarian regulations and illogical laws, mandate poisonous vaccines, engage in punitive taxation and serial warfare, etc. ...

We think we would be more concerned if Casey were an apologist for modern Western regulatory democracy rather than a courageous and principled opponent of it. We are grateful for his voice and message, especially during the 20th century when very few spoke out.

Again, we have no knowledge of any affiliation of his with Scientology, but we do know what we can read on the printed page. We believe that Casey has contributed greatly to an understanding of free-markets, especially in the 20th century when he emerged courageously as a prominent spokesperson at a time when there were very others.

But let us reverse the issue. What is the agenda of those who are bringing up a Scientology link? Casey doesn't mention it. His arguments are the same as they have always been - lucid, elegant and inspiring.

In fact, it seems to us a despicable canard - and an obscene red-herring - to read an honest interview freely given and then drag someone's alleged religion into it. It is like questioning one's veracity simply because he or she is Jewish or Roman Catholic.

Please respond to what is on the page, not to some malicious or false gossip about someone's supposed religious affiliation with a church that is alleged by some to do bad things - with many accusations coming from Western governments such as France, Germany or the United States.

I've submitted the following response comment to The Daily Bell:

Since I am here accused of "some malicious or false gossip about someone's supposed religious affiliation with a church that is alleged by some to do bad things" and of "a despicable canard - and an obscene red-herring" and asked "What is the agenda of those who are bringing up a Scientology link?" I would like to respond.

My criticism of Casey is not for being a Scientologist, but for injecting Scientology doctrine and claims from L. Ron Hubbard into his writing without being explicit or open about it.  This criticism is neither malicious nor false, but is backed up with specific citations.  Further, the Church of Scientology is not merely "alleged by some to do bad things," it has been caught doing so, which has been repeatedly and thoroughly documented (e.g., its breaking into numerous government offices and engaging in wiretapping, its attempt to frame author Paulette Cooper for a bomb threat which led to her arrest, its illegal covert operations against the mayor of Clearwater, FL, its attempt to cover up its responsibility in the death of Lisa McPherson, its formal policy of harassment using the legal system, and on and on).  Many of the documents that expose Scientology's involvement in such activities were seized in FBI raids in the mid-1970s or have been leaked by ex-members and are available on the Internet at locations such as http://shipbrook.com/jeff/CoS/index.html, http://www.xenu.net/, and http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~dst/Secrets/index.html

This week will offer an opportunity for many to hear Doug Casey speak at the FreedomFest in Las Vegas, July 7-11 at Bally's/Paris.  If you have some familiarity with Scientology and the writings of L. Ron Hubbard, listen carefully, and let me know if you hear anything of interest.

The market for creationism

Todd Wood of the Center for Origins Research at Bryan College has gotten around to doing what I haven't done, updating my analysis of the market for creationism that I did in early 2007.  He confirms some of the trends I noted, such as that the market for creationism has been growing and is dominated by Answers in Genesis.  His update goes further, and includes a comparison to the National Center for Science Education, noting that he market for criticism of creationism has grown along with the market for creationism.  He also points out that the groups involved got a boost revenue in 2005 during the Dover trial, that the AiG split from Creation Ministries International doesn't appear to have hurt AiG, and that "Godquest," formerly known as Creation Science Evangelism, the Hovind organization, is the #3 creationist organization for revenue behind AiG and the Institute for Creation Research.

Wood reports the following numbers for recent years:

2003:
$14.6 million market
AIG: 61.6%
ICR: 30.6%
*CEM: 4.2%
*CRS: 1.7%
*CM: 1.6%
*CSC: 0.4%

2004:
$15.8 million market
AIG: 65.7%
ICR: 26.8%
CEM: 3.1%
CRS: 2.0%
CM: 1.9%
CSC: 0.4%

2005: **
$10.8 million market
AIG: 50.4%
ICR: 40.3%
CEM: 5.1%
CRS: 1.0%
CM: 2.5%
CSC: 0.6%

2006:
$21.3 million market
AIG: 64.1%
ICR: 30.9%
CEM: 2.2%
CRS: 1.1%
CM: 1.3%
CSC: 0.3%

2007:
$25.6 million market
AIG: 69.5%
ICR: 27.6%
CEM: no data
CRS: 1.2%
CM: 1.1%
CSC: 0.3%
CMI: 0.3%

2008:
$33.3 million market
AIG: 68.2%
ICR: 26.2%
CEM: no data
Godquest: 2.8%
CRS: 0.7%
CM: 1.0%
CSC: 0.2%
CMI: 0.9%

Check out Todd Wood's post for more details.

