Atheism and the Scope of Skepticism

Despite the obvious commonalities between the two groups, the atheist movement has always had a rather strained relationship with the more generalized skeptical movement.  In part this is the fault of organized atheism, as many atheists endorse mystical crap like acupuncture and other alternative medicines while pretending to be reasonable just because they reject religion.  However, the real schism between the two groups is a result of the unfounded idea that atheism, at least in some forms, is not sufficiently scientific.  Those skeptical movements that disassociate themselves from atheism tend to see atheism as a philosophical outlook rather than a scientific or empirically justified stance.  The arguments in support of this claim, though, tend to be rather unconvincing.

Most forms of atheism address conceptions of God that are explicitly amenable to scientific tests.  The bulk of religious believers, for instance, do not believe in obscure deistic entities that never interact in the physical world.  They believe in a God that can manifest itself as a human being, perform miracles, heal sickness, control the vocal cords of those filled with the holy spirit (though God seems to take some perverse joy out of using those vocal cords just to speak in jibberish), and so on.  Even those deities that are a bit more remote and do not perform miracles of this sort are nevertheless testable, as they are said to be creators of the universe and to have placed humanity on top of some sort of cosmic hierarchy of importance.  These are all characteristics that yield testable hypotheses, and when our observations do not support these hypotheses, we have scientific grounds for rejecting these religious claims.  When we see that humanity is the product of random forces whose existence is not probable, much less logically necessary, that throws serious doubt on any conceptions of God who created the universe with humanity as its pinnacle achievement.

In that sense, then, atheism is indeed scientific.  Most forms of God can be ruled out on a purely evidentiary basis, in much the same way a scientist would rule out similar scientific hypotheses in other fields.  This is generally accepted, even among those skeptics who feel atheism is a philosophical stance rather than a scientific one.  The problem, naturally, is that some forms of God cannot be ruled out in this manner.  These versions of God are so remote and deistic that they yield no testable predictions or observations of any sort, and thus, the skeptics would argue, they are not susceptible to scientific investigation.  Massimo Pigliucci recently made an argument of this sort in a blog post titled “On the Scope of Skeptical Inquiry“.

Pigliucci acknowledges that some religious claims about God are scientifically testable, but in the end maintains that atheism is primarily a philosophical position because it addresses claims that can’t be assessed scientifically through the process of observation.  One of the examples he gives is the claim by some creationists that God designed the world to look as if it were billions of years old when it is in fact only 6,000 years old.  No evidence could contradict this kind of statement, obviously, and as such Pigliucci claims that it can only be assessed on philosophical, not scientific, grounds.

The problem, of course, is that this could extend to any realm of inquiry traditionally seen as within the scope of skeptical inquiry.  If believers in cryptofauna like bigfoot and Nessie protected their claims from inquiry by saying, such as they do, that we would not expect to see evidence of their existence even if we looked, clearly we cannot scientifically address such a claim.  Nevertheless, no skeptical organization is thus busy rewriting its mission statement to exclude cryptozoological investigations from its scope of inquiry; atheism, on the other hand, is singled out for just this reason.  If the basis for rejecting atheism as a form of scientific skepticism rests on the unfalsifiability of religious claims, then any other field of skeptical inquiry is open to the same sort of criticism, as those who believe in alternative medicine, creationism, psychic powers, and ghosts frequently make claims that are unfalsifiable.

With that said, the other problematic aspect of rejecting religion as a field of skeptical inquiry concerns the overly narrow conception of “science” endorsed by such skeptics.  Science isn’t just a process of simple falsification of claims.  It is much more nuanced and much scientific activity is philosophical.  Pigliucci tries to differentiate science from philosophy in noting that scientific knowledge seems to progress whereas philosophical knowledge seems to stagnate on the same unanswered questions.  This is an uncharitable characterization of philosophy, though.  Science itself is one of the ultimate successes of the progress of philosophy!  The early Greek philosophers weren’t simply asking questions about souls and free will, but were addressing questions of the natural sciences.  The scientific method is merely an epistemological and philosophical framework.  The reason philosophy doesn’t seem to progress isn’t because it is not successful, but because when it is successful it becomes renamed as science!

