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Help, I'm being attacked by Atheists

  
  

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Twig the Wonder Kid
13:08 / 03.09.07
This may have been naive of me, but I've never encountered Atheist Fundamentalism before.

I wrote a blog post on Saturday, Richard Dawkins - The Man Who Gave Atheism A Bad Name intended as a light hearted ribbing of Dawkins' atheism contrasted with his empassioned evangelicism of evolution. I thought it reasoned and relevant, simply suggesting that Evolution was a form of faith, because it couldn't be demonstrated scientifically (without a very long amount of time in which to make and measure predictions). But I wasn't expecting the attacks I have been receiving via the comments and email. I have been described as "a science denying loon", "contaminating the minds of the credulous", and various other "You're so wrong, ha ha" type comments, to the point where I'm having to moderate some of them out.

This wouldn't surprise me coming from the Creationists, but this is coming from Atheists.

So I'm having a moment of self doubt. Is it me that's mad or them? Is my argument so unreasonable it warrants this response, or are the Atheist Fundamentalists now as bad as the Christians?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
13:38 / 03.09.07
Right, answering this properly will take quite a bit of time. To start with, I'd like to question this:

I thought it reasoned and relevant, simply suggesting that Evolution was a form of faith, because it couldn't be demonstrated scientifically (without a very long amount of time in which to make and measure predictions).

It's not faith. When a scientist says that evolution is what has happened, she is not saying "Based on slim evidence, I beleive this to be The Truth, for ever and always", but "Based on all the evidence, I will accept this as our best model of the truth, until a better one comes along." You can't really call this "his empassioned evangelicism of evolution."

Whereas faith, although it's wider than a lot of people give it credit for, is, "(Based on no hard evidence) I beleive this to be The Truth." I've yet to find an example of faith that allows for new knowledge to come along and update it, that says "I beleive this until more evidence for something else turns up"; outside of some very outré stuff in the Temple, which sadly I don't think is very representative of most religious faith.

None of which is to disparage all religious people. I won't claim to know what "a religious person" thinks about anything until they've told me.

Now, on to these Atheist Fundamentalists. First of all, I think you're unintentionally confusing the issue with your choice of language. The term Fundamentalist really only applies to certain branches of Christianity. Now that might seem like nit-picking, but just because some of the things Christian Fundamentalists say, do, or beleive coincide with what certain other groups (e.g. Islamic extremists, Hindu nationalists, Zionists) say, do, or beleive does not mean we should call them all "Fundamentalists", because it implies a total similarity.

So what I would ask is, in what ways are these Atheists similar to Christian Fundamentalists to make you apply the designation to both? Because for me there are several massive differences:

-The Christians are following one specific written code, and a specific heirarchy, whereas the Athesists are not.
-The Christians consider themselves to be one body, the Atheists do not.
-The Christians tend towards hard-right politics, the Atheists are diverse.
-The Christians have shown themselves willing to rig elections and use violence in the name of their cause, these Atheists have not.

So that noted, do you mean that the Atheists have made a decision to go with one idea (in this case Evolution) and reject all others (the book of Genesis), and that this is equivalent to the Christians doing vice versa? Because if so, you're missing a basic point - that the Atheists are following an idea with (comparatively) lots of proof, for that reason alone, so it's quite sensible for them to follow that one and not the other one.

I think what you're doing is confusing the decision to be an atheist, to find an answer and to make arguments for it, with the decision to talk to and about "religious people" as if they are all one imbecile bloc, to ignore the reasons why people are religious, and to be generally rude.

I would start to worry if they were calling for the book of Genesis to be burnt, and I would start to worry if someone with such poor sociology skills as Dawkins was made MP for Religious Issues, but this is not happening as far as I can tell.
 
 
alas
15:27 / 03.09.07
I think what you're doing is confusing the decision to be an atheist, to find an answer and to make arguments for it, with the decision to talk to and about "religious people" as if they are all one imbecile bloc, to ignore the reasons why people are religious, and to be generally rude.

What he said. Maybe you've moderated out some of the responses to your blog, but the ones I can read cannot, I think, fairly be characterized as any kind of fundamentalism, although there is obviously some anger being expressed. To me, they read as frustrated responses to a variation on an argument they've heard made before: to wit, "science is just the same as faith!!!"--usually by Christian creationists.

You're not exactly making that claim, but your blog's skewed presentation of the substantial support undergirding evolutionary science--the thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles mentioned by one commenter, and the way that the evolutionary, old-earth paradigm undergirds research not just in biology but in many other intertwining scientific fields (organic chemistry, geology, etc.), and other issues--seems to me to suggest an equivalence of validity between the two perspectives, on scientific/logical terms, that is simply not warranted, from what I know.

