I used to have my doubts about Ayn Rand and her philosophy, Objectivism.  But then I read this awesome book about how all the heads of corporations and industrialists went on strike and lived in a society in the mountains where they built hovercraft, laser guns, and perpetual motion machines running on static electricity. When they left, the rest of society languished, reverting to using clovis points as their sole tools, their language degenerating into grunts and squeals. Near the end, the leader of the rich people hacks his way onto national TV where he gives a ten-hour speech about how stupid everyone is, only repeating himself 231 times in the process. Sadly, the leader is arrested for being too smart and building perpetual motion machines that are too awesome, so the rest of the industrialists and rich people are forced to break him out by using their laser guns to shoot their way into the prison to release him.

Anyway, this book was just so realistic and true-to-life that I realized my initial doubts about Objectivism were foolish. After all, what could be more plausible than a story in which rich people go off to live in mountains as self-sustaining farmers who invent  perpetual motion machines, all without the help of any sort of labor force? I could no longer deny the force of Ayn Rand’s philosophy in the face of such realism.

Now that I’m an Objectivist, I plan to remove all parasites from my life, choosing to live only for myself. This is why I plan to leave my wife and have kids only to abandon them later. I will eat my lazy dog, who refuses to get a job, for sustenance. After becoming an Objectivist, I also met a wonderful woman while I was raping her, and after I was done we promptly fell in love (but it’s an individualistic and strong-willed type of love). I couldn’t be happier. Whenever I’m not rubbing money all over my glistening body in ecstasy, I now spend all of my time punching poor people. This is the way life was meant to be lived.

Philosophers stereotypically care a great deal about making distinctions that aren’t very meaningful, and Massimo Pigliucci lives up to this stereotype in his blog post “Why Plumbing Ain’t Science“. He maintains, of course, as all philosophers do, that the distinction is actually quite meaningful and important, but that just proves his guilt. A fireman saving a child from a burning building, for example, never has to explain why his actions were important (except perhaps to a philosopher).  A man who invents a new vaccine doesn’t have to explain its importance.  Justin Beiber has never had to account for his vast importance.  As everyone knows, the first thing a guilty party does is profess innocence, which proves guilt.  Massimo is a philosopher, however, so he’d probably point out that the first thing an innocent person does is also profess innocence, meaning my hypothesis concerning his guilt cannot be falsified with this evidence.  But this is just the sort of underhanded thing a philosopher making a meaningless distinction would do.

Massimo points out three features of science that differentiate it from plumbing:

1. Its more refined methods.
2. Its historical precedents.
3. Its sociological structure.

The points are well-taken.  Plumbing does not utilize statistics or double-blind studies to unclog a pipe.  Plumbing has not historically been considered part of science.  And there are no educational social structures for plumbing by which plumbers go to school for half their lives to learn how to use very refined methods to arrive at conclusions.  So far as I know, journals like the Annals of Plumbing Science and the New England Journal of Clog Removal exist only in my mind (but if it exists in my mind, doesn’t it still exist, philosoraptor?!).  However, I think these distinctions aren’t important, and that plumbing is similar enough to science in its important information-seeking and problem-solving methods that there is really no reason to consider it a non-science other than for arbitrary personal reasons.

Let’s apply Massimo’s reasoning to another subject: namely, mathematics.  As a philosopher, Massimo could (and probably would) ask himself the pointless question, “Is addition a part of mathematics?”  The answer would seem to be no, according to Massimo, because the mathematics that people study in the university is much more refined and uses more complex techniques than simple addition.  Also, there are no sociological structures in place, like journals, professorships, and so on, for those who simply want to add things.  Presumably, the only indicator that addition is a part of mathematics is its historical inclusion in this class, and because addition fails two of these three tests, it must not be mathematics.

This reasoning should strike the reader as absurd, and that is because we don’t see the features of sociological structures and complexity as necessary components of “math-ness”.  I think the same criticism could apply to Massimo’s exclusion of plumbing from the domain of science.

For one, if plumbing were more difficult, or more of its questions were unanswered and hard to fathom, there probably would be a structure to plumbing that is similar to science, not unlike that of engineering.  The methods for answering plumbing questions, by dint of its new difficulty, would also therefore become more complex and refined.  But the methods would remain fundamentally the same: plumbers, like scientists, would use empirical evidence and hypothesis testing and induction to solve problems and answer questions about the world.  The fact that plumbing is easier and less complex is no reason to exclude it from the realm of science, in my book.

