And he offers a historical perspective on Skepticism and Religion.

Enlightenment theologians had to strike a bargain with scientific skepticism since they were terrified by a different, far older kind of skepticism: ancient Greek Skepticism. This rationalistic skepticism demanded high standards of provability before accepting anything as knowledge. The basic idea for a rationalist skeptic during the Enlightenment was something like this: Where reason and empirical inquiry cannot confirm, it must be disbelieved as unreasonable. For this rationalist skepticism, all the gods must go. The core of religion, and not just the claptrap, is entirely unreasonable and unbelievable, since no theological argument demonstrates a god’s existence and no empirical evidence is sufficient to support a god’s existence. Instead of saying "No Comment" to religion’s core claims, rationalist skepticism says "That’s unreasonable for anyone to accept."

To this day, many skeptics rely on both scientific skepticism and rationalist skepticism. It’s all about the appropriate use of reason. That is why being a genuine skeptic means being a disbeliever and being open about disbelieving everything religions talk about. But joining up with this current Skeptic(TM) movement means never having to tell the faithful how their god isn’t real. Is that too big a price to pay, to get more science accommodated by society?

To answer that last question, yes, it’s much too high a price to pay, especially since we aren’t getting a reasonable return on the investment. Science is a disruptive, revolutionary force, and lying about its implications does not lead to acceptance — it leads only to acceptance of an insipid shadow of science.

In a piece explaining why he won’t take Templeton money, Sean Carroll says why promoting godlessness is important. It’s how the universe works, something quite fundamental to how science operates.

Think of it this way. The kinds of questions I think about—origin of the universe, fundamental laws of physics, that kind of thing—for the most part have no direct impact on how ordinary people live their lives. No jet packs are forthcoming, as the saying goes. But there is one exception to this, so obvious that it goes unnoticed: belief in God. Due to the efforts of many smart people over the course of many years, scholars who are experts in the fundamental nature of reality have by a wide majority concluded that God does not exist. We have better explanations for how things work. The shift in perspective from theism to atheism is arguably the single most important bit of progress in fundamental ontology over the last 500 years. And it matters to people … a lot.

Or at least, it would matter, if we made it more widely known. It’s the one piece of scientific/philosophical knowledge that could really change people’s lives. So in my view, we have a responsibility to get the word out—to not be wishy-washy on the question of religion as a way of knowing, but to be clear and direct and loud about how reality really works. And when we blur the lines between science and religion, or seem to contribute to their blurring, or even just not minding very much when other people blur them, we do the world a grave disservice. Religious belief exerts a significant influence over how the world is currently run—not just through extremists, but through the well-meaning liberal believers who very naturally think of religion as a source of wisdom and moral guidance, and who define the middle ground for sociopolitical discourse in our society. Understanding the fundamental nature of reality is a necessary starting point for productive conversations about morality, justice, and meaning. If we think we know something about that fundamental nature—something that disagrees profoundly with the conventional wisdom—we need to share it as widely and unambiguously as possible. And collaborating with organizations like Templeton inevitably dilutes that message.

It’s going to be a great conference on science, education, and human rights (and that’s precisely what my talk will be about: science as a human responsibility and ethical obligation). You should all come! Don’t you want to visit Bucharest?

IHEU Conference in Romania, May 2013

I might get lost in that building.

I’m teaching cancer biology in the fall, and if you want to get a head start over the summer, here are the texts we’re going to be using: Biol 4103: Cancer Biology Introduction to Cancer Biology, by Robin Heskith Cambridge University Press, 1st ed. ISBN 978-1107601482 The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, by Siddhartha Mukherjee Scribner, reprint ed. ISBN 978-1439170915 Last time around, I used Weinberg’s The Biology of Cancer, which is an excellent, in-depth text, but was really heavy going for an undergraduate course — it’s more of a graduate/MD level reference book. The Heskith book is very good, giving more substantial introductions to the difficult concepts, and also as a bonus, is one third the price. Just having general chapters on cell signaling in normal cells, for instance, will be a big help in bringing students up to speed. For you outside observers, sorry, but this class won’t be going the supplementary blogging route. I’ve got some other cunning schemes I’m going to try on the students instead.