So, in a sense, the demarcation between science and philosophy is not clear.  Nevertheless, even if we accept the demarcation, it is clear that scientists do entertain and reject untestable hypotheses all the time.  Science isn’t simply a matter of testing reality against observation, but it also puts into practice epistemological principles like Ockham’s razor.  For example, basic philosophy of science shows that theories are always underdetermined by the data.  That is, for any set of data, an unlimited number of potential explanations exist that would also fit the data.  Evolution explains the data we see for the origin of human beings, for instance, but so does a hypothesis stating that the universe and human beings popped into existence two seconds ago with only the appearance of age.  Scientists reject all the other potential explanations, even though they can cohere with scientific observations, because they are untestable or not parsimonious.  Notice that scientists do not reject these alternative explanations after observing evidence that the additional elements of these hypotheses do not exist!  They are rejected for epistemological, and hence philosophical, reasons.  In this case the principle of rejecting untestable claims serves as a check against the tendency of human beings to make mistakes and err.  The more you assume, the more likely you are to be wrong, and thus scientists assume the least that is justified by the evidence.  As can be seen, the principle of parsimony is essential to science, because it cuts through problems of underdetermination by requiring evidence for additional explanatory entities.  As such, scientists do not claim the origin of humanity is not within the scope of skeptical inquiry merely because untestable hypotheses can be generated to “explain” our origin.  Scientific inquiry is not so constrained or feeble and frail that it cannot overcome untestable hypotheses.  This includes untestable hypotheses of a religious nature.

In short, the attempt to form ghettos of critical inquiry that exclude atheism from skepticism are misguided.  It would be as misguided as randomly excluding cryptozoology or alternative medicine merely because their supporters also make untestable claims.  Scientific analysis is always dealing with untestable claims.  Any theory accepted by scientists entails the rejection of countless untestable claims compatible with the underdetermined data set.  As such, rejecting untestable claims, whether they be religious in nature or not, is thoroughly scientific.  For the skeptical community to attempt singling out atheism for this reason thus seems silly and disheartening, especially knowing that it is likely motivated by the unfounded respect (which entails a lack of criticism) traditionally accorded to the religious.  I suspect that had we evolved in a parallel universe where cryptozoology was the reigning belief system, and we were all socialized to respect claims about Bigfoot and never criticize them, then we’d be seeing skeptical movements decrying the inclusion of cryptozoology within its scope.  Luckily, we do not live in that universe.  And hopefully we can change our current universe from one in which the skeptical community attempts to exclude atheism to one in which skepticism of religion is just as acceptable as any other area of inquiry..

The Anthropic Principle

The Anthropic Principle has had a long and sordid history among cosmologists and others.  In essence, the principle asserts that the fine-tuning of the physical constants that allow for the formation of conscious life requires some sort of explanation.  As an example, some physicists try to argue for the existence of multiple universes in order to account for the precise values of physical laws, like the cosmological constant.  However, this reasoning seems to be a bit flawed.

Many writers who invoke the Anthropic Principle speak of the principle as if it somehow demonstrates some sort of strange fact about the universe.  But the Anthropic Principle doesn’t really demonstrate anything.  It merely presents a problem, not an explanation.  The principle can’t be used to justify a hypothesis if there is no other additional evidence for the hypothesis in question.  As such, I don’t quite understand the fascination with the Anthropic Principle exhibited by many physicists.

Consider someone who has won a lottery.  Such an event is quite improbable.  According to anthropic reasoning, this improbable event would require some sort of explanation.  Suppose a cosmologist argued that he could explain this event by invoking multiple universes where the person plays the lottery.  The person loses in most of the universes, but happens to have won in our own.  In this sense, the improbability is explained away.  The cosmologist can further argue that the mathematical model of this multiverse is consistent and trumpet this as some saving grace of his hypothesis.  But in the end, if there is no additional evidence of these multiple universes, mere mathematical consistency is not enough to support such a hypothesis, nor is the improbability of winning the lottery reason enough to assert such a bizarre hypothesis.

