Stupid Atheist Tricks

From Sandwalk Blog

The Thought CriminalWednesday, May 30, 2012 8:19:00 AM
No time to listen to him this morning. Is it important?

"The answers, by the way, are no, no, and no. But you already knew that, didn't you?"

You "know" that? Don't you actually believe that?

If God did actually do 1 and 3, then the most determinedly atheistic and most rigorous of science (in my experience the one isn't anything like a guarantee of the other) couldn't do more than tell you how it was done and not more than that - even if full evidence and full analysis were available and possible, which they never will be. Science can't go beyond what the physical evidence can show and if God is the actual creator of the universe, that physical evidence can show no more than how God did it. What you think on either side of the question of if God did it can't be anything but belief or, as I suspect it usually is, preference.

2. is more problematic because it is a question about actual events in prehistory. We have no access to "original" humans, never mind access to their actions, understanding or intentions. We don't even have that in many non-original people living now. As even the biblical creation myth says that the first two people went bad fairly soon after they were first made, you'd have a mighty narrow range of entirely missing evidence to consider before you could know anything about it.

As someone who accepts evolution, you'd have to convince me you'd come up with a definitive definition of what African population constituted the "original" humans. And that would be before trying to divine what their actions, understandings and intentions were in order to assert their moral stature. Convincing me you'd identified the Adams and Eves would be a lot easier than the rest of it.

Of course, that is if you want to make a meaningful distinction between belief and knowledge. Muddying that line would seem to me to serve efforts like climate change denial, anti-vaccination fanaticism, the Intelligent Design industry, etc. Pretending to know what is merely believed can make someone arrogant, it can't make them any more accurate or persuasive to those not already predisposed.

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Arek W.Wednesday, May 30, 2012 11:53:00 AM
The Thought Criminal said:

"Science can't go beyond what the physical evidence can show..."

Science can "see" everything humans can "see" (because science is made by humans) and much more (because it uses advanced technology).

If science cannot go beyond what the physical evidence can show, then how can you?

"If God did actually do 1 and 3, then the most determinedly atheistic and most rigorous of science (...) couldn't do more than tell you how it was done and not more than that..."

And how do you know if 1 and 3 were done by God and not by Unicorn?

Are you using "other way of knowing" (aka making stuff up) ?


The Thought CriminalWednesday, May 30, 2012 2:56:00 PM
Arek. I don't need science to tell me that the invasion of Iraq was a moral atrocity and a political disaster, which is good because science couldn't do that. I don't need science to know it's wrong to torture and murder children, which is just as good because science can't do that. I don't need science to know that the axioms and laws of mathematics are valid or that deductive logic is, which is good because science can't do that and, since science depends on those as prerequisites, I couldn't take science seriously without those. I can't even use science to know that it's a bad idea to lie about science or anything else because there is nothing in science that could possibly demonstrate that it is a bad idea.

And how do you know if 1 and 3.....

I wish atheists could comprehend the conditional mood, they don't seem to be able to twig onto it. Not to mention your need to cherry pick a partially elided -jeesh!- sentence out of a paragraph that ends, "What you think on either side of the question of if God did it can't be anything but belief or, as I suspect it usually is, preference."

It's an "other way of knowing" to believe that you can know 1, 2, or 3, instead of believing them. Which was the point of my comment.

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we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- these honored dead by using them as hostages against the living.

Abraham Lincoln, in his most revered speech, unwittingly provided a weapon that has been used since to kill many thousands of people. American soldiers and the countless others who, thought unmentionable in the United States, are indissolubly bound to our dead through the absolute requirements of justice and truth due to their being killed by the actions of the United States government, in our names, often giving Lincoln’s words as the reason.

How many times in the United States, as an excuse to continue the slaughter in Vietnam, Iraq and other wars of empire, has that weapon been used with the horrible potency generated by unthinking, unreflecting, coercive patriotism and rote reverence?

How many more people have died through the deployment of Lincoln’s words “should not have died in vain”?

Lincoln was honorable. He may have been the American President who had the truest sense of honor unbound by the conventions of aristocratic pretense. It is likely that he provided the weapon out of innocence borne of his great character and out of the requirement to address the necessities of the hard weeks during which he gave the speech, some of the worst in our history. The price the world has paid for those poetic words almost certainly wouldn’t have been worth their price to him, had he realized how they would be used by others.

People without morals and who have no honor, have no reservations about killing people. Given their readiness to kill without cause, saying they distort even the most sacred words for the purpose of killing more people is an idea shocking only to those in the habit of pretending they don’t see what they can plainly see.

Unfortunately, when you look down the list of American Presidents, you find a notable lack of character and in even some of those of high character it isn’t reliably coupled with wisdom. We can hope and pray that George W. Bush, utterly corrupt, utterly incompetent and reveling like a theatrical Caligula in his role as vicarious warrior, is the worst that our system can produce. I doubt that even with the example of the worst of his predecessors, Lincoln could have imagined someone as putrid as him attaining and holding the presidency. What he could have made of the regency of Cheney is even harder to imagine.

This week, as in all weeks of all of the imperial wars begun and continued by those who have no honor, no morality, no intention to allow the rule of The People, the tinny echo of Lincoln’s words as spoken by mimics sound through the helium balloon that diverts but refuses to inform the American People.

Those words from those mouths in the context of Bush’s war in Iraq do nothing to honor the dead, they prop them up before the camera as hostages, not to ransom a purpose for his criminal war, but as an emotional bribe to continue it until he can pass it and the blame for it onto someone else. It turns the deaths of those who have already died into a weapon against those who haven’t died yet. The honor due them is transformed into blackmail.

The plain truth is that those who have died in Bush’s war in Iraq have already died in vain.There is no further price that can redeem that terrible truth or to turn the utterly corrupt motives of those who have brought and continued this war to any more than a pantomime of greatness. The attempt only exposes the decay of our entire establishment, even those who say the words don’t believe them. Nothing that can be said can change that horrible truth and telling that truth will be punished because our ruling elite have buried democracy deeper than Robert Lincoln was forced to bury his father. He did so to prevent the theft of his corpse. Unfortunately he couldn’t do anything to protect his father’s soul from being stolen by criminals lower than grave robbers.

Note: If you ever see me mention the American dead without also mentioning those killed by the American government and its proxies, please point out the omission.

First posted March 29, 2008

For My Parents

All of the dead, some in uniform, parents, old, children too young.
Holes in families, empty houses. Shadows on people. A name in rock.


A person remembers someone. A town, a life.
Countries give speeches. Speeches about speeches.
Speeches about people. Too far away to know.


And I can't tell you. You had to see them. In their towns. Both sides.


First posted 2006

Nina Simone Rags and Old Iron

Gary Burton - Joy Spring 1961 and already great

Romney Was An Adult When He Attacked The Gay Student

Mitt Romeny was 18 when he led a gang attack on a gay student at his prep school with a pair of scissors and,  according to others in the gang of attackers, gloried both before and after in their attack.   He was an adult, certainly by law, today,  probably he would have been considered eligible to be tried as an adult under the law then.

