30 November, 2007

The intermittent return of Glory

And such sweet sorrows it brings. Updating will probably be very irregular - how a good year between posts is not irregular is anyone's guess.

So, agnosticism - fence sitting, stealth atheism, weak atheism, non position, and so forth. As mentioned previously - and rather long ago - there are many different definitions of agnosticism, as there is of atheism, making explanations referring to atheism frequently recursive or problematic. The Religious Tolerance page on the subject delightfully and perhaps unwittingly elaborates just how tremendously unhelpful such dilution and broadening of the concept has been.

The term was coined sometime before 1869 by none of ther than T.H. Huxley - Charles Darwin's 'bulldog'; defender of evolution from the dark, whiffy forces of antiknowledge, and one of the first people to outright argue one of the most entertainingly offensive corollaries of common descent - that humans were themselves descendents of ape-like organisms. Brilliant, anticipatory, loving, compassionate - he is raved about here, and I command you to go, go, to better give the lad mad props, what.

Huxley had a rather vituperous and long-lived disdain for dogma of all varieties, but he was careful to avoid charges of being an infidel publicly and to present his views in a frequently sympathetic light - while in letters, and with not a bit of humour, revelled in the fools he was making out of numerous opponents. At the same time his wit and his defenses were frequently barbed and extensively devastating. Dear Huxley was a real life troll.

Privately he acknowledged he was technically an atheist - he did not believe in a personal, interested God, rejecting the idea thoroughly - whilst still having a problem with the atheism of the day:

I have never had the least sympathy with the a priori reasons against orthodoxy, and I have by nature and disposition the greatest possible antipathy to all the atheistic and infidel school.

Such disdain was in part due to the importance Huxley placed on methodology over faith: that is to say, how one comes to his conclusions was of utmost importance to Huxley, seemingly to a much greater extent than the actual positions that man held; unthinking, close-minded doctrine was bigotry in the hands of the atheist as much as in the hands of the theist. He wrote repeatedly against the doctrine of philisophical materialism on such grounds, and extended the argument to suggest that science and religion were complementary:

The great deeds of philosophers have been less the fruit of their intellect, than of the direction of that intellect by an eminently religious tone of mind. Truth has yielded herself rather to their patience, their love, their single-heartedness, and their self-denial, than to their logical acumen.

And all the reformations in religion–all the steps by which the creeds you hold have been brought to that comparative purity and truth in which you justly glory–have been due essentially to the growth of the scientific spirit, to the ever-increasing confidence of the intellect in itself–and its incessantly repeated refusals to bow down blindly to what it had discovered to be mere idols, any more.

It is above all things needful for you, working men, to note these truths. For with the limited time, and the limited means for study at your disposal, you run the risk of flying to one of two extremes–bigoted orthodoxy, or conceited scepticism.

These ideas are expanded and frequently returned to in subsequent essays and speeches, as Huxley developed an argument not entirely unlike Gould's 'nonoverlapping magisteria': science was pre-eminent at unravelling the mysteries of the natural world, while religion was relegated to ethical matters, matters distinct from 'the intellect'. He argued that when religion - specifically, theology - abandoned science in its understanding of the world it became false, bizarre and irrational. The spirit, the self-discipline and the values of religion guide, drive and enthuse the skeptic, but the scientific method best reveals the world around us, was the most honest and useful system by which personal belief should be developed. His arguments against antiscientific dogma are already quite stringent, and he notes that while 'no honest man can, for one moment, reconcile the plain teachings of geology with the statements contained in the book of Genesis' he warns against the desire to 'treat with foolish ridicule the book which the true man of science will ever hold in the highest respect, as containing the noblest and the clearest exposition of human rights and human duties extant.' All somewhat Thomas Jefferson.

