We consider ourselves atheists and scientists, of course

no, PZ, just because the cartoonist stated it, does not make it true.

Excellent, nice Don Quixote reference. Its sort of like that one cartoon, stating if we give equal time to everything, should we be teaching astrology instead of astronomy, phrenology instead of psychology, alchemy instead of chemistry, and humorism and bloodletting as an alternative to modern medicine.

As another bitter irony, I once mentioned the chemistry example to a creationist. Their response, "what's the difference".

As I post this, the tally is one "TILT" so far.

I'd rather just ask them if we need to teach the controversy on alchemy vs. chemistry, the heliocentric theory, or the germ theory.

@1, Sorry, on second reading I can more charitably interpret your comment as consoling PZ that he'll still have a full dance card, even if he is agiantist. I do picture the word "TILT" flashing on far too many folks' foreheads when I hear them burble effusively about the way they imagine the world to be.

Oh PZ, you are my Dulcinea.

You can come to mine, but then I don't have many parties for a similar reason...

You'll always be welcome at my parties, PeeZed. Pity I don't have any.

This party might also be happy to have you.

"no, PZ, just because the cartoonist stated it, does not make it true."

But it probably is :(

Maybe we should hang out, though.

I'm never going to get to go to parties anymore, am I?

Now I know why my social calendar is so empty.

I never get invited to that type of party - and I don't miss them at all. I'd rather go to somebody's house, drink cheap beer and watch and laugh at horror movies.
It's a lot more fun!

Let me just comment that Partially Clips is awesomely bent.

Another good response is to ask them whether or not we should give equal time to teaching the Holocaust and Holocaust denialism.

Dr. Myers, if you can get to Albuquerque by 7pm (Mountain Time), I'm putting on a delicious Indian feast. Stop on by for Avial, Muttar Paneer, Bhajis, Nan, and all sorts of other loveliness.

I'll save a seat for you.

This windmill was clearly designed. The "evil giant" interpretation is obviously a rationalist justification. It's just a giant, and god made it, and it's good.
Or do you think "giants" and "windmills" just evolved, on their own, by chance, like the circles that you find, in the windmills of your mind?
Heh. That told 'em.

"Dr. Myers, if you can get to Albuquerque by 7pm (Mountain Time), I'm putting on a delicious Indian feast. Stop on by for Avial, Muttar Paneer, Bhajis, Nan, and all sorts of other loveliness.

I'll save a seat for you."

Mmmmm, mind if my wife and I come on by?

If you're a member of the last group and a reasonably attractive woman, you still get invited to parties. Unfortunately, you get accused of being shrill or bitchy almost the instant you open your mouth, especially when it has been established that you're not there to sleep with anyone.

Big parties are over-rated anyway.I get invited to both and say this without bitterness: I prefer elitist dinner parties - the food, the conversation and the wine-fueled after party sex are all better.

I often wonder if Jonathan Wells is a giant windmill or an evil gasbag.

Oh yeah? How do you explain evil dwarfs and pygmy windmills then, huh?

How do you explain evil dwarfs and pygmy windmills then, huh?

A nice giant was upset he hadn't been invited to any parties. He was distracted, and wasn't looking where he was going. Woosh! Instant drawf collection. A very angry ex-giant. From there it was only a small step into evil…

Dwarves, of course, can attack the bigger windmills (like the one that did in the giant) with ease. They don't even have to duck. Faced with this threat to their existance, windmills rapidly evolved a smaller model good at making dwarf pâté.

I think that this could be cleared up to a remarkable degree--or at least the argument would get a lot more interesting--if all us reality-based types simply made the following proposal to the creationist cretins and IDiots:

If you are asking for schools to "teach the controversy," go to your church and convince your pastor and Sunday school teachers to teach the same controversy. Once they agree to give equal time to Biblical creationism and Darwinian evolution, come back to the school board meeting and ask again.

See what happens then.

And in medicine, we must teach the Hindu cow-urine theory... brought to you by The Digital Cuttlefish: "Urine for a Big Surprise!"

Skeptics and scientists, please!

If they want to "teach the controversy", they should require schools first teach how science handles "controversy" as a methodology, rather than as an anthropological practice. Similarly, if they want to discuss "strengths and weaknesses", they first need to make sure the curriculum has taught beforehand how science formally measures "strength/weakness": the Description Length Induction of the hypothesis.

On an unrelated note, it appears Virginia's Science Standards are up for review this year. Given that Liberty University is based in Lynchburg, this may bear poking at. (Disclaimer: I'm currently a Virginia resident.)

Dr. Mildred Watson: You're just like Don Quixote. You think that everything is always something else.
Justin Playfair: Well, he had a point. 'Course he carried it a bit too far. He thought that every windmill was a giant. That's insane. But, thinking that they might be, well... All the best minds used to think the world was flat. But what if it isn't? It might be round. And bread mold might be medicine. If we never looked at things and thought of what might be, why we'd all still be out there in the tall grass with the apes.
[from the film They Might Be Giants]

(Of course, we have evidence of the things he mentions. Not really much evidence for giants. Except of course for PYGMIES AND DWARVES!!1!)