The problem with such anthropic reasoning, as I see it, is that there are a variety of other potential explanations, and without additional evidentiary support they can’t be ruled out.  Beyond that, it doesn’t even seem as if improbable events necessarily require explanations beyond chance.  By definition, even very unlikely events can still occur, as they are only unlikely, not impossible.  Aside from chance occurences and multiverses, there are a number of other possible explanations, ranging from benevolent deities creating things in this way to “evolutionary” mechanisms that select for universes that promote life or perhaps universe characteristics that correlate with the formation of life.  Without any sort of additional evidence for benevolent deities, or multiple universes, or evolutionary selection mechanisms for universes, though, such explanations are only baseless conjecture.  I don’t think it is enough for String Theorists to talk as if the precise values of the physical constants, in tandem with the mathematical consistency of their models, is evidence for such a conjecture.

Of course, I am not terribly well-read on the subject, and if anyone has any resources that present any additional evidence for such explanations, I’d gladly look into it.  But it seems to me that the Anthropic Principle is highly questionable as a “scientific” principle.

Promoting Atheism Promotes Science

By now, Sheril Kirshenbaum’s and Chris Mooney’s book Unscientific America has received a lot of attention on the Internet, most notably for its attacks on atheistic popularizers of science like PZ Myers. Basically, the book argues that atheists should refrain from criticizing religion, as this sort of behavior alienates religious people from science and promotes a cynical, unpalatable view of science among the religious.

As Myers points out in his review of the book, it is rather strange that the book chastises vocal atheists for the sorry state of science education in our country, especially when the more vocal atheists tend to be the most vociferous supporters of science!  PZ Myers is reknowned for his attacks on creationism and his legendary blog Pharyngula, which exposes millions to science and the perils of pseudoscience.  The prolific atheist Richard Dawkins is also well-known for his popularization of science in such works as The Ancestor’s Tale, The Selfish Gene, and the upcoming The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution.  Atheists are also overwhelmingly represented in skeptical organizations whose missions are to spread scientific literacy and combat pseudoscience, whether it be through combatting the misinformation about vaccines and educating the public about alternative medicine and health or else through criticizing those who would misrepresent evolution, quantum physics, or even history (as is the case with holocaust deniers and 9/11 “Truthers”).

Not only that, but the real enemies of science, and indeed the direct enemies of science whose overt purposes are often to corrupt science education, tend to be religious.  That creationism and Intelligent Design are being spread and supported by theists for religious purposes is so obvious that it almost need not be said, let alone overwhelmingly demonstrated in a court decision in Dover, Pennsylvania.  Religious political conservatives are also notorious for impeding scientific progress through legislative power—by denying federal funding of stem cell research, by funding abstinence-only programs that preach ignorance of sexual functions and that have been empirically demonstrated to have no effect on the sexual activity of teenagers, by denying the evidence in favor of anthropogenic global warming, and so on.  And on the liberal divide of the political spectrum, religious influences prove almost as destructive of science education as those of the conservatives.  New age spirituality has given rise to the proliferation of nonsensical medical therapies to such a degree that “energy” therapies like therapeutic touch are taught in nursing textbooks whereas other mystical modalities like acupuncture have infiltrated legitimate medical institutions in spite of showing no therapeutic value beyond that of a placebo.  To ignore and respect the religions that influence and promote these harmful anti-science movements is folly.

