Rust Belt Philosophy

Instructors of all sorts - coaches, teachers, professors, etc. - often look for what's called a teachable moment. Loosely defined, teachable moments occur when someone runs head-on into their own ignorance and sees it plainly as such. At times like this, the instructor supposedly then gets to step in and, well, instruct. The drama, if any exists, results from the unstated premise that the learner really is willing to learn. Altogether too often, though, this premise is simply not met, in which case you end up with something like Lydia McGrew's argument about naturalistic optimism.

The post, which aims to show that the "inductive naturalist/Grand March of Progress argument has been getting way too much currency for way too long," is a comedy of errors at best. McGrew takes three swings at correctly identifying this argument and, appropriately, strikes out:

1. "Most problems which were unexplained by science in purely naturalistic terms have now been explained by science in purely naturalistic terms. So, by direct induction, any alleged evidence against naturalism has a scientific explanation in purely naturalistic terms." ["by direct induction"?? that's clearly wrong]
2. "Science has made and continues to make such great progress throughout history, gradually whittling away at the set of things that were previously not scientifically understood, that whatever it is that you are presently bringing forth as evidence against naturalism, I am sure that science will eventually get to that in time and explain it, as well, as entirely the product of natural causes." [surety, too, is wrong]
3. "There used to be a great many things that were believed to be the result of non-natural causes but which we now know to be the result of purely natural causes. Therefore, this (whatever it is) that you are bringing up is probably also the result of purely natural causes, even though we can't right now see how." [even probability is not quite right - relative probability, maybe]

One of her main criticisms is the supposed vagueness of the argument, which she presumes can only operate when, as in her versions, it refuses to engage in any degree of specificity. Given that she herself is the one crafting the argument, it's hardly fair for her then to turn around and question it. More to the point, it's pretty easy to rephrase the argument so as to avoid that particular attack by just being more specific. Indeed, McGrew does this herself at points, citing debunked ideas, like alchemy the evil-spirits theory of disease, that have specific contents, histories, and so on. Having thus apparently dispensed with her own objection, what remains?

Well, for one thing, McGrew observes that "we could easily generate a list of 'things' (of some sort or another) that were not previously well-explained by purely natural causes, most of which are still not well-explained by purely natural causes." Even those that have been "crossed off [the] list" have problems, because they only work "proximately and so long as we don't take our questioning back [too far]." Still more questions, like "Why doesn't Jenny love me," don't get any play at all, McGrew says. There's a theme here that will need to be addressed eventually, but it's worth the time to take these individually.

The first of these complaints is an exercise in comic irony and nothing more. Given the set S of things that need explaining, it's painfully obvious that the subset of S that has been explained in purely naturalistic terms is larger than the subset of S that has been explained in supernaturalistic terms, because the size of that latter set is zero. If the inability to fully explain a phenomenon counts as evidence against an ontological view, McGrew's Christianity is on far thinner ice than naturalism has ever been - but more on this later. The same point can be made of her second objection: every explanation system only works proximately, and the proximity that Christianity inhabits is far more constricted than the one that naturalism can cover. Her last and seemingly most powerful argument - the argument from minds - seems just to be based on her massive ignorance. Contrary to what McGrew says, naturalistic endeavors have indeed made progress in modeling behavior (on both the personal and group levels), analyzing emotions, and, yes, building minds.

But what of the larger trend displayed by these various attempts? McGrew describes it thusly: "any such meta-inductive argument simply encourages us to ignore whatever actual data or arguments we might have about the particular thing at issue. It is simply sloppy to dismiss, say, the argument from mind on the grounds that, hey, I'm an educated person, I'm inclined to believe that the mind did not originate by purely natural causes, but a lot of other educated people have been wrong about vaguely similar things." Passing over the question of what, exactly, constitutes "the argument from mind," it seems now that McGrew's irritation stems from a simple misunderstanding: what she calls the Grand March of Science argument is not a one-size-fits-all tool. Still, that's far from saying that we should "laugh it off the stage once and for all."

Roughly speaking, the Grand March of Science argument is just a long-winded way of identifying an argument from ignorance. What McGrew strongly implies but never says outright is that naturalism is a very weak ontology because of all that it cannot currently explain, but this is just childish. The most important lesson in the Grand March of Science argument is that the lack of evidence for x by no means entails evidence against x. In particular, the history of science has lots and lots of examples of people running an argument of the following sort...

1. Scientific naturalism cannot currently explain x.
2. Therefore, scientific naturalism will never be able to explain x.
3. Therefore, scientific naturalism is false.