And I'm rather in disagreement with the idea that the Bible is a particularly moral book (see, for instance, these joys); his understanding of what he terms 'religion' is also left somewhat ambiguous - one suspects with some intention, as he was an extremely savvy fellow; his essays and speeches also established his recognition of the scientific value of automatism - the notion that man and beast was best viewed as biological and intricate but ultimately mechanical and understandable structures, contributing strongly to the methodological naturalism which Darwin and Lyell had set in motion. Nonetheless, the immense value he placed in the Bible for its morality was consistently held throughout his life.

Huxley believed himself ignorant about purpose in the universe, he was questioning about the nature and purpose of man, the nature of God, the reality of miracles and other, wide ranging potential phenomena, and 'agnosticism' described the state his own lack of rigorously derived knowledge and understanding of such matters. His understanding of what agnosticism meant is somewhat stricter than it is popularly understood today:

Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates; as old as the writer who said, "Try all things, hold fast by that which is good" it is the foundation of the Reformation, which simply illustrated the axiom that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him; it is the great principle of Descartes; it is the fundamental axiom of modern science. Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him.
-Source

The modern idea of agnostic theists or agnostic atheists was quite alien to Huxley's conceptualisation: he stated flatly that 'Agnosticism [...] simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe.' Which leaves us with a bit of an issue - popularly, ' agnostic' is regarded as the idea that God is unknown or unknowable; that this is the central tenet, as revealed in descriptivist dictionaries (The American Heritage Dictionary, for instance, would rule out Huxley himself from being agnostic). And yet the idea that unproven, faith-based belief of all varieties is to be rejected is far more critical to Huxley. while he rejected dogmatic skepticism he propounded an accurate, honest and perhaps the most definitively skeptical methodology of all.

It was the dishonesty, the authoritative presumption which he rejected in theology, which he rejected in the strong atheist, and it's somewhat bizarre for self-identifying agnostics to embrace so warmly such cognitive dissonance. While an agnostic may hold, based on their current scientific understanding, that it is unknowable - or perhaps simply unknown - whether God exists, as Bertrand Russell points out it follows that 'an agnostic does not believe in God' - theism and atheism would not be beliefs reached through reason; therefore they simply would not be agnostic. We do not know if there is a God, therefore we cannot and should not believe there is or is not one. Our beliefs and sense of ethics are best informed by what we know, by what we have strictly tested and tried to disprove, rather than what we hope or guess to be the case.



The best chops of any thinking man


-Schmitt.

posted by The Reverend Schmitt., FCD. @ 11:16 AM 3 comments links to this post

19 May, 2006

SCIENCE!

Hello, friends! My computer at unviersity exploded - a rather unfortunate circumstance and one which meant I ended up ignoring this poor, flailing blog even more than usual. I should really have prepared an entry for what is turning out to be a somewhat wet return; instead I figured I'd do some vaguely and annoyingly introspective post about my rehabilitation, in the hope that inspiration strikes without my having to write about badgers or penises.

When I was little I collected a huge volume of books about aliens, UFOs, ghosts, leylines, British folklore, Loch Ness, religious miracles and the like. I used to love the most outlandish explanations, particularly those which suggested alternative histories and that seemed to prove the profound limitations, even marked falsity, of science. It used to boggle my mind completely that scientists - a blank faced hegemony - refused to believe the reality so patent infront of their eyes, a reality ludicrously and obsessively avoided to protect some paltry belief about the world, which I was led to believe embodied the entirety of science.

Then I started reading the actual perspective afforded by scientific investigation - not the straw man version of conflicting power struggles and ideologies presented in credulous books of paranormal phenomena - and found it absolutely astonishing how reasonable and tentative, yet predicated about the evidence that their conclusions often were. The sheer volume of evidence for the supernatural nature of many phenomena seemed to melt away before the fires of reason; the omissions of subtance in so many of those books was extraordinary. While the evidence for any of the range of phenomena occasionally described as paranormal seemed broad, it was extremely shallow - that is to say there was a lot of it, but almost always it was dribble.