Contrary to the thesis of Unscientific America, I believe that atheists need to become louder and more active in political and social movements in support of science.  Atheists already contribute greatly, through donations or active involvement, to science-promoting organizations like the James Randi Educational Forum and the National Center for Science Education.  Rather than silence atheists, we should encourage more people to accept atheism, thus showing that atheism is a viable and legitimate stance to take.  The more we legitimize atheism, the more support for science would be gained, both through the conversion of more people to atheism and the acceptance of atheism by the general public, to the detriment of fundamentalist, anti-science religious movements.  Even a mere glance at the demographic data overwhelmingly supports this position.

Scientists tend to be disproportionately nonreligious.  A study by Elaine Howard Ecklund showed that 52% of surveyed scientists professed no religious affiliation.  For comparison, only 14% of the general population expressed no religious affiliation.  Clearly, the differences are staggering.  For whatever reason, science education and interest in science correlate strongly with being nonreligious.  Even better, only 2% of scientists described themselves as evangelical or fundamentalist, whereas 14% of the general population identify themselves in this way.

More detailed analyses produce interesting results, as well.  The most prestigious and elite scientists tend to be even more nonreligious than their less prestigious scientific counterparts.  Indeed, one survey from 1998 by Larson and Witham seemed to indicate that among prestigious scientists disbelief in God was nearly universal.  The authors reported the following:

Our survey found near universal rejection of the transcendent by NAS natural scientists. Disbelief in God and immortality among NAS biological scientists was 65.2% and 69.0%, respectively, and among NAS physical scientists it was 79.0% and 76.3%. Most of the rest were agnostics on both issues, with few believers.

Another survey by Gross and Simmons found similar results.  They surveyed professors to determine their religiosity, finding that the nonreligious, and atheists specifically, were disproportionately represented in the population of college professors, though atheists were not a majority.  Interestingly, the proportions of atheist and agnostic professors rose continually in correlation with the prestige of the university that employed them.  Community colleges had about 15% who identified as atheist/agnostic, whereas four-year Bachelor-of-Arts-granting universities and nonelite doctoral-granting universities had a little more than 20%.  Most importantly, in elite doctoral-granting universities the proportion of atheists and agnostics was so high that they outnumbered those professors who with certainty believed in God, with a little less than 40% professing to be atheists or agnostics.  Of course, this survey included professors from all fields, including those who teach in subjects that are not in the natural sciences, including art and business.  Not surprisingly, those in the natural sciences, particularly biology and psychology, had much higher proportions (61%) of atheists and agnostics.

Of course, none of these studies show that being involved in science causes atheism.  In fact, this is most likely not true at all.  The data in Ecklund’s study, for instance, indicated that the most reliable predictor of a scientist’s religiosity was his or her upbringing; those raised in religious homes tended to be more religious, and those raised in nonreligious homes tended to be nonreligious.  In explanation of this data, Ecklund said:

It appears that those from non-religious backgrounds disproportionately self-select into scientific professions. This may reflect the fact that there is tension between the religious tenets of some groups and the theories and methods of particular sciences and it contributes to the large number of non-religious scientists.

Thus, science doesn’t convert the religious to atheism, but instead it seems that atheists tend to be predisposed to having an interest in or skill in science and its methods.  The studies showing that more prestigious scientists at elite universities tend to identify more as atheists and agnostics seem to support this interpretation, revealing that the nonreligious may select science as a profession because the methodology of science leaves little room for faith or belief without evidence and accords with an atheistic worldview.  Once again, religion seems to be harmful to the cause of science, as it not only offers contradictory explanations but also espouses a faith-based epistemology that is totally incompatible with proper scientific methodology.  It is no surprise, then, that those who are best at science and more reknowned tend to be atheistic or agnostic.

