We gets email!

So like I say I’m not having much luck finding humanisty stuff around here in Malaga. I did find a(nother) cool video by QualiaSoup which I think I’ll be blogging at some point, but here’s something a little closer to home. The Humanist Society at UoE regularly hold a prayer contest, which goes like this. The morning of the contest, a member of the society randomly generates a number, which goes into a sealed envelope. Noone else knows the number. Two other members of the society run the contest, getting people to choose a ‘god’ which could be anyone, and pray to this god for intervention whilst they roll the dice, trying to get as close as possible to the randomly generated, and unknown, number. Whoever wins, well then their God is obviously the one to pray to for divine intervention! Last year we also ran a parallel experiment using the wisdom of crowds phenomenon, where people had to guess the weight of a candle, the object being that none of the Gods were right, but the general guess of humanity was more or less on the money. Harmless, you might say.

Anyway so someone’s complained and I’m going to take their complaint apart piece by piece. I should mention that I haven’t actually sent this email back. You may call this two-faced but a response has already been sent from the society and I think it would be inappropriate to send another which probably says more or less the same thing but a bit more diplomatically. But if this person decides to read it here I’ll be happy to address any other complaints.

“okay.. this Wednesday at your freshers fair one of members decided to taunt the other religions at the fair by requesting four digit numbers and names of gods, then rolling a series of dice to prove that the peoples gods did not care.”

That’s not actually true, we don’t do this to taunt (in fact I don’t believe the members of the religious societies I know would even be bothered by it), there are indeed many other reasons why we do it. It demonstrates that the supernatural is difficult to quantify and measure, it makes people realise that there is more than one god out there on the market, it encourages people to question the world around them, it shows that if you’re going to make a claim about divine intervention, you should back it up with evidence. Perhaps most importantly, it demonstrates a sense of humour.

“This was a vague and frankly stupid attempt to taunt people of faith and to demonstrate your own faith as superior (and yes I mean faith in the same way that Richard Dawkins, the confessed atheist, has faith). It was
purely a random attempt to insult and aggravate and proved only that you were little, and did not understand your own cause.”

As I’ve said, we didn’t do this to taunt anyone. Humanists do not have faith. Please try to understand this, because it’s an argument that comes up time and time again. Faith is believing something without evidence. Humanism and atheism are not faith, they are simply a lack of belief in God (or that and more, in the case of humanism) since there is no evidence to demonstrate that there is one. There is no leap of faith involved. If we were to say “there definitely is no God”, then yes, that would be a faith position, because we couldn’t back that up with evidence, because you can’t prove the non-existence of an invisible being that seems determined not to be detected. But in the absense of evidence we maintain the neutral position of not believing until sufficient evidence is supplied. Google “Russell’s teapot” or “the invisible pink unicorn” for more information.

Yes, many of us are passionate about our lack of belief, but that is because we see the harm that religion often does to society and the way it affects the rational thinking of the population, as well as in some cases the public understanding of science, but this does not make it a faith position. Some even lean to the side that the evidence (such as the Problem of Evil), points to there not being a god, certainly not in the sense that the Abrahamic faiths tend to see it. But again, this is only going where the evidence takes us, there is no faith involved.

“As you claim to be humanist, a belief/devotion to the respect of humankind as a whole and one that accepts that people, even those of faith, should be approached with compassion, I would like to hear a public apology from your society for its members actions.”

I wonder if you actually heard any of our members directly insulting anyone else in the room? I was not present but it would be very out of character of any member of the society. What this experiment did was challenge an idea, the power of prayer, not an individual. Religion is an idea just like any other, it is not protected from criticism. We do not hold respect for any idea, not even our own, because if you can’t defend your ideas from criticism, then what’s the point in holding them in the first place? The only apology you will get is that we’re sorry you think independently-minded students need to be protected from our gentle questioning of an extraordinary claim such as the power of prayer.
“Should this not be forth-coming I shall label your society as obviously only intended to offend and shall report its actions to the student societies council (who ban societies based upon racist or discriminatory views) and the various humanist organisations across the UK and request that your society should be shut down.”

I fail to see how the experiment was discriminatory. Anyone who wished to take part was allowed to, and those who declined to (only 6 out of over a hundred) were not asked again. EUSA and the student societies council are well aware of our group and what we do, and I’m certain that any attempt to have the society shut down would result in failure. We comply with EUSA rules and enjoy the freedom of speech that being a member of a liberal democracy involves. The hypersensitivity of others is no reason to suppress freedom of speech.

Furthermore if you think this is sufficient justification to shut down a society, perhaps you should consider making a complaint about the majority of the religious societies, many of which explicitly state that anyone who doesn’t believe as they do will suffer for eternity. We do not take this seriously, although it is certainly much more offensive than what we were doing at the Fresher’s Fair.

“Before you ask.. I’m an agnostic (In the words of Old Harry’s Game an Atheist without courage in their conviction). However I have more respect for a Christian evangelist who believes he is trying to save my soul that an atheist who preaches just to taunt me because they believe they are right.”

Atheists who argue against religion do not do so because they believe they are right. They do it because they see the bad effects that holding religious belief can cause, some of which I have already mentioned. They do it simply to search for the truth, just as a scientist would publish a paper refuting the ideas of a well-respected theory. Ideas, as I have said, are not immune to criticism, they should invite it! I have little respect for someone who makes the claim that my soul is in danger, and then uses that claim to convince me of that same claim’s truth, without consideration for the evidence. If it held any sway with me then I would simply believe the faith which has the greatest penalty for disbelief. I would expect anyone to respect more someone who strives for the truth via science and evidence, than someone who gets their truth from an Iron Age text or a nice feeling in their stomach, for example. I also presume you would respect such a person more than someone who denies women their rights, or who discriminates against gay, lesbian and transsexual people, or who preaches to children that they are going to burn in hell unless they adopt a certain lifestyle?

Skepticamp 2009

We had an excellent night at the Edinburgh Skepticamp 2009. The two Alexes gave presentations on statistical fallacies and paranormal investigations, respectively, whilst someone I’d never met before called Terry spoke about how best to win over the believers, and I concentrated on alternative medicine with homoeopathy being the main focus.

It was the last Q&A section that started the most vigorous debate, where we were speaking about whether it would be easier to win over a fundamentalist or a moderate believer, with all of the speakers up on stage. One man stood up and asked the question “What’s wrong with being a believer?” to which someone on stage replied that there’s nothing intrinsically wrong (depending on what you mean by ‘wrong’), as long as it doesn’t affect other things. The man agreed, but continued with the sentence “it’s wrong for religionists to force their beliefs on others, just as it’s wrong for skepticism to be forced on others”.

This struck me as rather curious because he was comparing two very different things, religion being a set of dogmatic beliefs, and science and skepticism being a method best suited to acquiring the truth. So I said so and he replied that, for example, ‘evolutionism’ was a belief that we were forcing on others. Somehow then we got into a discussion about the evidence for evolution and established that although it’s not a fact, it’s about as close to a fact as we have in science. But this man maintained that since it is not a fact it should not be forced onto others.

I struggle to see what his point was. Was he seriously suggesting that it’s just as morally wrong to teach a child about evolution, with all the evidence in favour of it, as to teach the child about creationism which has no evidence for it whatsoever? It’s obviously more wrong to ‘force’ a lie onto someone than a truth, and although we can’t possibly know for sure whether something is true, that’s not to say that all beliefs are equally valid. We can put them in order of what is more likely to be true, based on the available evidence, and we do know that some claims cannot be true based on the current evidence.

But that’s missing the larger point that skeptics don’t force their beliefs on others! Skepticism is about criticising other people’s beliefs and claims, picking them apart and saying “this is unlikely to be true because A, B, C.” We may then propose another belief that is better supported by the evidence, but skeptics would be more than happy to defend their beliefs from critical argument, if only because at the end of the process we’ll be one step closer to the truth! It’s all about the free interchange of ideas, something that skepticism and science do well, because they are always changing, and something that dogmatic belief systems like religion do very badly, since they don’t change at all.

I’m reminded of this video that PZ Myers posted on Pharyngula this week of Wendy Wright from American Women Concerned for America or something. I only watched the first part because I’m short on time right now, but that’s enough to see that she’s asking for a ridiculously high level of evidence for evolution (her version of evidence is ‘if you can’t put it in my hand, it’s not evidence’), whilst allowing her own beliefs to slip completely under the skepticism radar. Take a look, here’s the first part and I’m sure you can find the rest of them.

Thoughts on science and not-science

PZ Myers posted this excellent video of a section of a standup routine by Dara O’Briain this week, and it covers a few points which I think are pretty pertinent. Here’s the clip:

So first of all, he says that lots of people have no idea about statistics and how they should be used, and subsequently incorrect information gets peddled out by the media. I mentioned this in a post a couple of weeks ago, that some basic skills in stats and probability wouldn’t go amiss and would probably allow some people to see past some superstitions. Next up, he criticises how the media tend to report both sides of a story in a totally uncritical way. The BBC are notorious for this! Every science story that goes up on their website has a few paragraphs at the end of it dedicated to a loony fringe belief with no substance, expecting the reader to make up their own mind with the limited information a 300 word article can provide! Take CERN, for example. The possibility that it could create a black hole which would destroy the planet was taken seriously by a large proportion of the public, even though nobody involved in CERN thought there was the slightest chance, simply because the media portrayed both sides of the story with no critical thought whatsoever.

But Dara hits some nails right on the head. “But there’s this notion that everyone’s opinion is equally valid. My arse! A bloke who’s been a professor of dentistry for 40 years does not have a debate with some eejit who removes his teeth with string and a door!” Damn right! I can’t count the number of times in a discussion with an alternative medicine advocate or a religionist or something, I’ve made a good point and they’ve come back with “well that’s just your opinion”. Well yeah, it is my opinion, but if my opinion is backed up by evidence, and yours is your intuition or a story from a book, then I’m sorry, but mine is just better than yours! Show me some evidence and maybe I’ll start taking you seriously, but not until then.

But at 1.48 onwards he comes out with this gem: “but just because science doesn’t know everything, doesn’t mean you can just fill in the gaps with whatever fairytale most appeals to you!” Damn right! We once had a Christian come to one of our meetings at the Student Humanist Society and say that we all needed to do some philosophy of science because what we know is always changing so we can’t be so sure about trusting in science, using this in some absurd sense to justify their belief in Christianity. How ridiculous! So was this person not only pinning their hopes on the things not yet explained by science as all gap-worshippers do, but also hoping that other things incompatible with Christianity like Darwinian evolution* would be proved wrong by future scientists?!

But this goes even deeper than that, it shows an ignorance of what science is. Science is not just a bunch of stuff that we know about the universe around us, it is largely a method, an evidence-based process by which we can find things out about the universe and everything in it. If current scientific knowledge is proven wrong in the future, it will be through the scientific method itself, win/win! When was the last time the faith-based approach led to a significant advancement in human knowledge? The faith-based approach gave us leeching, witch trials and homophobia, I don’t think we need to hear about anything more from where they came from.

So anyway, a round of applause for Dara!

Tackling superstition

Apologies it’s been so long, but I’m crazy busy working every day and don’t  have a lot of time. I spend a lot of my space on this blog bashing religion, but I should specify that I don’t think religion is the main problem. Religion is in turn fed by irrationality and superstition, I think weeding out this root cause could solve a lot of the problems we have today.

I spend a lot of time talking with the people at my new job, not least because a large proportion of them speak Spanish and I like to practice. One of my colleagues provided an example of such irrationality at work. She said that she took her flatmate to the bank machine to take out rent money, and after he withdrew the money, he folded the notes over, and a number handwritten on the outside note was the exact same number as the amount of money he’d withdrawn. “How do you explain that?” she said smugly.

My response was to ask her how many times she’d taken money out, folded it up and there was a different number written on the outside note, or how many times there hadn’t been any number written on the note. A statistically unlikely event will still happen if you repeat the situation an excessive number of times, and that doesn’t make it a coincidence, much less a supernatural event.

Dawkins goes through a similar idea in one or other of his books, which I’ll paraphrase here. A TV psychic looks into the camera and tells the audience to look at their watches and clocks, proudly declaring that someone’s will stop right at that second, and that they should call in. 5 minutes later, a few people are calling in, amazed that he was correct. I mean, what are the odds that my watch would just happen to stop right when he told me it would, that’s amazing!

Except that it’s not. If millions of people are watching and they’re each looking at several timepieces, the odds of one of them stopping aren’t all that huge. Next we have people saying “my watch didn’t stop just then, but I was speaking to my aunt in Canada and hers did stop just then, she’s across on the other side of the world and wasn’t even watching, that’s amazing!” Except it’s not. If we’re now including not only the millions of people who are watching but all their friends and relatives that aren’t, then the Population of Events That Would Have Appeared Coincidental (PETWHAC) just grew significantly, but conversely it seems more amazing that a watch belonging to someone who wasn’t even watching had stopped.

So, how do we tackle such basic superstition? Fortunately I think the education system can do a lot of the work for us.

I suggest we start with a basic education in statistics and probability. I’m not hot at all on statistics but I have the basics and it helps a lot. There’s a lot of logic that goes along with it too which often isn’t emphasised. For example, just because there are two possibilities, doesn’t mean that they are equally likely. Most mathematical problems used to teach probability involve 10 different coloured balls in a bag pulled at random, but this is only useful for illustrating equally likely outcomes. There isn’t, as some apologists seem to think, a 50/50 chance that God exists, just because he either does or he doesn’t. A building either stays up or falls down, that does not mean that there’s a 50/50 chance that it’ll fall down at any given moment.

A knowledge of the scientific method would also go down well. My friend wouldn’t have made her silly mistake if she’d known about recall and confirmation bias (she only remembered the time there was a number, and not the hundreds of times there wasn’t), both of which need to be accounted for when we’re practicing science. Put Philosophy of Science on the school science syllabus! This will also make sure everyone knows why clinically controlled trials are essential in proving the efficacy of a treatment, why randomization, blinding and placebo controls are important, and hopefully get rid of people’s faith in unproven alternative medicines. Win/win.

Last but not least, we need to foster an environment of critical thinking. I took a Critical Thinking class at school. It was terrible. We got a history teacher who barely knew the first thing about the subject for a single session a week for 40 minutes, and all he did was teach us what a non-sequitor was (which I could’ve figured out from my Latin class) every week, and we’d mess around for the rest of it. If that was taught properly, that would’ve been the most valuble class I could have taken. But then I suppose Catholic schools aren’t too keen on having rational critically thinking students, are they? Fortunately I’m happy to hear that Critical Thinking will be going on the GCSE syllabus.

As a final thought, remember that dwindling church attendance numbers are not in themselves good news, since lots of these people are losing faith in organised religion simply to go into New Age bollocks or become superstitious and just believe in ’something’. We need to tackle the root cause, not just one of it’s branching weeds.

Fraternising with the enemy

The latest edition of Humanitie is out. This is my contribution, which as always should be read alongside Tim’s contribution from The Friendly Humanist.

I was invited by a friend of mine in the Christian Union (yes, I do have friends) to an Alpha Course group. For the first few weeks we followed the structure of the course guide, but we increasingly noticed that Nicky Gumbel, the incredibly well-spoken man behind the course, assumes he’s managed to turn everyone into a Christian after week three. Unsurprisingly, he’ll have to try again with me. So we did away with the course guides and instead we’d just have a discussion about some aspect of Christianity like the power of prayer, final judgement or the unlikelihood of life or something. Then after a few weeks of that we watched some short films as a stimulus and have a discussion afterwards, and we kind of fizzled out from there. All in all we met for about 10 weeks.

There were several points when I realised some differences between many theists and many atheists. For me and most other people, the reason for debate and discussion is a healthy respect for the truth. But that didn’t always seem to be the case there. Sometimes it seemed that the only reason they were engaging in the discussion was in the hope that I’d change my mind, with no possibility that they might too. Often I would make a point that they couldn’t answer (like for example that you could never justify eternal punishment), but instead of taking it on board, they just changed tack and used another argument to try and convince me. I didn’t expect that from relatively liberal Christians at university (although I’m still shocked that several members of the CU don’t believe in evolution).

So is it worth doing? Definitely! Interactions of this type between humanists and faith groups mean that next time someone at church refers to the demon atheist wallowing in sin and obstinate hatred of the innocent baby Jesus, the believer knows at least one example where that isn’t true, and similarly we don’t fall into the lazy trap of generalising religionists as idiots (we should only call them idiots if they ARE idiots). Humanists should constantly be challenging their own positions, and discussion with a group of people who don’t share those positions is the perfect opportunity to do so! I found that I came out of such encounters more sceptical of religious belief than when I went in, with my arguments and opinions honed (and my patience more durable). I have an appreciation for evidence that I didn’t have before. But most importantly of all, these interactions with faith groups mean that now, everyone at the Chaplaincy includes non-believers in their thoughts and actions from the offset. They no longer speak of ‘faith groups’ but of ‘beliefs and traditions’ or ‘backgrounds’. The humanists at the university have become part of a wider community based at the Chaplaincy. Of course many might see that as an excellent reason not to interact, but I think those people are missing out.