At the same time I was beginning to better understand the nature of science - as a self correcting tool to develop models of ever increasing accuracy of the phenomena about us; a science which is limited, but which draws its strength from those very same limitations. Many phenomena which I think could be possible, although distinctly unlikely - such as alien visitation, psychic powers and ghosts - could be revealed through scientific investigation and therefore be perfectly natural, if indeed they exist at all.

When I first approach a subject I try to have an open mind about it. Science may well one day be replaced by a superior epistemology, but nature has yet to show it to be archaic and defunct - and thus I demand the rigorous standards of science for any unusual explanation, particularly those which seemingly contradict already existing models. While having an open mind, it is utterly pointless to ignore the vast bulk of evidence when considering a position held in the minority within a given academic field.

If I don't understand a subject or an explanation, or lack the time or interest to find out more, I tend to tentatively accept the mainstream scientific explanation. If this is the case I try not to engage in discussions or debates about it - economics and psychiatry, for example, are well beyond my understanding. Remembering my own experiences and regarding the limitations of my knowledge I can well understand the scoffing disdain many people feel towards certain scientific fields, if not science itself. I occasionally feel the same way about psychiatry and economics - because I do not often know what mainstream opinion is, how tentatively a given view is held within that field's community, and my view of them both are gifted purely through media diktat.

I've heard the same story from the scientists I know - a few physicists, bioloigsts and linguists, and it's an issue often raised by a number of science bloggers - Dr Myers of Pharyngula and Orac of Respectful Insolence stick in my mind particularly as having addressed this a number of times, and The Two Percent Company - one of my absolute favourite blogs - has commented on how comedians, even ones we like, often denigrate science. The impression of science held by many people is often muddled by media representations. Almost universally it is explained in terms of politics; as a battle of rhetoric and posturing. I know that to an extremely significant degree this is exactly where my own skepticism of psychiatry and economics comes from, exacerbated powerfully by my own ignorance.

In the media, the genuine significance of research is often hampered in a journalist's or editor's need to make some political point; the most polarised opinions of scientific (and indeed, often nonscientific) authorities are given voice grossly disproportionate to their actual importance in a field, and science is painted as just so many guesses tenaciously clung to and often contradicted laughably, even predictably by some startling discovery which common sense should have revealed decades ago. This in contrast to real science: yes, there are people like that, and that has actually happened, but generally it is a series of ever increasingly accurate yet generally tentatively held models, which are healthily discussed and kept significantly honest by the actions of other scientists with other opinions approaching and gathering the evidence - always so heartily incomplete - from other perspectives, vehemently trying to disprove both themselves and each other. Some questions have been settled, yet in the act of solving one problem far more questions are always opened to us, and our knowledge is ever increasing even as we better realise how little we know.

Skepticism is important and vital if we wish to develop understanding. Science is the very act of a scholar trying rigorously to dethrone their own ideas and conceptions - in other words, I feel strongly that science is the best tool of a skeptic today. A scientist is fallible; the scientific community is fallible - and science is the best way to limit that fallibility. As I say, it may one day be replaced - I do not know. But that day does not seem to be soon.

-The Rev. Schmitt.

posted by The Reverend Schmitt., FCD. @ 10:32 PM 11 comments links to this post

20 April, 2006

Thank Heavens My God Hates You Too

I'm at home, and my critically slow internet connection combined with my passionate desire to be lazy means that I thought I'd pounce on a story which didn't require much research.

Hm! Quotations from this article unless otherwise noted.

Ruth Malhotra went to court last month for the right to be intolerant.

Malhotra says her Christian faith compels her to speak out against homosexuality. But the Georgia Institute of Technology, where she's a senior, bans speech that puts down others because of their sexual orientation.