Martin Gardner, RIP

The prominent skeptic Martin Gardner, mathematician, philosopher, magician, and writer, died today at the age of 95 (b. October 21, 1914, d. May 22, 2010).  He was one of the founders of the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (now Committee for Skeptical Inquiry), and had been part of the earlier Resources for the Scientific Evaluation of the Paranormal along with CSICOP founding members Ray Hyman, James Randi, and Marcello Truzzi.  Long before that, he wrote one of the classic texts debunking pseudoscience, Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (the Dover 2nd edition was published in 1957).  For many years (1956-1981) he was the author of the Scientific American column, "Mathematical Games" (taken over by Douglas Hofstadter and retitled "Metamagical Themas"), and he wrote a regular "Notes of a Psi-Watcher" column for the Skeptical Inquirer right up to the present.  His 70+ books included a semi-autobiographical novel, The Flight of Peter Fromm, a book explaining his philosophical positions including why he wasn't an atheist, The Whys of a Philosophical Scrivener, and an annotated version of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland works, The Annotated Alice.

He had been scheduled to appear by video link at the upcoming The Amazing Meeting 8 in Las Vegas, where a number of other skeptical old timers will be appearing on discussion panels.  His death is a great loss.

I never met Gardner, but was first introduced to his work reading his "Mathematical Games" column in the late 70's, and then his Fads and Fallacies and Skeptical Inquirer columns.  Gardner, Isaac Asimov, Carl Sagan, and James Randi were the first major figures I identified as skeptical role models.  One of the great honors of my life was receiving the Martin Gardner Award for Best Skeptical Critic from the Skeptics Society in 1996.

A Martin Gardner documentary that is part of "The Nature of Things" may be found online, and Scientific American has republished online its December 1995 profile of Gardner.  Here's a transcript of a February 1979 telephone interview between Martin Gardner and five mathematicians (thanks to Anthony Barcellos for transcribing it and bringing it to my attention in the comments below).

Various tributes:

• James Randi
• Phil Plait
• Wendy Grossman
• Richard Dawkins
• Douglas Hofstadter 
• Jeff Hecht (New Scientist CultureLab blog)
• Daniel Loxton
• Chris French
• George Hansen
• The Economist 
• A tribute in Spanish, with numerous links to other Martin Gardner tributes

UPDATE (June 11, 2011): An interesting chapter on Martin Gardner from George Hansen's book, The Trickster and the Paranormal, is available online as a PDF.

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.

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.]

Bad news for agnostics?

While past studies have shown religious believers to be happier than nonbelievers, some new analysis shows that it's not quite so simple. Luke Galen has found that the convinced non-religious are also quite happy, but people who are uncertain are the ones who are dissatisfied. Adam Okulicz-Kozaryn has analyzed data from the World Values Survey and found some more interesting details:

• Religious people are both happier and unhappier. While a higher percentage of religious people report themselves as extremely happy than convinced nonbelievers, a higher percentage of religious people also report themselves as extremely unhappy.
• Those who attend religious services and belong to religious organizations tend to be happier. And that's whether or not they believe--in fact among that group, those with the stronger belief tend to be unhappier. So it's the social aspect, not the doctrine, that promotes happiness. And this is further supported by:
• The more religious a country is, the happier believers are, and vice versa. In religious countries, believers are happier; in nonreligious countries, nonbelievers are happier.

See more at the Epiphenom blog.

(Cross-posted to the Secular Outpost.)

Daniel Dennett, The Evolution of Confusion

Daniel Dennett's talk from the 2009 Atheist Alliance International convention (link is to my summary) is now online:

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.

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.

Teaching the Bible in public schools

The following is a letter to the editor of Arizona State University's State Press that the paper didn't print. It was written in response to an editorial by Will Munsil, son of Len Munsil, who was editor of the State Press when I was an undergraduate in the 1980s. Len Munsil is an extremely conservative Republican, failed Republican candidate for Governor in 2006, and founder of the Center for Arizona Policy, Arizona's version of the American Family Affiliation. His daughter, Leigh Munsil, is the State Press's current editor-in-chief. When Munsil Sr. edited the school paper, he sometimes refused to print my letters to the editor for shaky reasons.

The letter below was written in response to Will Munsil's "Putting the Bible back in public schools," which was published on October 14.

I disagree with Will Munsil's assertion that the Bible is the foundation of American political thought. On the contrary, the American form of government was rooted in the work of enlightenment philosophers such as Locke, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. The U.S. Constitution's form of government has more resemblance to Caribbean pirate codes than to the Ten Commandments.

That said, however, I agree with Munsil that knowledge of the Bible is worthwhile and should be taught in public schools for the purpose of cultural literacy, so long as it is done without endorsing Christianity or Judaism. The Bible Literacy Project's curriculum might be one way to do it. One way not to do it is to use the National Council on Bible Curriculum in Public Schools' curriculum--it takes a sectarian perspective, is full of errors, and has failed legal challenges in Texas and Florida for being unconstitutional.

I suspect this letter wasn't excluded by reason of content, but because they had already printed a couple of letters critical of Will Munsil's op-ed by the time I submitted this on October 16. Perhaps I should have mentioned that I'm an atheist, which makes the extent of my agreement with Munsil more interesting. Of course, my view is contrary to Munsil's in that I think Bible literacy is likely to decrease, rather than increase, religious belief. But it wouldn't surprise me if the NCBCPS curriculum is the one that Will Munsil had in mind.

