Just passing through

Tired and lazy tonight, so no proper post, but I’ve been working on various alternative medicine themed rants for the Skeptictionary, because that’s the sort of mood I’ve been in lately. My hit count’s been climbing quite impressively lately, so hello to my many new fans. Feel free to chat amongst yourselves whenever I go quiet like this.

Also, it’s been interesting to note some of the search terms that have brought people here. Among the most notable this past week: “gay”, “sex gay”, “scientists rape attractively dressed women”, and “kent hovind 2009″. I hope you all found what you were looking for.

Homosexuals are gay

Are there any homophobic atheists out there?

Almost certainly quite a few, but the skeptical/atheist community does tend to be predominantly tolerant, progressive, and queer-friendly, at least in my experience. But I’m not going to ponder the possible reasons for that now.

I’m not trying to start a typical discussion about gay rights here. I’m not, at this point, going to blather on about why I think what I think, the importance of tolerance and progressivism, and all that. I just have a question.

First, though, maybe it is worth reiterating the obvious points to be made, and explicitly adding my voice to those in support of the people who need supporting in this issue. (That’s was pretty much the point of my last post, after all.) But I imagine most of the people likely to read this are already in agreement on a lot of things.

I think things like sexual attraction, romantic attraction, lust, and love, deserve to be acknowledged as complex, intricate, often confusing phenomena, and insisting that one particular narrow band within these experiences is the one and only “correct” way to be is unconscionably out of touch with reality.

I think gay people should be allowed to marry each other and raise families in exactly the same way that straight people are, with every single legal right and financial benefit that comes with it. (Also that what churches choose to recognise should be an entirely separate issue from what the state chooses to recognise.)

I think “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is bullshit.

I think we’ve all still got a lot of growing up to do, but we’re well on the way to reaching a general level of understanding and tolerance such that, in a few decades, discrimination against same-sex relationships and inter-racial relationships will be looked back on with equal repugnance and confusion.

I want to make all that as clear as I can, because… well, I have this question. It’s not something I remember ever hearing anyone on this side of the debate express any curiosity about; it’s unnervingly similar to what some of the people I completely disagree with have sometimes asked; and I really don’t want it to seem like I’m trying to make the same rhetorical, intolerant point as they are. But here goes:

When did it become the case that everyone who’s not actively in favour of gay marriage is a bigoted homophobe?

Does that seem to have snuck up on anybody else? Just in the last few years, it seems that we’ve been the enlightened, liberal, progressive, tolerant ones – and they have all been homophobic, bigoted, and generally driven by hate.

But this is a very new thing. For centuries of western civilisation, it’s been a given that marriage is a one man, one woman deal. It was also a given that homosexuality was aberrant and abnormal – and you probably didn’t really need to hate anybody to believe this, it was such a default setting. The idea of two guys getting married to each other would have sounded as silly and contradictory as letting squirrels vote, or serving chocolate cake with gravy. It really can’t have occurred to many people to actively oppose it. (I know there have been pre-now cultures with very different views on same-sex relationships than I’m describing here, but this isn’t about them.)

And even once the gay rights movement started gathering steam, and people started demanding the right to hold hands in public with whomever they liked without being harassed for it, my understanding is that there wasn’t generally much emphasis on marriage. Maybe they were just taking one step at a time, and were aiming for wider recognition as simply being fellow human beings first, before going for anything so ambitious. But even while people were coming around to the idea that gays are people too, and shouldn’t be reviled for it, and can have perfectly functional relationships just as well as anyone… I don’t think they were spending much time thinking about letting them marry each other. I could just be wrong, but I think for a lot of years it just didn’t get much play. Sure, they’re fine, don’t have a problem with ‘em, great people, some of my best friends, etc. But… they want to do what now?

To reiterate, I love my dead gay son friends. I think we’re definitely heading in the right direction. I’m glad to see the distinctions between straight and gay marriage shrinking toward zero, which is where I think things are headed. I just think there are more reasons not to be in favour of a particular kind of social change than a spiteful, vicious, hostile desire to keep those damn fags in their place. That’s not a fair or useful way to characterise everyone on the other side.

And I think it trivialises words like “bigot” if you use them as a blanket term for absolutely everybody who’s not with you on this.

Some of the Founding Fathers of the USA famously (or notoriously) owned slaves. A number of black people belonged to them, as property. We can now feel justified in calling this pretty seriously messed up, but it does a severe injustice to some great men if you conflate modern racism with the mindset of Thomas Jefferson.

But then, however different the societal norms of his time, he did own some black people. You could argue that Jefferson was prejudiced and bigoted, along with everyone throughout history who’s ever been against any kind of inclusive tolerance which we now consider reasonable. By that measure, we might be bigoted against all kinds of things that we don’t even realise, and the truth about our cruel prejudices will only be revealed centuries down the line, when everyone takes squirrel suffrage for granted and wonders how we could ever have been so callous as to deny it.