To start with my favourite fallacy, the tu quoque. Obviously Ms Malhotra's own inconsistency doesn't matter one jot to the wider issues involved, but this defender of religious freedom distinguishes herself as an outspoken critic of religious freedom, supporting the Academic Bill of Rights - which is either so weak as to be redundant, or as student Alex Suarez suggests in the nique.net article '[is] a good movement so long as it doesn’t devolve into a witch hunt for the professors on either end.' There is obviously little evidence that David Horowitz is on a political witch hunt for professors, which somewhat mitigates this concern. Ms Malhotra's citation of it, however, seems to fall in the latter category - seemingly to stifle a professor for holding views she disagreed with and arguing in favour of those views in class.

Ms Malhotra also seems to believe that while universities should be forced by law to allow all religiously inspired beliefs to be expressed...

"If gays want to be tolerated, they should knock off the political propaganda," the letter said.


...homosexuals should shut their damn dirty mouths and stop striving for - well, anything at all. Beleaguered demographics unjustly discriminated against for their exceptionally minor or irrelevent qualities sitting on their haunches expecting the magical, spontaneous proliferation of equality was certainly an effective tactic for ethnic minorities and women, but would it work for homosexuals? We may never know; homosexuals seem to have a perverse, almost determined need to be heard in the public square - imagine the cheek! Many of the buggers aren't even religious.

To the meat: I am exceptionally amused by the idea that a critical principle of many peoples' religious belief genuinely seems to be the crushing need to insult homosexuals and conduct lawsuits doomed to failure. That being said, I'm of two minds regarding this, though I'll try to force myself to come to an opinion. I would rather such ideas be discussed publicly: the best way to battle prejudice and arguments devoid of reason is to confront them openly and freely. Doing so allows their utter vacuity to be exposed - although this instance of Bad Idea is unfortunately religiously based, and religion often seems to remove the need to provide reasonable content for an argument. Allowing the debate to be conducted openly also removes the development of a martyr complex - stripping a critical strategic tool from the arsenal of antihomosexuals as well as being the right thing to do; free speech is meaningless if offensive or ridiculous ideas are forbidden. The university, as the gentle cusping hands of academia, would seem the perfect place for such beliefs to have their straps carefully unclipped; for the coverage of ignorance to be removed and the heaving bosom of religion to be expressed, analysed, and roughly slapped around by people who are less silly.

However, it's clearly wrong that individuals should feel harassed while attending a university, going to work, or otherwise trying to live their bloody lives. Corporations, universities, government employers, etc., may well feel the need to protect their wee charges from harassment by fellow students and colleagues - and to a significant extent, quite rightly too. Striking the balance between a comfortable and safe working environment and individual expression of belief is a tricky customer, and I think narrow attacks on fellow individuals and groups attending one's university - be it for their sexuality, religion, politics or ethnicity - are a different kettle of fish to criticising, in this instance, homosexuality itself. The article is somewhat unclear about the exact terms of the Georgia Institute of Technology's policies, and GIT's (teehee!) site is an absolute pain to try and navigate on a modem connection. The comment by GIT's spokesperson strongly suggests that there's little or nothing I disagree with concerning its policy:

A Georgia Tech spokeswoman would not comment on the lawsuit or on Malhotra's disciplinary record, but she said the university encouraged students to debate freely, "as long as they're not promoting violence or harassing anyone."


Regardless, Ms Malhotra's condemnation of the university's Pride group, and lambasting students coming out of the closet, easily crosses that line.

 -The Rev. Schmitt.

posted by The Reverend Schmitt., FCD. @ 5:24 AM 0 comments links to this post

24 March, 2006

Libertas et natale solum.

Copy from one, it's plagiarism; copy from two, it's research.



-The Rev. Schmitt.

posted by The Reverend Schmitt., FCD. @ 11:41 PM 0 comments links to this post

10 March, 2006

I'm Pretty Certain I Owe Thanks To Someone For The Sullivan Article.