Admittedly, I am not an evolutionary biologist. I have read evolutionary biologists and I'm pretty convinced by their arguments that the evidence that some form of evolution is responsible for the way our bio-world works now, and has worked through time. (One I read said that comparatively, the evidence, is actually stronger than the evidence that Caesar existed. I don't have direct evidence of Caesar's existence; I wasn't there. I have to trust the heaps of historians, of all stripes, who tell me of evidence attesting to his existence.)

You might be interested in this fairly recent, long-term thread from the laboratory which does discuss this topic quite intelligently and fairly, I think. In fact, I was surprised to notice that Lurid Archive, who is a mathemetician and typically very pro-science in his postings, began it with a post that, to me, echoes some of the questions that underlie your blog entry.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
15:57 / 03.09.07
When a scientist says that evolution is what has happened, she is not saying "Based on slim evidence, I beleive this to be The Truth, for ever and always", but "Based on all the evidence, I will accept this as our best model of the truth, until a better one comes along."

This implies that the scientific community is made up of dispassionate, cool-headed individuals who are concerned only with truth, and therefore not prone to stoutly, and in some cases viciously defending their own theories when same have been shown to be incorrect, or even open to question.

It's just not the case, I'm afraid.

And as far as all this goes;

-The Christians are following one specific written code, and a specific heirarchy, whereas the Athesists are not.
-The Christians consider themselves to be one body, the Atheists do not.
-The Christians tend towards hard-right politics, the Atheists are diverse.
-The Christians have shown themselves willing to rig elections and use violence in the name of their cause, these Atheists have not.

If the Christian Fundamentalists are one body with a specific heirarchy, who's in charge of it, and where is its headquarters? If you want to become a Chriatian Fundamentalist, how do you start, where do you go? Who do you need to know?

Similarly, I'm not sure if you could call the Bible (I'm assuming this is what you're getting at) a specific written code. For a manifesto it's alarmingly long, and full of contradictions.

And again, while as you say Atheism a broad church, noted Atheists from history have nevertheless Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot and Chairman Mao, all of whom were perfectly happy to indulge in a spot of the old ultraviolence when it suited them. Ok, you have specified 'these atheists' (supporters of Richard Dworkin, presumably) but on the other hand, you appear to be arguing that Christian Fundamentalists in general (whoever they are) are in some sense responsible for the actions of the inner circle of the Republican party under George Bush Jr, which seems like a bit of a reach to me.

I suppose it might be posssible to reach a consnsus about Richard Dworkin thus; that whatever he may or may not genuinely believe, at the moment he's mainly in the business of selling books, and is therefore not one to shy away from a position that might attract headlines, or the kind of reader that's prone to foaming at the mouth when defending his work.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
16:06 / 03.09.07
I do think that people like Dawkins, who to some extent make "the decision to talk to and about "religious people" as if they are all one imbecile bloc, to ignore the reasons why people are religious, and to be generally rude" are a real problem, because as I beleive I've said elsewhere their thinking extends as far as "my answer is much more logical than yours", but strangely not as far as "what logical, observable reasons lead to people becoming fanatics".

I think in the case of Dawkins this is because we have a top-quality Evolutionary Biologist who none the less knows sod all about sociology; when he is writing specifically against the creationist ideology on how the world became, he is great; but when he extends his subject to "all religion everywhere", well, a first-year social studies student could point out hundreds of instances in The God Delusion where the "illogical" religious behaviour (which he chastises individuals for) happens because of there being poverty, opression, etc, etc, all of which are social-economic factors and are not going to go away until we take time out from pointing out the obvious fallacies in, say, Hindu mythology, and do something about the utter avoidable suffering much of the world lives in.

Not to mention the way support for bowlderised versions of "science" and "reason" can always get co-opted by racism, sexism and colonialism - all you need to do is tap into the centuries of stereotypes of the Other being unreasonable compared to European/Western power, and all of a sudden your Iraq war is a charity mission, bringing enlightenment to those poor foreign types.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
16:18 / 03.09.07
Similarly, I'm not sure if you could call the Bible (I'm assuming this is what you're getting at) a specific written code. For a manifesto it's alarmingly long, and full of contradictions.