Well, maybe, but I think we can cut our species some slack for needing some time to come to terms with these new ideas.

Or perhaps it was reasonable back then for people to believe the discriminatory things they did, but now those same beliefs are unacceptable, because we’ve moved on so far and we all ought to have learned better by now. Perhaps society has changed so that, a hundred years ago, you didn’t have to be a homophobe to think gays should be stoned to death, or a racist to think black people should be whipped until they did what they’re told – but now, some elusive and ephemeral quality of “society” has brought the bar of bigotry down much lower. And although we can get away with denying rodents a say in the democratic process today, in the 22nd century that might just be beyond the pale.

I’ve started being sarcastic about that idea without even really noticing, which is usually a sign that I’m not convinced by it.

So maybe the other option is that the gay rights movement, wonderful and important though its achievements have been, and noble its aims, sometimes goes a little too far in demonising the people it’s theoretically trying to win over. Is there a chance that I sorta kinda have a point there? Or am I only offending everybody and demeaning the kind of intolerance gay people have had to face with my retarded squirrel analogy?

Oh, Xenu’s scrotum. I was in the middle of writing this when @badjournalism on Twitter alerted me to this Daily Mail story, which is full of points disturbingly similar to mine, but which is so wrong about so many things that it makes me want to disassociate myself from everything I’ve just said. But that really doesn’t seem right. I don’t want to avoid saying something because I’m worried it might make me sound like I’m saying something very different from what I intended to. That just means I need to choose my words carefully and make sure my actual point doesn’t get lost or obscured.

I’m all worded out for now, though, so I think I’ll just have to hope that I’ve done a good enough job so far.

That’s probably enough sexual politics for now. Tomorrow I’ll try and get back to something more directly in keeping with the themes of this blog, like all those sightings of Michael Jackson’s ghost. Actually, hang on, I think I can actually do that one quickly now:

You people are idiots.

Ah, that’s better.

New research indicates rape may be harmful, claim scientists

I know. Controversial, right? Well, let’s hope not.

Ben Goldacre recently wrote a piece for the Guardian (also on his site, Bad Science) about some preliminary research into “men’s attitudes towards coercing women into sex”, and how much misinformation, misunderstanding, and flat-out bullshit made it into the Telegraph’s reporting on the subject.

Now, I’m not going to talk here about the media’s inability to report on science competently. Ben’s got that covered. What I want to say is something which has been said often before, just never by me. And something makes me want to go on record with this thought, rather than just silently agreeing when other people say it.

First, I’m going to try playing devil’s advocate, to as great an extent as I think is reasonable. And I’m going to try really, really hard not to say anything that makes me sound like an insensitive, stupid, or sexist ass at any point, but I’ll be impressed if I can make it all the way through with a totally clean sweep on my first try. Please point out wherever I may fail in this effort.

It may be the case that, of women who dress to make themselves look more attractive, such as by wearing revealing clothing, a greater proportion end up being sexually assaulted, than of women who dress more conservatively. I haven’t looked into the numbers in any detail, and this has absolutely no connection with the study cited in the article, and although it might seem “intuitively” to make sense to some people it might not even be at all true – but it is possible that this may happen to be a true fact about sexual assault.

If it is true, then it may follow that there exist some women, who have been sexually assaulted while wearing comparatively revealing clothing, who would not have been assaulted had they been dressed more conservatively at the time.

There might exist women in such a position – who deliberately made themselves look attractive and were then assaulted – who believe that they might have avoided being assaulted if they had dressed more conservatively. They might have later told themselves something like, “I wish I hadn’t gone out dressed like that; then I wouldn’t have been attacked.”

If the initial assumption about the statistics is really correct, and proportionally more women are sexually assaulted while dressed revealingly, then it may be true, in some circumstances, that advising women to dress more conservatively would reduce the incidence of sexual assault, and result in fewer women becoming the victims of such an attack.

These are all things which I think it is technically accurate to say, with the given assumptions.

But having conceded all that, I think that all of it is utterly beside the point. Unless you’re making a very different and probably terrible point. Or at least, if not utterly beside the point, it’s all dwarfed into near total irrelevance by one very important thing to be remembered before any of this.

The very important thing to be remembered is:

You shouldn’t be fucking raping people whatever the fuck they’re fucking wearing.

See? That really wasn’t controversial at all, was it? I mean, that goes without saying.

The thing is, whenever people claim that a certain fact “goes without saying”, it’s usually right before they say it. In principle, it means that the fact is so obvious that it doesn’t need to be pointed out. But this isn’t the first time that I’ve seen this topic brought up and the ensuing discussion has involved questions about why women dress “provocatively” in the first place, about what they should “expect” if they go out like that, about how they can sometimes “lead men on” and make them think something’s going to happen, and so forth. And the thing that really ought to go without saying tends to go completely unsaid.