And it's time people stopped talking about it as "bullying", this was a criminal assault by a cowardly gang on an individual with a weapon

If he was an 18-year-old of color,  there is no doubt that this would have been played as a major campaign issue.   If he was a Democrat, it would probably end his campaign.    I'll bet that the Republicans are looking for something in Barack Obama's past to inoculate Romney with.   The difference is that Obama endorsed gay marriage yesterday.   Romney attacked gay marriage yesterday, when he was 65.

The Irrationality of Selfish Altruism

And, especially, of calling it "science"


 Laying down one's life for one's friends is obviously altruistic, but so also is taking a slight risk for them. Many small birds, when they see a flying predator such as a hawk, give a characteristic "alarm call", upon which the whole flock takes appropriate evasive action. There is indirect evidnece that the bird who gives the alarm call puts itself in special danger, because it attracts the predator's attention particularly to itself. This is only a slight additional risk, but it nevertheless seems, at least at first sight, to qualify as an altruistic act by our definition.

 Richard Dawkins:   p.6, The Selfish Gene,  Thirtieth Anniversary Edition, 2006

1. "Many small birds".   What does "many small birds" mean?   I'd imagine it means birds of different species which would, one assumes, have distinct practices associated with their specific species.   Without specifying even the species the story is useless.  The phase, though, does demonstrate one useful thing.   Richard Dawkins hasn't presented evidence from observations of actual flocks of birds, he has told a tale about "birds" and, both in his scenario and his conclusions, he has filled in the lack of supporting evidence with plausible sounding assertions.   His "flying predator such as a hawk" is only slightly less imprecise but it isn't much more helpful.   Why a "flying predator"?   Would the "first bird to call out"   in reaction to a land based predator have a distinctly different motive?

A major disadvantage of creating an imaginary scenario instead of trying to record evidence of a real flock of birds is that everyone who reads it will create their own "flock" and "predator" in their mind and it is almost certain that no two will be the same.   There is nothing to be learned about nature from an infinity of imaginary flocks of birds.   And that is another disadvantage if discovering anything about nature is the goal,  though coming up with a plausible sounding story is greatly advantaged by not having to consult the natural world.   Which is why folk lore isn't generally considered to be as reliable as science.

2.  "the whole flock".    A flock of birds doesn't specify a specific flock of a specific number of birds.   The story assumes that a flock is a flock.   Apparently the size of the flock, that can number less than ten or in the hundreds or thousands of individuals, is assumed to be unimportant to this conclusion.   It's especially problematic if degree of relatedness is important to the assertion, and that is the basis of Dawkins' story.

3a.  And where is the flock at the time the "bird who gives the alarm call"  calls out?   On the ground?  In the trees?  In bushes?  Some in trees and some in bushes?   Already aloft?   The story presents a generic flock in a generic location with a generic "bird who gives the alarm call" without specifying anything about its actual identity and situation when the alarm is given to what kind of predator in who knows what orientation in regard to the flock and, especially, the first bird to call out.   That would often be the case in real-world 3-D topology instead of an imaginary 2-D one.
3b.Where is that bird in regard to the predator, other members of the flock,  nd in what orientation?  Maybe it was the only bird which happened to be looking in the right direction at the split second before it called out.    Could it see the predator first and so was the first to call out in alarm?  Could it hear it first?   Maybe it had the best hearing in the entire flock and heard the predator first.   And I haven't mentioned the differences in the likelihood of different species of predators and potential prey being seen approaching or picked out of a flock due to their markings,  habits, the conditions in the sky, the foliage or on the ground.

4a.  Where is the "indirect evidence" that the bird to give the alarm was "in special danger"  as opposed to birds that didn't?    I would suspect that to know that you would have to have a sufficient number of filmed examples of this kind of scenario, of sufficient resolution, in which it could be positively seen that the alarm calling bird was the one caught to allow a valid conclusion that such birds were in such danger.   I don't know how many such filmed examples it would take to be able to draw a significant conclusion such as Dawkins makes but I suspect getting sufficient evidence is hard enough and expensive enough  that it will never really be done.
4b.  And any such documentation and analysis would also have to account for the location of the predator when the call went out and if the predator would have been able to hear and fix in on the alarm calling bird before it would be lost in the "appropriate evasive action" .  Is such action always "appropriate"?  Is there a difference in "alarm bird" to non-alarm bird (about time to consider them, isn't it?) predation if it's "inappropriate"?     As an aside, all of this analysis of filmed documentation would have to account for the differences in species, scenario, topography, etc. that have already been mentioned before this first, essential conclusion could be legitimately inserted into science.   The math would take a while.

5.  Dawkins assertion that the first bird to call out story rests on that assumption of it is at a "slight additional risk", without that, his identification of its behavior as "altruistic" is erroneous.   He also assumes that the bird's action attracts the predator's attention to it when it's quite possible that by creating pandemonium it is increasing its chance of escape.   Dawkins' tale assumes the alarm bird sees where the predator is, other birds taking off in a panic might be more likely to fly into danger because they don't see it.    I don't know how you could propose to decide which could be the motive, especially when so many other motives of being the first to perceive danger in the flock is the actual explanation of why it called out are possible.  Remember, Dawkins asserts that the heroic bird is only at " a slight additional risk", perhaps so slight an assumed risk that it would disappear in an actual analysis of the data when other factors are addressed.  And the problems are hardly all addressed by what has been looked at so far.

6.  And, getting back to the problems of a generic scenario as discussed in point 1., Dawkins seems to assume a single motivation in such alarm calling birds.   Even if he could develop the filmed evidence of a sufficient number of instances of alarm birds being the one caught,  even if he could account for all of the other possible topographical vectors to explain why it was the first to call out and differences in perception due to chance and native differences is sight and hearing,  he still hasn't proven that all of the individual birds would have shared the same motive.   The habit of considering animals as interchangeable objects meets its greatest challenge when behavior is the question.  Animals learn according to their individual experience and, perhaps in the case of birds, their own thinking.    Behaviors that are similar can have different motivating intentions behind them and animals can't testify as to their perception of their motives.  They can't even articulate those.

Question Begging,  Bigtime:

7.  Richard Dawkins' motive in asserting this avian "altruism" is for a very specific purpose, to propose that such altruism today is the product of natural selection acting on some "altruism" gene complex that would be provided with, he assumes,  an enhanced chance of being inherited and perpetuated in the species through the sacrifice of the "altruistic" birds.   His assumption that such genes would have an increased chance of being inherited in his story, though, is not without problems, either.

Assuming that the birds in the flock all shared this theoretical gene complex is wildly speculative, assuming such  genes were the motivation of the "altruism" is at least as wildly speculative.   In order for his scenario to do what he wants it to, there would have to be birds in the flock or the species that didn't have it.   There would be nothing for natural selection to select from if they all had the selfish "altruism genes".