Now, if atheists tend to be more interested in and better represented in the sciences, so much so that the more elite scientists are almost universally nonreligious, then this implies that the best solution to America’s scientific illiteracy is to simply convert more Americans to atheism, or to promote atheism in such a way that it becomes a more palatable and viable alternative to future generations.  In this sense, the “New Atheists” so reviled by Mooney and Kirshenbaum as indirect enemies of science are in reality doing the most good for science by bringing atheism into the open and attempting to topple the hegemonic insistence that religion cannot be criticized.  Given that Ecklund’s study (mentioned previously) showed that the religiosity of scientists correlated with the religiosity of their upbringing, it makes sense that making atheism public and visible would produce more atheists.  The more people are exposed to a nonreligious worldview, the more likely they are to see it as a viable alternative.  This, in essence, is the strategy of the New Atheists.  Refusing to criticize religion and remaining eternally silent on the matter, as Mooney and Kirshenbaum suggest, would not be helpful at all for science education, as it would limit the growth of the population most in-tune with and accepting of science!

What’s more, the New Atheist strategy for growth appears to be working.  Demographic data consistently show rising numbers of the general population who identify as atheist or agnostic, and even greater numbers ambiguously identify as nonreligious.  From 1990 to 2001 the number of atheists and agnostics increased from about 1 million to 2 million.  From 2001 to 2008 these numbers increased even more, with the population of self-identifying atheists and agnostics rising to 3.6 million.  The surge in numbers from the 90s made feasible the production of a large, social atheist movement, and the New Atheists likely arose from this growth.  From 2001 to 2008 it is likely the increasing numbers of self-identified atheists are at least in part attributable to the New Atheist movment, whether it be through the popularization of various books on the subject, atheistic ads running on buses and billboards, or the lively and vibrant atheist and skeptic community on the Internet.  In 1990, for instance, the Aris report combined atheism and agnosticism and found that 1,186,000 people identified as one or the other.  However, in general the distrubtion of atheists and agnostics is about half and half (with a slight edge to agnosticism), so it’s safe to assume that in 1990 about 540,000 people self-identified as atheists.  With that noted, the population of atheists increased by 360,000 people between 1990 and 2001, when the new total of atheists became 902,000 in 2001.  During the period that saw the rise of the New Atheism, from 2001 to 2008, the number of self-identified atheists increased even more dramatically, with the number of atheists added to the total nearly doubling:  about 700,000 people newly identified as atheists during this seven-year period, compared with only 360,000 in the previous eleven-year period.  Whether this dramatic increase in the numbers of atheists (agnostics rose quite significantly, too) is attributable to the New Atheism movement is, of course, debatable, but it seems likely that the movement had a significant impact on these numbers, and the mechanism by which the movement would produce new converts is certainly plausible.  What is more interesting is that atheists are almost certainly underrepresented in this study, as many people claimed to disbelieve in God according to a separate Aris survey question, and yet for some reason the same proportion of people did not self-identify as atheists.  With that taken into account, the survey shows that as much as 2.3% of the population is atheist in belief (if not in name), with 10% of the population being agnostic.

As a result of this data, it seems that the best way to promote science is to promote atheism.  Atheists and agnostics tend to have a worldview that predisposes them to interest in and excellence in science; atheists are not only widely represented in scientific fields but are even more widely represented among the elite and prestigious.  Demographic data also seem to suggest that increasing the visibility of atheists as a minority through vocal promotion of atheism—like the work being done by the New Atheists and other secular and skeptical groups—increases the support for atheism and its acceptance in society.  As such, if the correlations between science and skepticism of religion continue to hold, then increasing the number of atheists would much more effectively increase scientific literacy in America.  And even if the correlation between atheism and scientific literacy would not hold in the future, at the very least increasing the number of atheists would help eliminate those anti-science forces motivated primarily by religion.

What Does It Profit Science to Gain the World?

Not too long ago, I wrote a sarcastic post in which I detailed how skeptics and scientists could better communicate with the lay public.  I noted that skeptics need only utilize the same shoddy, lame arguments that are so effectively used by proponents of pseudoscience.  People are more convinced by rhetorical skill than reasoned argument, so it stands to reason that people would accept skepticism more readily if it were supported by the same fallacious reasoning of pseudoscientific nonsense.  Naturally, when I made this suggestion I was being facetious, but it seems that some skeptics and scientists are unwittingly advocating such a stance, apparently not realizing that advocating the popularization of skepticism and science would inevitably lead to such nonsense.