It’s not that there’s no room at all for nuance or subtlety to any debate about sexual interaction. Of course there is. Some of it gets very complicated – but, y’know, some of it’s really, really simple. And something as simple and obvious as the fact that you never, ever get to have sex with someone who doesn’t explicitly want you to often seems to get pushed to one side during these discussions, for the sake of the supposedly more nuanced stuff. Stop pushing it to one side. It really needs to remain front and centre.

It’s certainly more important than any statistics. Statistically you’re also a lot more likely to be punched in the face by me if you talk about rape as though it’s ever in some way the victim’s fault. But it would still be a violent act which I flat-out should not do (even though in this case I would argue that it’s a lot less clear-cut).

And whenever you try to make some more subtle point – like about whether it’s helpful or appropriate to offer advice on how women might dress to decrease their chances of being assaulted – if you’re not always reiterating that nobody ever deserves to get fucking raped no matter how the goddamn hell they want to dress or act, then you’re likely to sound like an ass. Your well thought out, insightful arguments are going to boil down to “If women don’t want to be raped then they shouldn’t dress like whores”. And that’s profoundly fucked up.

Aaaand that’s what I think about rape. Yay. Feel free to pick me up on any wrongness or inadvertent jackassery, but if we’re going to discuss this in the comments, let’s all be very careful when choosing our words. And even more careful when choosing the ideas we want to express with those words. ‘Kay?

Play your gods right

My pun muscles are letting me down if that’s the best I can come up with. The New Humanist’s “Zeal or no Zeal?” is perfect, and there must be other religion/game-show wordplay possibilities out there. I’ll keep trying.

The point is, people in Turkey are going to be trying to convert some atheists on a TV panel show, by the clever application of flawless logic and the careful presentation of substantial evidence to support their beliefs. Well, probably not. I don’t know how they’re going to try doing it (though I haven’t actually looked any further than this article, so maybe there’s more info out there). But it seems like a weird idea.

I mean, a game-show format implies that it’s going to take place over the course of an hour or so, in a studio somewhere. Which sounds like a curious setting for a soul-shattering revelation. Can a decision like this really be settled that quickly? Are they expecting really useful conclusions to be reached in between commercial breaks? Maybe once they’re done with the TV show, we ought to send this team over to the Middle East, to clear up some of the uncertainties and loose ends that have been bothering them there for the past few centuries.

I wonder if there’s a lightning round. “Okay, heathens, fingers on buzzers. You will have sixty seconds to be convinced of the absolute truth on one of these subjects: the transubstantiation of the host wafer, the divinity of Muhammad’s revelation, or that only through Nirvana can true peace of mind and freedom from suffering by attained. You may confer. Unfounded claims and fallacious reasoning are permitted. Your time starts… now!”

Although it doesn’t look like they’re using this as a selling point at all, there’s also an extra layer of gambling built in – obviously not all the faiths the contestants might be converted to can be true, so if they get the wrong one they’re risking eternal damnation by angering the real god. It’s like you finally open the box in front of you, but instead of £250,000, it contains a horde of demons to drag you down to the pits of Hell.

They’re playing to win a holiday, too. Well, they call it a “pilgrimage”, but come on. “Mecca for Muslims, Jerusalem for Christians and Jews, and Tibet for Buddhists.” I wonder how many of the potential converts would admit to being swayed more by the prospect of where they’ll have to take a trip, than by the actual arguments made in support of the religions.

Given that the criteria for counting the show as a “win” seem to boil down to “Were they an atheist at the beginning?” and “Are they a Christian/Muslim/Jew/Buddhist at the end?”… well, I have two fairly obvious questions:

1. How will you know? and
2. How will you know?

I’m an atheist, but I’d abandon my unfaith and worship whatever god you care to name if it gets me a free flight. Hell, I’d do it for a Klondike bar, and I don’t even know what one of those is. I’ve heard of them, and apparently people often perform unlikely feats to acquire them, and if pushed I’d guess there’s chocolate involved, but I’ve no idea whether I’d even like it. And yet, I’m hungry, so hail Thor. That’s how unprincipled I am.

We’re told: “Converts will be monitored to ensure their religious transformation is genuine and not simply a ruse to gain a free foreign trip.” Well, I can’t imagine anyone finding a cunning scheme to work around that kind of security.

And as for how the godless prove themselves as such beforehand: “An eight-strong commission of theologians will assess the atheist credentials of would-be contestants”. Wait, we have credentials? Am I supposed to have been sent a welcome pack with a badge and some papers notarised by Richard Dawkins? How is this assessment going to work? I don’t think atheism shows up on any medical screenings you can do. It’s not something you can disinfect.