...only to have science explain x. What the Grand March of Science argument demonstrates, then, is that arguments like the one above - arguments, in other words, like McGrew's ill-defined arguments from the mind - fail, and we know this even before we find an explanation for x that fits with naturalism. While one could not run this kind of objection on what mathematicians (and maybe philosophers) call constructive proofs, like irreducible complexity,* it functions perfectly for things like the infamous Sinner Ministries proof of God** or the oft-repeated charge that naturalists have a responsibility to account for the actions of every last Bible character.*** On the truly silly view that the absence of evidence is itself counter-evidence, then, McGrew's view falls harder and faster than naturalism does, but if the absence of evidence is just the absence of evidence she's just flat wrong; in neither case do claims here damage the Grand March of Science or give any greater credibility to 3-step arguments as outlined above.

*And, happily, one doesn't have to in that case. A constructive proof, by the way, is one that demonstrates its conclusion by constructing some (usually abstract) object.
**"You [as a non-theist] use the universal, immaterial, unchanging laws of logic, mathematics, science, and absolute morality in order to come to rational decisions, but you cannot account for them." In other words, take the argument above and substitute "universal, immaterial, unchanging laws of logic, mathematics, science, and absolute morality" for "x."
***McGrew: "And tell me again exactly why this means I should believe that the mind is a purely natural phenomenon or that the disciples hallucinated Jesus' appearances, because I'm not seeing it." In other words, take the argument above and substitute "the mind" or "Jesus's appearances" for "x."

Part of what makes this blog even remotely challenging is that many bad arguments nonetheless have good pieces or sub-arguments. At the absolute minimum, every one comes from a place of real disagreement, even if the author lacks the ability to properly elucidate that disagreement (or, perhaps, the courage to admit to it). The current commentary surrounding Obama's service initiatives is a paradigm example of this phenomenon, as Jackie Cushman demonstrates in her criticism of the SAA and GIVE acts.

She has a number of complaints, but the recurring theme seems to be the idea that "public service [cannot come in the form of] more government intrusion and more government jobs." For one thing, she says, tax "payments are required" whereas charity is optional. Also, "we often don’t know where the money goes or don’t agree with how our tax dollars are spent." Furthermore, she identifies the good of charity as benefiting "not only to those who are helped, but also to those who give" in that the givers feel happier, which again does not track to paying taxes. Cushman's final criticism of Obama's plan is that it would reduce "the incentive for individuals to make personal contributions" because of its impact on the tax structure. "If the goal is to promote good works," she concludes, "then let us do that directly, maintaining the current tax rates for charitable giving and letting people instead of government decide where their money should go." On Cushman's view, then, real or genuine service differs from tax-funded initiatives: "one is charity and the other is government work – the two are not the same."

It's hard to know where to start with all of this. Certainly some of it is accurate, but some of it seems wrong and all of it is interconnected. Because of that fact, I'll start by trying to disentangle her argument somewhat. The first step in this process is to note that service, charity, and good works are not the same thing. Good works seem to be the most general of the three, with service coming next and charity being the most specific: good works can be compensated (or not) and can take the form of money or action (or both); service by definition earns no monetary compensation but again can be money, action, or both; and charity is just giving money without any direct compensation in return. Since Cushman focuses so consistently on issues of money - taxation, government funding, and so on - it seems reasonable to say that she really only means to discuss charity.

Unfortunately, there are times when this focus slips, such as when she defines "the core of charity" as "one person helping another based on one person’s passions and another person’s needs." Rightly speaking, that seems more like an essential property of service, and though this distinction may seem academic it actually makes a big difference. Since all of Cushman's predictions only involve money, those predictions are rather weak in terms of their ability to affect what she calls the core of charity: after all, even if Obama's plan negatively impacts our ability to give money, as Cushman says it will, it won't do anything to our ability to help others based on our passions in other ways.

There's also a problem with her gripe that government money is hard to track and/or spent on unlikeable projects: the same thing is true of most charities. No charitable organization has either perfect transparency or a perfectly approved-of agenda, but that clearly doesn't stop people from giving. (As an exercise in demonstrating this, simply visit any 501(c)(3)'s website and replace its name with "the government" in all of its promotional material. If that change makes you feel differently about those promotional materials, that warrants some major introspection on your part.) But what of her claim that charitable contributions will drop under Obama's new tax structure?

