Oh, PZ Myers Won't Like That...

Science blogger Josh Rosenau denounces "bullshit" arguments

For those concerned about the state of scientific literacy in the United States, one would have assumed that Sheril Kirshenbaum and Chris Mooney's Unscientific America would be a welcome entry into the debate.

One would think that any book that decries the lack of scientific literacy in the American public and offers potential solutions would be welcome.

But one would be wrong.

Many fundamentalist atheists have objected to book, claiming it denounces them as responsible for the spread of this scientific illiteracy.

Part of the problem is the way these individuals respond to any criticism at all. The rapid response to Unscientific America is an example of this. For for many of those who orbit the Scienceblogs universe -- particularly the most fervent Pharyngulites -- one has to imagine that Scienceblogger Josh Rosenau may very well be off the reservation with these particular remarks:

"Sam Harris' famous and oft-repeated claim that religious moderates enable fundamentalists also strikes me as bullshit. How can the Rev. Barry Lynn's work with Americans United for Separation of Church and State be taken as enabling fundamentalism? How can the efforts of religious moderates to end the enforcement of school prayer be taken as tacit endorsement of fundamentalist modes of thought? How can the hundreds of clergy who specifically defend evolution as compatible with their faiths be seen as clearing the ground for creationism? Could someone with actual awareness of the viciousness directed by those of Dembski's ilk toward serious scholars like Nancey Murphy really think that moderates enable fundamentalists? What can we call this line of argument but bullshit?"

For the purpose of his argument, Rosenau defines "bullshit" in the vein of Harry Frankfurt as an argument made in utter indifference to the truth -- they making the argument know full well it isn't true, but simply don't care. They say it anyway because it helps them fulfill their own purposes.

Harris isn't the only atheist Rosenau takes to task using this argumentative framework. He also targets Sciencebloggers Abbie Smith and Jerry Coyne for their own bullshit arguments in regard to Unscientific America:

"And in the latest fight, Mooney and Kirshenbaum were personally maligned, and their book misrepresented to a degree that raises questions about whether critics actually read the book. Abbie Smith claimed that the book was inherently dishonest because it does not, being a printed object, have a way for critics to include their responses in the book itself. Like others, I find this rather bizarre. I love Abbie like a sister, but I cannot fathom her hostility to a book which, at least when she began her fusillade, she admitted to not having read."

Not only did Rosenau dismiss the kind of arguments that individuals like Myers and his followers tend to absolutely love for precisely what they are -- bullshit -- but he even took on a fellow Scienceblogger for their simpering outrage at being criticized.

But even more troublesome for critics of Unscientific America may be that Rosenau simply isn't toeing the line regarding this book at all:

"Most worrisome, though, was Jerry Coyne's review of Unscientific America in Science [magazine]. A review in the top scientific journal is a fairly rarified entity, one with various rules and expectations. Not least among those expectations is that the reviewer will give an honest account of the book as written, and will take issue with the authors' actual claims, not with imagined enemies. I took classes with Coyne as an undergraduate at Chicago; I know him to be an honest and honorable man, a scrupulous researcher, and dedicated to thoughtful and open discourse. Thus, my expectations for his review were rather high. I hoped he would rise out of the muck which has surrounded the book online, and give a fair look at it, however assuredly critical it might be.

Instead, I cannot characterize his review as anything but bullshit. His opening sentence claims that 'Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum argue that America's future is deeply endangered by the scientific illiteracy of its citizens and that this problem derives from two failings of scientists themselves: their vociferous atheism and their ham-handed and ineffectual efforts to communicate the importance of science to the public.'

In fact, Mooney and Kirshenbaum specifically do not claim that atheists are responsible for scientific illiteracy, nor do they claim that scientists alone are to blame. In my review (which the authors feel 'characterizes our argument in great detail and with the utmost accuracy'), I noted that 'The solution Chris and Sheril advocate is, broadly, to bridge key gaps. ...Science is not just separated from academic disciplines across the quad, but from the media, from journalism, from religious communities, from politics, and (they observe in an endnote) from the law. ...Americans as a whole are increasingly disconnected from what science is, and what scientists know. This is a problem not just for the general public, but because of the increasing specialization of science, a problem for scientists themselves.' This assessment blames scientists and the public. Mooney and Kirshenbaum blame the emergence of 'evangelicals ...as a political force' not just for many broad problems, but specifically for the conflict between science and religion. They write: 'Of course, the New Atheists aren't the origin of the cleft between religious and scientific culture in America– they're more like a reaction' to the emergence of politically active fundamentalists.

To claim, as Coyne does in Science, that they offer two solutions to these several gaps is simply false, and if Coyne had read the book with an open mind, he would know that they do not blame atheists for those gaps, nor do they think bridging the science/religion gap is some silver bullet."

Certainly, this is true.

After all, it isn't as if the science/religion gap has never been bridged before. Many of history's greatest scientists were also religious individuals. That individuals such as sir Isaac Newton and William Thomson Kelvin could make fundamental breakthroughs in science while believing in God demonstrates that science and religion are not incompatible.

Not that individuals like Myers would care to admit that.

If anything, the science/religion gap is being invented by various "cultural warriors". Right-wing Christians who oppose evolution being taught in classrooms are certainly one side of that invented cultural war. PZ Myers and his followers find themselves on the other, and like the religious right, they have largely invented their pretext for war.

"Coyne's review proceeds to badly misrepresent the core of the problem that Mooney and Kirshenbaum identify. Coyne writes as if the scientific illiteracy which the book's subtitle warns 'threatens our future' is about what facts Americans can recite. In fact, the book criticizes this view of scientific illiteracy at length, replacing it with a definition of scientific literacy involving how people perceive science's relevance to their lives. Coyne claims to be showing that the problems of public perception of science are 'more complex than the authors let on' when he writes: 'The public's reluctance to accept scientific facts may reflect not just a lack of exposure but a willful evasion of facts due to conflicting economic agendas (eg, the case of global warming), personal agendas (vaccines), or religious agendas.' But this is the point of their whole second chapter, and is a theme they return to throughout the book; this is the point of their emphasis on disconnects between scientific culture and the cultures of politics, of journalism, of popular entertainment, etc. Again, if Coyne had read the book with an open mind, he would know this.

Chris and Sheril go to great pains to show that the deficit model (the 'people are stupid' form of scientific illiteracy that Coyne addresses in his review) is inadequate, and that the real issue is a disconnect between what science shows and what people think is relevant to their own lives and what they think is worth knowing. Coyne, thinking he is problematizing Unscientific America's claims, is actually repeating the authors' thesis. Again, I don't know how he could do that if he actually read the book and engaged with it on its own terms, and set out to write a fair and accurate review. His review is bullshit, and as such, brings shame to him and to Science."

Of course, PZ Myers -- whose Pharyngula blog has become something of an unofficial flagship for the Scienceblogs site -- probably won't like to hear Rosenau's thoughts on the matter.

Myers has made his thoughts regarding Unscientific America quite clear -- and, unshockingly, his complaints seem to have more to do with his personal agenda vis a vis atheism than with any actual arguments contained in the book.

It isn't the first time that PZ Myers has placed his personal agenda ahead of science. It almost certainly won't be the last, either.

All one can really do now is keep their fingers crossed for Josh Rosenau. One has to imagine that the onslaught by PZ Myers' toadies is going to be rapid and fierce. Hopefully, he won't be intimidated out of the forum of debate.

Paul Zachary Myers: Cultural Warrior

PZ Myers decries "anti-science, anti-intellectual" culture

Speaking regarding a reported shortage of American post-graduate science students, University of Minnesota biologist accuses a rather vague culprit for the problem.

"The problem is we have a strong sub-cultural thread that is simply anti-intellectual, anti-science," says Myers.

"...In Germany, that kind of debate is considered trivial," Myers compared. "In the U.S., anti-intellectualism is not a trivial problem. We have a culture war that isn't happening in Europe."

Of course, it's extremely convenient for PZ Myers to note the existence of an alleged culture war. He, after all, is a dedicated cultural warrior.

Myers, as anyone knows, is a fierce advocate of atheism, and is among an extreme cabal of fundamentalist atheists who often attempts to argue that religion and science are incompatible.

He seems to overlook the fact that scientists as distinquished as sir Isaac Newton and sir Francis Bacon -- among many others -- considered their religious faith to be perfectly compatible with science.

(Although, to be fair, the Catholic Church didn't seem to consider science to be compatible with the religious faith of Copernicus.)

The United States, meanwhile, remains one of the countries in the western world with the highest per capita rates of religious observation -- although this has been shifted in recent years.

One would wonder what Mr Myers would have to say about this alleged "anti-science, anti-intellectual sub-cultural thread" if one were to ask him how he thought his attempts to decisively separate religion and intellectualism were questioned to his face.

That is, if he bothered to answer such a question. All too often he tends not to.

But the logical answer to this question is obvious: if tension between religion and science has really led to this alleged anti-science trend that Myers alludes to, one would have to consider Myers' efforts to stir up tension between religion and science to be at least partially responsible.

If there really is such a trend at all.

But PZ Myers would know full well if there's a cultural war happening in the United States. He's busy enough instigating and then fighting it that we can take his word for it.

Guess What Mark Steyn and PZ Myers Have In Common?

At first glimpse, it may seem that Mark Steyn and PZ Myers have very little in common.

Mark Steyn is a cultural critic who routinely provokes Human Rights complaints and general outrage from the left side of the political spectrum.

PZ Myers is a tenured biology professor and devout atheist who routinely provokes outrage from the right side of the political spectrum with his tirades against religion.

Myers and Steyn couldn't seem more different. But as it turns out, these two individuals have more in common than the fact that they've attracted a similarly single-minded collection of zealous followers.

As it turns out, each man has a very similar attitude toward Islam.

Mark Steyn's stance on Islam has long been well known. He's an advocate of Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations theory. He's even gone so far as to argue that western civilization needs to significantly bump up its fertility rate in order to prevent being supplanted by Islam.

In other words, Steyn portrays Islam as a menacing, dangerous threat to the so-called "civilized" world. He's been hauled before the Canadian Human Rights Commission for saying this.

Meanwhile, in a post at PZ Myers' blog, Pharyngula, Myers relates the story of Muzzammil Hassan, an individual who established a television station with the goal of refuting stereotypes about Islam. Instead, Muzzamill wound up murdering and decapitating his wife when she demanded a divorce.

Myers, who's never encountered a slander against religion he didn't immediately fall in love with, reaches an interesting conclusion: "it's not a stereotype, but simply a fact that Islam is a patriarchal religion of misogyny."

It's amazing that Myers, a darling of those on the left wing who want to firmly entrench atheism as a fundamental part of the progressive political movement, could walk away from such comments unscathed. Yet the progressive left that would so gleefully denounce Mark Steyn for expressing the same sentiment has remained predictably quiet in regards to the matter.

One has to imagine that it doesn't matter much that both men are approaching their argument from assumptions that are fundamentally flawed.

Separate portions of Benazir Bhutto's Reconciliation could be used to refute either man.

Bhutto's explanations of how the Koran actually mandates fair treatment of women and grants them political and civil rights would prove to be a significant challenge to Myers' sentiments. (Also, the fact that Mohammad's first wife was the first Muslim is a detail that seems to escape Islamophobes.)

Bhutto's dismantling of the clash of civilizations thesis in the closing chapter of teh book would confront Steyn with the reality that freedom and democracy, not the end of Islam, is most likely to erase any threat posed to the Western world by the Muslim world. If she were still alive today, Bhutto would remind Steyn that Western countries haven't often been good allies to Muslim democrats.

Sadly, Bhutto isn't alive to counter the fear mongering language of either man, having been martyred in the name of bringing democracy to Pakistan.

But it's amazing how much these two have in common when it regards Islam -- and equally amazing that Myers is being allowed a free pass for his Islamophobia.

The Riddle of Theological Environmentalism

In a recent post at Pharyngula, PZ Myers is excited by a recent Nature Video Channel video featuring Sir David Attenborough in which he blames the Bible for fomenting an attitude that validates environmental destruction.

"The influence of the book of Genesis which says that the lord God said 'go forth and multiply' to Adam and Eve and that the natural world is there for you to dominate," Attenborough explains. "'You have dominion over the animals and plants of the world,' and that basic notion that the world is there for us and if it doesn't actually serve our purposes it's dispensible, that has produced devestation of vast areas of the Earth's surface."

"Of course it's a great oversimplification," Attenborough admits. "But that's why Darwinism and the fact of evolution is of great importance, because it is that attitude which has led to the devestation of so much of the Earth."

Naturally Myers, who has never heard a criticism of religion that he didn't enjoy, is quite enthused about Attenborough's comments.

But as Attenborough himself admits, his comments are a great oversimplification of the matter. After all, one of the most important elements of religion is that of interpretation.

As it turns out, a great many Christians interpret the Book of Genesis very differently. While some very much do seem to subscribe to the Coulter-esque "take it, rape it, it's yours" school of thought, there are many Christians who believe that their religious faith obligates them to care for the Earth.

Such is the attitude toward the environment taken by organizations such as Care for Creation, a religious environmental group that brings together Christians, Muslims and Jews to meet the group's goal of better caring for the environment.

This is also the motivation behind the recent publication of the the Green Bible, a version of the Bible in which scriptural verses referring to God's love of his creation and God's commandment that the Earth be cared for are highlighted in Green.

Approximately 1000 pages of the book -- printed with soy-based ink on recycled paper with a cotton cover -- are duly highlighted.

Contrary to Sir Attenborough's insistence that the book of Genesis, in particular, is responsible for validating environmental destruction, a significant portion of Genesis is highlighted in green.

While someone who wants badly enough to find justification for careless exploitation of the environment may find it in Genesis, those who pay close attention will find commandments toward caring for the environment as well.

Ironically, the book of Revelations also features numerous passages that promote care for the environment. This is ironic because many Christians who have rejected the Green Bible have questioned the need to care for a world that, according to particular interpretations of the Bible, will only be destroyed anyway.

Even if the eventual destruction of the Earth isn't treated as a rationale for rejecting a biblical focus on environmental protection there is still the matter of priorities. Some conservative Christians have argued that saving souls is more important than saving the Earth -- although they clearly overlook the need for a healthy planet for the next generation (also representing the next generation of souls, depending on the nuances of one's own religious views).

In Canada, the theological environmentalist movement has found some influential leaders. In particular Preston Manning has been instrumental in promoting the Bible as a book that encourages environmental conservation.

This matter isn't nearly so simple as Sir Attenborough describes it. For those intent on believing that the Bible justifies environemtnal destruction, they will find it. But for those who want to believe that the Bible encourages proper stewardship of the environment, they will find that as well. Often, they will support for these differing view points in the same parts of the Bible.

This is why theological environmentalism is a riddle. But like any great riddle, it is one that must be solved in order for the wisdom it entails to be enjoyed.

Unfortunately, the search for this solution won't be abbetted by individuals like PZ Myers who would rather content themselves to chortle triumphantly.

Ugly is as Ugly Does

PZ Myers makes excuses in the wake of a poor debating performance

PZ Myers is absolutely correct when he describes his debate with Kirk Durston at the University of Alberta last night as "ugly".

But considering that Myers himself was the contributor of a great deal of that ugliness to that debate, one should think that he doth protest too bloody much.

Today in a post on his blog, Pharyngula, Myers essentially makes excuses for his poor performance in the debate last night -- and for the record, while he clearly out-shone Durston on the topic of science, his refusal to debate the actual topic of debate can't be looked at as anything other than a default.

In particular, Myers takes exception to Durston's previously-mentioned suggestion that states in which a core value was atheism was responsible for more state-perpetrated mass murders than states in which any religion was a core value.

(Durston described a core value as any value from which a state's other values are derived. Certainly, this is nothing if not an extremely cumbersome definition, but it does work.)

In order to justify that claim, Durston relies on the work of Rudolph Rummel, a political scientist at the University of Hawaii.

Myers essentially claims that if Rummel himself doesn't state that idea in his thesis, then his work can't be used to support it -- tantamount to suggesting that Albert Einstein's theory of relativity couldn't be used to build atomic bombs because Einstein disagreed with them.

And certainly, Myers is right when he notes that Durston's "atheist core value society" argument is nowhere to be found in Rummel's work -- or is at lest very difficult to find. What Rummel's work does provide, however, is the source material that Durston used to draw that conclusion.

In a table of democides -- which Rummel defines as combining genocide with mass murder -- Rummel ranks the states with the largest body counts throughout history, ranking them from deka-murderers to centi-kilomurderers. This table is pictured to the right.

An examination of the top five -- the dekamurderers -- alone confirms the basis for Durston's argument. Three of the five countries he lists as the top murderers in history -- The People's Republic of China, the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany, Cambodia and North Korea -- are in the top five.

This may confirm the basis for Durston's argument, but it doesn't justify the argument itself. For one thing, to describe Nazi Germany as a state in which atheism was a core principle would be flagrantly false. The Nazi party promoted a state religion that was based on a collection of source material, ranging from far eastern spiritualism to bizarre occultism.

Moreover, it would be remiss to overlook the religious -- notably Christian -- overtones of European colonialism. Colonialism was treated by many leaders as a mission from god to deliver Christianity around the globe, and claim what they insisted God had created for them.

Think of the priest in The Four Feathers blessing British soldiers going off to fight the insurrection in Sudan telling them that "God has blessed the British race" with its empire.

But Myers, who accused Durston of peddling "bad history" during the debate, moves on to peddle more bad history himself in the course of his debate post-mortem blog entry.

First off, he claims that atheism was not a core principle of Marxism. This is flagrantly false. Karl Marx denounced religion as an "opiate of the masses" -- a false consciousness-inducing ideology that would have to be cast away in order for the allegedly inevitable revolution of the proletariat to come.

It was actually Vladimir Lenin who rejected the need for institutionalized atheism in his 1905 essay, "Socialism and Religion". While this would seem to invalidate the assertion that atheism was a core principle of the Soviet Union, one would have to remember what took place under Joseph Stalin's regime.

Stalin took advantage of pressure being applied on the Soviet government by organizations such as the League of the Militant Godless -- whose slogan was "the fight for godlessness is a fight for socialism" -- to justify changing the Soviet Constitution in 1936. He entrenched the anti-religious cause within the Constitution of the USSR.

This was done so Stalin could nationalize Church lands. Although Stalin made concessions to the Russian Orthodox Church during the second world war -- the Church was instrumental in re-casting the struggle against the Nazis as the Great Patriotic War -- the state continued to spread anti-religious propaganda through the Soviet Department of External Church relations and the KGB.

Even the more relatively moderate regime of Nikita Kruschev mandated the registration of religious groups with the Soviet government.

Entrenching atheism within the Soviet Constitution established it as a core value of that state. Myers is as wrong as he could possibly be to try to pretend otherwise.

Myers also lobbed an accusation at Durston that he was "poisoning the well" by even bringing this up in the first place. This is arguably a valid point. Then again, individuals like Christopher Hitchens have been arguing that religion is responsible for the most killings of any social force in human history -- the point that Durston was actually trying to refute.

If Durston was indeed poisoning the well, he shouldn't be excused for dumping more poison into an already-poisoned well. But by the same token, he didn't poison it first.

Myers also mischaracterizes one of Durston's key arguments. Myers insists that Durston claimed the Flavian testimony of Jesus is evidence of Jesus Christ's divinity. In fact, Durston claimed that the rapid spread of Christianity in the period immediately following Christ's death -- not more than a hundred years later, as Myers claimed -- is evidence that many people believed Jesus had risen from the grave. The Flavian testimony is believed by many to confirm this.

Myers did excel at his scientific arguments. His rebuttal to the argument that Intelligent Design is necessary to explain the complexity within nature was admirably elegant: that simplicity and efficiency, not complexity, are the hallmarks of good design.

But listening to Myers debate -- and his reliance on the "donkey's laugh" -- makes it plainly obvious where some of his admirers get their rhetorical "skills" from.

The debate was ugly. Mostly because neither individual came to the table with any thing terribly ground-breaking to say, and only one of them (Durston) bothered to actually debate the topic they had both agreed to.

Myers' hands were every bit as dirty as his opponent's in making the debate between himself and Kirk Durston an ugly affair.

Update:

It seems like Myers may be uncomfortable with his own conduct during the debate. Coming in additional commentary thrown in at the end of his blog post:

"It was Durston's first words that were insulting and illogical — a shot at calling atheists evil. I suppose if I'd opened by announcing that Christians were all stupid, we would have had equivalency…but I did not.

And yes, we talked past each other the whole time. The debate topic was far too broad, I thought we were going to argue about the evidence for design, but Durston wiggled away and talked about anything but."

Anyone who was actually at the debate can say for a fact that this is untrue.

In fact, Myers opened his remarks by saying (roughly paraphrased) "do leprecauns exist? This is the same thing. This is crap."

Apparently, in Myers' mind, expressing his sheer contempt for the beliefs of others doesn't qualify as calling them stupid, as long as he doesn't say so in those explicit words.

Furthermore, if Myers was unsatisfied with the topic of the debate, he should have done exactly what Kenneth Hynek said he should have -- he should have declined the debate.


Other bloggers writing on this topic:

Lawrence A Moran - "Kirk Durston vs PZ Myers"

Kenneth Hynek - "PZ Myers Should Have Skipped the Debate"

Let's Talk About Bad History

In a debate over whether or not God exists at the University of Alberta tonight, PZ Myers and his debate opponent, Kirk Durston, explored one of the more insipid questions used to answer the question over which ever is superior:

The question of which has been responsible for more deaths: religion or atheism.

By drawing upon the body counts amassed by the five most bloodthirsty atheist societies -- which, for the purposes of debate, was defined as societies in which atheism was a central and encompassing tenet -- Durston concluded that between Cambodia, China, North Korea and the Soviet Union atheism has allegedly killed more people than anything else.

Myers objected to the argument under the basis that Durston was classifying all atheists as mass murderers -- but conveniently fails to overlook that fellow famed atheist Christopher Hitchens applies the same argument to religion, by Myers' standards suggesting that all religious people are mass murderers.

He then went on to insist that Adolph Hitler was a Roman Catholic. Accordingly, history's most despised mass murderer -- despite the fact that Joseph Stalin actually killed many more people -- was religious.

Unfortunately for Myers, his assertion is flagrantly false.

Those who paid close attention to history know know that Myers' assertions -- the one thing he excelled at during the debate, with the exception of boring people with a lecture about Hox genes -- know that this is bad history.

Hitler may have been raised Catholic. But in truth, Hitler lived the last decade of his life as a bizarre occultist.



It's well known that Hitler and the other senior members of the Nazi party believed that Aryans were the master race. What is less well known is that they believed Aryans were descendents of Atlantis, who lost their godlike powers due to mixed breeding with the members of "lesser" races.



And while Myers is entirely correct to note that Germany was -- and remains -- a predominately Lutheran and Roman Catholic country, and correctly notes that the Roman Catholic Church holds some complicity in the events of the Holocaust due to its lack of intervention, his argument falls short on one important point.

There is a stark difference between complicity and complete and sole responsibility.

(Interestingly, Pope Benedict seems to be set to welcome Richard Williamson, a Catholic Bishop who denied the Holocaust, back into the Church.)

But Myers should double-check his history before the next time he accuses a debate opponent of peddling bad history.

...It's OK When We Do It

Over at the Canadian Cynic Temple of Sycophantic Group Think, there's no question that they really, really hate "freepers".

Unless, of course, it's them doing the freeping. Then, it's all hunky dory.

This time, the idea actually isn't theirs. In fact, it actually turns out to be the brainchild of "EZ" PZ Myers.

The entire affair revolves around Ian Bushfield and the University of Alberta's Atheists and Agnostics' Associations' demands that references to God be removed from the U of A convocation ceremony.

The Edmonton Sun offered up a poll asking readers whether or not they agreed.

As it turns out, things were not going the way Myers, Cynic and their ilk would have hoped. In fact, before Myers chose to intercede in the poll, 67% of those who had answered preferred to keep references to God in the ceremony.

"Will that have changed when I wake up in the morning, I wonder…?" Myers asked, seemingly hypothetically. Considering that the title of his post was "Canadian Poll to Crash", he had to have known full well that his flock of mindless sheep were going to do precisely that.

In the end, the Myers'-inflated poll result produced a 91% margin of victory for himself and his atheist sheep.

Unsurprisingly, Cynic feels quite triumphant over this result. Of course, it this had been, oh say... the Canadian Blog Awards, they would have whined to high heaven.

Fortunately, the Edmonton Sun poll in question is and remains entirely meaningless. The defeat incurred by Cynic and his coterie of mindless douchebags when they failed to deliver the Galloping Beaver a blog award (via freeping) is certainly much less so -- it represents a wholesale rejection of Cynic's imagined influence in the Canadian blogosphere.

Still, Cynic and his cronies at the Groupthink Temple simply wouldn't feel like themselves if they weren't proving themselves to be the utter apex of intellectual dishonesty, cowardice and hypocrisy in the Canadian blogosphere.

There's something very special about becoming everything one claims to hate -- something that generally only the most intractable ideologues can fail to appreciate.

Richard Dawkins Far From a Paragon of Reason

The Enemies of Reason bumps against numerous shortages of reason

Richard Dawkins has unquestionably become the growing atheist movement's resident heavyweight.

Whenever asked, he'll be the first to insist that atheism is the natural handmaiden of scientific rationalism, and insist that the only way for such rationalism to ultimately endure is for its alternatives -- notably, religion and spirituality -- to be discredited and, ultimately, destroyed.

One would be tempted to dismiss this as hysteria unless one of Dawkins' closest collaborators, "EZ" PZ Meyers, hadn't said so much himself.

However, if Dawkins and his cohorts are really so concerned with preserving rationalism and reason, one would expect that they would strictly impose themselves within the limits of these concepts.

In the hysterically titled The Enemies of Reason, a Dawkins-produced documentary aired by the BBC, Dawkins proves himself to fall far short of that.

In the first part of the two-part documentary, "Slaves to Superstition", Dawkins emerges as a curmudgeony, cynical individual prone to hyperbole.



"Science has sent orbiters to Neptune, erradicated smallpox and created a supercomputer that can do 69 trillion calculations per second," says Richard Dawkins during the opening of his television documentary, The Enemies of Reason.

"Science frees us from superstition and dogma," he adds. "And allows us to base our knowledge on evidence."

Dawkins' thesis on religion in his film becomes immediately apparent -- religion makes people small-minded and irrational, and poses a threat to the world's ability to govern itself according to reason.

Yet Dawkins indulges his own irrationality and small-mindedness at length throughout his film -- rarely as cogently as within the opening 60 seconds.

"There are two ways of looking at the world," he insists. "Through faith and superstition or through the rigours of logic, observation and evidence -- through reason."

Reason is threatened by an "epidemic of irrational thinking," he insists. Religion "impoverishes our culture," he announces. "New age gurus exhort us to run away from reality," he laments.

To Dawkins, religion is more than simply a means for individuals to seek answers to questions that science can't answer, it's some sort of insidious threat to civilization itself.

"As a scientist, I don't think our indulgence of irrational superstition is harmless," he says. "I believe it profoundly undermines civilization."

"We live in dangerous times when superstition is gaining ground and science is under attack," Dawkins muses. "In this program I want to take on the enemies of reason."

Apparently, in Dawkins' mind, science is at risk of being subjected to another holy inquisition such as that inflicted upon Gallileo. But instead of resisting the spectre of dogmatic intolerance wholesale, Dawkins' solution seems to be to unleash an inquisition on religion instead.

"Increased life expectancy, health and leisure provided by modern medicine and industrial technology have given more people more time than ever before to educate themselves, express their creativity and ponder existence."

People expressing themselves and pondering existence are both pursuits that Dawkins seems fine with -- he just wishes people would restrain themselves within the means of which he personally approves.

"Yet into this better world that reason has built, primitive darkness is coming back," Dawkins laments. "A disturbing pagan mix of superstitions."

Dawkins first takes aim at astrology, trying to draw as close a comparison between it and racism as he can manage. "Amusingly, it falls afoul of our modern taboo against lazy stereotyping," he insists. "How would we react if a newspaper published a daily oolumn that read something like this: 'Germans - It is in your nature to be hardworking and methodical, which should serve you well at work today. In your personal relationships, especially this evening, you'll need to curb your natural tendency obey orders. Chinese - Inscrutibility has many advantages but it may be your undoing today. British - Your stiff upper lip may serve you well in business dealings, but try to relax and let yourself go in your social life'. And so on through 12 national stereotypes. Of course, the astrology columns aren't as offensive as that, but we should ask ourselves exactly where the difference lies."

The fact that racism divides people based on immediately apparent physical and cultural characteristics - skin colour, language, etc -- and astrology practices divides people more arbitrarily is obviously among the chief differences between astrology and racism, as is the fact that astrology divides people fairly evenly across (not amongst) such racial and cultural divides.

In other words, there's a world of difference between astrology and racism. Neither fall within the narrow conflines of what Dawkins would consider to be "rational" or "reasonable".



From astrology (Dawkins notes that, surprise surprise, he prefers astronomy), Dawkins moves on to belief in the paranormal -- in particular, psychics.

Once again, Dawkins is picking an easy target. The revelation of JoJo Psychic Alliance's Miss Cleo as a complete fraud served to largely discredit the psychic community.

But Dawkins makes no mention of Parapsychology, a scientific (probably better described as pseudo-scientific) field in which researchers attempt to apply the scientific method to the paranormal in an attempt to explain it, most often with mixed results. They often study psychic phenomenae.

It should be of little surprise to anyone that a scientific field would emerge to stupiy phenomenae that conventional science has all but abandoned, and perhaps for good reason -- science seems to lack the tools necessary to explain them.

In the case of psychics, Dawkins jumps on a theory offered up by skeptic illusionist Darren Brown: cold reading. Cold reading, Brown insists, is basically a glorified method of word association in which various words are offered up and subjects supply the meaning on their own.



Yet cold reading doesn't explain how an individual such as Craig Hamilton Parker could "cold read" such specific details about such specific people.

For skeptics, however, there is a far superior method of debunking many psychics -- such as the case of Peter Popoff, who ran a similar outfit, yet was revealled to be "reading" people through FM radio transmissions to a headset. Various audience members were revealled to be "cased" before hand.

As it turns out, most of Craig Hamilton Parker's congregation are regulars. This alone explains his ability to percieve details about individual members as if they have been delivered from beyond the grave. In other words, the far more rational explanation of familiarity and (perhaps even) research rather than obscure psychological trickery.

Dawkins' questions about the pyschological impact of percieved contact with the dead are also entirely legitimate -- questions that should be asked, and questions that Parker himself should certainly feel obligated to answer.

Parker insists that he's trying to help others -- and he may even believe he is -- but that doesn't change the legitimacy of Dawkins' concerns.



Dawkins then turns his attention to, of all things, dowsing -- the practice of trying to find water using sticks.

Dawkins blames time-old notions of animism -- the belief that everything existing in the world possesses some spiritual nature -- for what he dismisses as -- admittedly, because they so often are -- irrational thought.

In particular, Dawkins notes the tale of the Persian king Xerxes, who once ordered the ocean punished for destroying a bridge he had built. The belief that the ocean was a "malevolent force", Dawkins views as irrational.

Of course, Dawkins is overlooking some realities of the times in which these beliefs were widely held -- times in which many people who travelled by sea never returned alive, if they ever returned at all. The belief that the sea is malevolent could have been treated as a parable for the fact that the sea has, historically, been very very dangerous for those who dared embark upon it.

Dawkins next turns his attention toward gamblers.

He insists slot machines -- "one-armed bandits" as he describes them in the popular manner -- dispense prizes randomly.

He notes that many gamblers have their own particular routines they like to engage in, and then asks if such superstitious behaviour is the result of human evolution. He suggests that quaint notions of luck are actually the result of biological processes that help living creatures judge situations statistically in order to make decisions that help optimize survival.

Dawkins argues that supersition is little more than the fallacious side of a pattern-seeking tendency of animal minds: finding a pattern where none exists.

But for Dawkins to choose electronic gambling machines -- Video Lottery Terminals as they're known in Canada -- as his example of this is, in itself, a folly. First off, these machines don't dispense prizes randomly. They're programmed in order to dispense prizes in a manner that optimizes profit. Furthermore, there is no such thing as a random number within a computer -- only a calculated number deliberately computed to resemble randomness as much as possible.

Nor is there really any such thing as randomness in nature. The governing laws of nature -- physics, thermodynamics, biology, etcetera -- may often collude in such a incomprehensible manner as to appear random, but there is no such thing as true randomness. Thus the suggested animal instict to search for discernable patterns.

When famed psychologist BF Skinner introduced such randomness into an experiment involving pigeons, he witnessed them exhibiting superstitious behaviour -- attempting to influence patterns with "false positives" that they had percieved to influence the "random" distribution of their food.

Dawkins attributes it to a human desire to read meaning into everything -- "faces in toasted cheese" and "fortunes in tea leaves".

Of course, meaning will always remain subjective. Dawkins attributes it to a desire for an organizing force -- yet the human brain itself is an organizing force. The human brain absorbs stimulus from its environment, then natural processes within the brain manage these stimuli to a tolerable level, effectively ignoring any stimulus these processes have been conditioned to treat as immaterial or unimportant.

In other words, there are things going on around the human brain that the conscious mind never recognizes.

An obvious difference between Dawkins and the numerous "believers" he examines throughout Enemies of Reason seems to emerge: simply, that these processes of his brain have been conditioned in order to ignore stimuli that others do not, while others' brains have been conditioned in order to ignore stimuli that he does not.

One could hypothesize at length about differences between individuals like Dawkins and the believers at a fundamental neuropsycholigical level.

Once these differences are recognized, one conclusion becomes unignorable: that Dawkins' mind has reached different subjective conclusions about the nature of the world around us using different information.

It's well-known that Dawkins prefers his own method of attaching meaning to the world around him: science. But it's in this vein that a strong case can be made for at least one alternative: spirituality.



Spiritualists actually come in great variety. Dawkins turns his attention to Satish Kumar, who argues that everything in the world has both physical and spiritual properties.

Without giving Kumar's views any more than a cursory examination, Dawkins dismisses it as "fabricated meaning".

"Science and rationality are often accused of having a cold, bleak outlook,"Dawkins muses. "But why is it bleak to face up to the evidence of what we know?"

In the perception of those such as Kumar, Hamilton Parker and others such as Ben Stein, the answer to this question is very simple: because it discounts difficult questions about what we don't know. Questions of meaning and purpose, which often science will not even begin to explore.

Science is under attack, Dawkins insists. Yet Dawkins and his compatriots are the ones who have professed that they will eliminate religion. It would seem that religion is what is really under attack.

Of course, it hasn't always been this way. When Copernicus questioned the Heliocentric view of the Catholic Church, he was punished severely even after he recanted his view -- which turned out to be demonstrably correct.

There is little question that scientists were targeted by the agents of the Church -- both within the formal structure of the Inquisition, and under other, more informal guises.

But as the formal onslaught of the church against science has effectively subsided -- scientists are no longer imprisoned for their work -- Dawkins seems to believe that the time has come for the exact same evils to be turned upon religion: an inquisition of science against religion.

Individuals such as Michael Onfray have gone so far as to promise a "final battle" between religion and atheism.

For Dawkins, however, the battle is not against religion alone. He also blames postmodernism for allowing alternative worldviews to be treated with respect -- respect that he himself has proven unwilling to afford.

Yet the critiques postmodernism offers to science are entirely benign questions -- questions that, if answered, would strengthen science's claims to objective truth, rather than weaken them.

"Reason has built the modern world" Dawkins insists.

Certainly so. But reason has not built the modern world alone. Religious and spiritual movements have been alongside science all along, often acting as philosophical, moral and spiritual guides to the world. Religious and spiritual movements have provided key cultural memes around which modern societies have been built.

In his effort to enforce his strict views of scientific rationality upon others, Richard Dawkins has fallen far short of the paragon of reason he often purports himself to be.

Smarter Than You, But Slower On the Uptake

Coming to us via Ezra Levant is the tale of Richard Dawkins and "Beware the Believers", a hilarous YouTube send-up of the top atheist heavyweight.

"If anyone can understand a single word of this, don't bother to translate, just tell me whose side it's on. I get the feeling (same with South Park) that there are people out there who assume that something that is obviously MEANT to be funny therefore must BE funny, and they immediately shower it with accolades such as "Wow", "Hilarious", "Awesome" and, most side-splitting of all, "LOL"."

Which is almost ironic: in a video that mercilessly lampoons Dawkins' arrogance, anti-religious zealotry and polished abrasiveness all that Dawkins is concerned about is "whose side it's on".

For someone as allegedly brilliant as Richard Dawkins, it should embarrassing to be that parochially slow on the uptake.

Zeitgeist is an Intellectual Dead End

Online "doctumentary" lives up to its premise in the most ironic way imaginable

If you watch the online "documentary" film Zeitgeist closely enough, it isn't too hard to decode the film's central message:

Hey, you. Yeah, you. You're fuckin' stupid.

"The last thing the men behind the curtain want is a conscious, informed public, capable of critical thinking," the film's omnipresent narrator insists. "Which is why a continually fraudulent zeitgeist is outputted via religion, the mass media and the educational system. They seek to keep you in a distracted, naive bubble. And they are doing a damn good job of it."

Zeitgeist is broken down into three parts, taking aim at religion, 9/11, and banking.

In the end, however, the film falls flat on its face because of its premise: you, the viewer, are fucking stupid.

It makes this assumption, and quickly unravels in the intellectual grasp of anyone who isn't stupid: provided they bother to check the necessary facts.

In the first part of the film, entitled "The Greatest Story Ever Told", Zeitgeist takes aim at religion: specifically, Christianity. By noting a number of alleged similarities between Jesus Christ and various other religious figures throughout history.

Then, unfortunately, the claims fail to hold water. In particular, many of these claims are based on theological claims that remain largely unsupported.

In particular, the film claims that the Egyptian god Horus possesses all the characteristics of Jesus Christ. However, they have to rely on Harpur's un-anotated and unsupported work in order to do so.

The claims become even more contrived when the film claims the Greek god Attis, who castrated himself in a fit of passion and bled to death, is another Christ-tale.

Perhaps the film's producers believe they made a novel point when they relied on scholarly work that scoured the world's various religions and mythologies for figures that passed any spurious resemblence to Jesus Christ, then labelled Christianity as "plagiarism" and "fraud".

Then one remembers that what moderate Christians the world over agree is really important about Christ is his benevolent message.

Oops. Better pretend he never existed. (More on this later.)

In the second chapter of the film, entitled "All the World's a Stage", Zeitgeist portrays 9/11 as a "false flag operation" carried out against the United States by its own government.

The film predictably attempts to make the case that the World Trade Center was actually the result of a planned demolition.

Despite the persistence of these conspiracy theories, they have been consistently and chategorically disproven. Only those who are predisposed to insist that a malevolent conspiracy is the only plausible answer continue to believe them.

The less time wasted on these conspiracy theories, the better.

In the film's third part, "the Men Behind the Curtain", the film insists that central banking, and existence of the United States federal reserve, is part of a grand conspiracy theory to give international bankers control over the United States, and enslave its citizens via the distribution of currency.

In particular, the film accuses international bankers of warmongering, and various U.S. presidents (including Woodrow Wilson and Theodore Roosevelt) of war mongering on their behalf, and dragging the American people into wars "they wanted nothing to do with," even insisting that the Lusitania was "sent" through German-occupied waters during WWI in a bid to force American entry into the war.

Essentially, Zeitgeist argues that belief in religion -- specifically, Christianity -- builds a foundation for people to believe the so-called "lies" the "establishment" feeds them regarding historical events.

The film concludes by raving over the so-called "North American Union" they argue is imminent, and claim that it, along with European Union, African Union, and Asian Union, will lead to a greater amalgamation, and "One World Government".

In the end, however, Zeitgeist can be reduced to nothing more than Michael Mooreism at its very best (or, depending how you look at it, its very worst). What the producers can't prove, they distort. What they can't effectively distort, they simply ridicule. What they can't prove with evidence, they simply make up.

Ultimately, however, the film finds its downfall in its online format. Thanks to the fact that the film must be watched online, every "fact" cited in the film can be checked through little more than a rudimentary Google search.

All too often, these so-called "facts" don't stand up to scrutiny.

For example, the film at one point claims that there's no evidence that Jesus Christ ever existed, noting that no active historians of the day took note of a man wandering about and performing miracles.

And certainly, this is true. If only it were the entire story.

Unfortunately for the producers of the film, there is a good deal of archaeological evidence for not only many of the historical events described in the Holy Bible, but also for the existence of Jesus himself (albeit indirect evidence in this particular case).

In the end, the film relies on the many similarities between Christianity and various pagan religions to disprove Christianity entirely. Of course, this falls intellectually flat to anyone who's so much as read The Da Vinci Code, who know that pagan traditions were adopted into and adapted to Christianity, and with good reason.

In another case, the producers claim the United States Federal Reserve is a private corporation with no culpability to the U.S. government.

False again.

The producers of the film fail to mention that the U.S. government maintains control over the Federal Reserve by appointing its Board of Governors. The board's seven members are appointed by the president, each serving 14-year terms. Theoretically, these appointments are made infrequently enough to ensure this board retains a largely non-partisan demeanor.

The chairman and vice chairman are similarly appointed by the president, to four-year terms.

The film sustains yet another factual black eye when it claims the pre-Vietnam war Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened.

Which, if you refer only to the second attack alleged during the Gulf of Tonkin incident, which would actually be true. However, the initial naval battle on August 2, 1964 did occur. This being said, the entire incident was demonstrably manipulated in order to support overt American entry into the Vietnam war.

For the average commentator eager to denounce American foreign policy, this alone would be enough. Unfortunately for the producers of Zeitgeist, they didn't simply need to demonstrate that the truth regarding the Gulf of Tonkin was twisted, they needed to pretend it never happened, so they could link it to what is clearly their prime target: 9/11.

Sometimes, the claims made in the film don't even stand up to the most basic scrutiny, such as the case wherein a 9/11 survivor claims that he felt a massive explosion from the World Trade Center's basement mere moments before feeling the impact from the plane hitting the building.

This despite the fact that the tower took more than an hour to collapse, making the implied theory that the so-called "basement explosion" was part of a planned demolition entirely untenable.

Perhaps the most telling image within Zeitgeist, however, is the constantly-displayed image of the Earth in a cage, suggesting Earth has become something of a Prison Planet -- one may draw their own conclusions in regards to this.

Zeitgeist clearly leans heavily on the half-boiled "revelations" offered by self-aggrandizing would-be conspiracy messiah Alex Jones. It's very plausible the film may be more than merely a convenient platform for his ideas.

Zeitgeist is a film so eager to cut away the so-called "fallacies" that it targets that it ultimately falls on its own sword. In the end, its own premise becomes its downfall, as anyone prepared to do even a precursory amount of critical thinking can quickly dismiss the film as sheer garbage.

"The more you educate yourself, the more you understand where things come from, the more obvious things become, and you begin to see lies everywhere," the film insists.

This is actually a very fitting quote for the film. The problem with Alex Jones and his breed of conspiracy theories is that they see lies everywhere, even where they don't exist. Worse yet, they aren't above a little dishonesty themselves in order to "prove" the fallacy of these so-called lies.

People used to agree that such dishonesty was a bad thing.

The convenient thing about dealing with ignorant people, however, is that they generally don't bother to double-check what they're being told. They accept it at face value.

The producers of Zeitgeist assume the viewer is stupid. As such, they make themselves easy prey for those who aren't.