But let us return to the relevant question: Is the demarcation of science from non-science important?  Massimo answers in the affirmative, pointing out that there are negative political and social consequences to expanding the definition of science, such as allowing for crazy ideas like homeopathy, creationism, and parapsychology to fall under the rubric of science.  I, however, do not see these intrusions as negative.  Homeopathy, creationism, and parapsychology can be seen as science; it’s just that they are failed hypotheses.  Each of these hypotheses is as empirically testable as the most well-known theories in physics and biology.  The only problem is that they failed their tests.  Seeing these subjects as science, specifically failed science, thus does not harm anything.  In that case, the proper route to take with the political and social ramifications is to simply argue that people should not be learning, teaching, or practicing failed science, rather than non-science.  Nothing really changes should we expand the definition of science to include plumbing, except that a few plumbers might start wearing white labcoats. The “problem” therefore doesn’t seem to important and involves no disagreement about anything of worth.  You say gavagai, and I say rabbit-stage, but in the end we’re both pointing at a damned rabbit.  For all intents and purposes, those who think plumbing can be considered scientific agree with Massimo on all points, and the only disagreement is on the labeling.  And that, my philosopher friends, is the kind of concern over little nothings that made philosophers famous.

Gerald Biloxy, an obscure professor in the philosophy department at the University of Montana, made a startling discovery last Wednesday.  He had discovered the meaning of life.

Among lay people, the meaning of life is often considered one of the most important philosophical questions, but professional philosophers through the ages have preferred to address weightier problems with much more relevance to our daily lives, such as dilemmas about whether trolleys should be stopped with levers or fat people, the all-important and life-changing distinction about whether knowledge is justified true belief or undefeated justified true belief, the question of how many a priori angels can be known synthetically to dance upon the head of a pin, or the riddle of whether the hegemonic power structures that disenfranchise the Other can be deconstructed along with all other binaries and hierarchies.

Biloxy happened to uncover the meaning of life as his thoughts were drifting from his more routine philosophical work of concocting absurd thought experiments as counterexamples to prevailing ideas.  ”I was trying to envision a possible world in which fluffy baby seals, who were actually mindless zombies, were being clubbed to death by zombies, who were in fact brains in vats, which incidentally were surrounded by actual brain-craving zombies, in order to refute rule utilitarianism,” explained the philosopher.  ”However, in working out the details I was distracted by a non-black non-raven, so much so that I thought about something of worth, which led me to understand the meaning of life in a sudden moment of clarity.”

Biloxy rushed to find a notepad, hurriedly scribbling out his thoughts and the reasoning process that led to his conclusion regarding the meaning of life.  ”After figuring out the meaning of life, I quickly retired to the liquor cabinet to relax.  With this discovery, after all, I was guaranteed to become one of the most prestigious philosophers of the day, with the attendant benefits that go along with such prestige, such as an improved likelihood of getting tenure (1% more likely), a chance to leave the University of Montana for a slightly more renowned college, like the University of Idaho, and a $50 annual pay raise, bringing my philosopher’s salary to nearly $70.”

Despite his discovery, though, the philosopher was soon foiled by philosophical difficulties.  He had celebrated his discovery a bit too recklessly and found that he had forgotten the meaning of life.  ”I was unperturbed when I forgot the meaning of life, some time between 11:23 PM and time t, because I had written it down much earlier than time t.”  To his horror, though, he could not decipher his own writing when he looked at his notepad the next day.

“It wasn’t that my writing was illegible.  It is perfectly legible.  The problem was in the very nature of language itself.  After forgetting the answer, consulting my notes was useless.  The meaning of every word was underdetermined.  When I wrote the word happiness, for instance, I did not know whether I was referring to feelings of joy, or joyous feeling-stages, or feelings of joy that will at time t become feelings of horror (jorror).  Similar problems surrounded all the other words, such as the, meaning, gavagai, and of. All was lost.”

The philosopher then showed us the notepad, and he was indeed correct: much of it was indecipherable.  It was full of made-up words like modality, heuristics, and ontology (presumably the study of onts), and was also riddled with italicized letters preceded by tildes (~) or backward letter Es.  Clearly, this philosopher was dyslexic.

Later the next day, after he realized he would never decipher his notes, he notified everyone he had emailed that he had not uncovered the meaning of life.  Upon hearing of this, his colleagues immediately set out to solve the problem for themselves, but soon thought better of it, and once again resumed debating whether trees exist if no one is around to look at them.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I hate many, many things.  In a time when atheists are fighting desperately to be seen as good, kind, well-meaning folk, I brazenly admit to being an angry, pissed-off atheist.  But of all the things that anger me—whether it be God, religious fundamentalists, chiropractors, naturopaths, conspiracy theorists, or recently-pregnant women who won’t stop talking about their damned kid—few things piss me off more than people who misuse and misunderstand the concept of Ockham’s razor.  Mary Roach, the well-known pop-science author of books like Spook, Stiff, and Bonk, is the latest to anger me in such a manner.