The strength of this argument, I think, depends on Cushman's conflation of good works, service, and charity. Her initial formulation uses the phrase "public service" and her closing uses "good works," which makes me believe that her ultimate concern is the sum total of all self-sacrificing ethical acts, not just the charitable ones. And so much the better - to sacrifice the whole for a part would border on the ridiculous. But her warring intuitions betray her somewhat here, because it's precisely the whole that Obama has his eye on. Indeed, I daresay that he knows full well that decreasing the tax write-off for charitable contributions is apt to reduce said contributions, so the real question is whether or not his plan to offset the drop in charity with a rise in overall service will work or not. Cushman, though, does not ask that question.

This is not to say that none of her concerns are at all valid. In the course of defending Obama's plan, one needs to be able to explain why the happiness-in-giving that Cushman references is an acceptable casualty, because it very much will be a casualty. Similarly, Cushman is right to call for a more explicit and solid account of the proper balance between public and private charity. But neither of those points is at all capable of proving that government-funded acts don't count as good works nor that Obama's plan won't result in an overall increase in goodness (or happiness, justice, whatever). Ultimately, though, all of this may be irrelevant: for all the noise in arguments like this, the value in the signal may never reach a wide enough audience to make any difference at all.

Scientists received a shock several weeks back when a reputable magazine's cover story was entitled "Darwin Was Wrong," and it looks like they're in for another one now. As Frank Pastore accurately(!) reports, "Edward C. Green, director of the AIDS Prevention Research Project at the Harvard Center for Population and Development Studies...agrees with the pope" that condom use actually increases the spread of AIDS. Specifically, Green makes three substantive claims that could be seen as supporting the pope Ratzinger's recent statements:

1. "We have found no consistent associations between condom use and lower HIV-infection rates."
2. "There is a consistent association shown by our best studies, including the US-funded Demographic Health Surveys, between greater availability and use of condoms and higher (not lower) HIV-infection rates. This may be due in part to a phenomenon known as risk compensation, meaning that when one uses a risk-reduction technology such as condoms, one often loses the benefit (reduction in risk) by compensating or taking greater chances than one would take without the risk-reduction technology."
3. "The best and latest empirical evidence indeed shows that reduction in multiple and concurrent sexual partners is the most important single behavior change associated with reduction in HIV-infection rates (the other major factor is male circumcision)."

For a Harvard researcher, Green really ought to know better than to make unqualified claims like these. Especially since he just published a paper through that same AIDS Prevention Research Project that contradicts two of those three statements, he would've been better served to clarify the context of his remarks.

In that paper, Green - who writes with Timothy Mah, Allison Ruark, and Norman Hearst - straightforwardly admits that "incorrect, inconsistent, or nonuse of barrier methods such as condoms" qualifies as a significant "risk factor" for contracting HIV/AIDS. Furthermore, the authors cite several studies where certain cohorts - "serodiscordant couples" and "at-risk populations, including sex workers," to take just two examples - greatly reduce their infection rates by using condoms consistently and correctly. "Correct and consistent condom use," they continue, "undoubtedly reduces an individual's risk of HIV infection, yet the effectiveness of condoms for preventing transmission at the population level has been limited" [all emphasis mine]. This is a major distinction and one that Green, Pastore, and the pope all fail to make in their diatribes against condoms.

One of the most important parts of doing any scientific research is establishing the proper context. For example, the fact that objects fall at different rates on different planets fails to disprove universal gravitation precisely because the contexts are different. The error that Green makes in his interview is that he fails to divide his findings up into their appropriate contexts. As he himself admits, condoms are used successfully by many different sub-populations even though otherss react to the presence of condoms in a negative enough way to balance out the positive effects of that first group. Thus what appears to be a stable or even worsening situation across the board actually breaks down into many variegated situations: some groups improve, some don't vary much at all, and others worsen. This is where Green's risk compensation theory comes into play, and where a more intellectually honest researcher would've been a bit more precise.

In order for Green's population-level statistics to be a valid reason to ditch condoms altogether (which is clearly what the pope wants), it would have to be the case that prevention efforts could only happen with respect to entire populations. But why should anybody believe that? Public health initiatives, at least nowadays, are more than capable of targeting specific demographics - indeed, that's a key step in even local, small-scale efforts. At its absolute strongest, then, Green's argument could only partly support the pope's (and Pastore's) blanket prohibition against condom use: since we know which cohorts (sub-populations, demographics) react positively to condom-based initiatives and which don't, there's no reason to punish the former group for the latter group's screw-ups. A slightly deeper look, though, will reveal that Green doesn't even have enough data to make a decisive conclusion about any groups.