Maybe they go through something like the Blasphemy Challenge… but then what if they end up genuinely converting to Christianity?

“I deny the Holy Spirit.” *half an hour later* “…Oh, fuck, I’m screwed.”

The name of the show is “Penitents Compete”. I’m not sure exactly how perfectly nuanced a translation that is from the Turkish, but a “penitent”, according to dictionary.com, is characteristed by “feeling or expressing sorrow for sin or wrongdoing and disposed to atonement and amendment”. Now, maybe in Turkey this is a fair assessment of the state of the godless community, but it doesn’t describe many atheists I know. We don’t seem to be a typically sorrowful bunch. What are they supposed to be penitent about? If you don’t believe that God exists, who is there to atone to? Maybe it’s more that they’re competing to become penitent, because it only kicks in once you’ve realised how abhorrent your previous existence was before you accepted Jesus/Yahweh/Allah/Xenu/whoever.

Anyway, that’s about all I got. Not sure why this particular subject provoked me to such lengthy sounding off, but hey, words are good.

But the string theory was disappointingly scant

So last night I went to the latest of Robin Ince’s science-themed, rationalist, comedy and music shows, A Night of 400 Billion Stars (And Maybe Some String Theory). Here are some scattered thoughts about it, loosely strung together in a way that can’t really be called a “review”.

Robin Ince is still utterly superb. The many hours of sleep he hadn’t got over the last couple of days since Glastonbury didn’t seem to slow him down at all, although I’m pretty sure he did introduce the show at the very start as “A Night of 40 Billion Stars”, which might have meant we were being short-changed on an unprecedentedly vast scale. (Seriously, that’s 360,000,000,000 massive balls of roiling nuclear energy which were on the bill but weren’t provided. If that doesn’t merit a partial refund, I don’t know what does.)

The music was pretty consistently good, I thought. None of it spectacular, but a nice mix of stuff. I spent much of this morning muttering “Schnapps… Schnapps…” and feeling haunted by Martin White’s scary eyes. Darren Hayman was fun too, and Gavin Osborn, though I’ll probably have forgotten their names and what they were singing about fairly soon.

The comedy was what mainly made it worthwhile, though, with most of the great stuff coming from the young female performers (and not just because I’m a young male comediphile). I don’t remember seeing Josie Long’s name on the bill, so she was a lovely surprise. Lucy Porter was as adorable as ever, and completely won at life both for a Tycho Brahe / Michael Jackson joke, and for a poem which was almost certainly the most lyrically awesome thing to happen to the periodic table since Tom Lehrer. Someone I didn’t know, and whose name I’ve just had to look up to find out that it’s Helen Keen, was a lot of fun to listen to talking about her list of favourite rocket scientists throughout history. Something about her style of speaking was a little reminiscent of Boris Johnson, which in my book (but possibly not everybody else’s) = awesome.

And, speaking of odd celebrity comparisons which are probably as undeserved as they are unflattering: Christina Martin (her wot invented the God Trumps card game that Robin Ince played with someone from the audience who’d brought her own deck along) is also fab, and I don’t want to say anything derogatory about her because she’s really nice and very funny and a splendiferous force for good in the world, but this is supposed to be about recording the thoughts I had about stuff, so I’m going to say it anyway. Something about her reminded me somewhat of a Catherine Tate character. Not any particular one, just generally. There’s not really anything to it, just something in her style of delivery happened to prod my brain into making that connection. My flatmate looked at me like I was a freak when I suggested it, though, so it’s almost certainly just a quirk of my oddness than anything she needs to worry about. Sorry, Christina. You’re much funnier than her. I’m subscribing to the New Humanist right now. Please don’t block me on Twitter.

The only quibble of any import that I had was about the odd chunk of recycled material. Robin Ince barrels along with all his material at such a rate, and straddles the divide between being funny and scientifically informative so expertly, that it hardly matters, but there were a few lines I’d heard before at the godless show at Christmas (or possibly his stand-up gig more recently), and the closing extract from Feynman’s book was the same one as had closed the previous show. You have to know that a fair slice of your audience are going to be return visitors like me, who’ve seen the last show already, right?

And Simon Singh’s always great to hear speaking, but I’d been assuming that we’d get to hear something about the BCA case, as that’s what’s extremely topical in his life right now. I know there’s only so much that he’s at liberty to talk about, but some sort of update or summary of thoughts might have been good, of the type that he’s been giving in some of the interviews he’s done lately. (I didn’t manage to attend his recent appearance at Skeptics in the Pub, and kinda want to know exactly what I missed.) He’s still fun to see, but anyone who was there at the Christmas show doesn’t really need to revisit the Katie Melua story again, especially when there’s spine wizards to be mocked (a task mostly left up to Robin, and which he took to with his usual gusto).

