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Category: science (page 3 of 8)

‘Other ways of knowing’

14 September 2011 / / 10 Comments

Today on campus, there was a Christian Union talk about atheism, entitled ‘Why I am not an atheist‘. I can’t stay away if atheism is being discussed, and while they’re usually well-read on Dawkins et al. and give a good critique of the Gnu Atheism, they don’t always apply the same critical eye to their own faith. I was hoping the speaker would explain how Christianity improves on atheism, and in this I was (inevitably) disappointed.

A guy named Rory was the presenter. He was a good speaker — enjoyable to listen to, funny at the right times. His main reasons for being a Christian and not an atheist were:

  • He had no compelling reason to doubt his ‘sense’ that a god exists. It seemed to me that if he’d been born elsewhere and -when, he’d have no compelling reason to doubt his sense that Odin or Vashti exists. Beliefs are true to the extent that they are supported by evidence, not hunches.
  • The Christian world-view ‘resonated’ with his experiences. But people who have different world-views also find that their experiences ‘resonate’, whatever that means. Our experiences don’t always mean what we think they mean.
  • He found it satisfying to have someone to thank (after thanking people). I understand that — I feel grateful to the people in my life, and once I’ve thanked them, I like to pour my effort into making things better for them through service.
  • Finally, he found it hard, within an atheistic worldview, to account for things that are wrong in the world. I don’t know why he decided to press that point. Why would he use this as a strike against atheism, when this is actually much harder to explain from a Christian perspective? In question time, I mentioned that it was very easy for atheists to explain evil in the world — people decide to do things that harm people. But it’s very difficult for believers in an all-powerful, good god to explain why bad things happen. There’s a whole branch of theology (called theodicy) dedicated to trying to explain this very thing, yet the Problem of Evil remains. But Rory couldn’t quite get why atheists would see a thing as ‘evil’ outside some kind of ‘god’ frame. Unfortunately, we had to move on before full understanding could be achieved. Rory — if you’re out there, let’s continue this, because I’d like to understand your view.

I did ask one other question, though. His last point in the presentation was that he found it naïve to think that science was the ‘only way of knowing’ something. Now, I’ve heard people say that there are other ways of knowing, and when I ask them what they are, they invariably respond with something that is… not a way of knowing.

In response, Rory mentioned Dawkins’ letter to his daughter, in which he wrote that tradition, authority, and revelation are bad reasons for believing something. But Rory thought that these were okay reasons to believe something, part of this complete scientific breakfast. He also mentioned intuition as something that was important in finding truth.

I explained that intuition was important — say, in coming up with a hypothesis — but intuition is not a way of knowing. If someone has an intuition about something, they do not know that that thing is true. It appeared that he was confusing ‘how you get an idea’ with ‘knowing that the idea is true’, which is a rather serious mistake.

So I want to say this very clearly: The way to know something is by empirical observation. That is the only way. (And even when we’ve observed something, it still might be wrong! Which is why replicable observation is so important.) There are no other ways of knowing. Not tradition — many traditions have turned out to be wrong. Not authority — authorities can be wrong. Not revelation — you don’t know the source of a supposedly supernatural revelation. It could be all in your head. Science — systematic, reproducible, empirical observation — is the only way of knowing.

If you think you have another way of knowing, leave it in comments, and we’ll have a look.

Denser is slower

6 September 2011 / / 1 Comment

A linguistic tidbit from the ‘Obvious in Retrospect’ file:

A recent study of the speech information rate of seven languages concludes that there is considerable variation in the speed at which languages are spoken, but much less variation in how efficiently languages communicate the same information.
…
Dr. Pellegrino outlined the major findings of the team’s research: “Languages do need more or less time to tell the same story – for instance in our study, the texts spoken in English are much shorter than their Japanese counterparts. Despite those variations, there is a tendency to regulate the information rate, as shown by a strong negative correlation between the syllabic rate and the information density.” In other words, languages that are spoken faster (i.e., that have a higher syllabic rate) tend to pack less information into each individual syllable (i.e. have a lower information density).