I was going to update a previous post about sperm stem cell transplants in boars, when I came across a very recent paper with a similar technique in the Rhesus monkey, and I couldn’t pass it up. So a little of the background content here is duplicated from that previous post.... M. Wilson Sayres http://mathbionerd.blogspot.com

Today, the Minnesota legislature is supposed to vote on gay marriage. I know because the pressure has been at fever pitch — I got three phone calls yesterday from advocacy organizations calling to get me to call my representative. I’ve told NOM to take a flying leap, but Minnesotans United, despite the annoying dunning, have my favor. Apparently, my representative, Jay McNamar, is one of those dumbass undecideds. He’s been waffling over the issue, an uncertainty which doesn’t just leave me cold, it makes me actively dislike him. I’ve called him several times to tell him that this is the civil rights issue of our era, and if he can’t make up his goddamn mind about something as basic as human decency, he’s not on my side. If he votes against it, he’ll never have my vote ever again; if he can muster a little integrity and principle, maybe I’ll reluctantly put a mark next to his name on a ballot next time around. But the word is that we’ll know today. Don’t disappoint me, Minnesota!

Christian Post
'No Deal!' To This Atheist T-Shirt - The Christian Post
Christian Post
A Utah T-shirt making business has refused to do an order of shirts for an atheist organization due to an objection to the message on the proposed T-shirt design. TIKI Printing of West Valley declined the business of the group Atheists of Utah, which ...

The skeptics are circling the wagons. I knew they would. It’s what they always do to defend their naive version of “science”.

Stephanie Zvan has a good post rebutting Daniel Loxton’s defense of the skeptical delusion that atheism is “unscientific”. I can summarize his argument briefly: “I’m an atheist, skeptics have gone after some religious claims, and science can’t tell the difference between invisible dragons and nonexistent dragons and therefore doesn’t care.” And of course he props all this up with the claim that this is the official scientific view.

No, it is not. There is no one true scientific method; testability is not the sole criterion that scientists use to work towards the truth; there is no absolute definition of what constitutes science (nor can there be, I would argue), which is why the demarcation problem is so difficult. Establishment skeptics love to parade their kiddie version of how science works as justification for dismissing atheism as a legitimate scientific position in a way that they would never do to homeopathy or UFOs or any of the other subjects they are willing to pursue. Why, I don’t know. I’ve always assumed it was a political ploy to avoid annoying numerous donors and the mass media, but if they insist it isn’t, I’m going to have to fall back on another explanation: they’re just ignorant.

These skeptics love their little gotcha games. Their ideal is the experiment that, in one session, shoots down a claim cleanly and neatly. So let’s bring in dowsers who claim to be able to detect water flowing underground, set up control pipes and water-filled pipes, run them through their paces, and see if they meet reasonable statistical criteria. That’s science, it works, it effectively addresses an individual’s very specific claim, and I’m not saying that’s wrong; that’s a perfectly legitimate scientific experiment.

I’m saying that’s not the whole operating paradigm of all of science.

I’m saying that we use all kinds of methods: reason, empiricism, inference, hypothesis testing, modeling. Sometimes it conforms neatly to the standard diagram of the scientific method you’ll find in the first chapter of your introductory biology textbook, and often it doesn’t. Science has more avenues to explore questions than just the insta-test skeptics favor, and you should mistrust skeptics who tell you that we know less than we do, because simplistic reasons, like testability.

Individual skeptics may have opinions about all those philosophical matters, but none of these are questions science can answer. As Novella and Bloomberg explained [in a well-known 1999 Skeptical Inquirer article], “science can have only an agnostic view toward untestable hypotheses. A rationalist may argue that maintaining an arbitrary opinion about an untestable hypothesis is irrational—and he may be right. But this is a philosophical argument, not a scientific one.”

Uh, guys? Science is a philosophy, a very specific one. That disavowal doesn’t even make sense.

And you know, I deal with creationists all the time who use arguments very much like skeptics’ to claim that paleontology is untestable and therefore unscientific. “Were you there?” Can you design a simple test that can be demonstrated on a stage to a crowd of onlookers that really shows that that fossil bone is 70 million years old? And the answer is that no, we can’t make our tests conform to the simplistic skeptic standard. That doesn’t mean they’re unscientific, or that we should be agnostic on the age of the earth.

