Presto Agitato

Blogfodder: The Smell of Fear

As somebody who has championed science all his career, carrying a lot of water for the profession against its critics on many issues, I am losing faith.  Recent examples of bias and corruption in science are bad enough.  What’s worse is the reluctance of scientific leaders to criticise the bad apples.  Science as a philosophy is in good health; science as an institution increasingly stinks. – Matt Ridley, The Times, 8 Dec 2014

I think maybe he's a bit pessimistic. Signs of proper scientific pushback are budding everywhere.

Quote of the Day: To Hide the Truth

A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks.  It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language.  It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. – George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

Faith and Fiction

If the statements [the Bible] contains concerning matters of history can be proven [to be contrary to truth] by extrabiblical records, by ancient documents recovered through archaeological digs, or by the established facts of modern science, then there is grave doubt as to its trustworthiness in matters of religion. In other words, if the biblical record can be proved fallible in areas of fact that can be verified, then it is hardly to be trusted in areas where it cannot be tested. – Archer L. Gleason

Quote of the Day: Moral Sentiments

Any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, the parental and filial affections being here included, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become as well developed, or nearly as well developed, as in man. – Charles Darwin

Bizarre and Unreasoning

Christopher Hitchens writes in his forward to Victor Stenger's God: The Failed Hypothesis:

In other words, none of these god-centered ‘hypotheses’ can do more than replace, or attempt to restate, the original fallacy of the ‘design’ arguments.  Meanwhile, our advances in knowledge and technique simply place these efforts under an ever more pitiless and skeptical gaze.  Now we know roughly the age of our species.  Richard Dawkins has put it as high as a quarter of a million years, while Francis Collins (the extremely genial and decent C. S. Lewis fan who oversaw the Human Genome Project) once in my hearing said that it could be as little as a hundred thousand.  No matter.  Let us take the lower figure, and use it to prove the truth of revelation.  On this model, our species emerged and for tens of thousands of years cowered in the few climatic refuges of the globe that were hospitable to it.  Life expectancy?  Perhaps a couple of decades.  Infant mortality?  Extremely high.  Death from tooth decay or diarrhea? Commonplace.  Terror of microorganisms in general?  Intense.  Fear of death from earthquake, tsunami, volcano, and flood?  Extreme, and again compounded by ignorance.  Wars between tribes and clans for food and territory?  Grim and frequent.  Religion?  Not known to us, but probably involving human and animal sacrifice to propitiate weird idols.

And for a minimum of ninety-five thousand years, heaven watches this with folded arms!  Stony, lofty indifference attends the striving and the suffering and the agonizing deaths of infants and innocents, to say nothing of sadistic and genocidal violence and the worship of bogus shrines and false gods.  And then, at long last, after nine thousand and five hundred decades or so (an instant in evolutionary time, to be sure, but quite a long time for frightened mammals), it is decided that heaven must intervene.  By direct revelation.  But only in certain illiterate and backward parts of the Middle East.  As I say, you may choose to believe this if you desire, but that is what you must now believe.  Until an amazingly recent date, science would not have compelled you to face the absurd consequences of your faith in quite this way.

The book does indeed accomplish that, although Stenger's title (or sub-sub title, to wit: ‘How Science Shows that God Does not Exist’) overreaches by quite a bit.

But, to be clear, there are two questions, related but not the same: Is there a creator or, more precisely, any evidence for a creator or at least a ‘gap’ which a creator might plausibly fill; and is there any reason to believe in the beneficent and provident God of Abraham, Isaac, etc.?  Stenger answers the first question quite effectively in the main (occasional overreach notwithstanding) and scores well regarding the second.  Hitchens, in those two paragraphs, thoroughly finishes the job.

Quote of the Day: Free Will

The stars aren't aligned
Or the gods are malign
Blame is better to give
Than receive!
                – ‘Free Will’, Rush

Book Note

I set aside Stenger's God (see the Current Reading list at right) for the moment in favor of Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea, for two reasons: The topics turned out to be a bit closer than I had expected (not a lot, but enough to matter) and Dennett isn't overreaching.  I'd guessed from Stenger's subtitle that he would overreach (and thus waste some of my time), but I came across the Dennett book second.  I'll finish Stenger when I'm done with Dennett.  And then on to more Dennett.

And yes, I know that the Ferguson book has been ‘Current’ for a very long time.  It's very dry reading.

Bibliobibulo

It's four months into the year already, and I'm just now getting around to posting last year's reading list.  So sorry.  Alphabetically, by author:

Asimov, Isaac	The Caves of Steel
	Foundation's Edge
	The Naked Sun
	The Robots of Dawn
Blackwell, Andrew	Visit Sunny Chernobyl: And Other Adventures in the World's Most Polluted Places
Brodie, Fawn M.	No Man Knows My History: The Life of Joseph Smith
Clarke, Arthur C.	2061: Odyssey Three
	3001: The Final Odyssey
	Firstborn
	Sunstorm
	Time's Eye
Dick, Philip K.	Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Dobbs, Michael	Six Months in 1945: FDR, Stalin, Churchill, and Truman--from World War to Cold War
Douglass, Frederick	Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Fleming, Ian	Goldfinger
Freely, I. P.	Yellow River
Gillinov M.D., Marc and Nissen M.D., Steven	Heart 411: The Only Guide to Heart Health You'll Ever Need
Harris, Sam	Lying
	The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
Hatch, Alden	General George Patton: Old Blood & Guts
Hoyle, Fred	Black Cloud
Malhotra, Deepak	I Moved Your Cheese: For Those Who Refuse to Live as Mice in Someone Else's Maze
Montgomery, David R.	The Rocks Don't Lie: A Geologist Investigates Noah's Flood
Muhammad (&c.)	The Koran
Muller, Richard A.	Energy for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines
	Physics for Future Presidents: The Science Behind the Headlines
Nock, Albert Jay	Our Enemy, the State
Pollard, Justin	The Rise and Fall of Alexandria: Birthplace of the Modern World
Pournelle, Jerry	Starswarm
Prince, Erik	Civilian Warriors: The Inside Story of Blackwater and the Unsung Heroes of the War on Terror
Rand, Ayn	Atlas Shrugged
Reeves, Richard	Daring Young Men: The Heroism and Triumph of The Berlin Airlift-June 1948-May 1949
Rosenbaum, Ron	Explaining Hitler
Rumsfeld, Donald	Rumsfeld's Rules: Leadership Lessons in Business, Politics, War, and Life
Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft	Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus
Shlaes, Amity	Coolidge
Stiles, T. J.	The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
Stowe, Harriet B.	Uncle Tom's Cabin
Watson, James D.	The Double Helix: A Personal Account of the Discovery of the Structure of DNA
Weiner, Tim	Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA

About one every nine days.  Meh.

Sophist Apologetics

Received via e-mail, this is why ‘Christian philosopher’ is a contradictions in terms.  Plantinga's definition of the word ‘atheist’ applies to very few people – maybe one person I know, and I doubt that many.  This means that either he is confused about the meaning of the word, either etymologically and in common use, possibly both, in which case he is no scholar, or he knows better and simply prefers to abuse straw dogs, in which case he is a liar.  Given his status as ‘emeritus’, the first seems unlikely, so the second is probable.

Since Plantinga and Gutter mentioned him, let's take Richard Dawkins as an example: In his book The God Delusion, Dawkins proposes a ‘spectrum of theistic probability’, a seven-point scale of belief by which a ‘one’ is complete certainty that God exists and ‘seven’ is complete assurance to the contrary.  On this scale, Dawkins, who is a proselytizing anti-theist, declares himself to be a six.  That is, he is willing to look at new evidence if anyone can provide such, but he's seen it all already and would like everyone to please quit with the fairy tales.  In fact, he insists.  Questioned closely on the point, he later conceded (with a chuckle) that maybe he's a 6.9.

I'll go with that.   I was raised Baptist.  I've read the Bible (all of it), I've heard all the arguments (mostly non-arguments), I even went to a Christian junior high-school for one year (it didn't work out), and I must say that, though I won't completely foreclose the possibility of new evidence upon which I will need to modify my opinion (it wouldn't be the first time), after millennia of recorded attempts to come up with a reasonable argument for the existence of great spirits, the possibility seems pretty damned slim. 

Logically, it's not my business to prove the negative – a fool's errand in any case – but rather the believer's responsibility to prove that his belief in the supernatural, which none can see nor hear, is true.  (Or, at the least, barely plausible!)  So far, the faithful haven't even gotten off zero, so I'm classing the entirety of spiritual belief down around Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.  Mind you, if someone can provide valid and sufficient evidence of colored-egg-laying bunnies at the spring equinox, I'll have to consider it, but let's just say that I'm not holding my breath – and I doubt that anyone will accuse me of being agnostic on the point!  I'm not into imaginary friends.  (Which might explain my aversion to Facebook, too.)

George Will Embraces Semantic Slop

George Will, explaining why ‘Judicial activism isn't a bad thing’:

Many judges … in practicing what conservatives have unwisely celebrated as ‘judicial restraint’, have subordinated liberty to majority rule.  Today, a perverse conservative populism panders to two dubious notions — that majorities should enjoy a largely untrammeled right to make rules for everyone, and that most things legislatures do reflect the will of a majority.

Conservatives’ advocacy of judicial restraint serves liberalism by leaving government’s growth unrestrained.

I see that the modern liberal (read: the American left's) effort to redefine ‘judicial activism’ has succeeded in confusing Mr. Will, so allow me to clarify this for him:

‘Activism’, whether of the political, social, or judicial variety, is an effort to effect political change.  Thus, judicial activism is the willful imposition of the judge's political preferences onto the law.  Judicial restraint is the limitation of judicial action not just to what the law actually says, but also to the rules of procedure, i.e. limits on ‘standing’, and what is necessary to correct the narrow issue at question.  ‘Sweeping decisions’ are almost always improper.  This is not ‘judicial passivity’ but rather the recognition that political disputes belong in the political process – i.e. to the political branches of government – and that judges are unelected referees who must not only constrain the political branches but also themselves.

If Congress or the president exceed their power, then non-activist judges, honestly interpreting the law and following the principles of judicial restraint and their oaths to ‘protect and defend the constitution of the United States’, must slap them down.  This is not ‘activism’, but rather proper and limited action, i.e. Doing their jobs.  That judges are sometimes forced by unmoored politicians to strong action, and that the political branches will surely feign outrage, is beside the point.  But to confuse action with activism is to give judges an opening to run riot over the constitution.  And so they have, to our great harm.