Dawkins' assumption that  a gene complex resulting in that, specific, type of action resulting in death would stand a better chance of being inherited and perpetuated among the surviving members of the flock has one huge problem.    "Altruistic" birds being preyed on instead of "non-altruistic" birds would give the gene complex a decreased chance of of being inherited by cutting out a potentially breeding animal that carries it.  Its death increases the percentage of "altruism gene free" birds in the flock or the species whenever that happened.  That would be the case even if only one or a few birds in the flock didn't have the "altruism" genes.  If the "altruism gene complex" is held by a majority of the flock, why would it persist if "altruism" carrying birds were more likely to be preyed on than selfish birds that don't carry the "altruism" gene?   You would expect that birds not carrying the gene and at less of a chance of being preyed on would tend to predominate in the species, thus removing the reason to make all of Dawkins' assumptions.   Again, if all of the birds in the flock carried the genes, Dawkins' motive for the "alarm bird" to call out would disappear and, as mentioned, natural selection would be irrelevant to it.   If only the "altruistic alarm" bird in the flock carried those genes or if a minority of them did then their "altruism" would tend to lead to the genes' extinction.   That would make such altruism truly altruistic, if it was intentional and for that reason, which can't possibly be demonstrated,  but it would remove it entirely from the analysis of natural selection and "gene selfishness".

You could also wonder about other genes the proposed altruistic bird no doubt carries,  genes governing things that are known to be present instead of this theoretical avian altruism.  Genes that would not be shared by many other birds in the flock which might not be advantaged by the act of actually selfish "altruism".   It's quite possible that those genes would be "disadvantaged" by the self sacrifice.   Are those genes weaker than these most ambiguously advantaged "altruism" genes?    I'd think that genes for sensory acuity would tend to wipe out any influence "altruism" genes in Dawkins scenario.  Especially since they are far more relevant to the predation scenario.   Dawkins story depends on the alarm bird seeing the predator, I mentioned  hearing as a factor.  Since those senses, presumably, were developed through natural selection  to warn of danger and  insure survival,  among other things,  Dawkins scenario would seem to present the paradox of  an obvious selective advantage being mitigated into a selective disadvantage through his entirely theoretical genes.   And in the case of eyesight and hearing,  differences in those abilities are indisputably real and relevant to the proposed scenario.   Dawkins' "altruism" is entirely speculative and highly counter-intuitive, if not irrational.   The idea of selfish "altruism" was invented to try to force a situation that is clearly not explainable by natural selection into an undocumentable,  irrationally assered universal concept of natural selection able to explain virtually everything about behavior.   It includes so many patches, paradoxes,  assumptions  and add-ons that it is far less probable than the idea that the whole enterprise is basically flawed.   It is certainly not parsimonious in any sense of the word, for you fans of Occam's Razor.


It was many years ago that I first read Dawkins' "first bird to call out" scenario but recall that my first problem with it was the large flocks of black birds in North America in which several species flock together. You would think that if the first bird to call out was at greater danger it was enhancing the chances of birds of  other species to survive and reproduce instead of it trying to survive while another bird of another species was caught.   And one of those species of black birds seen in such flocks is the notorious cowbird which lays eggs in other birds nests to be reared by parents of another species,  putting their own young at a disadvantage of surviving.   And birds in the environment are often in proximity to birds of other species, flocking or not.  But those reservations were based in looking at actual birds and not imaginary birds.  I could have also mentioned the often observed game of statues among, not only many species of birds, but, also, at least two species of squirrels I've observed when a hawk flies over in nature.


These are only some of the problems with Dawkins'  nature lore as I've noticed them.   I suspect a specialist could come up with more.


With the charm and seeming plausibility of Richard Dawkins lore it could go lost that Richard Dawkins has gone from assuming the existence of unverified "altruism genes" to producing a simulation of evidence assuming them to to create an artificial scenario to support their existence, all without the inconvenience of actually having to get evidence from nature, where natural selection would work, or addressing problems with his scenario.   His premise is asserted to prove itself.   Which is what is so often done in the "behavioral sciences" but which real science isn't supposed to find acceptable.   Or, at least, that's what I'm told by people such as Richard Dawkins as well as what I was taught as a young student in science classes.   That kind of thing is the reason that entire schools of behavioral science rise and fall, creating about the largest section in the Cemetery of  Discontinued "Science".  Not that it is widely mentioned as a problem.

Good luck setting up the cameras to tell you which bird called out first.   Having looked at lots of real flocks of birds in the wild,  I'd guess that's a virtually insurmountable problem of getting the evidence you'd need to do this.

De Larry Summers Selon Jonathan Haidt

The estimable Echidne of the Snakes who, clearly, understands statistical method and research better than Jonathan Haidt, not to mention yours truly,  addressed his annoying assertions that, damn it, Larry Summers was right about girls and math.  

Science And The Wider World

I daresay that most of you are by no means reluctant to accept the scientific epic of the Creation, holding it perhaps as more to the glory of God than the traditional story. Perhaps you would prefer to tone down certain harshnesses of expression, to emphasise the forethought of the Creator in the events which I have called accidents. I would not venture to say that those who are eager to sanctify, as it were, the revelations of science by accepting them as new insight into the divine power are wrong. But this attitude is liable to grate a little on the scientific mind, forcing its free spirit of inquiry into one predetermined mode of expression; and I do not think that the harmonising of the scientific and the religious outlook on experience is assisted that way. Perhaps our feeling on this point can be explained by a comparison . A business man may believe that the hand of Providence is behind his commercial undertakings as it is behind all vicissitudes of his life; but he would be aghast at the suggestion that Providence should be entered as an asset in his balance sheet. I think it is not irreligion but a tidiness of mind, which rebels against the idea of permeating scientific research with a religious implication.

Arthur Stanley Eddington: Science and the Unseen World  

Asserting that intelligent design is a part of science requires an unallowable extension of non-scientific observations and ideas into science.   It is a violation of the formal requirements of science.  Science can't include information that doesn't conform to certain, fairly restrictive requirements.  That information has to be about the physical universe as it can be adequately observed, quantified, analyzed with methods of science, etc.  So the idea of a non-physical designer, teleology,  purpose,  values, morals etc. can't enter into the restricted confines of science.    I'd guess that most informed people would agree with those restrictions in so far as religion is concerned.   In fact, religion is the extra-scientific area of thought that has been most successfully kept out of modern science.  It has, beyond question, been the one category of thought which has been most rigorously rejected by those scientists who are hostile to religion as well as those of us who do so merely out of the kind of reasonableness Eddington talked about.  In doing that they are rigorously following the agreed to rules against ideas and information which can't be processed with science being inserted into the  discourse of science.

Other areas of thought and life have not been as rigorously segregated from the ideally pristine vessel of science.   Personal profit, professional ambition, political ideology,  intentional fraud, racism, sexism, class bias, ...   have all been successfully introduced into even the formal publication of science,   They have had damaging effects on science and, far more importantly, have caused far more harm in wider life than religious infiltration has.   Personal profit and professional ambition have certainly been among the least successfully excluded of pollutants of science as can be seen 24 hours a day of petroleum and gas propaganda featuring scientists as shills on American TV.   And there are lucrative opportunities for scientists in areas other than the extraction industries, not least of which is in the productions of ever more deadly ammunition and armaments.  The silence of the wider community of science on this massive corruption of the idealistic and beneficial endeavor that they present science to be is more revealing of trouble in science than the entire anti-religious campaign has managed to turn up.