I should point out that I think it should probably be taught as part of a world religions class that covers more than just Christianity--kids should not only get information about the Bible that they won't get in Sunday School, they should be informed about other religions, as well as the fact that history has been full of doubters of religion, as documented in Jennifer Michael Hecht's excellent Doubt: A History.

You can find out more about the NCBCPS curriculum that failed legal challenge in Texas here.

Munsil cited Stephen Prothero, whose op-ed piece, "We live in a land of biblical idiots," I wrote about at the Secular Web in early 2007.

Paul Haggis leaves Scientology

Paul Haggis, director of the film "Crash" (not to be confused with the David Cronenberg film of the same name), has left Scientology with an open letter published on ex-Scientologist Mark "Marty" Rathbun's blog (which has also supplied links to Scientology's reply).

One of Haggis' main complaints is the Church's homophobia. Was Haggis really in Scientology for three and a half decades without realizing that homosexuality is 1.1 on the "tone scale"? Good for him for leaving, but he must have had blinders on regarding everything he complains about.

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.

Massimo Pigliucci on the scope of skeptical inquiry

Massimo Pigliucci, a biologist and philosopher at the City University of New York and regular writer for the Skeptical Inquirer, has offered up his thoughts about the relationship between skepticism, atheism, and politics. He wants to argue that skepticism and skeptical inquiry are identical with scientific skepticism, and mostly distinct from philosophy, religion, and politics. He restricts the domain of skeptical inquiry to "the critical examination of evidential claims of the para- or super-normal," and further restricts his notion of "evidential" to the empirical. (He subsequently refers to philosophical arguments and reasons as "non-evidence based approaches." I disagree, though this may be strictly a terminological dispute--I often use the word "evidence" to apply to reasons and arguments, not just empirical observations or reports of empirical observations, and I think this is common usage.)

He ends up drawing a Venn-style diagram which has an outer circle labeled with "critical thinking" and "rational analysis," within which is a series of three overlapping circles labeled "atheism," "skeptical inquiry," and "political philosophy." He argues that skeptical inquiry only overlaps with atheism where religions make empirical claims that are subject to scientific investigation, and likewise for political philosophy.

I offered a few critical comments at his blog, noting that it is odd that "atheism" is the only label on his diagram which is the name of a specific position rather than a method or discipline, and suggesting that it be labeled something like "views on religion." I also suggested that that circle extend beyond the scope of the "critical thinking" and "rational analysis" circle, though that's presupposing his diagram is descriptive rather than normative. [Note added 1:31 p.m.: If his diagram is understood as a diagram of what is appropriate subject matter for critical thinking, rational analysis, and skeptical inquiry with respect to atheism and political philosophy, then those two circles should arguably not extend outside the border of critical thinking/rational analysis.] Similar considerations should apply to the "political philosophy" circle. People hold religious and political views for reasons other than those produced as a result of critical thinking and rational analysis.

I also took issue with his identifying "skeptical inquiry" with scientific skepticism. Skeptics have always used philosophical tools as well as scientific ones, but I would find his diagram more accurate if the middle circle was labeled "scientific skepticism" or even "scientific inquiry."

I also have some skepticism about this taxonomic enterprise in general, which is arguably both philosophical and political itself--Pigliucci is not using scientific methods to set up this framework, it's philosophy, and there are political and pragmatic reasons for wanting us to accept it--to issue in a ruling that certain domains are off-limits for skepticism, namely the examination of religious and political claims that are not subject to empirical investigation.

I think there are good pragmatic reasons for skeptical organizations to restrict themselves in such a way--the methods of skepticism can be used by anyone, regardless of their political or religious views, and organized skepticism has tried to appeal to a broad audience to focus critical attention on paranormal claims where scientific methodology can be brought to bear. But I'm skeptical of this as a general picture of the applicable domain of the methods of skepticism or skeptical inquiry. (I should note that I don't think that atheism implies skepticism--thus the reason for extending a circle with that name outside the boundaries of critical thinking and rational analysis--nor that skepticism implies atheism. Skepticism is about the methods used, not the conclusions reached. An atheist might think that any consistent application of skepticism will lead to atheism, but that presumes both that atheism is true and that consistent application of skepticism is a guarantee of truth, which it is not.)

I agree with commenter Maarten that the boundaries of these circles are fuzzy--just as the boundary between science and non-science doesn't admit to a bright-line demarcation. People can conceptualize the boundaries differently, even granting Pigliucci's conception of "empirically investigatable" as the domain of skeptical inquiry or scientific skepticism. The boundaries between scientific disciplines are themselves fuzzy and they use different methodologies, with huge differences between experimental and historical sciences, for example.