He did get his gherkin out, though. I couldn’t see it when it went orange, because the podium was in the way, but I’m told it was an impressive sight.

Faith of the faithless

Let’s own up to a dark and terrible truth.

We atheists all know that we have just as much faith in unproven superstitions as the religious people we so gleefully despise. I mean, secretly, we’re all well aware that our beloved “science” is just another way of seeing the world, dependent on at least as much blind belief as, say, fundamentalist Christianity, and that evolution is a religion just like any other, with Darwin as our god. Right? That’s why we worship him and never question anything he ever said or did, right?

We like to bill ourselves as the skeptical, rational, faithless ones, just because our convictions are always tentatively held based on the current state of the competing theories and subject to change in light of new observations. But come on, we’re among friends here. We don’t need to keep this ludicrous pretence up all the time.

But I was wondering: Since our position is really one of at least as much blind faith as your average god-botherer, what would a position genuinely devoid of any faith actually look like?

Most religious believers will proudly claim faith as a virtue, after all, and wear their disregard for measurable truth and empirical reality as a badge of honour. But any traditional scientific mindset is just as faith-based – or so we’re often told by these same religious types (and who would know better?). Does this mean that everyone alive has to have some sort of faith in something? Must every opinion ever held by a human brain be on this same level of unprovability? Does belief in anything, or the holding of any conviction, on any subject, necessitate an equally religious approach?

Or is it actually possible to be truly faith-free, and look on life without ever making that leap, leaving aside for now the issue of whether this would actually be a good thing?

This is a question for any faithful who make this argument, rather than actual skeptics, obviously. Despite my little rhetorical device up there, which you may have noticed my attempting to use for comic effect a few paragraphs ago, faith is entirely antithetical to what we call our scientific, skeptical worldview. But the true believers do stop by here from time to time, so maybe someone will care to explain this. If scientific understanding is based on faith just as much as your religion, what would an outlook that really doesn’t have any faith at all look like? Are there people out there who approach the world in this way? Would it be possible for them to ever know anything, or form any kind of views on the truth?

Many people would say that this is called “science” – but is science something different, and intrinsically faith-based in the way it’s set up? Or could science potentially be this faithless worldview I’m talking about, if all those silly scientists would stop espousing positions that so obviously require you to just “believe” in them, like evolution, for which nobody has ever published reams and reams of evidence?

Or, if we tried to take a faith-free approach to everything, would we find ourselves stuck in some sort of limbo, where nothing can ever be known, understood, or even talked about coherently? Are we really left with no choice but to apply a faithy outlook constantly, one way or another, if we ever want anything to mean anything? This seems weird to me, but if you can explain how it’s reconciled with whatever your concept of faith is, I’d love to hear it. (It also brings up the usual questions of how you can judge your own kind of faith to be superior to any other, but that’s a long-awaited rant that I’ll get back to working on another time.)

Feeding the trolls

Today, instead of being particularly original, I responded to a couple of comments on my post about Kent Hovind from a while back. Well, I was bored. So, here are my responses in full, because I’m unlikely to come up with anything else of substance to post here today. (You might want to read this comment and this one for the context.)

---

Okay, I’m having a dull afternoon, so I’ll bite. Let’s do this thing.

Some dude:

1. Paragraph breaks and syntax are your friends. Run-on sentences obscure your point. If I can’t understand what you’re saying, I can’t even decide whether I disagree with you, let alone how to defend whatever you might be disagreeing about.

2. “…your evolution theory says that everything created itself…” – No it doesn’t. It says that the variety of living organisms we see in the world can best be explained as the result of compounded variations in replicating entities on which selective pressures have been acting over billions of years, and it says it with a great deal more detail and nuance. But I wouldn’t be surprised if you don’t understand the difference.

3. “I think before your claim is any good to me, you should be standing in front of one of those stalactites and stalagmites like he is so it sounds like you know what your talking about…” – I can put on an impressive white lab coat as well, if what will impress you is flashy gimmicks, and you’d prefer a meaningless sense of authority to actual data. What possible difference does it make to the truth or falsehood of what I’m saying, whether the ground next to me is pointy while I’m saying it? If my facts are right, they’re right; if they’re wrong, they’re wrong. I’m not a geologist who’s spent years studying stalactite formation. Neither is Hovind, and I’m guessing neither are you. If you want to make an actual coherent assertion regarding any kinds of rock formations, and the implications of your observations and conclusions on evolutionary theory, go ahead. So far you’re just calling people fools a lot.

4. “How long would it take for lightning to strike some amino acids and begin to form them into this complex shape we call a watch?” – Seriously? You’re still going with William Paley? How can you have no idea what a bad analogy that is to the incremental processes of natural selection?

