Presto Agitato

Feck, Shite, Arse

James Q. Wilson, RIP

I was unhappy to learn, yesterday, of the death of Andrew Breitbart — and not just because he was, um, not much older than me (coff) — but this is just devastating:

With the death of James Q. Wilson earlier today, America has lost a towering intellectual figure. The mind reels when thinking about the issues Professor Wilson wrote about with such precision, intelligence, originality, and elegance: crime and human nature;  drug legalization, science, and addiction; moral character; benevolence; free will; families and communities; race; business ethics and capitalism; American government; democracy and the Islamic world; and much more.

James Q. Wilson was not only America’s pre-eminent political and social scientist, he was one of our leading moral philosophers. There was no subject, it seemed, on which he couldn’t deepen our understanding.

He was also a monumental presence within conservatism. Professor Wilson brought to the movement what it desperately needed: rigorous and cogent analysis; respect for social science and empirical data; and a calm, measured style that never exceeded what the evidence indicated.

Requiescat in pace, sir.  Sigh.

In Like a Lion

Welcome to Minnesota!  We were supposed to get 1-3" snow mixed with rain (more rain than snow) overnight, but we must have gotten 6" after an ‘icing event’ (read: freezing rain, ugly layer of ice) late last night.  Schools are mostly closed and so is most of the rest of town.  I haven't seen the mailman, either.

Good thinking!

An SRV Minute

Quote of the Day: Who Are You Calling a Skeptic?

Perhaps we should stop accepting the term ‘skeptic’.  Skepticism implies doubts about a plausible proposition.  Current global warming alarm hardly represents a plausible proposition.  Twenty years of repetition and escalation of claims does not make it more plausible.  Quite the contrary, the failure to improve the case over 20 years makes the case even less plausible as does the evidence from climategate and other instances of overt cheating. — Richard Lindzen, PhD, MIT climate scientist

A Matter of Definition (and Intellectual Honesty)

Richard Dawkins, author of The God Delusion and dean of the ‘new atheists’ (a term he has never used nor endorsed, so far as I know), admits that he's not entirely sure:

There was surprise when Prof. Dawkins acknowledged that he was less than 100 per cent certain of his conviction that there is no creator.

The philosopher Sir Anthony Kenny, who chaired the discussion, interjected: ‘Why don’t you call yourself an agnostic?’  Prof. Dawkins answered that he did.

An incredulous Sir Anthony replied: ‘You are described as the world’s most famous atheist.’

Prof. Dawkins said that he was ‘6.9 out of seven’ sure of his beliefs.

‘I think the probability of a supernatural creator existing is very, very low’, he added.

Those who have read Dawkins' book will know that he has not changed his position except, perhaps, to strengthen it.  In the book he said he was six points out of seven sure there is no God.  In the video (link above), he revises that to 6.9.  For those of you who keep track of significant digits, that's 99%.  I'd add a few significant digits (and fill them with nines), but in principle he is correct; neither can he prove that there are no monsters under his bed.  (They're invisible, you know!)  Be very afraid!

But I would dispute Prof. Dawkins' definitions of ‘atheist’ and ‘agnostic’, and I don't think the choice of terms is inconsequential; it is very important (as he notes) to distinguish between reasoned disbelief and punting.  One percent and fifty percent are very far apart.  According to the Random House dictionary (as of 2012), an atheist is ‘a person who denies or disbelieves the existence of a supreme being or beings’, while an agnostic is ‘a person who holds that the existence of the ultimate cause, as God, and the essential nature of things are unknown and unknowable, or that human knowledge is limited to experience’.  Thus, one can disbelieve in god without outright denying him/her/it, and still be an atheist.  (I call the two positions ‘atheism of the first type’ and ‘atheism of the second type’, respectively, having borrowed that terminology from others.)  As for agnosticism, I'm content with the argument that the ‘ultimate cause‘ is unknown (yes it is, and boy wouldn't I like to know!), but the rest is a naked cop-out. 

The basic logical rules, somewhat counterposed, are:

1. One cannot prove a negative fact.
2. The burden of proof is on the person who makes the positive claim (in this case, that God exists).  This can be seen as a corollary or a restatement of Ockham's Razor — with all due apologies to Brother Ockham.

So here we are, after thousands of years of failed Christian (etc.) effort to prove the existence of God — and at least hundreds of years of pre-Christian effort (e.g., Aristotle) — and we've come up empty.  There is no evidence, physical or logical, for any supernatural being, and every failed ‘proof’ digs a deeper hole from which which belief must climb.  One is left with naked faith (i.e., belief without evidence), rank illogic, or doubt and disbelief.  To be ‘agnostic’ is to punt.

As the evidence stands, I wouldn't give the existence of a supernatural being one chance in an American billion (10⁹) and probably a good deal less than that.  (I've never looked at it, before now, in terms of specific probabilities).  I believe in god like I believe in the Easter Bunny and Mitt Romney's ‘severely conservative’ bona fides.  So I certainly ‘disbelieve’ in the supernatural and am thus an atheist, but no matter how infinitesimal the odds, they aren't perfectly nil (nothing is) so I don't absolutely ‘deny’ the possibility.  I just think it's a baseless, bizarre, laughably silly, and horribly destructive idea.  So I refuse the temptation to punt or to pretend — nor, apparently, to mince words when provoked.