Finally, I agree with commenter Scott (Scott Hurst), who observes that religious believers do make very specific claims "about the nature of the universe, how it works, and its history (including our own)," and specifically noting belief in the power of prayer. These things are empirically testable and do make at least some common (one could say "vulgar") conceptions of God and religion refutable by science. The fact that a more sophisticated believer or theologian can construct a view that uses the same words yet withdraws from the realm of the empirical doesn't mean that the vulgar conception hasn't been refuted. This is perhaps more obvious with modern religions such as Mormonism and Scientology, where in the former case historical evidence and DNA evidence falsifies some key claims, and in the latter case where scientific evidence falsifies a great number of its claims. Hubbard's cosmology, for example, includes the idea that Xenu dropped thetans into a volcano on Hawaii 75 million years ago, but Hawaii didn't exist 75 million years ago. His book History of Man includes Piltdown Man in the human lineage, even though that fossil was discovered to be a hoax shortly after the book was published. And so forth.

It's fine for Pigliucci to define and use the terms the way he wants, but I don't think he's given strong reasons for the rest of us to accept the specifics of his formulation.

UPDATE (October 24, 2009): Russell Blackford has written "Pigliucci on science and the scope of skeptical inquiry" at the Sentient Developments blog, which comes to similar conclusions with a somewhat more comprehensive argument.

No God on Twitter

The #1 "trending topic" on Twitter is "No God," apparently started by re-tweeting of "Know God, Know Peace. No God, No Peace." This prompted atheists to jump in promoting the "No God" part of it, and then angry theists to complain about "No God" being the top trending topic--but perpetuating it with each of their complaints.

The topic is generating lots of hilarity, as Attempts at Rational Behavior (@rationalbehavio) has pointed out in a couple of blog posts, with some people trying to start "Yes God" as an alternative topic--but including the words "No God" in their tweets!

UPDATE (4:41 p.m., Arizona time): Twitter has decided to censor its "Trending Topics" list, and has merged tweets matching either "No God" or "Know God" into a topic labeled "Know God." If you actually click on that link to see the matching tweets (it explicitly does a search for either string), there are still a lot more that match "No God" than "Know God."

UPDATE (10:10 p.m., Arizona time): Benjamin Black offers this entertaining commentary of what almost happened, which provides a better explanation of "Trending Topics" for those unfamiliar with Twitter.

Atheist Alliance International conference, quick version

The Atheist Alliance International convention took place over the weekend, October 2-4, 2009, at the Burbank Airport Marriott hotel, and I took my usual level of notes for the talks I attended. But rather than (or perhaps temporarily in lieu of) giving detailed summaries of each talk over the next several weeks, this will be one post with brief comments on each. If there's demand, I can follow this up with more detailed posts on individual talks of interest.

There were over 700 attendees at the conference, and I believe I heard that last year's conference was about 450. It's not as big as The Amazing Meeting, but if that rate of growth isn't an artifact of say, the fact that this conference was co-sponsored by the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Science and Reason and featured an unbelievable set of high-powered speakers, then they'll catch up quickly. The AAI conference participation seemed to be more diverse than TAM, with a higher proportion of women and minorities, though it's still not close to representative of the population--there's still a white male dominance.

The conference talks were divided into "tracks" which were really more just rough categories than a system of tracks that could be followed, which were Science, Advocacy, Heritage, and Development. Events that weren't talks included an optional pre-conference event of attending a live studio taping of a TV show ("100 Questions"), an optional post-conference event of an L.A. bus tour and visit to the La Brea tarpits, a live viewing of "Real Time with Bill Maher" featuring Richard Dawkins (shortly before they both showed up in person), entertainment by Mr. Deity (including live performance and a few of the shows, as well as some personal background from Brian Keith Dalton), a live recording of the Dogma Free America podcast with a panel of speakers, a standup comedy showcase hosted by Comedy Jesus Troy Conrad, a "taste of Camp Quest" for kids, and an Atheist Nexus live music party.

Friday
I arrived a bit later than planned--my expected driving time of just under six hours turned out to take over seven due to a few traffic issues along the way--and I missed three things I had wanted to attend. Those were Rich Orman's panel discussion for his Dogma Free America podcast, with P.Z. Myers, William B. Davis, and Sunsara Taylor; Alpharabius' talk on atheism in the Arab world; and Russell Blackford's talk on attempts to regulate against "defamation of religion." Fortunately, Alpharabius gave me a capsule summary of his talk and I had a few chances to chat with Russell Blackford and Rich Orman, so that partly made up for it.