Yes, I mean The Bible, specifically the Ten Commandments and the Old Testament, which Christian Fundamentalism as a movement identifies as the Fundamentals they want. Which is, as you say, complicated. Though you'll be hard-pressed to find me the equivalent Big Book of Atheism which all Atheists, to some degree, consider sacred in the same way. There are certainly certain scientific or philosophical texts that tend to be popular, but the Atheist "texts" are like a gasseous cloud of different fields, traditions and disciplines, whereas the Christian text - there is of course one specific one, the Bible - is much more of a specific code.

This implies that the scientific community is made up of dispassionate, cool-headed individuals who are concerned only with truth, and therefore not prone to stoutly, and in some cases viciously defending their own theories when same have been shown to be incorrect, or even open to question.

Well, yes, these are human beings we're talking about, and often quite anti-social ones as well. The point is that the scientific community has an in-built way of ignoring them - if the theory's shot down by evidence then it doesn't matter how viciously they defend it, it just won't be accepted. Whereas if a pastor gets up and acts stoutly and viciously, about something like gay marriage, say, then the Fundamentalist community is in a position to listen with open ears.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
16:22 / 03.09.07
In fact I'd quite like some links with examples of these scientists who stoutly and viciously defend their theories even when proved wrong.
 
 
sleazenation
17:18 / 03.09.07
Well, I had a quick read of Twig's post.

Unless I'm missing something, it seems like it is attacking the theory of evolution as being unfalsifiabile, and then, following a version of Karl Popper's argument, that this renders it unscientific.

But this only follows as an argument (against evolutionary theory) if A) you do the heavy lifting to explore the ways in which evolutionary theory is unfalsifiable, looking both backwards into the fossil record (the possibility of filling enough gaps in the future) and forward with increasing study of biological life forms into the future,
B) you reference any evidence you cite (where does your figure of 1% of creatures that have ever lived appearing in the fossil record come from?) and C) you buy into Popper's notion of science in the first place.

Now, I don't think falsifiability, nor Popper's ideas are really my strong suit, but the above areas do seem, to me at least, to be quite important to advancing an arguement of falsifiability on the theory of evolution.
 
 
Alex's Grandma
18:23 / 03.09.07
The point is that the scientific community has an in-built way of ignoring them - if the theory's shot down by evidence then it doesn't matter how viciously they defend it, it just won't be accepted.

You talk about the scientific commmunity as it's some sort of elite that automatically excludes 'unscientific' ideas, but consider the debate about climate change in the Eighties and Nineties, and whether it was the result of man-made factors; it's now generally accepted that climate change in this respect is something to worry about, but for a while back there this was highly controversial. And I'm sure there are still a few old war horses out there who don't feel that say, chopping down the Amazon rain forest is a problem.

I'd be delighted to provide some links, but unfortunately my grasp of science is so poor that I wouldn't know where to look off-hand; nor am I really prepared to sacrifice the time it would take for me to substantiate my hypothesis via evidence off the interweb.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
11:30 / 04.09.07
I asked for links, E Smith, because when you said "stout and vicious" I assumed you were talking about Dawkins, and I wanted to point out that his theories, or the theories he's defending, haven't actually been disproved. Which doesn't justify his blustering, but at least it's blustering in the name of logic, as opposed to the Phelpses of this world.

You talk about the scientific commmunity as it's some sort of elite that automatically excludes 'unscientific' ideas, but consider the debate about climate change in the Eighties and Nineties, and whether it was the result of man-made factors...

Okay, good point. We could also mention scientists getting bought out by large petrol companies and so on. But seriously, are you actually trying to say that a few rude people like Dawkins, and a few patsies like David Bellamy, make the sicentific community as disreputable and fanatic as the Westboro Baptist Church? Or that because David Bellamy is obviously being paid lots of money to pretend climate change isn't happening, therefore people who argue for the scientific, atheist explanation for the formation fo the world (a related, but separate issue) are just as bad as Christian fundamentalists?
 
 
Tryphena Absent
12:04 / 04.09.07
I think it's rather proportional, in order to measure "as disreputable and fanatic" you would have to find out how many scientists there are with a connection to climate issues and how many were deniers and then how many Christians there are and how many of them deny evolution and perform a comparison. Only at that point does the argument you're embarking on have any validity at all. I think you're having a bit of a silly discussion over there because no one can measure disrepute, it's only about your perception of science and Christianity.
 
 
Lurid Archive
14:28 / 04.09.07
On the original post, I think that alas and allecto have it about right. The blog post referred to is, I think, implicitly dismissive of a very large body of scientific evidence that isn't actually acknowledged. Whether that makes the post itself unscientific is a matter of taste, probably. One interesting thing that comes out of reading the post is that Twig seems to have a model of scientific enquiry that only allows verfication (or falsification) via direct observation of fundamental phenomena - hence the 'evolution is untestable, and inherently disprovable' line.