Meanwhile, how are we to distinguish between windmills and giants? No doubt someone will come along and tell us to first study giantology before saying that there are probably no giants. Now stop worrying and go find Dulcinea.

Dr. Myers,
You are a professor, who works on a campus in a college town in the middle of nothing... Throw some A's around, and you'll be up to your ballsack in parties and keggers (which I would NEVER catergorize together)

This cartoon reminds of some of those arguments for God which try to use Bayesian and other statistical methods of analysis to arrive at probabilities that God does -- nor does not -- exist. The worst begin along the lines of "Okay, before we begin looking at evidence pro or con, we start out with a totally neutral stance of either God exists, or it doesn't -- so that makes the basic starting odds of God's existence 50:50."

I have a dice. Either I will roll a 6, or I will not. Thus, for any dice, the odds of my rolling a 6 will always be 50:50.

I'm no mathematician, but don't think that works.

"Have you ever gotten sucked into one of those endless "Teach the controversy!" or "You're afraid to look at both sides" kinds of arguments?"

Yep. Got one going right now on the Gotelli thread. Long on "both sides" and persecution whining, short on actual support for their side.

Where do these atheistic science parties happen and how does one get invited?

Well Biologista, sometimes you have to start them yourself... I'm part of a freethought group in my city and tonight I'm hosting a viewing of Religulous... should be fun ;)

(Of course, we have evidence of the things he mentions. Not really much evidence for giants. Except of course for PYGMIES AND DWARVES!!1!)

Meanwhile, how are we to distinguish between windmills and giants? No doubt someone will come along and tell us to first study giantology before saying that there are probably no giants.

But there were giants in the past. Of course, they were not human giants.

People would find the femur or scapula or patella or tooth of a fossil elephant or rhino or girrafe, and say "Wow! This must be a hero's bone! Or one of the titans or giants killed by the gods! They sure did grow big in the past. But we're all small now. We all done shrunk!"

I'm advocating The First Fossil Hunters, here, as containing explanations of how certain ideas of a mythic past were given credence by the discovery of things in the natural world. Would people have ever come up with the idea of giant humans/humanoids if giant fossil bones had never been discovered?

With apologies to Gordon Lightfoot, PZ, and Cuttlefish...

Reaching for his holding tank, he drops a purple squid from his hand
And taking time from science labs, he shouts across the Internet once more
'Til his fingers are so sore

"I come from the town of Morris, nicest place you'll ever see
I spread knowledge to the students in a university
I fight ignorance and hatred in whatever guise it takes
'Cause reality's important and religion's always fake

"See Seattle's Disco Toot, who twist our words to suit their need
See the boards of education, going where the D.I. leads
See the dumb opinion polls, they are just begging to be crashed
See the televangelists, sowing their lies to reap more cash"

No problem, you just gotta hang out hippies more often. They throw some fun parties. And they usually end just in time to go to work. If you haven't passed out.

Funny, the people I hang out with would all be happy to explore the windmill argument in all its goofiness, and are used to settling on definitions before beginning an argument. But this might be because I have no patience for the other kind.

I think true argument and true thought are skills that are almost never taught -- perhaps in university, but not much before then. And if the skill isn't taught, people won't recognize it when you are practicing it, and will think you're just being academic. Or heavens, maybe elitist.

Noni

PS I wanna come to the East Indian feast, too! But sadly, nowhere near Albuquerque .

They Might be Giants!

(From the Twitter campaign to eat the internet in lots of tiny little bites.)

Don't worry, PZ, their parties are lame anyway. That's why we lurk around here - for some of us it's our only hope for some intelligent conversation :/

I'll throw you a party! We can get drunk and watch "Primeval" by BBC.

Levi FTW:

Another good response is to ask them whether or not we should give equal time to teaching the Holocaust and Holocaust denialism.

This is a sure-fire way to make their faces turn red as they sputter impotently. Half the time it shuts them up on the subject permanently.

This is a sure-fire way to make their faces turn red as they sputter impotently.

Which is, of course, unless they are a holocaust denier.

Atheists get to go to parties now and again. It's not as if we stop having obsessions and gracious thoughtful friends. I was a guest last night at the Cartoon Art Museum's opening reception for their Watchmen exhibition (click on my name for some amusing incriminating evidence) featuring props, art and costumes from the upcoming film, along with some astounding original art from Dave Gibbons, who signed his new book for me. OK, so it was less a party and more of a fanboy event in anticipation of Wondercon, but when you've got, gathered in one room, mannequins wearing the film's costumes for Nite Owl, Silk Spectre and Rorschach, paintings, props and newspaper clippings from the comic lovingly recreated for the film, and then you could wander over to the next room and see original stop-motion puppets from Coraline--you don't have to be a windmill-tilter to have a good time, you just have to live where the parties are.

Well, I'd invite you all here tonight, if it weren't for the fact that the last ferry sailed almost an hour ago and the commercial float planes are all limited to daylight VFR. Still, if you want to get a water taxi, I'll meet you at the dock.