P.Z. Myers gave an entertaining talk on "Design v. Chance" that began with a parody of a typical intelligent design creationist presentation, argued that ID arguments are at root an "over-extended metaphor" of design accompanied by misrepresentations of science. He showed how the ID claim that Darwin thought cells were mere "balls of protoplasm" is false, and presented evidence that various features thought to be characteristic of multicellular life have been found to be present in choanoflagellate protists. He ended by sharing a couple of useful words, "kipple" (from Philip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep," meaning accumulated useless objects) and "granfalloon" (from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Cat's Cradle, meaning a label on a group that doesn't really have anything significant in common, like "Hoosier"). For "granfalloon," he quoted the statement from Bokonon in Vonnegut's book, "if you wish to study a granfalloon, just remove the skin of a toy balloon." Isn't "atheist" a good example of a granfalloon, if all we share is lack of a belief in God? (This ended up being relevant to Brian Parra's talk at the end of the conference.)

After a cocktail and socializing session, the main ballroom showed "Real Time with Bill Maher" on a big screen, featuring his guests Janeane Garofalo, Rep. Marcy Kaptur, and Thomas Friedman, then joined by Richard Dawkins. Maher demonstrated the witty and incisive criticism of religion that won him the Dawkins award, though he also made some comments about environmental causes of cancer that have raised controversy about his receiving an award with "science" in its name when he has pseudoscientific opinions about matters such as medicine (as Orac has forcefully argued in a series of posts at his Respectful Insolence blog: one, two, three, four). This was followed by entertainment from Mr. Deity in the form of both live performance and videos, along with some personal history from Brian Keith Dalton. Then Bill Maher and Richard Dawkins entered the room. Dawkins recounted the highlights of Maher's "Religulous" as the reasons for the award, and Maher accepted the award, noting (accurately) that Dawkins summary was better than the movie itself, followed by his routine of reading from Rick Warren's The Purpose Driven Life which you can find on YouTube. Maher was the least-approachable celebrity at the entire conference; even those sitting at his VIP table were unable to ask him questions, as P.Z. Myers reported firsthand.

Saturday
Ed Buckner gave a talk about how atheist and freethought organizations are learning to cooperate, which I live-tweeted comments on.

Lawrence Krauss gave a talk on "Our Miserable Future" or "Life, the Universe, and Nothing: The Future of Life and Science in an Expanding Universe," in which he argued that the best evidence shows that we are in a flat, rather than an open or closed universe, which means that it will continue expanding towards some limit. He gave a history of cosmology from the discovery of the expansion of the universe to dark matter, and pointed out that we are fortunate to live in a time when the energy density of dark matter vs. ordinary matter in the universe is approximately the same, and the expanding universe is at a point where other galaxies are still visible. The upshot of this is that we are fortunate to live in a time where we have the evidence of Hubble expansion and the Big Bang. Intelligent civilizations of the distant future will be unable to see any galaxies other than their own, or any evidence of the Big Bang, and will conclude that they are in a static and eternal universe based on the best evidence that they have. Such people will be "lonely and ignorant, but dominant," which Krauss said those of us here in the U.S. are already used to. They will have an irreparably wrong picture of the universe from their epistemological blindness due to state of the universe around them. (What similar blindness do we suffer from due to our current place in the universe and observational abilities?)

Carolyn Porco gave a talk which began as a celebration of Galileo's steps towards a scientific method, which she said couldn't be applied to God because no experiment is possible that is relevant to God. (This strikes me as erroneous in a number of ways, since claims about God usually have empirical consequences, it's possible to make philosophical arguments which draw upon scientific data, and her picture of science seemed to be based on an overly simplified Popperian philosophy of science.) She argued that it is "very difficult to prove a negative" (as if "proof" is what science cares about--but at least she didn't make the mistake of saying it's impossible). She claimed that science and religion are "completely different" and are not only not equivalent (certainly true) but are "not intersecting"--apparently advocating something like Stephen Jay Gould's "non-overlapping magisteria" view, which is falsified by the fact that religions do make empirical claims. She complained about Hollywood's depiction of scientists in a negative light and blamed it for deterring young people from going into science, though she supplied no scientific evidence to support this (though she referred to a survey of science-related films from 1920-1994 by two researchers that concluded depictions were overwhelmingly negative). I think it's unlikely that such depictions have much of a negative effect at all, since polls in the U.S. and other countries about what professions are most trusted put doctors, teachers, and scientists very high compared to most other professions. Businessmen are similarly victims of negative portrayals in Hollywood, and are also less trusted, but that doesn't seem to translate into fewer undergraduates choosing to become business majors. I suspect a better explanation of any reduction in science enrollments (if that's actually happening) would be found in elementary and secondary education, along with the fact that people find science and math difficult. She concluded with a series of fantastic photographs of Saturn and its moon Enceladus from the Cassini mission.

Martin Pera spoke about embryonic stem cells, science and policy, arguing that it will revolutionize medicine by allowing restoration of cell loss through transplantation as well as the development of new methods of research using stem cells. He pointed out various challenges to "regenerative medicine," including rejection, tumor formation, and implanted stem cells developing the same pathologies that they're designed to treat, but observed that these also present new opportunities to learn. On the public policy side, he argued that scientists need to engage more with the public, patient advocacy plays a key role in policy discussions, and careful and thoughtful regulation is preferable to "premature prescriptive regulation." (This ties into a lot of the subject matter in law, science, and technology I'm studying this semester, and Pera's talk had considerable overlap with a talk I attended earlier this year at the Humanist Society of Greater Phoenix on embryonic stem cells by Prof. Jane Maienschein of ASU. If I write up a more detailed summary of this talk, I'll bring some of that into it.)

