Culture Wars
tfk | December 10, 2009Janet Stemwedel brings her expertise in science and science ethics to bear on the contents of the emails stolen from the University of East Anglia. As with all of her work, the whole thing is worth reading, but I want to pick up on this claim:
If you don't thoroughly document your code, no one but you will have a clear understanding of what it's supposed to do. Actually, if you don't thoroughly document your code, you yourself, at a later moment in time, might not have a clear understanding of what it's supposed to do. (Then there's the question of whether, when executed, it actually does…
tfk | November 29, 2009A week or so ago, someone broke into a server at the University of East Anglia and made off with a range of emails and other data from the university's Climate Research Unit. This excited lots of climate change deniers, as they've long claimed that CRU had secret evidence that global warming wasn't happening, or something. Much web commentary followed, in which a supposedly "random sample" of these emails were widely distributed and dissected publicly.
My first thought on reading about this was not about climate change or the ensuing storm of BS about it. I thought of the scientists'…
tfk | October 27, 2009Jason Rosenhouse, criticizing Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum's reply to Jerry Coyne's review of their book in Science, ends with this thought:
You can not consistently argue that one side hurts the cause every time they open their mouths, but then object that you are not telling them to keep quiet. Free speech has absolutely nothing to do with this, as has been explained to M and K many times. No one thinks they want the government to come in and do anything. To be honest, I'm baffled that M and K persist in getting so irate on this point. Of course they want people like Dawkins to keep…
tfk | October 20, 2009Don McLeroy, erstwhile head of the Texas Board of Education, doesn't like the National Academy of Sciences. At least not on even-numbered days. During the science standards fight, he praised the NAS definition of science. Then again, he endorsed a crazy, self-published pamphlet declaring that the NAS is "sowing atheism." And of course, he dismissed the good advice of the NAS and other science groups when they asked him not to undermine evolution education, telling the Board "Someone has to stand up to these experts."
And now McLeroy has decided to attack the NAS in social studies standards.…
tfk | October 7, 2009I still don't know if I'm using that word right, but Science and Religion Today asked me a question about the award Chad wants to give me. They wonder "Do moderates have a responsibility to be more vocal in science and religion discussions?"
It's an admittedly vague question, and they left off my epigram, from Petronius: "Moderation in all things, even moderation." Ah well.
In brief, I said yes. I used "religious moderates" in what I think is an idiosyncratic way, taking it as the religious subset of moderates on a particular question much under discussion lately, not members of congregations…
tfk | October 6, 2009This has inexplicably been marked for deletion, but the author deserves a pat on the back. Genesis, the opening to the Conservative Bible:
1 In the beginning, God did a cost/benefit analysis and decided that social collectivism was the only sustainable economic paradigm and that the only people that actually go to hell are sinister, self-absorbed, greedy myopic fascists such as those that created Conservapedia.
"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty…
tfk | October 5, 2009Conservapedia is the gift that keeps giving. Recall that Conservapedia formed to correct the nefarious liberal bias of the collectively edited Wikipedia. That is, they kept losing edit wars because they could support their claims, and since they couldn't conform reality to their beliefs, they'd just write an encyclopedia enshrining them. Much fun. But now there's a bigger threat to their goal of completely isolating conservatives from any differing views: The Bible (h/t):
As of 2009, there is no fully conservative translation of the Bible which satisfies the following ten guidelines:[2]…
tfk | October 5, 2009Jerry Coyne is right:
Nobody who has followed Dawkins’s work and writing could possibly think he’s an accommodationist
Or rather, he's probably right. I've never been clear what "accommodationist" means, it seems to adapt itself in perfect Calvinball style to suit whatever enemy someone might have. Thus, when Eugenie Scott answers the question "Are science and religion compatible?":
I don't have to address that as a philosophical question, I can address that as an empirical question. It's obvious that it is. Because there are many people who are scientists who are also people of faith. There…
tfk | October 1, 2009Newsweek interviews Richard Dawkins:
Are those incompatible positions: to believe in God and to believe in evolution?
No, I don't think they're incompatible if only because there are many intelligent evolutionary scientists who also believe in God--to name only Francis Collins [the geneticist and Christian believer recently chosen to head the National Institutes of Health] as an outstanding example. So it clearly is possible to be both. This book more or less begins by accepting that there is that compatibility. The God Delusion did make a case against that compatibility in my own mind.
I…
tfk | September 30, 2009Disco. clubber Bruce Chapman, a former census director who ought to have learned something about demography and perhaps accounting along the way, writes that the Public Doesn't Know the Truth About Social Security:
â¦how many Americans (may we see a poll?) understand that â¦we really are at point (and past it for the next two years) when spending on Social Security finally exceeds income from Social Security taxes? Can a tax hike and/or benefits reductions be long away? Meanwhile, add this new item to the list of runaway Federal deficit spending.
Yes we can see a poll! This, from 2005, seems…
tfk | September 29, 2009I've gotten distracted recently from a couple of topics I desperately want to return to. A look at Jason Rosenhouse's sensitive and personal essay on "Ways of Knowing" will have to wait a bit longer, because I finally got ahold of Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, a copy I've had since high school and which I haven't read since then. I'll be spending some time, then, on notions of truth in literary contexts.