Green, Pastore, and Ratzinger all recommend replacing condom-inclusive programs with something that focuses more on behavior. The pope, of course, uses more flowery language than Green does, but the essence is this: people need to have fewer sex partners. The astute reader will notice that a population-wide reduction in the average number of sex partners can happen alongside a population-wide increase in correct and consistent condom use. Ratzinger and Pastore for sure, and possibly also Green, seem to think that we can only move forward with one of those two things at a time, but that's just absurd. While still keeping in mind that different demographics have to be handled differently, it would absolutely be feasible - maybe not easy, but certainly feasible. In fact, that's exactly what Green's group paper recommends: "In order for HIV-prevention programs in the context of sexually transmitted epidemics to achieve their goal of reducing prevalence at the population level," it says, "they must decrease the efficiency of transmission, the risk of exposure, or both. This decrease can be accomplished in three ways: (1) by completely avoiding exposure to HIV through sexual abstinence or by mutual monogamy between uninfected partners; (2) by reducing the risk of exposure through a reduction in number of sex partners or sexual encounters; or (3) decreasing the efficiency of transmission through condom use, male circumcision, or other methods."*

Together with the relatively positive attitude towards condoms, the repeated inclusion of male circumcision in this research points to a rather unflattering portrayal of Ratzinger, Pastore, and Green. Since they all follow the evidence they cite only insofar as it agrees with theologically conservative Christian doctrine, odds are that their primary allegiance is not to the evidence itself but rather to said doctrine. It's just as negligent to specifically ignore the pro-condom parts of the research as it is to ignore the pro-abstinence parts - and, for the record, I think it's patently negligent to ignore the pro-abstinence parts.** Specifically, it's just as negligent in this case to say without qualification that condoms make things worse as it is to say that reducing sexual encounters is unrealistic. While both of those things are currently true for some parts of the populations in question, that's not at all the same as saying that either will always be true for everyone. If we want to actually solve this problem, we'll have to move beyond this mud-flinging stage, but we can only do that if people like Green, Pastore, and Ratzinger quit spinning nuanced findings into black-and-white recommendations just so that they can say, "I told you so."

*Similarly, there's a question about whether or not other steps can be taken to mitigate risk compensation. Given that we have a name for this phenomenon it seems reasonable to postulate that we can at least identify some patterns in the circumstances that contribute to or hinder it.
**At least, in the proper context: it's not necessarily a great idea to say that all the things that work in third-world African countries are going to translate to suburban America.

That "Don't mess with Texas" thing might have been a good idea at one point in history, but these days I can't imagine that it serves as anything other than a blinking neon target for snark. Oh well.

Ed Brayton, whose analysis is usually quite good, suggests the following good-but-not-great interpretation of this Texas op/ed: "This is a Rorschach argument. Once offered, it tells you all you need to know about the person making it. It tells you that you are dealing either with a liar or with someone whose entire understanding of evolution is cribbed from creationist pamphlets." Accurate though I think that is, I also think Brayton missed the interesting part of the argument.

As Brayton points out, the author of the piece (one Don McLeroy) does err in defining science and he also does engage in some pretty serious quote-mining, but to me those are basic at this point: if you are a creationist or a creationist advocate and those are your only two tricks, you aren't worthy of my time. (Granted, Brayton has a much wider scope of interest in his work and blog, but still.) That I'm writing about this nonetheless must mean, therefore, that McLeroy pulls a rabbit of an altogether different color out of his ten-gallon hat* - and indeed, that's very much what he does.

Way at the end of his piece, McLeroy talks about the concept of stasis. He quotes Steven Jay Gould as saying that stasis, "not show[ing] any appreciable evolutionary change at all," is exemplified by a "great majority of species" in the fossil record. Questions of context aside, so far this is fine: if the only source of evidence for evolution were fossils,** the theory would be on somewhat shaky ground. Having all the other evidence that we do, however, we can safely reject McLeroy's conclusion that stasis (in the fossil record or elsewhere) "raise[s] a problem for the evolution hypothesis in that stasis is the opposite of evolution."

As best I can figure, this is not a case of equivocation: he seems to understand that evolution-the-hypothesis and evolution-the-process are two very different things. What he doesn't seem to get, however, is that evolution-the-hypothesis is capable of supporting - indeed, explicitly predicts - periods of both evolution-the-process and stasis. The urgent dilemma that McLeroy thinks he's imposing on evolutionary scientists, then, just doesn't exist: there's no need to reconcile any theory with one of its own predictions. McLeroy does get one thing right, though - the cultural friction regarding evolution really doesn't exist "because of the religious faith of creationists." It exists because idiots who don't understand evolution at all - like, say, McLeroy - nonetheless feel qualified to make policy that affects the teaching and study of evolution. The religious faith of these idiots (insofar as it exists) doesn't help, but it's the idiocy first and foremost that's causing the problem.