In other other words, the more information packed into each syllable, the slower those syllables have to be delivered. Across languages, those two factors balance each other.

It makes sense because human brains have a cognitive limit, and they’ll only put up with so much throughput. Still, nice to see this result in black and white.

Without a trace

5 September 2011 / / 1 Comment

I recently learned of L’Anse aux Meadows. It’s a place in Newfoundland, Canada where Vikings settled about 1,000 years ago. It’s the oldest European settlement in the Americas. The Vikings didn’t live there very long — only about 10 years — and it seems that there weren’t that many of them. It’s only a small site — no stables, no burials.

Yet for that small a group in so short a time, they left enough artifacts to fill a small museum.

Long-time readers will see where I’m going with this. The Book of Mormon claims to be the history of a group of people who lived in the Americas for about a thousand years, numbering in the millions. The book discusses their metalwork, their swords, their coins, their money, and much more — no evidence of which occurs in the archaeological record. And they didn’t dwindle down slowly — they were supposedly killed off quickly in wars of extinction. You’d think that something would have survived, but no.

Maybe the Nephites and Lamanites just didn’t build stuff as well as the Vikings. Or else fictional people don’t leave archaeological traces.

Lectures on Doubt: What faith is

28 July 2011 / / 5 Comments

I once described faith as “the willingness to suspend critical reasoning facilities in the service of a belief for which there is no adequate evidence”. Not everyone likes this definition (strangely), so I thought I’d return to the topic of faith and refine it a bit.

You might think it’s strange for an atheist to talk about faith in the first place. Perhaps you’d say I couldn’t give it a fair treatment, since I don’t have any. Which is a typical faith-y thing to say: you don’t really understand faith (or you’re not qualified to speak about it) unless you’ve fallen for it completely. You have to take the leap, and then you’ll get it. However, if ‘faith’ means ‘fooling yourself’, then a person of faith would be the worst person to ask about it. Anyway, humour me. Treat me as a somewhat objective observer. Have a little faith.

On the other hand, you may take exception to my claim that I don’t have any faith. Of course I do, you might say. It takes faith to do anything! It takes faith to be an atheist, I’ve been told. My Uncle Richard used to say that it takes faith to believe that the floor will be there when you get out of bed in the morning. It takes faith for scientists to study a cure for cancer, since they don’t know that they’ll be successful. It takes faith to believe in, say, evolution. So I’ve been told.

I don’t believe it. When people use this reasoning, they’re stretching the definition of faith to encompass everything, which intrudes on other concepts that we already have words for. Defining ‘faith’ this way makes the word meaningless.

The key insight to what faith is hinges on an understanding of its relationship to evidence, and it’s this: If you have evidence for something, you do not need faith in that thing. You just need to open your eyes. For this reason, I describe faith as belief without evidence.

The Book of Mormon agrees fairly well with this assessment. (It’s not a source I think much of, but some people do.) It says that once you know something, your faith becomes dormant.

32:17 Yea, there are many who do say: If thou wilt show unto us a sign from heaven, then we shall know of a surety; then we shall believe.

32:18 Now I ask, is this faith? Behold, I say unto you, Nay; for if a man knoweth a thing he hath no cause to believe, for he knoweth it.

Faith is only necessary in the absence of knowledge, according to this author. I’d agree. Insofar as evidence brings you knowledge of a thing, there is no need for faith in that thing where there is evidence for it.

So with that in mind, let’s go back to those who think that everything requires faith. Does it require faith to put your feet on the floor, believing it will be there? No. I have a lot of evidence that the floor has been there on previous mornings, and I can infer with some degree of certainty that this morning will be like other mornings. There’s a very high probability that the floor will be there, based on the evidence. (If tomorrow morning I turn out to be wrong and fall through the floor, I’ll update accordingly.) I may have a ‘belief’ that the floor will be there, but ‘belief’ is not the same as ‘faith’. I have a ‘belief’ that I am sitting at a computer writing this, but since this belief is well in evidence, I don’t need to exercise any faith in it.