In her book Spook: Science Tackles the Afterlife, Roach portrays herself as a sort of wishy-washy, noncommital skeptic.  This, too, is the sort of thing that angers me, as one should always devote one’s life fully to skeptical principles with flair and gusto.  However, when she totally abuses the principle of Ockham’s razor, defiling it with her innocent, questioning prose, I couldn’t help but look at Spook with a sort of enraged pity, not unlike the way one looks upon a mangy dog that has suddenly began humping a small child; it is a disgusting, wretched display, but we almost forgive it because it is too stupid to know any better.  Indeed, I almost feel saddened to have to eviscerate Roach’s well-meaning, but horribly incorrect, description of Ockham’s razor.  But it must be done, for the sake of edifying my readers and delighting myself.

For a little context, Spook essentially details the long history of pseudoscience concerning the afterlife and ghosts.  She investigates soul-weighing experiments, crackpot physical theories about the survival of consciousness after death, and so on.  For me, it was a light, fun read until I finally read her description of Ockham’s razor, which caused me to have a raging seizure and dress my dog up as an effigy of her book while beating it relentlessly.  She explains the principle in a chapter about the capacity for infrasound (low-frequency and inaudible sound waves) to induce paranormal experiences, like sensations of a felt presence.  She ends the chapter like so:

If you ask me which is the more likely explanation—infrasonics or spirits—I will tell you to apply the wisdom of Occam’s razor, a principle which holds that the simplest, the least far-fetched, of two competing theories is the place to put your money. But depending on who’s shaving, Occam’s razor yields manifestly different views. To those who believe in an afterlife, the most straightforward explanation for hearing your dead dad is that you’re hearing your dead dad’s spirit. Infrasonics and vibrating eyeballs and fight-or-flight responses would, given this particular worldview, seem to be needless and unlikely complexities (p. 237).

You can't use Ockham's razor on just anything, especially suicide attempts.

Mary Roach’s understanding of Ockham’s razor is distressingly common.  Few people understand what the principle actually entails, largely owing to an unfortunate and misleading sound-byte interpretation frequently rendered as, “The simplest explanation is the best.”  Of course, worded like that, the principle is indeed stupid and ambiguous and should be pelted with baboon feces.  After all, if mere simplicity provides the royal road to truth, then that crazy, complicated science stuff, which is inundated with complex equations and statistics, goes right out the window in favor of the Ken Ham/religious mystic view of reality, complete with men riding atop saddled dinosaurs and the Earth resting upon an infinite series of stacked tortoises.  Truly, if the simplest explanation really were the best, then this overly simplistic paraphrasing of Ockham’s razor would suffice.  Unfortunately, Ockham’s razor doesn’t rely only a vague, amorphous conception of simplicity; instead it relies on a very precise and complex definition of exactly what makes one theory more epistemologically complex than another.

Roach goes wrong in just this way, by assuming an ambiguous definition of Ockham’s razor in terms of whether a theory is “simple” or “far-fetched”.  The principle is best explained in its more complex, fleshed-out form (as opposed to the walking-dead zombie form used by Roach) to avoid such confusions.  Basically Ockham’s razor states that the theory that makes the fewest assumptions, given the current state of evidence, is the best theory.  In essence, the principle only demands that the claims of a theory be founded in some sort of evidence or fact, as those theories that proliferate in hypothesized, assumed entities for which there is no evidence are less likely to be true.  For instance, if I explain the water cycle with stages of precipitation and evaporation, this water cycle theory is more parsimonious than a hypothesis that posits a water cycle model with the stages of precipitation, evaporation, and magical elves.  The latter model would be rejected by Ockham’s razor because it posits magical elves when there is no additional evidence in support of their existence, and because the model that posits only precipitation and evaporation adequately models the water cycle without positing any elves or magic.  In a nut shell, Ockham’s razor tends to lead to truth because it prohibits baseless assumptions, and as we all know it is much easier to be incorrect when we come to conclusions based on assumptions for which we have no evidence.  If you want to add magical elves to your theory, find evidence of magical elves.  It’s really quite simple.