5. “It should sound pretty stupid in your mind! If it doesn’t, there is nothing anyone can do for you because God intends to kill you.” – Wow, that came out of nowhere. Remind me where in the Bible it states specifically that God will kill anyone who fails to be impressed by the watchmaker analogy as an argument from design?

6. “…but you made the best argument that evolution is retarded when you said: “No one has ever claimed the money.”” – If you put stuff in quotes like that, the implication is that you’re repeating an exact phrase that was used. When that’s not the case, like here, you look like either a liar or an idiot. Given the point you’re trying to make, the idiot option is much more likely. No one has ever claimed the money (see, now you can quote me on that) because Hovind’s criteria are entirely unreasonable and show a complete lack of understanding of the scientific process. This, as you seem to have somehow missed, was the entire point of my article. Saying that this shows up a flaw in evolution would be like me claiming that all religion is obviously bullshit because I’ve been trying to get a personal interview with God for this site for weeks now and still nobody’s making it happen. It’s just not a realistic thing to demand as “proof”.

7. “…I already know God so your efforts to convert me will fail.” – I’m really not trying to convert you. You’re almost certainly right that there’s no hope for you. I’m just talking about some science.

Blah blah blah, bored of this guy now.

creationist_always:

1. “…people call this man a wack job, nut, crazy, Ect… And why is he all of these things? Just because he has a different view than some?” – Ugh. No, it’s not just because he has a “different view”, it’s because he appears to be profoundly detached from reality. Kent Hovind is not Galileo. Sometimes when people hold steadfastly to a position that differs from the mainstream, they’re groundbreaking geniuses whose insight will be lauded in years to come. Sometimes they’re just loons who get locked up because they think they’re Napoleon. I call Hovind a nut because he’s a nut. He’s deeply wrong about many things, and he’s had them explained to him often enough that simple ignorance no longer works as an excuse.

2. “…the people who are toughing the stones have a THEORY of what they think happened…” – You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. Also… “toughing” the stones? Whuh? Even as a misspelling of “throughing”, that’s comically bad.

3. “NEITHER CAN BE PROVED!!!” – You have no idea what “proved” means either. Prove to me right now that George Washington ever existed. Or that the country of Finland isn’t just a hoax. I’m guessing you’ve never seen either with your own eyes – by your reasoning, doesn’t that totally preclude any knowledge of it? If you’ve never been into space and watched the Earth orbiting the Sun, do you have any reason to believe that that’s what happens? Gould’s famous line is that a “fact” in science means anything “confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent”. Some things are supported by so much evidence that whining about how nobody saw it happen and you can’t really prove anything is meaningless.

4. “Now the first 4 may not have to do anything with evolution of “humans”, but don’t humans need…” – Yeah, this whole bit completely misses the point as well. The “Theory of Evolution” concerns the variations that emerge among replicating entities under selective pressures. It has nothing to do with the formation of stars and so forth. Now, it’s true that evolution couldn’t happen without the context in which these entities could replicate – in our case, a planet of a certain type orbiting around a star – but all that is an entirely different field of study. It’s like expecting a psychologist to be an expert on the chemical properties of water, on the grounds that you can’t very well analyse somebody’s mental state if they’ve died of thirst.

5. “And the first 4 are purely faith based. Not a single person was around to see any of that happen. So if you can’t prove it…” – Dude, what the hell do you think scientists do all day? Do you picture them sitting round, kicking their heels, making up random elaborate stories about whatever takes their fancy, and concluding “Well, we’ll never really know anything, it’s as good as any guess we’re ever likely to make, might as well stick it in the textbooks”? You’re really saying that because nobody was watching the formation of our galaxy, nobody can ever say anything more meaningful than a random guess about what was going on? Here’s an experiment you can try at home. Next time you have a meal, see if you can guess what went into it when it was being made. Maybe there’ll be some cream-coloured, fluffy, potato-tasting stuff, and you’ll conclude that, sometime in the past, a starchy tuberous crop was harvested, transported, cleaned, cooked, mashed, and prepared for consumption. You didn’t see any of that going on, but you may be quite happy to assume that it happened. Are you taking it all entirely on faith? Or, shockingly, might you have stumbled upon a process by which we can actually find out things about the past by looking at stuff in the present?

Also, if both sides are faith-based, how come your faith is right and the scientists’ faith is wrong? On what grounds do you decide that? Remember, you’re not allowed to use any evidence or empirical data, otherwise it’s not faith any more.

6. “Kent Hovind is a good man and was wrongfully put in prison.” – AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Hahahahaha. Hahaha. Oh, I needed that. He lied about his income and cheated on his taxes, you deluded chump. Thank you, creationist_always: I was getting all uptight and frustrated there, but then you gave me a genuinely good laugh, and a great opportunity to use the word ‘chump’, which is something I don’t get to do often enough. Much appreciated.