Does a scientist need faith to work on a cure for cancer? No. A scientist may have a reasonable expectation of success, based on (again) evidence, but this is not the same as ‘faith’. Perhaps it would be more appropriate to describe this situation as ordinary ‘reasoning under uncertainty’, the kind we engage in every day. Or perhaps ‘hope’.

Do we need to have faith in scientific theories, like evolution? Not at all. You can ask a scientist what evidence led them to that conclusion, and they can tell you. Even better, you can replicate those results yourself, given time, equipment, and expertise. Of course, I haven’t actually replicated many scientific results myself. Do I therefore have faith in the scientists? No. It’s true that scientists typically function in what could be called a climate of ‘trust’, but this is optional. People in science can review each others’ results — no faith required.

What happens in faith is something like this: You don’t have evidence for something, but you wish it were true, so your faith makes up the difference and allows you to keep believing. It’s not knowing something, but believing it anyway. In other words, it’s wishful thinking.

Things that you have faith in may not always turn out to be wrong, but they’re likely to be, since it’s kind of hard to get things right. To get something right, you have to observe, generate ideas about what’s happening, control the natural tendency to see what we want to see, and figure out what it would take to prove your idea wrong. Even after you’ve gotten it mostly right, your idea might need to be refined, or overturned entirely if the evidence demands. That’s the cost of making reality your guide. But if you have faith, and you are unmoored from reality, you just keep believing whatever you want! Isn’t that easy?

Well, no. Having faith is not easy, especially when contrary evidence is staring you in the face. That’s when it takes a lot of tenacity to hold on to faith by sheer force of will. I can see why people would consider it a virtue, since it does take a lot of effort. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that people speak of ‘exercising’ faith.

But rather than exercise faith in things for which we lack adequate evidence, how much better it would be to find out the facts, and when facts are scarce, to keep an open mind. Faith needs to be thrown out, and where possible, to be replaced with knowledge.

Faith Fair at UWA!

19 May 2011 / / 3 Comments

Yesterday, UWA held a Faith Fair. You could argue that any fair where you don’t know who assembled the Ferris wheel is a faith fair, but this was a real Faith Fair, and the UWA Atheist and Skeptic Society was invited. What’s a university doing promoting faith, anyway? We’re supposed to be helping people learn to think better, not worse. But we wanted to provide a balance, and I think it’s cool that we were invited, even though we’re not a religion and have no faith.

Our contribution was ‘Ask an Atheist”, which consisted of a bunch of us sitting at a table, waiting for questions. In the first few hours, one guy asked us about the Illuminati, and another couple asked us directions to some other building on campus. Pleasingly, another student signed up with us. That was about it.

Pretty soon, the UWA Christian Union set up their own table next to us, and together we all sat, not being asked questions, and being completely ignored by the studentry.

Here’s a picture of all of us.

Notice the extremely large zone of no people around us.

In short, the Faith Fair was a total bust, and I couldn’t be happier. Students at UWA don’t give a fart for faith, and that’s the way I like it.

There was one interesting bit though, where we asked Scott, the president of Christian Union, about what happens to people who died before Jesus. I know different religions answer this in different ways — and the Mormons have an innovative, if resource-intensive, solution — but I wanted to hear his response.

I think Scott answered this in a thoughtful and careful way. He named a few different ideas people have had over the years — like, the Atonement applies to them retroactively, or if they were ‘good’ they get a pass, and so on — but in the end, he said plainly and honestly that they didn’t know.

“How would you find out, if you wanted to?” I asked.

The only way he could come up with was by… interpreting scripture! Of course, that approach has worked wonders over the years at providing clear, unambiguous, and well-agreed upon answers to great religious questions.

The whole conversation made me feel quite impatient and irked with religion. There’s a question there, and everyone agrees it’s a good question that really should have an answer. But there’s no agreed-upon answer, and even worse, there’s no agreed-upon way of getting an answer.

Wouldn’t that drive you mad? What if we had to work that way in the sciences? Sure there’s a lot we don’t know, but we have an established way of getting the kind of answers that people can agree on. If we had a lot of scientists from different countries and different backgrounds, and we had some scientific question that we wanted to find out about, we may not have an answer right away, but we could at least come up with a research program to work towards an answer.

