Category: In Defense of Science

The Baloney Detection Kit for US Political Discourse

Posted on by Dan

In the era of Fake News, the Big Lie, and innumerable sources of misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda it has become necessary for each of us to channel our inner Carl Sagan and equip ourselves with a baloney detection kit in order to decipher political truths from falsehoods. We need to think about politics scientifically. Indeed, a healthy dose of skepticism is required to navigate the US political landscape and those with a leaning to the scientific worldview will naturally be better equipped that those with a leaning towards the religious worldview.

Donald Trump The Big Liar
Donald Trump: The Big Liar

Those with the religious worldview have been conditioned from childhood to believe in “faith”, resulting in the unquestioning belief in biological absurdities such as a virgin birth and a death and resurrection. Neither of those events ever happened, clearly. And just because a few fanatics living 2000 years ago claimed that it happened is not very good evidence. Consider this: eyewitness testimony in our modern judiciary system is considered flimsy evidence at best because we know how unreliable human memory is and we know common human fallibility is. So one would think that secondary accounts of events that were recorded decades after the event would be considered suspect at best, but to the religious folks, not so much…

In any case, it’s no wonder that these folks are the leading proponents of some of the most ridiculous conspiracy theories in the current US political discourse. If you find a conspiracy nut, it’s a good chance they are a Jesus lover. For those of use who have *not* gone too far down the fundamental religious rabbit hole, I’ve put together a toolkit of helpful tactics to help sort out truth from fiction and outright lying. It is imperative that we apply these to the US political landscape because democracy is currently under attack.

The Baloney Detection Kit

Everyone needs a baloney detection kit. Many of these tactics have personally saved me from believing things that may have felt right to me or that I have wanted to believe is the truth, but have ultimately turned out to be false. To keep things simple, I have four rules to always follow when trying to decide fact from fiction from US politicians.

  1. Bayes’ Theorem – The Bayesian system of thinking is: Initial belief + new evidence = new and improved belief. It is a form of probabilistic thinking used under conditions of uncertainty (which basically applies to every situation you will encounter). The mathematics behind Bayes’ Theorem basically says that if you have an extraordinary hypothesis, it should require extraordinary evidence to convince you that it’s true.
  2. Occam’s Razor – This is a rule of thumb that when trying to figure out what happened in a situation, the simplest explanation is usually right. Another way of thinking about this is the explanation that requires the *least* amount of coincidences – or special explanations – is usually the right one.
  3. Debate – Debate is a good thing. Anyone trying to discourage you from debating a topic is probably lying. Science fears no questions. The truth fears no questions. Those who fear questions also fear science and the truth.
  4. Do not become emotionally attached to an idea or ideology – Be open to the possibility that you might be wrong. Evidence should change your opinion (see Rule #1) If you decide ahead of time that what you believe to be true must be right then you aren’t thinking scientifically, you’re just a religious fundamentalist.

The Improved Baloney Detection Kit

Carl Sagan
Carl Sagan; author of Science as a Candle in the Dark
(Credit: National Geographic)

These four rules will serve anyone pretty well most of the time, but of course not 100% of the time. Nothing can reduce uncertainty to zero percent but of course we can always get closer and closer to the truth. In order to take things to the next level I recommend reading Carl Sagan’s classic book Science as a Candle in the Dark. In particular, pay close attention to Chapter 12: The Fine Art of Baloney Detection.

Carl Sagan was a remarkable person who wanted to use science to improve the human condition. May his spirit of skepticism live on.

The kit is brought out as a matter of course whenever new ideas are offered for consideration. If the new idea survives examination by the tools in our kit, we grant it warm, although tentative, acceptance. If you’re so inclined, if you don’t want to buy baloney even when it’s reassuring to do so, there are precautions that can be taken; there’s a tried-and-true, consumer-tested method.

Carl Sagan

Further reading: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

Reasons to be an Atheist #1: Science Works

Posted on by Dan

The reasons to be an atheist today are numerous and varied. This article will be the first in a series of articles outlining the many reasons to be an atheist. The first reason to be discussed acknowledges that we have a better system of explaining the world than a religious one. The world is big, complex, and many times confusing. This is one of the reasons people turn to religion, because they feel that religion will provide answers to some of life’s biggest questions. However there is a more accurate system of thought out there that provides these answers and unlike religion, it actually works. It’s called science.

Science vs Faith
Quote by Tim Minchin

Civilizations have invented thousands of religions over the centuries in an attempt to explain the world around them.  After centuries of debate the results of religion are inconclusive on most topics and it’s been a spectacular failure on the rest.  As for one popular example, in the early 17th century the Catholic Church forbid Galileo Galilei from teaching the Copernican view of the Solar System that placed the Sun at the center of the system with the Earth and the other planets orbiting around it. According to the church at the time this view was in conflict with the teachings of the Bible. Clearly, the Bible got this basic fact wrong. On the other hand, there is overwhelming evidence that science works very well as a system of thought for explaining the world around us.  By adapting a scientific worldview we have no reason to be religious.

Science works because of its method and its commitment to the principles of scientific objectivity. Religion relies on blind faith to reveled prophecy. The two systems of thought for attempting to understand the world couldn’t be more polar opposites. Let’s take a look at why science works by looking at the five steps of the scientific method and the five principles of scientific objectivity.