Look at me, I’m being skeptically activisty!

The following is an email I’ve just sent to the Daily Telegraph. They posted this article on their website today, which Ben Goldacre alerted me to on Twitter earlier, and it inspired me to another rant about what rubbish homeopathy is. Quite possibly it’s all rather petty and pointless, but I’ve decided I’m going to try and err on the side of over-eager zealotry for a while, when it comes to skeptical activism, at least until I get better at it.

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Dear Sirs, Madams, and so forth,

I’m writing about the article posted in the Health section of the Telegraph website today, the 22nd June 2009, titled: “Annabel Croft: Why I have come to rely on homeopathic medicine”. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/wellbeing/5576901/Annabel-Croft-Why-I-have-come-to-rely-on-homeopathic-medicine.html)

I think Frances Glover has done the Telegraph’s readership a substantial disservice in her portrayal of homeopathy in this piece. I won’t get into how newsworthy it may or may not be, that someone who used to play tennis has expressed a view about a thing – I like hearing celebrities gab on about whatever inconsequential thoughts happen to be passing through their heads as much as anyone. But this article became little more than an advertisement for a selection of products which, although marketed as health treatments, have a track record of showing absolutely no pharmacological benefit whatever.

Ms Croft’s basis for recommending homeopathy seems to be entirely one of personal anecdote, but this is a notoriously unreliable way of distinguishing genuinely useful medicines from bogus ones. It may have seemed to her at the time that the progression of events – pain from the cyst, taking the homeopathic remedy, and relief from the pain – was proof of a causative link, and provided a demonstration of the power of the remedy, but we simply can’t establish such facts with any certainty from such a limited data sample.

Ovarian cysts are surprisingly common, and pain does not typically last very long anyway (http://www.emedicinehealth.com/ovarian_cysts/article_em.htm has more information). It is entirely possible that Ms Croft’s condition may have been of a sort which would have got better over time anyway.

Because we can’t go back in time, and see what actually would have happened if she had made a different choice, we can never know for sure. But what we can do is run large clinical trials, in which hundreds or thousands of patients are given homeopathic treatments, and their results are compared against hundreds or thousands of other patients with similar backgrounds, who are given a placebo remedy – pure water, for instance, or a sugar pill. These trials can rule out any alternative explanation for the rate of recovery, and are far more effective at establishing whether a treatment actually works, or whether it just happened to be taken by a patient who was getting better anyway.

Rigorous clinical trials of homeopathy have repeatedly failed to find any evidence that it has any effect beyond that of a placebo. This isn’t to say it has no effect at all – people may often benefit from the reassurance, comfort, and attention provided in a homeopathic consultation, as the practitioner may be able to provide a longer and more personal session than a GP, which can itself do some good. But decades of scientific study shows that people taking homeopathic solvents might as well be taking nothing but water.

In fact, they generally *are* taking nothing but water. The article states that the active ingredient is “diluted down to microscopic quantities”, but this is usually not the case. The solvents are more commonly diluted to such an extent that there does not exist even a single particle of the active ingredient in the final solution. Rather, it is claimed that the water retains a “memory” of the particular ingredient which it once contained. It’s never been explained how this could be possible, given our modern understanding of the laws of physics. Given such an implausible basis, the evidence would have to be overwhelming before we should give this idea credence. It is not; the evidence consistently implies that homeopathy has no effect beyond a placebo.

Many of the uses Ms Croft describes are exactly the sort of thing where a psychological effect might be enough – if you really believe you’re taking something that will calm your nerves, you may find yourself actually calming down – or where people will often recover in good time anyway, and may be tempted to attribute this to the homeopathic treatment. Children get minor colds and sniffles all the time, and tend to get over them pretty quickly – it’s very easy to decide after the fact that a particular intervention is what made it happen. This kind of subjective, amateur assessment can often provide misleading conclusions; when it comes to giving advice on people’s health, we need to take particular care in testing a theory before accepting and promoting it.

The whole article takes a tone which isn’t just reporting facts, but gives homeopathy a strong and unequivocal endorsement, in a way which really concerns me. Anecdotal evidence is offered as conclusive proof, and the purchase of various types of treatment from specific vendors is actively recommended in the final paragraphs. It seems irresponsible to encourage people to invest their time and money in “remedies” which have been demonstrated not to work, and to sing the praises of a strategy which involves deciding to actively avoid consulting a GP (someone with actual medical qualifications). People reading articles like this may well assume that there is sound data behind these treatments, and good reason to believe they actually work; it’s not obvious at all from the way they’re discussed here that the evidence suggesting that they’re any good at all is non-existent.