I think this is where the skeptic movement’s foundation in stage magicians begins to hurt. They offer a valuable perspective — they’re far better at detecting intentional fraud than most scientists — but when your whole perspective on science is shaped entirely on criteria that make for a good show, your understanding suffers. And when it leads to stage magicians yelling from the stage at scientists that they don’t understand science, you’ve got a real hubris problem.

You know how real scientists treat untestable hypotheses? Pragmatically and operationally as invalid*. If you don’t even have an evidential chain of reasoning to lead to your hypothesis, we reject it out of hand. If that hypothesis, unsupported by evidence, further contradicts known properties of the universe, we can dismiss it as falsified, even without direct testing of that specific hypothesis…especially if such testing requires elaborate, expensive, time-consuming procedures with negligible likelihood of coming up with a useful result (and if there is no possible way to test your absurd claim, then fuck it, into the trash bin with it). When there are a thousand equally unjustifiable hypotheses being flung about with fanatical certainty and equal lack of reason, we cut the Gordian knot and reject them all and start working our way through known facts to determine a root cause of all the chaos.

I like Stephen Jay Gould’s definition of a fact:

In science, ‘fact’ can only mean ‘confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.’ I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.

By that definition, the non-existence of gods is a fact. Those scientific atheists, the New Atheists, that the skeptics scorn have been working their way down the objective chain of evidence, not trying to disprove gods with simplistic tests (because they’re too incoherent and contradictory), but developing better ideas that more accurately describe how the world works. They’ve been doing the hard work of science. When Victor Stenger can so eloquently describe the natural origin of the universe godlessly using mathematics and physics, when Richard Dawkins can explain the origin and modification of life without recourse to magic or the supernatural, it becomes perverse to withhold provisional assent and babble about being agnostic towards religious explanations. The New Atheists aren’t expressing mere opinions, they’re telling you about hard-earned knowledge about the real world.

And the skeptic movement has become an inbred circle of perversity. They disrespect that hard-working progressive pattern of scientific inquiry because it doesn’t fit neatly into their game-show model of science.

And, as Stephanie points out, they aren’t even consistent about it. Somehow, they insist that we must be agnostic towards religion, while not being so gentle towards alternative medicine, alien astronauts, or moon landing conspiracy theories.

You do realize that the moon landing conspiracy theories are exactly as ridiculous as religion, don’t you? Assertions of insidious agents carrying out elaborate plans, selective and distorted interpretations of the available evidence, avoidance of the actual, substantial evidence that there actually was a natural event…yet no skeptic is getting up and announcing that we must be agnostic about the moon landing, nor are they all beating up Phil Plait for his “unscientific” confidence that men have walked on the moon.

*And even there, there are exceptions: think of string theory. But the exceptions prove the rule that science is a lot more complicated than the neat tidy package into which movement skeptics want to tie it up.

Some Christian dorkasaur named Gene Mims has an argument for silencing atheists. It’s about unicorns.

Unicorns

Stay with me for a moment and I think I can give you a better understanding to my perplexity concerning atheists.  You see I do not believe in unicorns.  You may and that is surely your right, but I don’t.  They are cute in cartoons, movies, and comic books, but I must confess that I don’t believe in them.  So what’s the point.  The point is that since I don’t believe in unicorns I don’t give them much thought.  I don’t write about them or speak about them.  I don’t go to conferences on how to stop people from believing in them.  I do not fund legal societies to stop people from being able to talk about unicorns in schools and public places.  I  don’t worry if people celebrate holidays dedicated to unicorns.  For me they don’t exist.

Give It Up

To all bent-out-of-shape atheists I say simply, GIVE IT UP! Find something else to worry about like global warming, Republicans, education, war, and rain forest destruction.  Let those who believe in God alone.  If He doesn’t exist then why all the worry and concern?  If He does exist then you don’t care anyway.  He won’t bother you.  Try not to be bothered by what you don’t believe in and work on what you do know. The more you talk about God the more likely it is that those who may share your position might begin to doubt it and actually search for Him and find Him.