A quick gander at the Internet before I do some more detailed entries:

THE BBC prints, hot on the heels of the most ironic article ever, an article entitled Can Acupuncture beat Addiction? The BBC's conclusion: yes. Mystery solved!

It is 'nothing new', 'based on ancient Chinese medicine dating back thousands of years', helps with something very sciencey called 'detoxification' and two nonscientists say things. With this kind of evidence no counterargument needs to be presented, which is fortunate because the Beeb doesn't try.

It would have been irresponsible, surely, to point out that most double blinded clinical studies have failed to show a significant effect greater than placebo – if any - or that its theoretical framework is very silly, as it would bias the choices of rational people against such a treatment; further it would demand a rigorous set of standards for acupuncture that no other alternative medicine lives up to.

ANDREW SULLIVAN quotes...well, probably himself:

What the Islamic world has succeeded in doing is forcing me to decide whether I'm going to side with a US policy which I think is often dirty but is nevertheless open to public scrutiny or an almost medieval, bloodthirsty and closed religious dogma whose intention - and partial achievement - is to undermine my way of life.


Jesus aside, I find little as spiritually fulfilling as a blatantly false dichotomy; the exception perhaps being clearly ludicrously false claims.

Of course Mr Diet et Mon Droit's policy – the one which isn't mediaeval - isn't 'open to public scrutiny' at all. The State Department only recently 'briefly' looked at the States' human rights abuses after intense criticism. The Pentagon has only recently released the names of 300 of its over 500 detainees at Guantanamo Bay after the Associated Press went swinging in with a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit; a helpful reminder that the public don't know anything about hundreds of people the US has detained (though we know that some are citizens of allied countries, that many have been released after it was decided they weren't the 'worst of the worst' after all, and a few children who have reached adulthood in detention,) the reasons it has detained them, the state of the facilities in which it detains them, what crimes (if any) they have commited, their legal rights (just kidding! They're allowed one sorta right!) Then there's the secret CIA prisons and extraordinary rendition, which result in the unknown treatment and secret detention of an unknown number of prisoners. By no means last nor least, domestic wiretapping wasn't exactly public knowledge until it was leaked (a bit of transparency the Justice Department is trying, bless its heart, to rectify.)

The British media and Government are, yet again, behaving in the same appeasing way towards Muslim fundamentalism in our own country


Indeed; the gaoling of extremist cleric Abu Hamza is intended to throw us off the sheer and unmitigated tolerance for Muslim extremism this country embraces. As is the widespread condemnation of the London protests and calls for arrests, or the thousands strong demonstration in London which dwarfed the earlier, nasty one with the jolly placards, which condemned both the cartoons and the reactions of extremists.

THE HUFFINGTON POST is a bit rubbish, really.

WILLIAM DEMBSKI learns of selective breeding, and is amazed.

Ah, but I am being unkind; there is a legitimate controversy here! To present both sides: his commenters seem unable to decide whether he is making an unfunny nonjoke about the already-satirical use of the terms 'intelligent design' in an experiment which just happens to demonstrate the usefulness and predictive power of evolutionary theory, or whether he genuinely did not realise that scientists may have heard about artificial selection, esteemed scientist that he is.

-The Rev. Schmitt.

posted by The Reverend Schmitt., FCD. @ 2:10 AM 1 comments links to this post

06 March, 2006

A Crash Course In Irony

Posted without comment.

Oh, alright: my biggest regret with this article is that I will not get to see Ben Goldacre's face when he reads it.

-The Rev. Schmitt.

posted by The Reverend Schmitt., FCD. @ 1:49 AM 2 comments links to this post

21 February, 2006

And Now: A Touch of Class

In the interests of promoting a clean, high-brow primness to proceedings: a photodiary of peoples' first introduction to the phenomenon known as Goatse. Only mildly amusing, until you recognise one of the photographed:





-The Rev. Schmitt.

posted by The Reverend Schmitt., FCD. @ 11:03 PM 2 comments links to this post