But a little reflection on this reveals quite a few problems. At heart is the denial that observation is dependent on theory. Obviously if such a view were taken to the extreme then all measuring instruments would be unavailable to the scientist. But even if moderately held, it is difficult to see how much of modern science could survive. Geology would definitely be in trouble which, ironically, would please the young earth creationists no end.

Even with Newtonian mechanics the situation is much more subtle than is commonly thought - this omni-present, invisible "gravity" acting instantaneously at a distance...have you actually seen it, or is it just a matter of faith?

I guess I could also comment on what Alex's G is saying, except I am not sure that it amounts to more than the observation that scientists are human, and therefore subject to social pressures. Thats unobjectionable, but also a pretty weak statement without some specifics attached to it, and I'm not sure how that is going to work. For instance, there is the claim that there are ethically dodgy scientists (check) who are unconcerned about the environment (check) and yet the overwhelming scientific consensus is now that man is having an detrimental effect on climate (check). Maybe I'm not seeing it, but this doesn't sound like an actual criticism of the scientific establishment.
 
 
Regrettable Juvenilia
15:34 / 04.09.07
Oh dear, Allmacto. We have cut loose from the moorings of That Which We Know About and are all adrift in the GeneralisOcean and the Illogican Sea.

But seriously, are you actually trying to say that a few rude people like Dawkins, and a few patsies like David Bellamy, make the sicentific community as disreputable and fanatic as the Westboro Baptist Church?

This is a blatantly bad comparison. Does the Westboro Baptist Church constitute the whole of a comparable body to the "scientific community"? No, it does not. What you have just avoided saying, presumably because you realised that it would summon someone's wrath, is "make the scientific community as disreputable and fanatic [sic] as the Christian community". Presumably another reason to avoid saying this is that you know you would be hard pressed to show that the "Christian community" is disreputable and fanatical.

To be more generous, perhaps what you meant to say was "do a few rude people like Dawkins, and a few patsies like David Bellamy, make the sicentific community as disreputable and fanatical as the Westboro Baptist Church does the Christian community?" But here again you are tilting the scales in your favour - both by presenting it as a fait accompli (without Evidence) that there are only "a few" bad apples in the science camp, and that they are at worse only "rude", whereas you have clearly picked the worse one of the worst extremes of Christianity and expanded it part-for-whole. Bad Allmacto. No biscuit.

Or that because David Bellamy is obviously being paid lots of money to pretend climate change isn't happening...

What Evidence makes this reason for Bellamy's statements so obvious to you?

...therefore people who argue for the scientific, atheist explanation for the formation fo the world (a related, but separate issue) are just as bad as Christian fundamentalists?

"Bad" strikes me as entirely unhelpful here. But wait, before we even get onto that, let's just deal with the fact that: yes, you're right, surely Alex's Grandma was indeed not saying that. Because he didn't mention David Bellamy, nor the word "bad". He invited you to consider some of the debates which have taken place within the scientific community, so as not to view it as a monolith which is always self-correcting and progressive, much in the same way one would be ill-advised to view Christianity as a monolith which is never either.
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
15:38 / 04.09.07
Actually "fanatic" is not only a noun but also a variant form of the adjective "fanatical". I'm just saying.
 
 
shockoftheother
16:47 / 04.09.07
There is certainly a problem with the original blog posting in that it assumes all sorts of belief in intangibles are identical (as well, incidentally, as promoting the myth of the thousand-year 'dark ages') and that the problem of induction invalidates all forms of scientific endeavour. This seems, somewhat inevitably, to end up in the tautological circles of logical positivism. It's not unreasonable to say that evolution falls prey the problem of induction, but perhaps it is a little unreasonable to say that this makes it the same as religious faith. Indeed, as has been pointed out, it's also a little unreasonable to draw the line at evolution: if evolution relies on unsupported generalised theories, what part of science doesn't? Can you *show* me natural laws? No, of course, you can only show the effects of what seems to be a universal principle, not the principle itself.

So far, so standard. The question is what makes this sort of belief in intangibles different from religious faith. The standard defence, in my experience, tends to invoke Popper's positioning of falsifiability as the key to scientific method or Quine's naturalistic epistemology, both of which have their problems, and I suppose one could debate the extent to which evolution is falsifiable, but claims of unfalsifiability are a common tactic of creationists and have been answered by a number of scientists, usually along the lines of 'the fossil of a rabbit in the Jurassic era would totally disprove evolution'.