Jerry Coyne gave a summary of his book, Why Evolution is True. He defined five constituents of the theory of evolution and pointed out predictions, retrodictions, and evidence supporting each of them from a variety of scientific disciplines. He book-ended his discussion with the famous chart of rate of acceptance of evolution by country (from a study co-authored by Eugenie Scott) at the start, and a suggestion as to why that pattern of acceptance holds at the end (appealing to Greg Paul's evidence that belief in God is correlated with social dysfunction). He concluded that the real way to increase the effectiveness of teaching of evolution is to build a better, more just society. I'm skeptical--I think there are likely other causes behind the correlation, and that the strength of religious belief in the U.S. may be the result of religious competition due to the lack of an official state religion.

Daniel Dennett gave what I thought was the most interesting talk of the conference, titled "The Evolution of Confusion." His initial premise is that you reverse engineer things by trying to break them, and to reverse engineer religion, you can look for "experiments of nature" in the same way neuroscientists reverse engineer the brain by looking for cases of humans with particular brain lesions or damage due to accidents, and compare them to those without. In the case of religion, the form of pathology he chose to study is preachers who are atheists. Not former preachers who are atheists, but those who are still in the pulpit and in the closet, yet don't believe in God. Working with Linda LaScala, he's found six cases of such preachers (who themselves think there are many others), ages 37-72, one female and five male, three in liberal denominations and three in literalist/fundamentalist denominations. These people have fallen into what he called "the not so tender trap" where they have financial dependence upon their jobs, have lost opportunities for other training, and find it "difficult to say to the rest of the world I have wasted the last 40 years of my life." Half of them, though, he thinks will go public in the near future, while two will probably never do so, because they feel like they will do less harm by living a lie than by coming clean.

Dennett compared these closeted atheist clergy to homosexuals in the 1950's, either having no "gaydar" or being afraid to test it. They'll occasionally resort to the age-old subterfuge of saying things like "I have an uncle who thinks X, what do you think of that" to their colleagues to try to identify other possible atheists by expressing their doubts with a thin veil of plausible deniability.

Each traces the roots of their problems to seminary, because professors of Bible studies tend to tell the truth about the evidence, and the evidence isn't good for the Bible. But they do so with a theological spin that is an attempt to use clever ways of speaking to glide over problems and provide ministers with answers to "What can I say to the parishioners?" which have the features of not being a bare-faced lie, relieving skepticism without arousing curiosity, and seeming to be profound. Dennett introduced the concept of a "deepity"--propositions that seem to be profound, because they are actually logically ill-formed, having one meaning that is trivially true and another which is false but would be earth-shattering if true. A familiar deepity is "Love is just a word." On one reading, it's true--"love" is just a word. On another, it's false--"whatever love is, it isn't a word," he observed, and noted "You can't find love in a dictionary--that's almost a deepity itself." This is an elementary logical mistake, failing to distinguish the use of a word (in the latter case) from a mention of a word (in the former case). If you quote a word to talk about the word itself, that's a mention; if you use the word to convey its meaning, in order to refer to the things described by the word, that's a use. This is a common error in undergraduate philosophy papers, so common that many graders identify it as "UME" -- "use-mention error."

Dennett gave examples of such errors in statements by Karen Armstrong, including in the title of her book, A History of God. It's not a history of God, it's a history of the concept of God. Similarly for Robert Wright's recent The Evolution of God. And he provided some further examples from sociologist of religion Rodney Stark (who seems to me to be using the "symmetry principle" just as sociologists of science do) and from Karen Armstrong, including this answer from the latter in response to the question "Do you believe God exists?" from Terry Gross on NPR: "That's the wrong question. It presupposes that God is the sort of being that could exist or not exit. God is no being at all. God is being itself. God is the God beyond God." Dennett observed that "God is no being at all" is sophisticated theology, while "No being at all is God" is crude atheism, yet those are logically equivalent statements. Theology, Dennett argued, is "like a magician doing a trick where you can see the card up his sleeve."

At dinner, we watched a short three-minute promotional video for the Richard Dawkins Foundation that featured Michael Shermer, P.Z. Myers, and Brian Greene, among others, talking about what is science. Richard Dawkins then spoke, summarizing the last chapter of his latest book, The Greatest Show on Earth, which has chapter sections related to and titled from the words of the last paragraph of Darwin's Origin of Species. One of the more memorable sections was about "The Four Memories" we have--the memory of past successes encoded into our biology and preserved by natural selection, the immune system's memory of diseases we've experienced during our lifetime, the memories accumulated by our brains, and the collective memory of transmitted culture.