Aww, we have something in common. I don’t believe in unicorns, either! So I don’t spend much time dwelling on them, myself. We’re both a-unicornists! We should form a club.

Of course, there’s a reason I don’t worry much about unicorns or unicorn believers. We don’t have institutions dedicated to preaching about unicorns every week. People don’t get tax breaks for believing in unicorns. Unicornists don’t have a de facto lock on elected office. Nobody is telling me I need to include unicorn biology and paleontology in my courses at the university, or in high school. The unicorn lobby is essentially non-existent.

I’m not at all concerned about unicorns. If we had them, it would be unicorn-believers who would worry me. I’m not afraid of getting gored by a unicorn, and neither is Mr Mims, but we might just have reason to be terrified of the kind of fanatic who would consider mindless faith in unicorns to be a necessary prerequisite to moral behavior and inclusion in civilized society, to the point where they try to force unbelievers to obey and be silent.

Same with God, Mr Mims. Gods don’t exist, so they don’t trouble me in the slightest. But I fear your dumbassery, Mr Mims — that exists, unlike the invisible being to which you so zealously devote your life.

Maybe you should think just a little bit more deeply about your analogy between god and unicorns. I think there’s a significant similarity that you missed.

So the mouthbreathers in South Carolina elected corrupt, lying, slow-witted Christian Mark Sanford to congress yesterday. John Fugelsang delivers the definitive summary of SCarolina politics.

BURN.

I’m getting the impression that Jamy Ian Swiss also kinda pissed off Greta Christina.

A man, Lt. Col. Jeffrey Krusinski, who was in charge of a branch of the Air Force’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response program, was arrested after groping and assaulting a woman in a parking lot. How can that be? Didn’t he read his own specialty’s literature on sexual assault?

Maybe he did. You should take a look at the Air Force brochure on sexual assault. Not one word telling men not to do it, but lots of lecturing to the woman readers on what to do.

“It may be advisable to submit [rather] than resist,” reads the brochure (.pdf), issued to airmen at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina, where nearly 10,000 military and and civilian personnel are assigned. “You have to make this decision based on circumstances. Be especially careful if the attacker has a weapon.”

The brochure, acquired by Danger Room, issues a series of guidances on “risk reduction” for sexual assault. Among others, it advises people under sexual attack in parking lots to “consider rolling underneath a nearby auto and scream loud. It is difficult to force anyone out from under a car.” A public affairs officer at Shaw, Sgt. Alexandria Mosness, says she believes the brochure is current.

While the brochure also explains that sexual assault is not always committed by people who “don’t look like a rapist” — attackers “tend to have hyper-masculine attitudes,” it advises — it does not offer instruction to servicemembers on not committing sexual assault. Prevention is treated as the responsibility of potential victims.

You know who is going to love that brochure? Rapists. Informing their victims to submit as a matter of official policy is simply a delightful inducement to go out and get some by force.

There is apparently some administrative inertia to making changes in the rape culture on air force bases.

“To any rational person this is completely backwards and shows the scope of epidemic,” Purchia added. “Fundamental reforms are needed — the reporting, investigation and adjudication of sexual assault must be taken out of the chain of command.”

That’s a step that the military has been reluctant to take. At today’s hearing, Welsh and Donley expressed concern that doing so might pose a risk to “good order and discipline,” as Donley put it. (“This is not good order and discipline,” replied Sen. Kirstin Gillibrand of New York.)

That’s exactly what I was thinking. How does rape fit into the ideal of good order and discipline?

A new forum for Catholic/Atheist dialogue - Patheos
Patheos (blog)
Brandon Vogt, author of The Church and New Media has opened a new site called Strange Notions, that's meant to be a forum for debate and discussion between Catholics and atheists. For some reason, it seemed like the readers of this blog might be ...

I did that brief interview with Ray Comfort last weekend, and today I find a nice gift basket waiting for me.

It looks a bit picked over already because I picked it up just before heading off to a division meeting, so I opened it up and encouraged my colleagues to help themselves. Then I sat back and watched their physiological responses after sampling. Departmental politics can be brutal.

(Nah, just joking, I wasn’t at all worried. Ray Comfort is a total ditzwaffle when it comes to science and logic and reason, but I think he’s probably a better socialized ape than many scientists I can think of.)