I think it also might be interesting to consider the ways in which religious faith predicates moral claims on ontological claims, where modern science, arguably, does not. And yes, as Allecto has pointed out science aims to continually revise its claims about the universe. But I think there's a historical problem here. Science and religion have not always existed as entirely different, mutually antagonistic fields of discourse, because 'science' in the sense of a post-enlightenment, anti-metaphysical branch of ratiocination endeavouring to discover natural laws is a bit artificial and hasn't always existed 'hidden' inside religious thought. Equally, I think it's probably unwise to think of religious thought as simply a kind of misguided science. It's here that I'd suggest looking at Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, which I think could have some interesting applications to this problem.

Anyway. On the topic of atheist 'fundamentalism', I do think there is an interesting trend among some atheists to create a collective identity and engage in atheist consciousness-raising - check out Dawkins' & Dennett's articles on being 'a Bright' here. (Warning: I find Dawkins' article crass on a number of levels, you might too.) And if you want to find a vociferous, evangelical atheist, Dennett's probably much closer to that than Dawkins.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
12:24 / 05.09.07
Right then, Smith/AG and Petey, given your critcisms, let's try and work out what everyone's actually saying. If when he posted:

This implies that the scientific community is made up of dispassionate, cool-headed individuals who are concerned only with truth, and therefore not prone to stoutly, and in some cases viciously defending their own theories when same have been shown to be incorrect, or even open to question.

...Smith was doing as Flyboy said,

He invited you to consider some of the debates which have taken place within the scientific community, so as not to view it as a monolith which is always self-correcting and progressive, much in the same way one would be ill-advised to view Christianity as a monolith which is never either

...then that's absolutely fine, and if I've been constructing monoliths it is good and neccesary of you to tell me so. I've been having screaming rows with people on other sites about the fact that the only thing all Muslims have in common is that they're all Muslims.

To rephrase my question in a better way then, what I'd like to make clear, because I'm still not sure, is whether we're actually going to equate some Atheists with some Christian Fundamentalists, and if so who, how and why.

I.E., is there such a thing as "Atheist Fundamentalism", as, oh, millions of blithering homophobic, reactionary idiots across the internets would like you to beleive. This is a really important point for me, which is maybe why I've been generalizing - there is a whole body of opinion for whom "Teaching kids that homosexuality is fine/teaching the scientific idea of evolution/using something other than abstinence-only sex-ed/not having a religious government = Atheist Fundamentalism". That is to say, people who round on perfectly sensible ideas and accuse them of being "fundamentalist", dictatorial, etc, etc, and if we accept that there is such a thing as an "Atheist Fundamentalist" we risk giving weight to that sort of persecution complex ideology.
 
 
Twig the Wonder Kid
14:16 / 05.09.07
Thanks for all these points. I agree with most of you, and clearly there was a lot at fault in the original post. To try and answer a page full of valid points in one breath ...

use of the term 'fundamentalist' (allmacto) - my use is a lazy modernised version of the term, yes, but I only used it to underline the comparison with the religious equivalent. The equivalance is the idea of arguing a case from a position of absolute truth, i.e. the inability to step outside of your own viewpoint because the world cannot make sense to you without it.

I think what you're doing is confusing the decision to be an atheist, to find an answer and to make arguments for it, with the decision to talk to and about "religious people" as if they are all one imbecile bloc, to ignore the reasons why people are religious, and to be generally rude.

I disagree here. My argument is from a stance of healthy skepticism, not an opposing viewpoint. The response is not simply prejudice against the religious, it is an attack on anyone who doesn't share one's views, which is more than just a defence of one's atheism.

As Alex's Grandma says, my mistake was probably invoking the name of Dawkins. I've written many even less reasoned rants on the subject of evolution in the past which have passed without comment.

I would call Dawkins an evangelist though (allmacto), because he is in the business of spreading his message to as wide an audience as possible, even if his message is mostly one of reason. (p.s. the sociological appraisal of Dawkins is great)

(sleaze) I did do the maths behind the 1% figure. I don't have my workings in front of me, but it was based on 50,000 species in the fossil record, 2,000,000 species on earth currently, and an estimated turnover of species over millions of years. (don't quote me on those figures)

But really I'm trying to avoid having to justify my skepticism of Evolution (for which I do have long arguments), instead I'm defending my right to be skeptical in the first place. To hold no belief one way or the other doesn't seem to be acceptable to the modern athiest (or modern Christian)

Falsifiability - (lurid / shock) I agree, and I wasn't making any claims to a scientific argument. But I'm certainly not saying direct observation is the only way to verify of a theory. My yardstick is the ability to make predictions, and then measure a result to see if those predictions have been realised. By this method Newtonian physics can be demonstrated repeatedly, as can astro-physics and quantum mechanics. But an eons long chain of very small incremental random mutations cannot.
 