Dawkins spent a very, very long time signing books, and looked exhausted when he signed my copy of The Blind Watchmaker near the end of the line.

The evening ended with a live music and karaoke party put on by Atheist Nexus.

Sunday
The first talk of the morning I attended (and live-tweeted) was Gerardo Romero of Ateismo desde Mexico, about atheism in Mexico. His group has been around for about 10 years. It first started on MSN forums but migrated to its own website and forums, and has now begun to migrate into the real world with two atheist marches. The First World Atheist March occurred on September 28, 2008 in Mexico City and Guadalajara in Mexico, as well as in Italy, Spain, Peru, and Colombia. They received newspaper coverage in the Excelsior, a major Mexico City newspaper. A second march was held on September 27, 2009 (Spain did theirs on a different day due to a holiday conflict), with participation also from ArgAtea in Argentina and Ateos from Peru. He talked about ADM's plans for further activism to promote science and critical thinking, separation of church and state, and distribution of condoms. ADM has a podcast, Masa Critica, as well as an electronic magazine, Hidra, published on their website.

Jonathan Kirsch spoke about the "Inquisitorial toolbox," first in the context of the history of the Inquisition and then as applied to more recent events. The main tools he described were the use of torture as punishment for wrong belief (as opposed to wrong action), calling this torture by a different name to conceal the real purpose behind the act, and requiring the "naming of names" as an act of contrition to show the sincerity of a recantation. In practice, this was used to eliminate competition and accumulate wealth, as well as to combat heresy (a word that derives from the Greek word for a free choice). He described the beginnings of the Inquisition as a tool to root out and eliminate the Cathars or Albigensians, whose heresy was to disbelieve in the newly-introduced 13th century doctrine of transsubstantiation. The Cathars reasoned that this doctrine was the opposite of holy belief--if we believe it, we must believe that "when we go to the privy we will piss out the blood of our savior, and excrete the body of our savior." A crusade against them failed to wipe them out, and so the Inquisition was invented to root them out by using informants, the threat and actuality of torture, and the collection of names. The Inquisition was subsequently used to wipe out the Templars and seize their wealth--forfeiture was also a key tool in the toolbox, making the victims pay for the privilege of being tortured.

Kirsch gave more modern examples including the use of "spectral evidence" in the Salem witch trials, the show trials of Stalinist Russia, and Hitler's forcing Jews to wear identifying badges and the identification of Jews in terms of bloodline as elements consciously copied from the Spanish Inquisition. And although the last victim of the Inquisition was executed in 1826 (garroted and placed in a barrel with flames painted on it as a reminder of the glory days of burnings at the stake) and the Inquisition was formally ended in 1834, The Holy Office which was created to run the Inquisition still exists to this day under a different name ("Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith"), headed by the Pope. I was reminded of how the Church of Scientology, after being prosecuted for criminal activity associated with its "Guardian Office," claimed to reform by changing the name of that unit to the "Office of Special Affairs."

Kirsch also observed that the tactics of the McCarthy Era and of the "global war on terror" have also used tools from the Inquisitor's toolbox. I think he could have also pointed out uses of the toolbox in the war on drugs (especially the use of civil forfeiture and "naming of names").

Eugenie Scott gave a talk about intelligent design which focused primarily on the strategies that have been used to try to get it into the public schools. While the direct approach failed in Kitzmiller v. Dover, the latest approach has been with "academic freedom" and "explore alternative evidence" bills and attempts to change state educational standards. She recounted recent events in Texas regarding attempts to put "teach the controversy"-style wording into the Texas Educational Knowledge and Skills document, which started as a requirement to teach "strengths and weaknesses" across all domains, and ended with "all sides of scientific reasoning." She then looked at some 1990's-2000 cases where individual teachers tried to teach creationism and were slapped down (Ray Webster, John Peloza, and Rodney LaVake), and noted that the "academic freedom" bills are essentially an attempt to legislate against such further slapdowns. Such a bill has passed in Louisiana, which allows teachers to bring in supplemental materials to critique biological evolution, global warming, and human cloning. She pointed to a phylogeny of these bills constructed by Anton Mates that showed how they have evolved.

These bills are constructed to try to avoid the possibility of legal challenge. They avoid any mention of religion to avoid establishment clause violations. They stress free speech and academic freedom. They are phrased as protective of a teacher's right to teach alternatives. And they are formulated as permissive rather than directive bills, which means that they have avoided a facial challenge--a judge isn't likely to grant an injunction against them on the vague language of the bill, but only to do so on the basis of an "as applied" challenge if there's a particular case of where a teacher following the bill engages in activity that infringes the constitution and a parent and student with standing can be found to sue.