Now let’s apply Ockham’s razor to competing explanations concerning sensations of ghostly presences, as in the example from Spook quoted above.  One hypothesis posits that known entities like low-frequency sound waves and flight-or-fight stress responses can produce these sensations, with a smattering of evidence to support the claims.  The other hypothesis posits that actual ghosts are producing these sensations, with no evidence of ghosts other than these disputed sensations.  According to Roach, Ockham’s razor cannot decide between these two hypotheses, because one’s worldview—depending on whether it accepts the supernatural or not—would influence what one considers the “simpler” theory.  But this is not a correct application of the principle, as Ockham’s razor is decidedly not ambiguous with a proper contextual definition of the word simple.  The first hypothesis posits entities that everyone agrees already exists; we have plenty of evidence demonstrating that low-frequency sound waves and flight-or-fight responses are present in reality.  The other hypothesis, however, invents a new existential entity, and further a new existential category (the supernatural), in an attempt to explain the evidence, even in spite of the fact that there is no other confirmation of the existence of such paranormal entities.  Now, if we can explain the phenomenon with already-existing entities like sound waves, there is no further need to posit anything more, much less an entirely separate and ineffable spiritual plane of reality.  The paranormal claims are thoroughly shaved away by Ockham’s razor, regardless of your worldview, because the principle depends only on reality and evidence, not ideology!

So just as we reject magic elves as necessary to explain the water cycle because already-known processes like evaporation and precipitation can explain the cycle, so too are we led to reject paranormal hypotheses concerning strange sensations of vague presences when already-known processes can account for the evidence.  Ockham’s razor, far from being a tool that can be wielded haphazardly by two sides of a dispute to come to startlingly different conclusions, actually slices open paranormal claims and reveals them for the empty, silly nonsense they are.  Like any good razor, Ockham’s razor only has one handle, and it can only be grasped from that one side.  Anyone who tries to grab it from the other end only winds up getting sliced.

Many people believe that the main difference between agnosticism and atheism is that atheism is dogmatic and closed-minded whereas agnosticism is more open and accepting. In reality, though, the difference between agnosticism and atheism isn’t a matter of degrees of certainty; the differences are primarily epistemological. The rowdy, unshakeable, dogmatic boisterousness associated with atheism is not a defining feature of the position, but is instead a persistent mischaracterization. In the olden days of yore, atheists were merely stereotyped as immoral, evil baby-eaters. Nowadays, we are characterized as arrogant and dogmatically certain immoral baby-eaters! This misguided stereotype must be put to rest, for we baby-eating atheists are actually quite moral and frequently embrace positions of fallibilism—the exact opposite of dogmatism!

Now, atheism is primarily seen as dogmatic because it assumes nonexistence given an absence of evidence. This is almost always the contentious point. An agnostic would assert that absence of evidence is not proof of absence, maintaining that asserting nonexistence without any evidence is an argument from ignorance. An atheist, on the other hand, finds it perfectly reasonable to conclude that something does not exist given an absence of any evidence. The atheist does not believe with certainty that God does not exist given the lack of evidence, only that this is more likely to imply that God does not exist. Thus, the point of contention between agnostics and atheists isn’t about certainty, but about whether nonexistence can be inferred from lacking evidence. As mentioned earlier, the dispute is mostly epistemological.

The problem is rather obvious. If something did not exist, we would expect to find no evidence of it, but even if the thing did exist we could expect to find no evidence of it, for the evidence could be hidden from us. Similarly, if I had no evidence that my dog could fly, and then argued, “But you have no evidence that my dog can’t fly!”, this would hardly be a convincing argument, as I’d be making the claim in the absence of any evidence, judging that my dog could fly from a position of complete ignorance.

These problems are not legitimate, and they pose no sort of barrier to professing atheism, though. While it is indeed an argument from ignorance to assert that my dog can fly in the absence of evidence, this is because a flying dog is the sort of thing that can be supported with evidence. If a dog could fly, we’d expect to find evidence of the dog zooming through the skies, perhaps dropping turd-shaped surprised on our heads. But the same is not true of nonexistence (particularly concerning the bit about shitting on one’s head from the sky). If something does not exist, would you expect the nonexistent thing to produce evidence of its nonexistence? Of course not. One would expect that the nonexistent thing would produce no evidence whatsoever. Thus, in the case of nonexistence, the absence of evidence is exactly what we’d expect to observe.

Nevertheless, it is true that we can never be certain that a thing does not exist, owing to the fact that we may merely be ignorant of the evidence. The agnostic is entirely correct to point this out. The problem, of course, is that atheists tend to take a pragmatic, fallibilistic epistemological approach, whereas agnostics seem tethered to the idea of an epistemology rooted in logical certainty. The atheist doesn’t care if his position is uncertain; he doesn’t necessarily demand logical certainty. All that matters is that the position fits the evidence better than other hypotheses. In the end, an agnostic who demands certainty from claims of nonexistence is demanding the unreasonable and the impossible.