 
My Mom Thinks I'm Cool
14:28 / 05.09.07
My yardstick is the ability to make predictions, and then measure a result to see if those predictions have been realised. By this method Newtonian physics can be demonstrated repeatedly, as can astro-physics and quantum mechanics. But an eons long chain of very small incremental random mutations cannot.

I assume evolution would be capable of predicting that a creature with characteristics x, y, and z, common to other creatures it was thought to be related to, would exist at approximate time t in the fossil record, and then some day you might find this evidence.

obviously evolution isn't going to be able to predict (very well) the likelihood of finding the fossil in question, given the randomness there. and is generally vague enough that, often, the actual finding of the fossil ends up changing how creatures A and B were thought to be related.

but yeah. saying it can't predict anything and be tested, I don't agree. I think it can and I expect that it has. I'll ask my evolution of mammals buddy to provide some backup for that assertion.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
14:30 / 05.09.07
Twig, thanks for coming back to the thread. I realize we all seem to have disagreed with you in various ways.

Twig: The equivalance (between certain Atheists and Christian Fundamentalists) is the idea of arguing a case from a position of absolute truth, i.e. the inability to step outside of your own viewpoint because the world cannot make sense to you without it.

Is this what Dawkins is doing, though? Do we have evidence that this, specifically, is "the Dawkins delusion"? Or is the problem with Dawkins and co their style and their gaps - not so much gaps in their reasoning, but gaps in terms of what they don't ever get on to reasoning about in the first place (economy, effect of colony, exploitation, under-education, latent human behavioural traits, on the religious, possible value of religious behaviour in keeping communities together, etc).

I really want to find out who exactly is arguing the Atheist case from the position of absolute truth (i.e. non-scientific, non-philosophically) - if there are Atheists out there who do this, then I'd like to know, because anyone who does this is dangerous. All the prominent Atheists I can think of are or were scientists or philosophers.

I'm trying to think of an Atheist who was so without being willing to think about or explain it, and I can only think of Attilla the Hun, and I may well have got that wrong.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
14:32 / 05.09.07
but yeah. saying it can't predict anything and be tested, I don't agree. I think it can and I expect that it has. I'll ask my evolution of mammals buddy to provide some backup for that assertion.

There's bacteria, and the moths in that industrial town that were found to display a change from white to black over several generations as the buildings got blacker with the smoke (making it easier for black moths to hide from birds).
 
 
Twig the Wonder Kid
15:04 / 05.09.07
The case of the peppered moths has also been used by both sides of the debate. The change in phenotype was extremely fast in this case (occurring over a hundred years or so), which is a completely different timescale to the connections drawn through the fossil record (which are in the tens of thousands of years).
 
 
All Acting Regiment
15:10 / 05.09.07
Well, okay, but it's still evolution in action. Phenomena can happen at different speeds - if a mayfly lives for a day, and a great tortoise for a century, and some trees for 400 years or more, then a process like evolution might work at different speeds in different conditions.
 
 
My Mom Thinks I'm Cool
15:10 / 05.09.07
I really want to find out who exactly is arguing the Atheist case from the position of absolute truth (i.e. non-scientific, non-philosophically)

My experience with atheists who seemed, to me, closed-minded about the whole thing, was not that they based their own beliefs in science On Faith, but rather that they very easily dismissed any idea which seemed, to them, to be "supernatural".

in a specific case that comes to mind - there was no need to listen to someone trying to describe their experiences with chi, because chi is bullshit. why is chi bullshit? because "science can't explain it". there was no attempt to determine whether or not the chi-advocate's experiences were valid from a scientific point of view. there was no quoting of scientific studies about energy work being a psychosomatic phenomenon. there was the firm belief without need for questioning that chi sounded like hocus-pocus, and therefore, it was.

aside from the rudeness of not allowing one person to finish talking about their experiences, it was annoying because it very much seemed to imply that Science already knows everything worth knowing, and anything that hasn't already been explained must not be a real process. which is, to me, sort of contradictory to the whole point of being a Scientist (trying to rigorously test/question what is currently believed and expand theories or create new ones to explain previously inexplicable phenomena.)

the atheist in my example was an engineer, I suppose, rather than a researcher.
 