With religion, you can’t even start. All the answers come from a god who never speaks directly, but has (allegedly) left a lot of mutually incompatible, multiply contradicting (and self-contradicting) holy books whose contents need to be massaged into a comprehensible answer. Even then, the various practitioners won’t agree. You start hitting insurmountable limits just about as soon as you start asking questions.

The religious metaphysical approach is a recipe for stuckness.

Why science is better than religion: The Hell Conflict

30 March 2011 / / Comments Off on Why science is better than religion: The Hell Conflict

Lots of Christian denominations try to downplay the doctrine of Hell, for obvious reasons. It seems inconsistent for a loving god to torture people for eternity, when their sins were of finite duration. Nonetheless, the Bible depicts Jesus teaching that people will be tortured in Hell for eternity. With lots and lots of fire.

One Methodist pastor has been let go because he was humane enough to question this doctrine.

A pastor at a Methodist Church in North Carolina lost his job after questioning traditional views on the nature of hell.

Chad Holtz got his walking papers after posting a note on Facebook supporting a controversial book by an evangelical preacher that rethinks hell as a place for billions of damned souls.

“I think justice comes and judgment will happen, but I don’t think that means an eternity of torment,” Holtz said. “I can understand why people in my church aren’t ready to leave that behind. It’s something I’m still grappling with myself.”

Because eternal torture is, you know, such an appealing notion.

The money quote for me comes from Alfred Mohler, discussing the book at the center of the conflict:

“I just felt like on every page he’s trying to say ‘It’s OK,'” said Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Mohler at a forum last week on Bell’s book held at the Louisville institution. “And there’s a sense in which we desperately want to say that. But the question becomes, on what basis can we say that?“

That is a really good question: On what basis could we say that someone is, or is not, in Hell? Anyway.

Was it right for the church to oust its pastor? Usually you wouldn’t say that someone should be fired for their belief, but when their business is promoting a belief, then belief is no longer a matter of conscience; it’s a job qualification.

This kind of conflict is an inevitable consequence when these three conditions are met (and in most religions, they are all present to some degree):

1. Faith is touted as a supreme virtue
2. Uniformity of belief is considered desirable
3. Beliefs are unmoored from any empirical base

Point 3 ensures that someone will arrive at a different belief than the mainstream, since there’s no way to verify whether beliefs are true.
Point 2 ensures a conflict between believers who believe differently.
Point 1 makes it difficult to abandon beliefs blithely, so this can entail personal dramas and crises of conscience.

Compare what happens in the sciences.

1. Doubt is the modus operandi. Faith is considered an impediment, not a virtue.
2. The group eventually arrives at a consensus. This is different from groupthink, because innovation is also valued. Anyone who can topple an old established theory using evidence becomes famous.
3. The court of appeal is the world of empirical data, so conflicts can be resolved experimentally for well-defined questions.

This is how science can provide a way to answer well-defined questions, and why groups of scientists do not need to excommunicate each other or burn each other at the stake.

O-Day Hijinx: Part 1

25 February 2011 / / 2 Comments

I talked to a lot of interesting people at UWA’s Orientation Day. It’s a day when university clubs have their big membership drives. Religions, eager to counter the effects of learning, have their booths as well, and — oh joy — one was a contingent of Mormon missionaries. So I took some time off helping the UWA Atheist and Agnostic Society to have a chat.

They’re fun to talk to, but I can never get used to how uniform their thinking is. You could get the same line of patter from any of them. I suppose atheists say the same things, too.

Here’s the first in a multi-part series: Trolling teh Mormons.

What atheism means to me

6 February 2011 / / 18 Comments

Reverberations are still being felt from PZ’s blog post last week. He complained about “dictionary atheists” who were overly specific about the definition of atheism. Singled out for his annoyance was something I’ve said many times:

Atheism is not a belief. It is a lack of belief.

Or when I’m feeling like breaking out the first order predicate calculus:

Atheism is not a “belief” in “no gods”. It’s “no belief” in “gods”. As such, atheism doesn’t make any claims. It’s a reaction to the claims of theists.