The final talk of the day I attended was Brian Parra's talk, "All Together Now: Strategies for Growing the Freethought Community." He distinguished identity vs. beliefs, pointing out that the Pew polls on belief are structured by first asking how a person self-identifies, then asking them a series of questions about belief. Only 1.6% of the U.S. population self-identifies as atheist, and it can be daunting to look at 1.6% vs. 98.4% of everybody else. But if you add agnostics, you get another 2.6%, a total of 4.2%, which is a group larger than Jews and Mormons put together. If you add "none"'s, you get another 12.1%, and a total of 16.3%--about the size of the black community. If you add in the "don't know" answerers, and adherents of nontheistic religions, you get up to 18.5%. If you look at not-monotheists, you get 20.1%. And if you look at not-evangelical-Christians, you get 74.3%.

He further noted that if you look at how self-identified Catholics answer the question "Do you believe in God?", you'll find that 25% of them said no. (By the same token, though, if you look at how self-identified atheists answered that question, you'll find that 21% of them said yes.)

He suggested that we define positive aspects of atheism and create coalitions based on common ground, and drew squiggly circles around a diagram that showed all of these groups regarding their answers to the questions, for those who don't believe in God, who believe in a physical universe and natural cause (I believe he meant *only* in, i.e., rejection of the supernatural), who support secular government, humanistic ethics, and have confidence in science and reason. These he identified as the "Big Five" for creating an atheist worldview. Afterward, I asked him what's the difference between his "Big Five" and secular humanism, to which he answered "Nothing." If it is different, it is only in being somewhat more concisely (and vaguely) formulated.

He concluded by saying that a possible model for success is church minus the theology--it's just a community that plans varied activities aimed at different age groups and interests, not just about atheism but in the name of atheism, which stays in touch with constituents via various media, which brings new people into positions of responsibility, and which seeks out "public displays of atheism, not merely for protest and activism, but also to demonstrate that atheists exist and are nice people."

I'm not sure I'm optimistic about that approach. Not only is it already being done by the humanists (including both CFI and AHA), while his initial remarks were about ways to increase the scope and size of coalitions, his "Big Five," by looking at the intersection of those "squigglies" rather than the union, inherently shrinks them. And by far, the one that cuts down the group the most is the first one, nonbelief in Gods. I think this is, to some degree, an advantage that skeptics have over atheists, which is that they put the emphasis on the last item on his list, support for science and critical thinking, rather than the first. I'm inclined to think that the last three of the "Big Five" are far more important things to share in a civil society than the first two.

All in all, it was a great conference, despite a few glitches involving errors in room assignment, last-minute schedule changes, and technology. The most appealing aspects for me were the top-notch speakers on science and the chance to socialize and engage in discussion with many like-minded, intelligent people, even if they are part of a granfalloon.

UPDATE (October 11, 2009): Relevant to Brian Parra's talk is Luke Galen's sociological study of nonbelievers, the Non-Religious Identification Survey, as well as Bruce E. Hunsberger and Bob Altemeyer's book Atheists: A Groundbreaking Study of America's Nonbelievers, which I just read about in the presentation slides of a talk by Taner Edis of the Secular Outpost.

UPDATE (October 23, 2009): You can find a translation of this summary into Arabic at the Arab Atheists Network website.

UPDATE (November 16, 2009): Daniel Dennett's talk from the AAI conference is online here.

UPDATE (December 27, 2009): Lawrence Krauss's talk, Jerry Coyne's talk, Andy Thomson's talk, Richard Dawkins' talk, P.Z. Myers' talk, and Carolyn Porco's talk are all on YouTube as well.

Other Blogs on the AAI Convention
P.Z. Myers wrote about Russell Blackford's talk on defamation of religion, Toni Marano, Robert Richert's talk on Vietnam, Maurice Bisheff's apparently kooky talk on Thomas Paine, the Dogma Free America panel, the Maher/Dawkins Award ceremony, an exhibit on Evolutionary Genealogy, a gift of a bottle of wine supplied while having dinner with Daniel Dennett, acting in a forthcoming Mr. Deity episode, other gifts of wine and Surly-Ramics jewelry, proof of meeting Mr. Deity and Lucy supplied by your truly, and a challenge regarding the Atheist Nexus.

Paul Fidalgo wrote summaries of the Dogma Free America panel, Lawrence Krauss's talk, Caroline Porco's talk, and the Bill Maher award.

John Crippen describes his AAI convention experience in three posts: one, two, and three.

Surly Amy offers her observations on why "You Don't Have to Be a Skeptic to Be an Atheist," which nicely complements P.Z. Myers' review of Maurice Bisheff's talk. I agree with her, and also note that you don't have to be an atheist to be a skeptic. These two posts illustrate why I prefer to self-identify with skeptics.

Rich Orman interviewed a number of the speakers for his Dogma Free America podcast, including P.Z. Myers, Ed Buckner, Stuart Bechman, Sean Faircloth, Alpharabius, and Brother Richard of AtheistNexus.

If anyone comes across other summaries worthy of mention, note them in the comments or in email and I'll append them here.

(Photo of UFO sighting in Marriott lobby by Reed Esau.)