 
Twig the Wonder Kid
15:15 / 05.09.07
Allmacto - I'm not really accusing Dawkins of being a fundamentalist, that was just a flip inflammatory Burchillism really.

But I would apply the term to some of the commenters to the post. When I wrote "Atheist Fundamentalist" I thought I was creating a fictional pigeon hole, which was why I was so surprised when a few real people came to roost there.
 
 
Twig the Wonder Kid
15:19 / 05.09.07
My favourite comment being

“why can’t [people] just keep their uniformed [sic] pie holes shut and listen to the elite”.
 
 
Twig the Wonder Kid
15:28 / 05.09.07
Well, okay, but it's still evolution in action. Phenomena can happen at different speeds - if a mayfly lives for a day, and a great tortoise for a century, and some trees for 400 years or more, then a process like evolution might work at different speeds in different conditions.

Agree. This is the distinction between macro and micro evolution. Micro evolution is fine, it explains the diversity of species on the planet quite nicely. Macro evolution is the contentious one, because this is the one that postulates the origins of life.
 
 
Twig the Wonder Kid
15:32 / 05.09.07
How does the fossil record stand when taking micro-evolution into account? Micro evolution - the observable, testable flavour of evolution, wouldn't show in the fossil record at all would it?
 
 
Alex's Grandma
16:09 / 05.09.07
aside from the rudeness of not allowing one person to finish talking about their experiences, it was annoying because it very much seemed to imply that Science already knows everything worth knowing, and anything that hasn't already been explained must not be a real process. which is, to me, sort of contradictory to the whole point of being a Scientist (trying to rigorously test/question what is currently believed and expand theories or create new ones to explain previously inexplicable phenomena.)

Yeah, this reminds a bit of the 'experiment' on water dowsing conducted on Dawkins' UK TV show recently, which seemed to be fairly heavily loaded in favour of the skeptic. I should declare an interest here by saying that I've seen it done and it appears to work, or to at least be a phenomenon that's worth investigating (though I've no idea what the mainstream scientific consensus here is, or if such a thing can even be said to exist) so it was bit dispiriting to watch six self-professed dowsers, none of whom were especially articulate, be put through their paces by Dawkinds and his accomplice, only, pretty much inevitably given the nature of the experiment, to be dismissed as cranks. Basically, they were asked to 'dowse' which of a series of static cups in a small tent contained water, but seeing as the point of dowsing, at least as I understand it, certainly as I've seen it demonstrated, is that it can be used to locate streams of water, it seemed like an experiment that none of the subjects should really have agreed to participate in. Although judging by the look of glee on Dawkins' face when their success rate was shown to be 'no better than chance' it was good for him, anyway.

On a seperate note, I'm slightly uncomfortable with the idea that scientific opinion in the Eighties and Nineties which disputed current received wisdom on climate change was necessarily funded by petro-chemical dollars. I doubt, although I don't know for certain, that this was the case.
 
 
elene
19:18 / 05.09.07
The case of the peppered moths supports only the evolution theory. It is an instance of microevoltion, but it also illustrates the falseness of the dichotomy you, Twig, with the creationists, seek to construct between micro- and macroevolution, because it is clear that two populations of moths, separated by the evolutionary forces that support black moths here and grey moths elsewhere, can after a sequence of many thousand such selections eventually reach a state where they no longer interbreed, and are therefore of different species.

Evolution is falsifiable. It could be proven false were it false and will be proven false if it is. As it has not been proven false to date it's far more likely it belongs to a set of similar theories some of which model reality very closely, and that our understanding will move from one such theory to the next, ever closer to true understanding, as our knowledge increases.
 
 
diz
06:19 / 06.09.07
But really I'm trying to avoid having to justify my skepticism of Evolution (for which I do have long arguments),

Long does not equal sound.

instead I'm defending my right to be skeptical in the first place.

You have the right to be skeptical. Others have the right to think less of your opinions in general as a result of the ones you express. If you argue from a position of ignorance, which you are, you shouldn't expect to be taken seriously.

To hold no belief one way or the other doesn't seem to be acceptable to the modern athiest (or modern Christian)

Darwinian (or neo-Darwinian) evolution is not an issue on which educated people disagree or withhold judgement at this time. It is far and away the current theory which makes the best sense of available evidence. Expressing skepticism about evolution is the equivalent of expressing skepticism about the idea of a heliocentric solar system - it just means you don't know what you're talking about.