You have my compliments on running an often fine newspaper, but this was a disappointingly slack piece of journalism. I hope I don’t have to see too many more stories in the news about uninformed people off the telly grandly espousing inane positions which could easily be refuted by a few basic facts if you asked anyone who actually knew what they were talking about.

Regards,

Me

P.S. Gosh, I sounded rather bitchy and smug towards the end there, on reflection. Sorry about that – it’s almost certainly nothing personal at you, dear reader, wherever on the hierarchy of newspapering you happen to be – but this does bother me, and I had to say something in support of skepticism, critical thinking, and science-based medicine.

What if you only had a trillion years?

This isn’t an argument I’ve seen put forward anywhere before, so it’s possible I’m having one of my more original moments here. I’ve written before about the idea that only a god, or an eternal afterlife, or something of that ilk, can give life any meaning or purpose, and why I think it’s bollocks. But here’s a way of looking at it which I only recently thought to consider.

To recap briefly and coarsely the position I’m taking a stand against: “What’s the point in anything if we’re all just going to die and rot in the ground?” My actual answer to that is in the above-linked article. Here, I’m going to look at it another way.

Suppose, for now, that there is an afterlife. Imagine that all humanity are possessed of souls, spiritual elements of our being which survive bodily death and pass on to a higher plane, where there awaits us all a true, blissful Eden of utter contentment and gloriously divine holy commune with Vishnu himself. Or whatever. However lovely you could hope for your choice of afterlife to be, it’s that with knobs on. Heaven. Sweet.

Only, imagine it’s not quite eternal.

Okay, as a mathematician I can’t use a meaningless phrase like “not quite eternal” without wincing – something can’t be just a bit less than infinity – but suppose that the soul itself has a finite life-span, and will eventually die. It’s just that it’s a really, really long life-span. Say, a trillion years. Or, better, a trillion trillion trillion. That’s, like, loads. (See, I really am a mathematician.)

So, after you die, your soul lives on for more time than you can possibly conceive. You could live a million natural lifetimes, and a hundred million more, see the entire universe through every moment of its existence so far, watch countless millions of stars explode and die, burn up and fizzle out, over billions of years… and still, after all this time of ecstasy and delightenment, of utter heavenly fulfilment and rapture, you’ve made barely the lightest hint of a shadow of a sliver of a dent in your allotted time. Not a microscopic fraction of a percent of a trillionth of a percent of your afterlife is done. To within any reasonable level of accuracy, you still have absolutely everything to look forward to – and still will do a further trillion years of bliss from now. And so on, and so on, lofty rhetoric, yadda yadda.

But at the end of all that, you will die. Again. For real this time. Your near-immortal spirit gets snuffed out, your soul ceases to be. No after-afterlife. No post-postscript. Annihilation. Nullity. Although you have all this fun for many orders of magnitude more time than it’s possible for the human mind to fathom, there will come a day when it all stops. Eventually, total oblivion is your unavoidable fate.

So. Is it all still completely pointless?

One way of looking at it is that all the complaints about the miserable hopelessness of an atheistic worldview still apply. We’ll all be super-dead someday, with nothing of us remaining. It seems unthinkable that the existence of a conscious soul could just stop. There’s no ultimate, eternal accountability, so why worry about anything you do now, in this temporary state of being?

But this seems silly. If you can’t find enough opportunities to make your afterlife worth living throughout 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years in Heaven, then frankly you’re beyond pity. Is there anyone who could really go through all that and still not be satisfied, not content with what they’ve been given, insist that it’s pointless and not fair unless there’s somewhere else to go onto next, and somewhere else after that, and somewhere else after that, or they get to stay here for ever and ever and ever, like some four-year-old throwing a tantrum and insisting that they want more ice cream and they’re never going to go to bed?

Well, probably. There’s no pleasing some people. But it does seem like a ridiculous position to take. You get more years than you could even count to in a trillion years, and which you could treat like eternity – it’d be indistinguishable from it for virtually the entire time. I’d say it’s a pretty sweet deal. I can’t see it realistically being deemed an utterly pointless and bleak existence.

The only alternative is that an existence can have a purpose, can be meaningful and worthwhile and fulfilling in itself, without needing to be completely endless. The fact that it all stops one day doesn’t make this impossible. Because it’s good, now, during the time you do get, and that’s enough.

And then it’s just a matter of arguing the numbers. If value can be found in a squillion years in Heaven (for any finite value of “squillion”), but not in a life-time on this planet, then I say you’re just not trying hard enough.

So, what does anyone think? Am I making sense? Is this at all convincing? Is it well trodden ground already? Enquiring minds want to know. (And low-rate bloggers wouldn’t mind the traffic.)

And don’t you forget it

New Skeptictionary post due up tomorrow.