Take, for instance, this recent post from the Science-Based Medicine blog, in which Val Jones writes about his attempt to convince a committee to not publish misleading information concerning the treatment of autism.  He ended up making a presentation alongside an opposing doctor who advocated alternative treatments for autism.  Val writes:

The committee ended up siding with my opponent. I was flabbergasted and asked one of the committee members what on earth they were thinking. She simply shrugged and said that my opponent was more likable than I was.

He concludes from this experience, as well as from his review of Randy Olson’s latest book about science communication, that scientists need to be more likeable, to learn how to tell better stories, and so on.  If scientists do not do so, they will eventually lose the culture wars to the forces of pseudoscience.

The prospects of training scientists in such rhetoric, though, worries me.   For whatever reason, people enjoy mindless speculation about the paranormal.  These are the kinds of stories people want to hear.  It isn’t that these stories are told particularly well or with any sort of special flair.  Indeed, watching any number of the incredulous ghost hunter, psychic children, or mysteries of the Bible shows on television has revealed to me that, if anything, the purveyors of such woo tend to be horribly daft when it comes to good story-telling.  Are we supposed to believe that a show about ghost hunters traipsing about in a dark basement with an unsteady camera and bad lighting, blandly commenting about electromagnetism and cold spots, with nary a trace of plot development or narrative, is somehow compelling story-telling?  And yet these types of shows regularly outperform any program with even a hint of real science in it.

The fact is, we live in a culture that has seen the production of classic movies wittled away into the production of cliched and recycled romantic comedies, banal action movies steeped with inane one-liners, and farcical comedies in which the only “joke” is the fact that you’ve just paid $12 to watch a movie whose plot is essentially an extended case of flatulence.  We’ve seen literature go from Pride and Prejudice, War and Peace, and Crime and Punishment to Twilight (essentially vampire pornography) and Goosebumps.  We’ve seen science documentaries go from the Cosmos series to What the Bleep Do We Know.  We’ve seen political discourse devolve into isolated, partisan polemics from both sides, both steeped in ridiculous conspiracy and paranoia, whether it be baseless tirades about government-led death panels and Obama being the antichrist or Republican-orchestrated attacks on the World Trade Center staged as terrorist attacks.  And what passes for TV nowadays is often little more than so-called reality television, in which cameras follow around the stupidest men and women in America to watch them get drunk, bicker, and sometimes have sex with each other.  People would sooner watch Flavor of Love (and who wouldn’t want to watch an aging rap icon who resembles a malnourished ET make out with beautiful women who engage in silly athletic competitions to win his heart?) than a compelling drama with an actual plot and real character development.  Are these the types of stories scientists should be telling?  If we wish to popularize science, these are the models of popularity, after all.

Because the masses are so easily swayed by nonsensical, mindless horseshit—as well as by logical fallacies of all stripes—it worries me when scientists are exhorted to appeal to the masses.  The masses are fucking idiots.  They don’t like good story-telling.  They like simplistic cliches that appeal to their prejudices and superstitions.  The fact is, these people simply don’t like science.  Science has had and continues to have masterful story-tellers, from Carl Sagan to George Gamow to Neil Degrasse Tyson to Stephen Pinker to Richard Dawkins, and not even these masters have made much of a difference.  It is overly simplistic and foolish to think we can repackage scientific content and somehow make it marketable to the same people who derive pleasure from American Idol and True Blood and who think Glenn Beck makes compelling arguments.  Most people are blustering retards who only appreciate the most outrageous sophistry as argument and the most appalling, bland pablum as art.  We should not sully science in a way that truly popularizes it.  For to truly popularize science, we would have to totally bastardize it and transform it into a mere shadow or husk of its former self.