And so on.

As if in response, PZ says:

Dictionary Atheists. Boy, I really do hate these guys. You’ve got a discussion going, talking about why you’re an atheist, or what atheism should mean to the community, or some such topic that is dealing with our ideas and society, and some smug wanker comes along and announces that “Atheism means you lack a belief in gods. Nothing more. Quit trying to add meaning to the term.” As if atheism can only be some platonic ideal floating in virtual space with no connections to anything else; as if atheists are people who have attained a zen-like ideal, their minds a void, containing nothing but atheism, which itself is nothing. Dumbasses.

But but but!

I worried that PZ was getting away from good reasoning. The dictionary definition of atheism is very useful, if only for rhetorical purposes. Not advancing a claim means you don’t have to provide evidence, which is very handy for me. And in the case of gods, the burden of evidence really does belong to their claimants. Which puts the atheist on safe ground.

True, sometimes I do find myself speaking of “atheism qua movement” as being more than just lack of belief. For me, becoming an atheist and rejecting gods and supernaturalism — provisionally, of course — has been the gateway to a new way of thinking that has made my life better.

But how did a non-position do that? Since atheism is not of itself a philosophy or set of principles or anything like that, what kind of positive value does it impart? How can it help humanity or advance human knowledge, or really, do anything if it doesn’t of itself put forth any claims or do any of the things a philosophy usually does?

Let me use my subjective experience to untangle this.

My deconversion only became possible because I decided that I cared what was true more than I cared for my religion of origin. In the years leading to my deconversion, I learned more about how to think critically, and how to be skeptical about claims. Though my religion taught that I was to discount reason — sorry, “man’s reason” — I decided that it was better than the selective and convenient reasoning that people at church engaged in. And I learned more about the scientific method. Once those were in place, it was just a matter of time before I saw the claims of religion for what they were.

What I’m saying is that atheism didn’t get me to atheism — these other things did. Atheism was the result.

Which puts me where PZ already is: Atheism is not a philosophy — it’s a conclusion.

In that Montreal talk, I explained that there is more to my atheism than simple denial of one claim; it’s actually based on a scientific attitude that values evidence and reason, that rejects claims resting solely on authority, and that encourages deeper exploration of the world. My atheism is not solely a negative claim about gods, but is based on a whole set of positive values that I will emphasize when talking about atheism. That denial of god thing? It’s a consequence, not a cause.

What got me to that consequence — and what I’ve worked into my life since — are a number of positive -isms.

  • Secularism — I think people shouldn’t be allowed to use their god-belief as a way of controlling the behaviour of others, particularly children and those who don’t believe in the religion. A secular society means that everyone’s religion gets treated the same. That’s fair.
  • Rationalism — Having a commitment to using reason as a guide.
  • Skepticism — Being critical of claims. Asking for evidence. Asking “How do you know?”
  • Humanism — I’ve held off on calling myself a humanist so far, but if someone mistook me for one, I wouldn’t mind. I think it has much to recommend itself. The humanist slogan “Good Without God” is one that stirs this godless heart.
  • And of course, the scientific method — using publicly available observation and evidence confirmed by multiple sources to separate fact from fantasy.

These positive values are bound up in my atheism, and that of others whose stories I’ve read. So is it right to say that atheism is separate from these values? Well, they’re not all the same thing. Not every skeptic is an atheist. And atheists are not necessarily rationalists. So while these -isms are not synonymous with atheism (unfortunately), they do tend to cluster around atheism, to the extent that they get associated with atheism, even though they are not atheism themselves.

I think people use “atheism” as a kind of shorthand for these other positive values. Our minds work like that. We make little logical leaps all the time without noticing. So if I speak of atheism as a positive value, I hope you’ll understand what I’m doing. I’m leaving behind a strict dictionary defition of atheism, and using it as a way of talking about all the positive things.

So I get what PZ is on about. Hang the dictionary definition of atheism! Enough of arguing with the careful tweezers! These tools are our spaceship, and atheism is the rocket fuel!

Well, it’s not really rocket fuel, but I hope you know what I mean.