Suppose, for instance, we apply the agnostic’s demand for certainty to positive claims. Most agnostics would accept that the theory of evolution adequately explains the origin of species and biological variation. Of course, the theory of evolution is open to the same sorts of criticisms that agnostics apply to atheism. For example, one can never be certain that the theory of evolution is true, because we could simply be ignorant of the evidence that falsifies it. The theory of evolution, also like atheism, is underdetermined by the data. The absence of evidence for God could be explained by our ignorance of the evidence; similarly, even given all the evidence for evolution, we can invent ad hoc explanations for our biological observations that also fit the data, such as, “God created organisms in such a way that they would appear evolved.” But the fact that we can apply different explanations to the data doesn’t call the theory of evolution into doubt, because these ad hoc explanations needlessly multiply explanatory entities, calling into existence a god-like entity when there is no additional evidence of such a being. The God explanation is also untestable, because even if we observed that nothing in biology supported evolution—there were no homologies, no vestigial parts, no transitional fossils, no progression of species through time in a linear fashion, etc.—we could still say, “God created life.” An omnipotent being could create life that apears to have evolved or appears to have not evolved. No matter what we observe, this explanation fits, and so it is a much poorer explanation than evolution. Evolution, on the other hand, fits the data perfectly, even though it could have been falsified at any moment, which shows that its fitting the data is surprising and highly unlikely—unless the theory were true! When creationism fits the data it is no big surprise, as it would explain any observation whatsoever, and hence finding observational support consistent with creationism is not all that surprising or unlikely.

Obviously, the situation is the same with claims of nonexistence. If something did not exist, we would expect it to produce no evidence, and this would be the only expectation. Now, it is true that the thing could exist and we could be ignorant of the evidence. So if the thing did exist, we could expect evidence of it, or we could expect it to be hidden and hide its evidence from view. Notice that, in this case, any observation is compatible with the thing existing. But only the absence of evidence is consistent with nonexistence. This shows that assuming nonexistence is most prudent. Not only is the prediction more exact, but it is also falsifiable. In that sense, the position of atheism is far from dogmatic. Instead, it is pragmatic—the atheist assumes nonexistence, but knows this position could be falsified so long as the theist produces legitimate evidence of God’s existence. To criticize atheism for its uncertainty is thus as silly as criticizing the theory of evolution for its uncertainty. What matters is that evolution assumes the least and fits the evidence best. Similarly, atheism assumes the least and fits the evidence (or lack thereof) best.

Suppose, though, that if God existed, we wouldn’t expect evidence of his existence. That is, suppose God was totally transcendant and unknowable. In this case, the atheist can’t argue that nonexistence is the most plausible hypothesis simply because it exactly predicts the absence of evidence. An unknowable, mystical, transcendant God would likewise predict only the absence of evidence.

At first blush, this appears to be a winning rejoinder. The problem in this case, though, is that professing belief in such a deity is to essentially profess a belief in nothing. If one believes that God is totally unknowable and mystical, then to say, “God exists” amounts to saying, “I-don’t-know-what exists.” The only reason an atheist cannot disbelieve in such a deity is because the theist has not bothered to even define it. It is as if the theist were saying, “Djklerhi exists!” and then, when asked to clarify, saying that Sjklerhi is uknowable and hence the theist can’t say anything more about it. How the theist knows an unknowable entity exists is also never explained. So while rendering the deity transcendant and mystical may avoid the criticism concerning the lack of evidence, it just runs into the criticism of incoherence, and thus this is really no threat to the position of pragmatic, fallibilistic atheism.

Because claiming nonexistence based solely on the absence of evidence is justified through fallibilistic epistemology, atheism is similarly justified. Of course, throughout this post I have assumed, for the sake of argument, that there is no evidence for or against God. This is, to put it mildly, a rather generous assumption. Those conceptions of gods as omnipotent and morally perfect, for instance, run into all kinds of logical difficulties concerning what it means to be all-powerful, whether this is consistent with the capacity to do no evil, and various other self-contradictions. Those conceptions of all-powerful, morally perfect gods who created the universe, physically interact with the world, and care about humanity are also problematic, as the existence of evil, the miniscule scale of humanity’s presence in such a vast universe, and the hostility of the natural environment to life all seem to be at odds with these conceptions of God. As such, the case for atheism is really much stronger than merely asserting, “There is no evidence for God!”, as there is in fact much evidence that implies various gods do not exist at all. But in the end even if there were no evidence for or against God, atheism would still be the most reasonable position, because epistemic fallibilism is a reasonable position, and because absence of evidence is more than adequate evidence for absence.