Professional ambition, at least in the form of fraud in formal scientific publication has been more successfully expunged, when it is exposed.    The lesson that could be learned about weaknesses in the essential aspect of review in science and, especially, pre-publication review, doesn't seem to have been sufficient to have corrected those lapses.  And in no other area is that as obvious as in recent scandals in the social and biological sciences.   Professional ambition in the form of sometimes vicious intra-scientific ideological warfare is a ubiquitous feature of most scientific fields as well as in almost all academic disciplines.

Today, in the English speaking world,  ideological atheism is the most often and most successfully introduced ideological pollution of science, especially of the biological sciences, though physics seems to be catching up.   Certainly, that is the case in the wider culture of science, the overt insertion of materialist ideology into formal scientific publication being only somewhat less likely than its assertion in informal scientific discourse.    The assertion that science belongs to atheists, that atheism is a requirement to, not only do science but to be intellectually respectable,  that it is a worth while goal to push religious people into intellectual disrepute,  is the stated intention of many celebrity scientist-atheists like Dawkins, Myers and Coyne.  And their favorite weapon in their war against religion has been evolutionary science.  In that they follow a long line of scientific anti-religious campaigners such as Francis Galton, Thomas Huxley and Ernst Haeckel.   The features of evolution and its clear contradiction of a literal reading of Genesis is the most obvious reason for its utility as an attack against religion and the battle was taken up enthusiastically on both sides.  That, all along, there were large numbers of religious people who took the information provided by evolution in stride and continued to be both religious and scientifically informed, hasn't made any difference to those who cling to their favorite weapons in the Darwin Wars.

But, the debunking of Genesis aside, much of the attack against religion, especially the lines of religion coming from Judaism is more fundamental.     The very existence of the possibility of unselfish behavior and even morality has been attacked.    The problem is usually called "altruism" but I'm going to call it "unshelfishness" to remove that most important of all human attitudes and practices from the intellectual chopping block.

A lot of the most obvious ideological efforts inserted directly into science have surrounded the problem of unselfishness which, no matter how hard they try, can't be squared with natural selection.  Natural selection operates by selfishness, self-interest, and merciless struggle for existence and reproduction, selfishness is given the status of a force of nature in the extreme interpretations of Darwin.  The chosen method of treating it with natural selection has been to transform unselfish behavior into some occult form of selfishness that would be predicted by natural selection.  The results have been some pretty dodgy science, which has been discussed endlessly by the critics of Sociobiology and evo-psy.  I'll digress here to say that this kind denotative shift is a constant tactic of materialist polemic, it has to be because so much of human experience is incompatible with materialism.

Why they don't just admit that the theory of natural selection has some but clearly limited explanatory power is, again, ideological.  To admit that, like most theories, natural selection is limited in its usefulness, runs up against a number of cultural predispositions as to render admitting that limit impossible for the most passionate of ideologues.  Foremost is the habit of using "evolution" and, specifically the ideological figure head they've made of Charles Darwin in their culture war.  To admit some kind of limit in his foremost idea would be unbearable for them.   Instead, as in the writing of figures in the war against religion such as Dawkins and Daniel Dennett the attempts to apply natural selection have become wildly, even irrationally ambitions.   I'd assert that British nationalism and Anglophone chauvinism is also at work.    In the wider culture a lot  of it is attributable to the tiresome habit of the BBC to produce costume dramas about Charles Darwin,  that lazy custom being a sort of scientific Jane Austin mania.    That modern genetics has discovered other, competing,  mechanisms of evolution hasn't made a dent into the pop-culture hegemony of the natural selection absolutists, either.  In this the Darwin cult has an ally in creationism.  It's hardly in the interest of the creationism industry to address modern theories in genetics which add evidence to the fact of evolution for which their massive research into the Darwin circle is irrelevant.

There is a lot to be learned from considering the entire context of how one of the most obviously beneficial attributes of people was turned into the "problem of altruism".   Unselfishness only becomes a problem when natural selection is asserted to have universally applicable explanatory power.  Clearly, it doesn't.   It should never be forgotten that natural selection is, itself,  an intellectual explanation instead of an actual thing.  It is an intellectual construction made of assumptions about how organisms die and their rates of reproduction.  And it couldn't be more relevant to that consideration that it was built on the clearly class influenced analysis of Malthusian economics.   It has little in common with the laws of physics and chemistry, not surprising since the phenomenon it proposes to address is of such stupendous range of circumstances as well as diverse organisms, their physical bodies, the physical and ephemeral aspects of organisms in time,  their history.   Evolution is probably the most complex entity that science has ever proposed to explain.   There is nothing of intellectual accuracy or honesty to be gained by ignoring the intellectual origins and problems such ideas contain.  Whenever those are swept under the rug it would be good to suspect less than honest motives, generally ideological ones.   The asserted universal efficacy of natural selection to explain just evolution is certainly audacious, it should probably be considered irrational in view of later discoveries in genetics.    The assertion of its supremacy is certainly premature.   The effect of that assertion in the study of science,  its political position within science is an important issue.  The ability of those asserting the universal efficacy of natural selection to damage careers and to punish other viewpoints within science has, almost certainly, been capable of distorting the science, likely enforcing adherence to a view giving a less than accurate picture.    Pointing out that it is likely,  not only possible, that the very real and observable phenomenon of unselfish behavior has nothing to do with natural selection, as it so obviously doesn't,  would certainly be controversial outside of science.  It would be interesting to see what the consequences of explicitly saying that within biology would be.   One of the weapons aimed at anyone saying that would certainly be a charge of covertly trying to insert religion into science, that's a charge that is even laid against atheists when they dare suggest far more modest things of that sort.

Since engaging in a  very long  blog argument last summer surrounding what can be known about the origin of life on Earth, I've become more interested in the stated ideological motivations of scientists, using science to promote atheism.  They haven't been shy about making declarations, staking claims and even creating entire branches of "science" to promote a materialistic-atheist ideology using science as a tool.   The extent to which their scientific claims might be effected by their ideology is seldom considered.  I hold that huge swaths of the social sciences are motivated by materialism, often in order to reduce people and animals into material objects, generally with the most breathtakingly evidence free speculations asserted as the equivalent of hard science.

I will write up the blog brawl I had over the entirely unknowable origin of life on Earth at Greg Laden's blog, something which my non-fans have mentioned to me on other blogs, so I know it has some currency.   The "science" of abiogenesis could stand as one of the clearest ideologically motivated and sustained branches of the biological sciences.   It could stand as a prime specimen of obvious serial violation of the restriction against inserting ideology into science.   Not to mention fundamentally violating other requirements of science, logic and even the most basic aspects of sensible thought.

II.

Arthur Stanley Eddington said:

The physicist who inveighs against the lack of coherence and the indefiniteness of theological theories, will probably speak not much less harshly of the theories of biology and psychology. They also fail to come up to his standard of methodology. On the other side of him stands an even superior being – the pure mathematician – who has no high opinion of the methods of deduction used in physics, and does not hide his disapproval of the laxity of what is accepted as proof in physical science. 


Life is hard to study.  Organisms are far more complex than inert objects and physical systems, far more than the physics for which Eddington was a major figure of his time and the subject of applied mathematics, in which Eddington was also very highly accomplished.    Even single cell organisms are stunningly complex as compared to most of the non-living  things that physicists study.   Studying cells within a multi-cell organism add layers of added complexity and are not separable from the entire organism and can't be considered apart from it.  The complexities only multiply as a more complete and realistic picture of life is sought.  In order to just be getting on in biology often requires pruning out possible aspects of an enormously complex subject and to treat organisms as more generalized specimens than they are.   An individual organism is, truly, sui generis in many aspects of its life, physical structure, molecular activity, etc.  they are not merely interchangeable with other members of their species, though often studied as such out of practical exigencies, their individuality should never be forgotten.   They change as they live, often in dramatic ways due to different internal and external circumstances.  They do not exist in isolation but are intimately tied to their parents, their habitat and their environment, which are the opposite of simple and static items, either.   There is not a single organism that biology will know comprehensively and exhaustively,  there will always be more about any single organism than what science can tell us about it.  As more is learned about the things that effect organisms, the complexities multiply in knowable and presumably unknowable ways as those factors interact to influence the organism.  When the focus goes from an individual organism to include wider areas of life, the problems of understanding those grow.   My sister-in-law, who is a research biologist, likes to say "Biology isn't rocket science, it's a lot harder than rocket science".  

The complexity of life, which is stunningly obvious - one of Darwin's most famous passages praises the astonishing complexity of life in its environment -  has been one of the things used by creationists to attack the fact of evolution.  Though, the argument over the meaning of complexity doesn't, actually, attack evolution, it attacks the idea that life as it is was the product of random chance,  which  is essential for the atheistic assumptions about evolution and, indeed, all of physical reality.   That idea, ideologically motivated in this case,  could fall tomorrow and the fact of evolution, the stunningly massive amount of evidence supporting it, would still be there to explain.

Anyway, the implication in the argument is that the obvious complexity couldn't just happen by random actions according to chance.   And as the complexity of a result grows the calculation against the chance of that result happening by random actions also grows.   Which might "grate a little on the scientific mind",  but it is a conclusion which clearly has enormous persuasive power and which could be true.  The idea that intention was involved to produce that end might be unpalatable to materialists but it isn't irrational.   The dislike of atheists for an idea isn't a factor in determining its truth  any more than the dislike of non-atheists of other ideas.    Neither is the inability of science to address that possibility.   Science might be able to overturn some of the proposals of creationists within science, it can't touch the idea that the things science can show are the  product of God's intention. The ban on that idea only applies to science due to the exigencies of science, that ban only means that science can't address the idea not that it is proven false by that inability.  That ban doesn't cover any other part of life and human experience.

What is most remarkable in the political struggle surrounding that issue is that scientists fighting that question was never necessary.   Evolutionary science could have held to a strict line of presenting information about what the physical evidence indicated about  life, including that it evolved over billions of years,  without getting involved in extra-scientific brawls.   But history shows that, instead of protecting evolutionary science from becoming entrapped in materialist and atheist ideology,  of  avoiding involving it in an extra-scientific death match, evolution was claimed as a weapon of atheist ideology almost from the beginning, continuing down till today.

You would think that scientists who study evolution would have their hands full without that.   As compared to the ability of all of the scientists who have studied, do study or will study evolution, the topic is one of effectively  infinite complexity.   No  more than a tiny amount of the essential information required to understand evolution will ever be discovered, never mind studied to the extent that the conclusions about it could be rationally considered to be science.   Most of the potential information that was generated in the billions of years of evolving life on Earth is irretrievably lost.   One of the most obvious facts about evolutionary science is that its understanding will never be more than fragmentary.   And that is only in terms of the physical aspects of evolution that are the allowable subject matter of science, of data that can actually be had instead of an artificial substitute for data created out of ideological conjecture.

Questions such as teleology have never been treatable by science, though the habit of seeing things teleologically is so ingrained in human thought that even the most materialistic and atheistic of scientists are constantly presenting ideas such as "transitional species" which are teleological. Transition requires arrival, arrival requires direction. As if every "transitional" organism wasn't, itself, a member of what we would call a "species".   It is always an extinct species when considered this way and always seen as a way station on the road to a successor species or as a dead end.  Those "species", when they existed, the individual organisms that comprised those "species", were ends in themselves unless the concept of teleology is introduced.   There isn't any species alive today that isn't potentially "transitional", all of those which didn't come to a dead end could be considered to be "transitional".    

And teleology was  present, if unadmitted,  from the second that the first conception of evolution thought of the problem in terms of the production of species.   The very concept of evolution was born dancing on the cusp of teleology.  Considering individual organisms as merely parts of a somewhat artificial greater unit which their existence and reproduction serves is introducing a concept of temporal direction into the analysis.   The denial that the direction implies intention is a denial of the history of the subject as well as common sense.   "On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life"  is a title that is saturated by assumptions of teleology and implications of intention*.   Of course science, proper,  can't deal with more than what the physical evidence shows.  It is no accident due to the nature of the first chapter of Genesis that evolution was the subject that would be the major battle ground between science and religion on that basis, alone.  Though denying that the focus of evolution as science more than just runs up against ideas that are extra-scientific is one of the foremost pretenses of its use in materialist propaganda.

 The assertions of those atheists have provided  some of  the greatest opportunities to  biblical fundamentalists in the past 150 years.   Things might have been different if the Galtons and Huxleys and their ideological descendants hadn't used evolution ideologically, using it more dishonestly than it has been used by non-scientists without a professional obligation to observe the basic requirements of science.   When professional scientists violate the same boundaries as creationists why should anyone be surprised that those boundaries lose cultural allegiance?    Most people are not ideological atheists, most people are not true disbelievers.   Bullying assertions of authority by scientists might be effective with nervous people anxious to avoid the ridicule of materialists.  Clearly, most people don't respect that assertion of authority and are less than troubled by the ridicule.

The only reason that science can't deal with the concepts surrounding teleology is that its methods don't enable it to.  If those allowed for it, teleological thinking would be essential to consider in reviewing evidence and so gain a wider view of what is studied.    The rest of human thought isn't so restricted.   There is nothing to keep anyone from believing their  experience and from being persuaded that they see design and intention, in many things.   It would be irrational to deny that those are present if they were persuaded of their existence by their experience.   It is more than merely possible that the insistence on withholding belief merely because science can't account for an idea could lead to a distortion of what is real.  