Browse the wreckage of failed hypotheses

29 November 2010 / / Comments Off on Browse the wreckage of failed hypotheses

An interesting question posed by Richard Thaler over at the Edge:

The flat earth and geocentric world are examples of wrong scientific beliefs that were held for long periods. Can you name your favorite example and for extra credit why it was believed to be true?

Some are interesting:

In the early days of the field of Artificial Intelligence, researchers thought that it would not be terribly difficult to implement a vision recognition or language understanding program.
…
The importance of these misperceptions is the underestimation of the complexity of the brain.

and some are utterly superfluous.

That parrots were not only stupid, but also could never learn to do anything more than mimic human speech.

It was believed to be true because the training techniques initially used in laboratories were not appropriate for teaching heterospecific communication.

Eyeroll.

My answer would be: that superstition and ‘spirituality’ are suitable ways to answer questions about our world and that ‘having faith’ represents some kind of virtue. Spirituality, superstition, and faith have never contributed one thing to human knowledge because the answers they give come from intuitions and preconceptions, not from real data about the world. Yet many otherwise smart and educated people are still unable to relinquish such faulty methods.

My favourite comment comes from Charles Simonyi.

I think we are all too fast to label old theories “wrong” and with this we weaken the science of today — people say — with some justification from the facts as given to them — that since the old “right” is now “wrong” the “right” of today might be also tainted. I do not believe this — today’s “right” is just fine, because yesterday’s “wrong” was also much more nuanced “more right” that we are often led to believe.

Supernatural thinking can be deadly

1 November 2010 / / 6 Comments

A horrible story from France reminds us yet again why it’s always a bad idea to jump to supernatural conclusions.

Thirteen people were watching TV in a flat, when one of the men heard the baby crying. So he got up to get a bottle for the baby. Apparently he wasn’t wearing any clothes at the time.

“The man got up to prepare a bottle for the baby when his wife, seeing him, screamed ‘It’s the devil, it’s the devil’,” she explained.

In the confusion following this apparent case of mistaken identity, the naked man’s sister-in-law stabbed him in the hand and he was ejected through the front door of the flat. When he attempted to get back in, panic erupted.

“The other occupants of the flat fled by jumping out of the window,” Faivre said. According to police, one man jumped with the two-year-old in his arms and crawled two blocks away to hide in bushes, screaming: “I had to defend myself.”

The two-year-old died in hospital, another victim of superstition.

If you’re trying to explain something, you can go with natural explanations or supernatural ones. Natural explanations are always better. For one thing, you can check them out. And if you have two natural explanations for something, it’s possible to figure out which one is better experimentally. But how do you distinguish between two supernatural explanations? Who made the world, Elohim or Zeus? Or perhaps the Flying Spaghetti Monster?

But supernatural explanations are extremely tempting. They’re easy to come up with and they don’t require understanding anything at all. Saying that a god made the world is easier than understanding biology and cosmology.

In my Mom’s final days, she would sometimes call out the names of deceased family members. My family tended to favour a supernatural explanation for this: the spirits of these people were in the room, waiting to take Mom to a heavenly world. (That they were waiting to take her to Hell didn’t seem to occur to them. Observation: People only arrive at supernatural conclusions that support whatever narrative they buy into.) But there are many natural reasons why she might have called out names. Perhaps she was seeing hallucinations. Perhaps she was calling out lots of names at random, and we only noticed those that were dead. I noticed that she also called out the names of living people, as well as the names of people not in the family. (There was ‘Warren’ — we don’t know a Warren — as well as Charlemagne.) It took a bit of thought and knowledge to come up with these natural explanations, but in general my family liked the supernatural ones better.

The idea of spirits is a very pervasive one, but imagine the implications. There are unseen beings which could possibly be all around you. They might be watching you (yes, even in the bathroom), listening to you, and forming opinions on the things you’re doing. It would be easy to see how this belief could lead to a kind of paranoia. How could it do otherwise? Why wouldn’t you jump out of a window to avoid an evil supernatural enemy?

Supernatural thinking does nothing to advance our understanding. It’s the kind of thinking that kills people.

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