The Scientific Method

The scientific method consists of five steps.

  1. Making an observation – this involves observing some phenomena that requires an explanation of the phenomena
  2. Asking a question – the purpose here is to identify a specific problem and to narrow the focus of the inquiry
  3. Formulating a hypothesis – the hypothesis is an educated guess that can be tested
  4. Testing the prediction in an experiment – this is the investigation to see if the real world behaves as the hypothesis predicts
  5. Analyzing the result – here is where the conclusion is drawn on whether the evidence supports or rejects the hypothesis
The Scientific Method as an Ongoing Process
The Scientific Method
(Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Scientific Objectivity

The scientific method works because it is objective. While it is true that scientists are people, and peoples perceptions of the world are subjective, that doesn’t mean that science hasn’t figured a way around that problem to become objective in practice. Scientific objectivity also consists of five principles.

  1. Observability – for something to be scientifically objective it must be observable. This includes things that our senses cannot observe directly but we can observe the effects through equipment such as infrared radiation.
  2. Universality – for something to be scientifically objective it must consider and account for all relevant data.
  3. Self-consistency – all of the observable data must fit into a self consistent pattern to produces accurate results.
  4. Reproducibility – the data must be reproducible by other people.
  5. Debatability – the results must be debatable. The is the error-correcting process in science since individual people make strong emotional attachments to their idea’s or sometimes make mistakes.

The Difference Between Science and Religion in Explaining how the World Works

The scientific method along with its adherence to scientific objectivity provides the strongest tools we have to answering questions about the world around us. The universe works how it works and its up to us to discover how it works. That’s what science does, it discovers how the world works through observation and experimentation. Inventing superstitious religious stories and institutionalizing them over the generations doesn’t prove they must be correct, especially when observation and experimentation say otherwise. There is an enormous wealth of observable evidence that fits into a self consistent pattern that we call the theory of evolution by natural selection and which explains how humans, and all other species, evolved on this planet. There is absolutely no observable evidence for the creation myth of Adam and Eve in the book of Genesis from the Bible.

As the body of scientific knowledge has grown over time it has replaced religious explanations with scientific explanations. Religion still thinks it can provide answers to questions that science can’t yet answer, but that doesn’t mean that science won’t ever answer them. The remarkable progress of scientific knowledge over the past few centuries is one of the strongest reasons to abandon your religion and become an atheist.

Further Reading: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan; The Magic of Reality by Richard Dawkins; The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins; A Devil’s Chaplain by Richard Dawkins; Letter to a Christian Nation by Sam Harris; God and the Folly of Faith: The Incompatibility of Science and Religion by Victor Stenger

A Spirited Attack on the Holy Spirit

Posted on by Dan
holy-spirit-unterlinden-14th

The Holy Spirit is an elusive enigma. The Holy Spirit – one of three different yet same incarnations of the one true God (dwell on that paradoxical nonsense for a moment) – is a central figure in the Christian Holy Trinity; it is an entity which all Christians are said to possess.  Yet, it’s presence and physical properties conveniently and mysteriously escape the detection of modern scientific methods and instruments.  It reminds me of the dragon story in Carl Sagan’s classic, The Demon-Haunted World – Science as a Candle in the Dark.  To paraphrase the story:

Imagine I say to you that I have a real live dragon in my garage – surely you’d want to see it for yourself. What an opportunity, you think, to see a dragon, of which have been the stories of legends over the centuries, but has left no evidence.

“Show me,” you say, and I lead you to my garage.  You look inside and see some bags of sand, cans of spray paint, some interesting goggles, and other items in my garage, but no dragon.

“Where’s the dragon?” you ask.

“Right here.” I reply, waving vaguely.  “I neglected to mention the dragon is invisible.”

Hmm, you think.  You propose spreading some sand on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon’s footprints.

“Good idea.” I say, “but this is also a floating dragon.”

Well then you’ll use those infrared sensor googles over there to detect the invisible fire.

“Good idea, but the invisible fire is also heatless.”

Ok, so you’ll spray paint the dragon to make it visible.

“Good idea, but it’s an incorporeal dragon and the paint won’t stick.  And so on.  And so on. And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won’t work.

Now let me ask you this.  What is the difference between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who spits heatless fire and no dragon at all? If there’s no way to disprove my dragon proposition, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists?

Maybe, the only thing that you have really learned from my insistence that there’s a dragon in my garage is that there is something funny going on inside my head. Maybe you’d also wonder, if there are no physical tests that apply – nothing to show its mass, nothing to show its heat, nothing to show its chemistry – then what convinced me of the dragon’s existence in the first place?

The analogy between my dragon and the Holy Spirit should be clear at this point.  If the Holy Spirit resides within us, then we should be able to test for it.  We should, for example, be able to turn to the index of any biology textbook and reference the Holy Spirit just like we can for proteins, enzymes, neurotransmitters, DNA, ATP, lipids, the biochemistry of muscle fibers, the chemistry and structure of cells, the mechanisms of the nervous system, and on and on and on.

Until we can have any verifiable evidence of its existence it is safe to say that the Holy Spirit is imaginary.

Further reading: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan