Fire and Knowledge

Michael Shermer has written a good review of the movie Expelled. He’s very good at debunking conspiracy theories, and this film is pretty much a conspiracy theory targeted to evangelical Christians with little scientific education. Shermer goes over their various deceptions and debunks their main thesis (that anyone who believes in intelligent design is “expelled”) and their claim that Darwin caused the holocaust.

Continuing this blog’s seeming new focus on parody rap videos, here is one poking fun of the “new atheism” folks. Strangely well-done, JibJab style:

The author is not known, so it could be a viral video created by a PR firm for the movie Expelled (and thus the expelled logo throughout). Even if so, it’s still very funny and well-done.

Update 4/21: As was suspected, it was made by the Expelled team. If their movie was as creative and witty as this, it might have been worth seeing.

(via Edman)

BBC News reports that Turkey “is preparing to publish…. a fundamental revision of the Hadith, the second most sacred text in Islam after the Koran…. It says that a significant number of the sayings were never uttered by Muhammad, and even some that were need now to be reinterpreted.”

They are also rejecting “a long-established rule of Muslim scholars that later (and often more conservative) texts override earlier ones.”

I don’t imagine Muslim fundamentalists will appreciate this very much, but it seems rather encouraging to me.

[This quote is a bit long, but I thought it was a good response to paranormal claims.]

“A fire-breathing dragon lives in my garage.”

Suppose … I seriously make such an assertion to you. Surely you’d want to check it out, see for yourself….

“Show me,” you say. I lead you to my garage. You look inside and see a ladder, empty paint cans, an old tricycle—but no dragon.

“Where’s the dragon?” you ask.

“Oh, she’s right here,” I reply, waving vaguely. “I neglected to mention that she’s an invisible dragon.”

You propose spreading flour on the floor of the garage to capture the dragon’s footprints.

“Good idea,” I say, “but this dragon floats in the air.”

Then you’ll use an infrared sensor to detect the invisible fire.

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

You’ll spray-paint the dragon and make her visible.

“Good idea, except she’s an incorporeal dragon and the paint won’t stick.”

And so on. I counter every physical test you propose with a special explanation of why it won’t work.

Now, what’s 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 contention, no conceivable experiment that would count against it, what does it mean to say that my dragon exists? Your inability to invalidate my hypothesis is not at all the same thing as proving it is true. Claims that cannot be tested, assertions immune to disproof are veridically worthless, whatever value they may have in inspiring us or in exciting our sense of wonder. What I’m asking you do comes down to believing, in the absence of evidence, on my say-so.

The only thing you’ve really learned from my insistence that there’s a dragon in my garage is that something funny is going on inside my head. You’d wonder, if no physical tests apply, what convinced me. The possibility that it was a dream or a hallucination would certainly enter your mind. But then why am I taking it so seriously? Maybe I need help. At the least, maybe I’ve seriously underestimated human fallibility….

Now another scenario: Suppose it’s not just me. Suppose that several people of your acquaintance, including people who you’re pretty sure don’t know each other, all tell you they have dragons in their garages—but in every case the evidence is maddeningly elusive. All of us admit we’re disturbed at being gripped by so odd a conviction so ill-supported by the physical evidence. None of us is a lunatic. We speculate about what it would mean if invisible dragons were really hiding out in garages all over the world, with us humans just catching on. I’d rather it not be true, I tell you. But maybe all those ancient European and Chinese myths about dragons weren’t myths after all…

Gratifyingly, some dragon-size footprints in the flour are now reported. But they’re never made when a skeptic is looking. An alternative explanation presents itself: On close examination it seems clear that the footprints could have been faked. Another dragon enthusiast shows up with a burnt finger and attributes it to a rare physical manifestation of the dragon’s fiery breath. But again, other possibilities exist. We understand that there are other ways to burn fingers besides the breath of invisible dragons. Such “evidence”—no matter how important the dragon advocates consider it—is far from compelling. Once again, the only sensible approach is tentatively to reject the dragon hypothesis, to be open to future data, and to wonder what the cause might be that so many apparently sane and sober people share the same strange delusion.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (Ballantine Books: 1995), pp. 171-173.

Bill Sizemore has written up a not-too-favorable profile of Pat Robertson and his “soul-winning empire” of products and companies. Most amusing part:

In order to prepare for the imminent Second Coming—which Robertson believes will occur on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem according to biblical prophecy—he acquired METV (Middle East Television), a station then based in southern Lebanon that could broadcast into Israel. Straub was given marching orders to be ready to televise Christ’s return. CBN executives drew up a detailed plan to broadcast the event to every nation and in all languages. Straub wrote: “We even discussed how Jesus’ radiance might be too bright for the cameras and how we would have to make adjustments for that problem. Can you imagine telling Jesus, ‘Hey, Lord, please tone down your luminosity; we’re having a problem with contrast. You’re causing the picture to flare.’”

There is little possibility of our having a cold war with an Islamist regime armed with long-range nuclear weapons. A cold war requires that the parties be mutually deterred by the threat of death. Notions of martyrdom and jihad run roughshod over the logic that allowed the United States and the Soviet Union to pass half a century perched, more or less stably, on the brink of Armageddon. What will we do if an Islamist regime, which grows dewy-eyed at the mere mention of paradise, ever acquires long-ranged nuclear weaponry?….

In such a situation, the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own. Needless to say, this would be an unthinkable crime—as it would kill tens of millions of innocent civilians in a single day—but it may be the only course of action against us, given what Islamists believe. How would such an unconscionable act of self-defense be perceived by the rest of the Muslim world? It would likely be seen as the first incursion of a genocidal crusade. The horrible irony here is that seeing it could make it so: this very perception could plunge us into a state of hot war with any Muslim state that had the capacity to pose a nuclear threat of its own. All this is perfectly insane, of course.

—Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (W. W. Norton, 2004), pp. 128-129.

I was looking through the magazine rack at the hospital and noticed a number of Watchtower pamphlets. For those who don’t know, Watchtower is the Jehovah’s Witnesses propaganda magazine. I became frustrated that they would put their literature there, preying upon sick and scared people at the hospital.

It also reminded me of my time in high school when a friend and I would put gospel tracts in books (especially in the Occult section) at Books-a-Million. That was lame, but not this lame. I wasn’t preying upon the sick and scared, wooing them into a religion where it’s a sin to have blood transfusions.

Anyway, there are no more Watchtower magazines at that hospital.

The University of Washington psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has found that unhypnotized subjects can easily be made to believe they saw something they didn’t. In a typical experiment, subjects will view a film of a car accident. In the course of being questioned about what they saw, they’re casually given false information. For example, a stop sign is off-handedly referred to, although there wasn’t one in the film. Many subjects then dutifully recall seeing a stop sign. When the deception is revealed, some vehemently protest, stressing how vividly they remembered the sign. The greater the time lag between viewing the film and being given the false information, the more people allow their memories to be tampered with.

—Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World (Ballantine Books: 1995), p. 139.