It's doubly amusing/offensive to make the argument that Dawkins' supposed "fundamentalism" is comparable to that of the creationists, because it completely ignores the not-inconsequential point that Dawkins has the evidence on his side and, say, Kent Hovind, most certainly does not.
 
 
Automatic
09:34 / 06.09.07
You say you have 'long' arguments against evolution Twig.

Could you post them please?

It might give us a better idea of where you're arguing from.
 
 
All Acting Regiment
11:24 / 06.09.07
But I would apply the term to some of the commenters to the post. When I wrote "Atheist Fundamentalist" I thought I was creating a fictional pigeon hole, which was why I was so surprised when a few real people came to roost there.

Twig, could you give us an example? I'm probably being dumb, but could you post us, on here, the dodgy comments from your blog? Because even if I am sceptical about your exact choice of name, I am aware of a trend (certainly among the Internet Atheists) for "risky rudeness towards the religious" (risky because it risks building up barriers instead of taking them down) and I think such comments certainly deserve analysis.

To hold no belief one way or the other doesn't seem to be acceptable to the modern athiest (or modern Christian)

Your position is, then, that you wish to hold no beleif? That's an interesting path to take, but I'm not sure what benefits it brings. Would you mind telling us some more about why you choose this path (if indeed you do)?
 
 
Colonel Kadmon
22:12 / 06.09.07
Long time reader, first time poster...

Twigs position is not, as I understand it, that he chooses to hold neither position, but simply that he holds no belief one way or the other. This may seem a petty distinction, but it is not. A person may be unconvinced or otherwise adverse to choose either position.

I also am in this position, and have also found myself attacked by dogmatists on both sides of the fence. As I am a student of Religion in a primarily Christian establishment, and my social group are largely middle-class white European rationalist atheists, I have learnt to keep my mouth shut, largely to avoid conversations such as this, and the inevitable anger that ensues.

If you look at the history of the failure to adequately define what "religion" is, it is obvious that the argument as to whether evolution is the correct model or not is meaningless to this debate. There is far more to Christianity than Genesis, and more to Religion than Christianity. Aproaching it from a logic and fact-based point-of-view and attempting to "disprove it" is pointless. And yet this is Dawkin's arguement, fundamentally. "Dowsing is spiritual, dowsing is false, therefor all forms of spirituality are false" is not only a false sylogism, but is one based on a definition of false that only one side of the arguement would accept.
 
 
diz
22:37 / 06.09.07
Twigs position is not, as I understand it, that he chooses to hold neither position, but simply that he holds no belief one way or the other. This may seem a petty distinction, but it is not. A person may be unconvinced or otherwise adverse to choose either position.

Yes, they may, but in the case of the broad strokes of evolutionary theory, if, in late 2007, you are not basically convinced, you are either ignorant, stupid, an insane religious fanatic, or all three. There is no real debate here, and saying "I'm not convinced" does not in any way obligate us to debate you as if you had a serious position.

There is far more to Christianity than Genesis, and more to Religion than Christianity.

Absolutely. There are plenty of religious people who are fully comfortable with a rational, scientific worldview. Someone who says "Evolution is a form of faith" in most contexts is not one of them.
 
 
shockoftheother
22:52 / 06.09.07
There is far more to Christianity than Genesis, and more to Religion than Christianity. Aproaching it from a logic and fact-based point-of-view and attempting to "disprove it" is pointless.

While I think there's something to be said for the case of science and religion being two different, non-overlapping magisteria, I'm not sure the position you take here is really tenable. In particular, Christianity, while it has a history of non-literal and polyvalent (Origen, Augustine, Dante) interpretations of scripture, has just as long a history of taking the claims of the Bible literally where they concern matters of fact and logic - literal interpretation of Genesis being the most egregious example of this, but by no means the only one. Given that creationism makes claims on the domain of science, I don't think it unreasonable to expect its proponents to face its criticisms.

There is perhaps a problem of Dawkins overextending his reach, and I think that's an interesting cultural problem: we still have a predisposition to view the scientist as the universal pedagogue in a way that seems a little strange. Dawkins is an ineffectual critic of religion in many ways, but religion does make claims in the same domain as science and that's where his criticisms are most incisive.

Do you think it's actually possible to have a neutral position about evolution? The neutral position seems to require you to accept the validity of the so-called contesting 'evidence' - the same as the strategy used by the creationists who advance 'teaching the controversy'. Not all possibilities are equal.
 
  

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