As an example, consider Mary Roach’s best-selling science/skepticism books.  These are what science books would trend toward in order to become more popular.  For instance, in Roach’s book Bonk, a book exploring sex and sexuality research, she focuses heavily not on the actual science, but on the personalities behind the science and on trivial but funny anecdotes throughout the book, and she even includes herself as a participant in studies for anecdotal purposes and narrative effect.  The problem is that the science becomes very watered down.  Most of the text is devoted to describing locales and people, and not the actual sexual research.  What research is provided is often glossed over very quickly and superficially.  As an example, Roach only briefly mentions the controversy surrounding the existence of the G-spot in women, yet spends pages talking about various scientists’ eccentricities or describing how to masturbate pigs.  What is worse is that in her other book, Spook, Roach exemplifies the problem with trying to popularize skepticism: it simply can’t be done.  Spook is a book about pseudoscientific and scientific research concerning the afterlife and other such paranormal phenomenon.  Throughout its pages, Roach admits to being skeptical but only in a hand-waving, “but maybe there’s something really out there” kind of way.  Skepticism simply doesn’t sell, and Roach knows this.  People want to believe in mystical claptrap.  They like to hear about people and places, but not so much about science or research.  And, unfortunately, anyone who tries to popularize science for the masses would have to end up sacrificing the real scientific and skeptical content, as Mary Roach does in her own books.  And while Roach’s books have actual scientific content, imagine the depths to which they’d have to further sink to become truly popular.

What would truly popularized scientific content—as popular as The Left Behind series or The Da Vinci Code—look like?  I believe it would contain the most bland and trivial of scientific content, nearly stripped bare of anything meaningful and souped up with irrelevant anecdotes and incidental biography, perhaps even rendered in the style of reality television so as to be so completely inane as to induce projectile vomiting in those of us with sensitive aesthetic palates.  Truly popularized science would resemble the type of “science” we see advertised in newspaper headlines: exagerrated, distorted, chopped short, and frequently wrong.  It would tout miracle cures, unexplainable mysteries that “baffle” scientists, and so on.  The media already knows how to sell science; they’ve been doing it for longer than the skeptical movement.  And they know that incredulous mystery-mongering and fear-inducing sound bytes sell.  They know that fancy rhetoric, even if it is indeed logically fallacious, is more convincing than reasoned argument and actual fact.  Thus I find it laughable when skeptics try to argue that scientists need to learn how to sell science.  The newspapers and the popularizers have been selling science for ages, long before us, and they’ve already worked out the formula—and it doesn’t include skepticism or the legitimate, careful use of the scientific method.  I can’t reiterate this enough: most people are idiots and have poor taste, and they enjoy mysterious paranormal mumbo jumbo and accept logical fallacies as gospel truth.

We don’t need to popularize science and skepticism to such a degree.  Such popularization is impossible without bastardizing science of any legitimate content.  Scientists should refuse to dumb down the science to reach a wider audience.  They should refuse to pander to the ignorant and the silly, even if they do exist in droves of large market shares.  Why should we demand that scientists become poets and reality television stars?  Instead, we should demand of the public that they become educated.  Science doesn’t need to change; the idiots of the world convinced by non sequiturs, who decide arguments based on likeability and stage presence, are those that need to change.  Science simply can’t be marketed to such a population without making serious intellectual sacrifices—sacrifices that simply aren’t worth the effort.  In order to reach the heights of popularity, science would have to forsake reasonable conclusions for exagerrations, it would have to report biography and anecdote over actual data, and it would have to refrain from any skepticism and appear to remain open to, and endorse, the most inane of pseudoscientific possibilities.  In short, we can’t really hope to popularize science and skepticism to a public that is willfully uneducated and stone-dumb; nor should we want to popularize science in a manner that would appeal to such imbeciles.  For what does it profit science to gain the whole world if it loses its scientific soul in the process?  All we can do is continue reporting the actual science, and do so with passion and enjoyment, constantly ridiculing those who don’t understand it, and hope that our passion and ridicule will win over the future generations.

Ockham’s Razor and the Spooks

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.