No? Too bad, I'll just put away the canapés and champagne, myself. That's stoned wheat thins and Adam's Ale, actually. Party on. :-)

Not knowing anything more about that comic other than what you've said here, I get the impression that it's actually poking fun at people warning about climate change, since, after all, it's been said that if there's even a chance that human-caused climate change is real (pretending, of course, that there was no evidence for it either way), we should still act, because of the danger.

Are you sure that comic isn't from a climate change denialist standpoint?

I'm no mathematician, but don't think that works.

If you follow the iterative methodology associated with doing that sort of thing, it's not supposed to matter that you started out with a stupidly wrong probability. However, if you're a creationist, then you tend to set your starting assumption from the conclusion you want to have and you don't perform any evidence-based iterations at all. So a creationist is very unlikely to revise their opinion (ie towards reality) that way.

@42: Partially Clips doesn't have any visible ideological bias, it is clipart webcomics and just funny. Browse their archive a little and be amused :)

PZ, if you are ever in Atlanta, contact myself or my husband, John Snider (he interviewed you for American Freethought), and we will get our friends from Fellowship of Reason together and throw a party IN YOUR HONOR! The "reason" part assures you are in the company of like-minded people, and the "fellowship" part means that we like to throw parties, potlucks and other social events for said like-minded people. Although FOR is a non-profit, open to everyone, non-skeptics and religious nut-jobs generally don't bother to show up. ;)

Besides that malarkey, accommodationists to theistic evolution, bray that we new atheists and scientists err in affirming that science shows no cosmic teleology: that is a false demarcation of science as Victor Stenger and Paul Draper would affirm.
That the weight of evidence indeed portrays no cosmic teleology [ George Gaylord Simpson, Jerry Coyne] leads to the atelic argument that that means no need to bring in God as that would contradict natural selection, the anti-chance agency of Nature that has no plans and preconceived outcomes.
As Dr. Coyne affirms in his article in the New Republic, theistic evolution is an oxymoron. Had we disappeared, convergence, contrary to Karl Giberson and Keith Miller, would not have produced any other intelligent being. An article in Skeptic also notes that selection would not have made any other intelliegent ape in our place.
So, theistic evolution rests on the new Omphalos argument that God so hides Himself [ for epistemic distance so as not to overwhelm our free will in worshipping Him, but which John L. Schellenberger exposes as Him hiding Himself so well that He appears non-existent1] that while He does guide evolution, science cannot reveal that but only shows natural forces at work.
Yea, Scot, Michael Ruse, Giberson and Miller in effect affirm the Omphalos! They could maintain that from the side of religion, theism and evolution and the Big Bang do not conflict but they grievouly err in dismissing our affirmation that from the side of science, they do indeed confict!
Frederick Crews and William Provine have,in effect,told Dr. Scott that her position misleads.
Please ask NCES and her to stop that nonsense!
Pleas use the atelic and the argument against the new Omphalos underpinning of theistic evolution.
Thanks,PZ, for your new athesim, anti-theism! Perhaps, you'll write a book on all this and your general take on theism, whether narrow creationism or the wider one of theistic evolutionists.
We owe a debt to Coyne!
Blessings and good will to all!
Hasta luego.

Are you sure that comic isn't from a climate change denialist standpoint?

Any such standpoint would flatly contradict the last panel.

Morgan-LynnGriggs Lamberth

A god that hides itself completely is effectively no god.

Tis Himself, t'is a good point! With attribution, please, use this argument when arguing against teleological ones. They all - design, from reason[[Platinga, Lewis, Ewing], probability and fine-tuning assume that He had us in mind when they should show that.
And the naturalist argument from pareidolia also contradicts teleological ones: when theists look at Nature, they read behind her a caring, super minds as when people see Yeshua in a tortilla.
Then Hume's dysteological [ bad teleology] also contradicts them as he mentions the imperfections ; we ought to require theists to respsond to that challenge without them resorting to theodicy to defend the evils. Even without evil, the imperfections tell against omnipotent God.
Besides these three naturalist ones , are the problem of Heaven, the hiddenness, the presumption of rationalism, the presumption of naturalism, the infinte regress, and the ignostic-Ockham.
Amazon.com sells many atheist/naturalist books. I have about all of them.
Scott in her book against creationism takes to task scientists who dare to assert that evidence against theistic evolution. As Paul Draper emailed me, there is the problem of demarcation. I think that science can help resolve philosophical problems.
PZ, you might tackle that problem!
Thanks Tis.

Incidentally, the author of that cartoon, Rob Balder, is also a filk singer ( http://www.thefump.com/artist.php?id=5 ) and writer for the webcomic Erfworld ( http://www.giantitp.com/comics/erf0001.html ).

It needs a fourth panel.
"There are some who, realizing that society will pay them a tidy profit for working on the windmill/giant problem, will begin publishing papers on it concluding that the problem will take an entire lifetime of research to solve."

Of course, the parties mentioned in the last frame are political parties. No rational person ever gets to positions of power of any kind in a political party.