Science isn't the measure of all of  human experience, it isn't the measure of human life, it isn't even the measure of the entire physical universe.  Science isn't everything, it is a means to an end, providing us with SOME information about what our experience of the universe means, giving us a limited amount of information, albeit of enhanced reliability,  about a limited range of things.  Evolutionary science, as can be seen in the language of evolutionary scientists and their extra-scientific use of it, doesn't stand apart from that wider network of human thought and life.   In nothing has that interaction been more apparent than the ideological use of science by scientists to attack religion  and the acquiescence to that misuse of science among other scientists.  The response is predictable and not a strengthening of the position of science in society.

The lost opportunity of evolutionary scientists is to clean their house of extra-scientific content presented as science and to point out just what the science can and can't show.   It can't do that, though, without reigning in the ambitions of scientists and the fans of science who use science in their ideological war against religion and, inevitably, against the enormous majority of human beings who are religious.   Other ideological use of science, especially when personal interest and ambition is the motive, will be even harder to expunge from the ideally pristine body of science which is asserted to be the goal.  Especially under ideologies that negate the reality of moral obligations.   The obligation to tell the truth rests on an effective belief in metaphysical moral obligations.  The concept of science as a human activity rests on that obligation, it lives or dies by a non-scientific, moral obligation.    You can't even assert that telling the truth about science is essential and so  assert that creationism as science is wrong without that.

By far, the majority of people who accept science, who accept evolution as a fact, are religious believers,  And many if not most of us believe that evolution is the way in which God has created and sustained life on Earth.   I've never read a scientifically inclined atheist who understands that.   Anyone who believes in a Creator believes that the universe AS IT IS, as opposed to how anyone believes it to be, is, in every detail, at every level of resolution,  the intentional product of that creator.    Science can only study that same universe,  it doesn't study some alternative universe that is the exclusive property of atheists.  Every single thing about the universe that science discovers is an aspect of that universe.  When scientists find some exquisitely subtle, molecular aspect of evolution, they are discovering something about the universe that religious believers fully believe in as the product of God.   Religious evolutionists accept what science has found out about evolution and believe it gives us an insight into how creation has happened.   Biblical fundamentalists don't accept it, even as they might accept every other finding of science.  There have been biblical fundamentalists who have had distinguished careers in science, after all.     Fundamentalism, though, isn't essential to religious belief,  most of those who can readily accept the fact of evolution are religious believers who believe that evolution as it happens, happens according to the will of God.   As with the ability of science to comprehend the physical universe, our understanding of God's will  and those intentions is limited and it always will be.  

Ideas asserted to be accurate by science are constantly questioned and rejected for many reasons other than religion.   Ideas such as climate change are attacked because they are inconvenient and unprofitable for petroleum companies who have hired qualified scientists to attack climate change science and to promote a profit motivated pseudo-scientific line.   I have seen none of those scientific hacks expelled from the fraternity of scientists.   Large parts of environmental science have been attacked for similar motives and, these days, as part of right-wing political expediency.   As mentioned early in this post, ideas are constantly attacked within science, by scientists, for reasons of professional interest and, even, because scientists disagree with the findings.   Sometimes the critics of science are proven right,  sometimes they find refuting evidence, sometimes their analyses uncover mistakes and contradictions within what is proposed.   It is one of the conceits of  ideological atheists that that kind of questioning is a virtue other areas of human culture lack as an integrated practice.  They are, of course, wrong about that but it is among the things most often heard about religion, these days.   But when it's a Richard Dawkins or a Jerry Coyne whose ideas are subjected to that skepticism, their enthusiasm for it is considerably diminished. They don't, though, treat that kind of skepticism of science as the unpardonable offense in any other instance than when that skepticism is attributable to religion.   As I said, even when it is an atheist who is criticizing a proposal,  they are accused of covert religiosity, sometimes they are accused of trying to find a "sky hook", one of Daniel Dennett's favorite tactics.   As they convert unselfishness into  covert selfishness, they also convert criticisms of their ideas into veiled religion.


Unless something is done to seriously look at the ideological junking up of biological science and, especially, the very vulnerable science studying evolution,  those difficulties and the public rejection of science will become far harder and will eventually lead to a complete breakdown in public support of science.   I don't think arguments like the one Meyers presented below will do anything to add to the public confidence that scientists are engaged in a non-ideological search for information, not to mention the truth.   The consequences for all of us will be far, far more tragic than it will be for scientists who can't get funding and public school curricula being infiltrated, I hope temporarily,  by pseudo-science.

Further Update:   As the original title, I Still Can't Believe The Driftwood Dodge Didn't Get Smacked Down By Biologists, indicates, I wasn't intending to write a long essay when I began this post but it has turned into one.   I can't say that it is in the form I'd like it to be even after four days of revision.   If you would like to see a display of many of the issues I'm talking about here, just about the perfect one came  on the Chris Hayes Show the day after an early draft of this essay was posted .  The discussion featured Chris Mooney, a journalist who I admire but with whom I have some major disagreements and  Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist who I disagree with about many things as well as his fundamental orientation.    Notice, especially, what happens when John McWorter (with whom I disagree about almost everything),  declaring himself to be an atheist who rejects the idea of an intelligent designer, violates the taboo against mentioning appearances of design in evolution.   Also note the bizarre and appalling part in the discussion when Larry Summers' evidence free, sexist assumption of gender differences in mathematical ability WAS ASSUMED TO BE VALID, simply because what he was asserting had the trappings of science.   Addressing what's wrong with that will take a long post, in itself.

This is a Masterpiece

I'm Coming Home 

The Staple Singers 

Because Cells Are Like Accumulated Driftwood On a Shore

Therefore, No God.

If you might wonder how piles of driftwood  accumulating randomly on a shore and the organization of living, functioning, reproducing cells are supposed to be alike, count yourself among those who aren't privileged to share such Bright insights with P.Z. Myers, atheist blog celebrity.  

I'm not making this up, you know.

P. Z. Myers, I'm no creationist and intelligent design as science is as absurdly asserted as atheist ideology as science is, but  I've got enough respect for coherent, logical argument, not to mention the duty of someone who agrees to give a quasi-academic lecture to ACTUALLY PREPARE A COHERENT, LOGICAL ARGUMENT  instead of throwing a bunch of crap into a Power Point program,  to not say you've presented something less of both than the failed arguments of creationists.

What next?   How a pile of junk lying inert in your office, give or take something getting put on it or falling on the floor, is like really slow metabolism and reproduction?

I'm looking around for the condemnation of other biologists for this and am finding not too much.   In this you can see the danger of substituting atheist ideology for a rigorous separation of ideology and science.   If scientists don't see the danger of this kind of thing becoming the public face of science they are either cowards or ideological dupes.

Aldous Huxley Anticipates The Culture of the Atheist Blogosphere

Remember this the next time someone tells you to 'lighten up' or that you sound .... well, it comes down to sounding too much like an adult.