I do this not to claim that religious truth claims are identical to literary truth claims, but because I think we can sort out some ideas in the less fraught realm of literary criticism that…
tfk | September 28, 2009Darwinism and popular culture: Darwinists resort to whining when they are not popular (Also, this just in, water runs downhill):
In responding to a news item from two weeks ago, I'll assume Creation still has gotten a distributor. Therefore it's crummy and boring and will never get a distributor, as it did last week.
With Bonus Shorter D'oh! Leary: Origin of life theory: Complexity theorist Kauffman moving on:
I don't know who Stuart Kauffman is or what he does, but he sure isn't a genius. Neither is Bill Dembski, who at least has the courtesy not to self-aggrandize, for instance by…
tfk | September 28, 2009Last Friday I made some remarks about polling and evolution and atheism that got some knickers in twists. To summarize: Kevin Padian was asked to comment on a stupid stunt by Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron, who are passing out copies of the Origin of Species along with a foreword that alleges Darwin caused the Holocaust. Padian was appropriately dismissive, and noted that "The two kinds people who believe that religion and evolution can not coexist are extreme atheists and extreme religious fundamentalists. Everyone else doesn’t really have a problem. [A majority] of Americans believe that a…
tfk | September 25, 2009Jerry Coyne, 9/21/2009:
Kudos to the National Center for Science Education for putting up these videos [of Texas science standards hearings], and for their tenacious defense of evolution in Texas.
Thank you, Jerry. Since I shot those videos, and was present in Texas as part of that defense, I thought I was off Coyne's shitlist, and it certainly seemed like NCSE was off it as well.
But three days later he objects to a line I wrote about "atheists bent on insisting that literalism is the true form of religion":
Quote of the week, from the personal website of the Public Information Project…
tfk | September 23, 2009Apologies for the unusually crappy blogging this week. With the arrival of a replacement from my lost/stolen laptop, I should catch up on the 12,000 unread items in NetNewsWire soon, and return to normal crappy blogging.
In any event, Chad Orzel replies to last week's ruckus over "ways of knowing" by observing that "Using Analogies on the Internet Is Like Doing a Really Futile Thing":
No matter what the analogy is, any attempt to use analogy, simile, metaphor, or any other lofty rhetorical technique in a debate being conducted on the Internet is doomed to end badly. No matter how carefully…
tfk | September 18, 2009Several commenters on earlier posts have suggested that I am claiming that religious truth claims are the same as literary truth claims.
I understand how that misunderstanding could be reached, but it is a misunderstanding. I think that religious truth claims would include aspects of literary truth claims (the Bible surely uses metaphor and other literary techniques), but for religious believers, it clearly encompasses much more. As a non-theist, I don't fully grasp the level of meaning that theists experience in religion, and my analogy to literary truth claims is meant to set a lower…
tfk | September 18, 2009As promised, I've put a few tentative definitions below the fold, in hopes of clarifying questions in comment threads here and elsewhere. These definitions represent a starting point, not gospel. I'm not a philosopher, I haven't spent much time reading epistemology, and I may mangle things badly. If so, polite critique will lead to productive revision, and hopefully progress toward broader agreement.
The essential terms under discussion here include "truth," "truth claim," "knowledge," and "way of knowing." "Science" and "religion" are also worth defining, but also rather less woolly, and…
tfk | September 18, 2009Jean Kazez, a philosopher at SMU, blogs a nice critique of the bone I picked with Jerry Coyne. She sees in my argument:
a kind of defense by decimation. First you cut down the pretensions of religion; then you say religion is alright.
Rosenau says that if religious scripture doesn't deliver scientific knowledge, like a physics textbook, it can still deliver some kind of knowledge. It can deliver knowledge like novels do. When you understand fiction as fiction, you understand that it's true in vampire stories that there are vampires. What's true out there is only that power can come from…
tfk | September 16, 2009On Monday I posted a reply to Jerry Coyne's clique-ish and philosophically naive report on a talk he didn't see. I thought this would be a useful exercise because:
Coyne is a former professor of mine, I respect him, and don't want to see him embarrass himself.
High school-level cliqueishness seems unbecoming in a tenured professor.
Philosophically naive claims about the nature of science are unbecoming in a tenured biology professor.
Launching invective-laden attacks on a talk one hasn't seen is entirely unbecoming.
I reply again because efforts to address some of the issues underlying the…
tfk | September 14, 2009Jerry Coyne is nervous. He isn't sure if NCSE's Genie Scott will sit next to him at lunch, and he's not sure if he wants to sit next to her, when you get right down to it.
Why? Because in a talk at DragonCon (a talk Jerry didn't attend and only has second-hand information about), Genie said that there are "ways of knowing" other than science.
This is all part of the long and tedious battle between a clique of atheists who seem intent on enabling creationists in their muddling of the nature of science (enablers) and people who think it's possible for science and religion to exist without…