KMOV.com
Hugh Hefner award goes to atheist student who fought prayer banner
OregonLive.com
View/Post Comments. CRANSTON, R.I. — An atheist student who fought to have a prayer banner at her Rhode Island public high school removed is getting an award named for Playboy founder Hugh Hefner. WPRO-AM reports Jessica Ahlquist is among this ...
Ahlquist Wins Playboy First Amendment AwardPatch.com
Teen who challenged prayer banner to be honored at Playboy Mansi - ABC6 ...WLNE-TV (ABC6)

all 19 news articles »

He has a new movie coming out this summer, After Earth. It looks awful, but then, that’s what I’ve come to expect from Will Smith’s Sci-Fi outings. Jebus. Anyone remember that abomination, I, Robot? How about I Am Legend? I steer clear of these movies with a high concept and a big name star, because usually what you find is that the story is a concoction by committee with an agenda solely to recoup the costs and make lots of money…so we get buzzwords and nods to high-minded causes and the usual action-adventure pap. Just looking at the trailer, I’m getting pissed off: it’s supposed to be a pro-environmentalism movie, and what’s it about? A guy running around in the wilderness fighting off the hostile wildlife. Anyway, I got one of those generic invitations to help reassure the world that it’s a good science movie. Here’s part of what I was sent: On May 31st, Columbia Pictures is releasing what is perhaps the biggest movie of the summer, After Earth, starring Will Smith, directed by M. Night Shyamalan. No. Just no. Shyamalan is a hack. Why do people keep handing him big money and big projects? There are a lot of science parallels to this film, and I write to see if you or a colleague might be interested in interviewing one of After Earth’s top filmmakers and or a scientist associated herein. Famous futurist Ray Kurzweil Jesus fuck. Kurzweil is a consultant? Pill-popping techno-geek with an immortality fetish and no understanding of biology at all is the consultant on a movie with a supposed environmental message? WHY? explored with Will, his son Jaden Smith, and Elon Musk, how science fact meets science fiction in After Earth, and tghis can be seen here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RocpHuJWolc. As well, XPRIZE has teamed up with Sony to launch an unprecedented robotics challenge (information attached). What’s more, NASA plans to disseminate a lesson plan to teachers based on...
Read more

The First New Atheist
The Smart Set
Søren Kierkegaard was not an atheist. He was a Christian. All of his writings are either directly or indirectly about Christianity. He's thus a natural opponent to Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris. Except for one thing. Kierkegaard detested Christianity as ...

The First New Atheist
The Smart Set
Søren Kierkegaard was not an atheist. He was a Christian. All of his writings are either directly or indirectly about Christianity. He's thus a natural opponent to Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris. Except for one thing. Kierkegaard detested Christianity as ...

and more »

KMOV.com
Ahlquist Wins Playboy First Amendment Award
Patch.com
Jessica Ahlquist, the teenage atheist who successfully sued the Cranston School District and got a prayer banner that hung in the auditorium at Cranston High School West removed, will be at the Playboy Mansion on May 22 to recieve an award. The Hugh ...
RI prayer banner case student to get Playboy awardNews & Observer
Teen who challenged prayer banner to be honored at Playboy Mansi - ABC6 ...WLNE-TV (ABC6)

all 19 news articles »

…like I do, here’s a useful resource: Regular Care and Maintenance of a Zebrafish (Danio rerio) Laboratory: An Introduction. It’s text and a video guide to familiar procedures. Unfortunately, it also assumes you have a commercial zebrafish rack, which if you buy the smallest size available, will set you back about $10,000. I’ve just been using an array of 5 gallon tanks, each with its own filter system, which is cheap to set up, but a pain to maintain. I’m going to bite the bullet and build my own DIY flow-through system this summer, though, which I expect will cost a few hundred dollars…which is more in my budget. If you want to follow along, here’s a paper on a Modular, Easy-to-Assemble, Low-Cost Zebrafish Facility — it’ll be something like that. It’s not exactly the kind of show aquarium you’d have in your home, but if all you care about is embryo throughput, it’s loads of fun and lower maintenance than what I’ve been doing so far.