 At the sound of his voice the Director started into a guilty realization of where he was; shot a glance at Bernard, and averting his eyes, blushed darkly; looked at him again with sudden suspicion and, angrily on his dignity, "Don't imagine," he said, "that I'd had any indecorous relation with the girl. Nothing emotional, nothing long-drawn. It was all perfectly healthy and normal." He handed Bernard the permit. "I really don't know why I bored you with this trivial anecdote." Furious with himself for having given away a discreditable secret, he vented his rage on Bernard. The look in his eyes was now frankly malignant. "And I should like to take this opportunity, Mr. Marx," he went on, "of saying that I'm not at all pleased with the reports I receive of your behaviour outside working hours. You may say that this is not my business. But it is. I have the good name of the Centre to think of. My workers must be above suspicion, particularly those of the highest castes. Alphas are so conditioned that they do not have to be infantile in their emotional behaviour. But that is all the more reason for their making a special effort to conform. lt is their duty to be infantile, even against their inclination. And so, Mr. Marx, I give you fair warning." The Director's voice vibrated with an indignation that had now become wholly righteous and impersonal–was the expression of the disapproval of Society itself. "If ever I hear again of any lapse from a proper standard of infantile decorum, I shall ask for your transference to a Sub-Centre–preferably to Iceland. Good morning." And swivelling round in his chair, he picked up his pen and began to write.

 from: Brave New World 

 of course.

Another Comment

As I have mentioned, I used to overlook the obvious problems that materialism poses for free will, inherent rights, equality, and morality, out of a clearly misplaced hope of leftist solidarity, hoping that the greater good would provide "some new equation" - to steal from Emily Dickenson.  But that was only putting off the problem.

Added to that, the exigencies of preventing a nuclear extinction motivated by the struggle between capitalism and the pseudo-socialist regimes and keeping the United States out of third-world wars to prop up anti-communist despots, as well as giving material to domestic fascists, led to pretending that the results of materialism as a political ideology weren't horrific, massive and clearly visible.

And now, as I read Dawkins, Dennett, Coyne, etc. I see that the moral and political defects of materialism are gaining currency among the pseudo-left and available for the use of those same domestic reactionaries.  There isn't much of a difference between the two.

Well, looking at history just during my lifetime makes me more confident than ever that the metaphysical bases of liberalism are true and essential for survival and a decent life and that those are incompatible with an ideological system that starts off denying that those can be real. The choice to believe in those metaphysical bases informed by experience and history, is a far more rational act than the willful assertion that they are impossible.  Looking at the most thinly veiled nihilism being preached in the last years of the 20th and first years of the 21st centuries,  the refusal to take the lessons of recent history is one of the most irrational, selfish and irresponsible acts possible among an alleged intelligentsia.

I'm a gay, socialist leveler.  I will not acquiesce to a shoddy, threadbare, pseudo-scientific ideology that denies the superior information from the real world about human societies and life that history provides,  on behalf of scientistic hubris.  It is an entirely irrational act to deny that information consisting of piles of bodies, lakes of blood and hundreds of millions of enslaved and degraded lives.

On Quoting Richard Lewontin

Someone has asked me why I so often quote the geneticist Richard Lewontin in my arguments, noting that he's a professed materialist who has written a some things I can be assumed to disagree with.

The reason is that I know that if Lewontin has said something relevant to what I'm discussing it be fully informed, rigorously thought out, honesty addressed and well said.   Despite whatever ideological differences I have with him,  Richard Lewontin is always worth reading and considering.

Arnold Schoenberg Ode To Napoleon

Points Made In a Blog War Earlier Today

I assume when people say they believe people are merely material objects, that there is no free will, that there are no inherent rights, that there is no divine spark in people, when they either elaborate or endorse ideological systems that have no room for those metaphysical holdings that make human beings more than just objects and when their subsequent acts treat people like objects that those acts were the result of their stated beliefs.  That is especially true when they claim the status of science for those beliefs, denying they are beliefs but claiming they are reliably known.

What evidence is there that professed Christians who kill people and rob the poor are motivated by the words of Jesus and his closest followers, who taught against doing those things?  There is every reason to accuse "christians" who do those things of failing to follow the teachings of a man they claim to believe is God. There is no reason to accuse materialists who treat people like objects,  to use or kill them of failing to treat people like material objects.

-----


The choice of voting is a matter of predicting behavior, at least when considered rationally. You think that I should take a chance that people who say that people are merely objects and that free will, inherent rights, are delusions etc. don't really mean it and won't act out of that often vigorously held position. I'd guess they'd have a reason for saying what they did and it was among the best predictive factors in guessing what their behavior will be.

And I expect some religious believers really have a reason for saying what they do, perhaps even those who have a very hard time consistently overcoming their selfishness and that they're at least as likely to have their belief influence their future behavior as materialists are. My guess is that believing there is are divinely ordered moral laws with real consequences against selfish behavior is probably more likely to produce good behavior than believing that there is no such reason to not be selfish.

Stella Chiweshe: The Speech

Caught In The Sealed Maze of Materialism

Ever since I first found out how capitalism worked, seeing how it institutionalized greed and exploitation, I've been a socialist.   That would be a socialist, not a Marxist.   And, due to the utter confusion of the term "socialist" I've got to point out I'm definitely not a Fabian*.   I'm a socialist who believes that the workers should own the means of production and that that ownership should never be allowed to leave the hands of the workers who use those means to produce what is produced.   My friend at my former blog pointed out that my socialism was more in line with some branches of anarchism, though I'm anything but an anarchist.   As I mentioned, neither am I a Marxist.   And here, just for fun, I'll mention that Marx declared he wasn't a Marxist either.   Howard Zinn's guess at why he said that sounds plausible to me.

This morning, following up links on lefty blogs, I came to this rather dismal post  at Lenin's Tomb giving a wonderfully baroque exposition of why ideology is a material substance.   If you want to peruse it in all its tortured citations and reasoning, go ahead.   I doubt you'll profit from it, you'd probably get more of use from picking through the dry bones of the Abhidhamma  on some esoteric  point of Buddhist dogma more profitably gotten from some simple statement of the Dharmapada.   It's absolutely nothing.  I wouldn't insult the Golden Rule by involving it in a hands down comparison in its favor on the basis of the observation of actual life as compared to the vanity of  ideological romance. 

Here's the comment I left there after reading through it.  

If this is true, there isn't any difference between one ideology and another, they're merely different products of different chance factors of material causation.  There isn't even any reason to adopt one over the other because whatever decision is made is merely another product of material causation.   You may as well be a Republican-fascist as anything else.   Even the idea that your conclusion carries anything like truth or is anything like an objective picture of material reality is illusory.   

Why would you think your conclusions could escape the materialist substrate that you conclude your ideological opponents are a victim of?   No, that's silly, if your materialist ideology is the product of your peculiar line of causation, as you say your opponents' ideologies are, its being materialist isn't any reason to assume it's any more accurate.  Materialist ideologies aren't uniform and there wouldn't be any way to judge one as being more realistic than another one.

You've only sealed up any escape from a maze with no center and no goal.   There isn't any more reason to live in that one than there is to spend your life playing a video game.    I'd rather take a chance on your materialism being an academic delusion, even if what you're saying has some chance of being true. 

* Fabianism is a rich snob's idea of "socialism" from above, preserving upper class belief in their own virtue and the depravity of the poor.   It's among the more putrid uses of the word.   I'd be in favor of coming up with a different word to name my kind of socialism but that's not in my hands. 

Giving Excuses To Alcoholics As They Destroy Themselves

One of my brothers drank himself to death last year,  he'd had a long and horrible history of alcoholism and he was under treatment for almost the entire time.   His was the second disastrous experience my immediate family had with the mental health industry,  he had sought what he believed was the scientific route of treatment, psychiatry, psychology.    Obviously, it was entirely ineffective as he died.   Being a good atheist he rejected AA as being religious.   In the last several months of his life, as he sank farther into chronic drunkenness and his life was falling apart, I looked in vain for one of the alleged non-religious alternatives to AA only to find that, as so many of the "Humanist" anti-religious help groups, it was a Potemkin false front.    I found a grand total of one "contact person" listed in my state with no contact information given.   That was in contrast to well over a dozen AA groups, some of them reportedly quite secular, within easy driving distance of his home.  But, as I said, being a good atheist he rejected each and every attempt we made to help him find a group compatible with his credo.

Alcoholism, being a topic of pressing interest to me and having, by then, had quite a bit of experience with how horrible and encompassing a disease it was,  I got involved in several arguments about it on some leftish political blogs.   I heard all the same lines about AA that I heard coming out of my brother's mouth and more.  That it was "statistically" no better than doing nothing, that it was a religious cult, that it blah, blah, blah.    The greatest accomplishment of the "Humanist" -atheist  party line on AA seems to be to have provided people with a horrible, self-destructive addiction which is extremely difficult to recover from a series of excuses to not try to stop.   Oh, and there were assertions about the alleged atheist alternatives.   I think I might have asked for some evidence that those really existed at one point,  I don't recall any evidence given.    Last year also being the year when Ken Burn's "Prohibition" was shown on PBS,  I outraged a number of people by saying that the worst thing about prohibition was that it didn't work.   Just in passing, it's so funny to find out how easy it is to say the forbidden among the self-appointed "free thinkers".

I have to confess that my experience of last year has influenced my thinking that pop-atheism is anything but a force for good in the culture.  There is a reason that in 2012 you find atheists congratulating themselves on beginning to form charitable groups of the kind that religious people have organized for thousands of years.   I won't, though, be holding my breath to find out if they develop into anything more than the phony shell that the atheist alternative to AA has been.   I doubt it.

Life Isn't A Machine It Is Not Book Keeping It Isn't A Circus Act

Note:  This was first posted at my first blog on September 3, 2006.  It is reposted here as a commentary on NPR's new discovery of reporting.

As used in the context of politics and social life, “balance” is a very strange word. It’s an even stranger virtue. The assumption that finding a balance is the same thing as being correct is part of the automatic standard operating settings of our country. It is one that is accepted without question.

The “balance” fetish sees society and politics as if they are a revolving machine that will fly apart if some kind of mystical governor doesn’t keep things in a state of equilibrium. While this is, I contend, just more of the absurd habit of seeing all of life in terms of mechanics there isn’t any reason to think about public life in those terms. It is an unthinking response that has some dangerous political consequences. What “balances” democracy, equality, freedom? You can balance many things but you can’t balance reality.

The most important political use of this “balance” comes in the context of news reporting and the parasitic limpets attached to it, opinion “journalism”. In that context something called balance has replaced the reporting of facts*. It used to be that a reporter was required to get two independent sources to verify the truth of what their primary source had said. Now, instead, they just have to get a second opinion and that opinion doesn’t even have to present facts in refutation, it just needs to refute. The excuse is that the “reader will get to decide who is right”. Well, I’m very sorry to have to say that I’ve decided that is a lie, a cheat and a fraud entered into for reasons of laziness, cowardice, economy and ideology.

The function of good journalism is to present verified facts that a reader or listener can reasonably rely on at least contingently. A reporter has to do their job well enough to go past the point of presenting a false dichotomy which the reader then chooses a side to be on. This wasn’t always done honestly but it used to be done a heck of a lot more often than it is now. It’s not an unimportant matter, the news is a lot more earthshaking than presenting a choice between clear or cream soups.

The excuse that the “reader gets to decide” is fundamentally dishonest. Presumably a reporter will know a lot more than the readers will even after reading the results of their work. Not even an unusually long report will have enough information for someone to form an opinion. But that question shouldn’t even enter into the business of reporting the news. The reporter is the one who gets to decide but news decisions can’t be a matter of pro or con, it’s a decision about what is supported by the facts as they have it in their power to discover them. If the reporter fails in that task it is up to the editor to decide that they haven’t got the goods yet.

I first started noticing this kind of phony balancing act back in the 70s in response to the already years long effort by conservatives to destroy journalism. It was a cowardly capitulation to an organized effort to paint an objective media as liberal.** The media began by “balancing” their straight news reporting with stuff from the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution, The Heritage Foundation, and the Cato whatever. Have you noticed much in the way of ‘balance’ in the direction of the left, that is other than the typically soggy Milquetoast from the likes of the Brookings Institution? And we see today that the usual panel of talking heads on TV has one or more obvious right-wing representatives to “balance” one reporter.

With this decay of real reporting there has been the rise in several levels of “opinion” journalism, complete with excuses within the profession for why they are exempt from accurately presenting facts or even telling the truth. Analysis, op-ed, focus, feature columnist, right down to the lowest of the low, the pundit; the presentation of opinion by these entirely biased and interested parties is almost certainly cheaper than supporting a reporter through the difficult and expensive task of trying to uncover hard news. It is certainly more certain what the point of view expressed will be.

A democracy can withstand wars, depressions, insurrections, plagues and many other calamities, it cannot withstand the ignorance of the People. It cannot exist if a majority of its people believes that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and so the invasion was justified. It cannot stand if the majority of people know more about what goes on in Hollywood than inside the government. It is a measure of the failure of our news that Americans, with the most elaborate media structure in the history of the species are inadequately informed on issues they need to know in order to govern themselves.

I don’t believe in a right to be ignorant but like all opinion what I think doesn’t matter. But unless someone can find an alternative explanation I’ll have to believe that if people choose ignorance they will always lose their rights. People who are ignorant are unable to resist those who would manipulate them and exploit them, even without an effort to impose a dictatorship, they will likely stumble into one. Similarly, if the media chooses to pander to the least common denominator, if they seduce the population with infotanement for their corporate interests they don’t exist as a free press. A free press is always in danger of having the exercise of its freedom taken away from it. If they only report corporate propaganda they will find, in the fullness of time, that they are not allowed to do anything else. A free press is fully dependent on an informed and free electorate. Our media hasn’t given up free speech with a gag but with a simper.

* There is another aspect of this avoidance of news reporting posted at my first blog.

** A couple of years ago there was a letter in the Boston Globe, I believe in response to a story about David Horowitz’ McCarthy style efforts against college teachers. It was the most succinct and sensible answer I have ever seen to these charges. The letter said that College teachers tend to be liberals because they read a lot.