*How about that for mixed imagery?
**And maybe I have to also specify that one only measure the appearance of those fossils? I don't know for sure, but I think that DNA analysis might reveal real evolutionary change where just a skeletal structure would not. This is pure speculation, though.

As global warming continues to gain momentum as an issue, it also gathers detractors. Some of these, like George Will, have enough respect for data that they at least bother to falsify some, whereas others, like Jeff Mirus, don't need no stinkin' data. In fact, Mirus practically needs not to have data, as he bases his position mainly on a string of things he just doesn't know.

With the goal of denying that global warming serves as a good reason "to live simply and in solidarity with the world’s poorest," Mirus rattles off a laundry list of things we ostensibly cannot say about the phenomenon. First, he says, "climate is constantly changing in various cycles within cycles, and nobody really knows exactly what sort of cycle we are in now, or how long it will last. Moreover, nobody knows whether man’s activity is having an appreciable impact on whatever the current cycle is. Nobody knows whether the earth is getting warmer as part of a long-term trend that is irreversible if we don’t manage things differently. Finally, nobody knows if simply 'living more simply' will have any impact on whatever trend we have." Since the internet already has enough yeah-huhs to answer Mirus's elongated nuh-uh, I'll skip past these factual errors to something more original.

Despite the apparent confidence with which Mirus disavows all knowledge of anything relating at all to this thing called "global warming," one of his arguments forces him to hazard some guesses anyway. Even if living simply would help global warming, he says, "[t]he first result of a rapid reduction caused by aggressive simplification would be the further weakening of an already staggering global economy." Somehow or other Mirus fails to notice, only a few lines later, when he calls all "projections about the impact of personal habits in rich nations" - of which that most certainly is one - "impossible to make." And indeed, if you have no premises you cannot form any conclusions, which only leaves the question of why Mirus, having specifically and thoroughly deprived himself of premises, offers up a conclusion anyway.

Upon further reading, it might have something to do with a certain disposition of his. "I don’t know about you," Mirus says, continuing the pattern, "but I’m just naturally suspicious of organizations that launch initiatives based on the ideas currently most fashionable in the larger secular culture." It's rare to see the ad hominem fallacy displayed so prominently these days, because most people know better. If we've learned anything about Mirus over the course of this post, though, it's clearly that he doesn't know - not facts about global warming, not ways to predict behavior, not things about me, and certainly not better. Leave aside the question of whether global warming really is "most fashionable in the larger secular culture" - it ain't exactly ending hunger, fashionable-secular-causes-wise - Mirus is simply wrong to question popular ideas just because of their popularity.

Intentional ignorance and baseless paranoia are bad enough on their own, but Mirus combines them with a staggeringly smug sense of self-satisfaction. The problem here, whether it's global warming or mistaken belief in global warming, obviously cannot be solved with a facial expression. Maybe the most serious pitfall of armchair policymaking, and the one that Mirus falls right into, is that everything looks small from a distance. Unless one actually engages the relevant ideas in a subject area, there's simply no reliable way to identify the appropriate actions to take. If Mirus wants to sit back and grin dumbly while the world crumbles around him, he should be ready to forgive us the urge to knock some sense into his apparently empty head.

While a starfish is of course neither a star nor a fish and a peanut is not a nut (wiki says that it is a pea), I for one was still holding out hope that a bioethicist was someone who knew something about at least one of biology and ethics and who applied that knowledge in some way. Alas, it seems that, too, need not be the case. In an interview with what looks to be a couple of college newspapers, Christopher Tollefson demonstrates with pitiless thoroughness that the title of bioethicist says nothing at all about a person's scientific or philosophical knowledge or expertise.

Though the interview unfortunately leaves a good deal of his actual argumentation out, the few clarificatory points he does make are remarkable in their inconsistency and factual inaccuracy. First of all, Tollefson holds that "a human being is essentially a human being starting at the point of fertilization, and as such necessarily demands moral respect," which I guess means either that one out of every two genetic twins isn't a human being or that some fertilized eggs are two or more people - identical twins, of course, being the result of "a single [fertilized] egg [that] divides into two separate embryos." This view also runs into certain problems when it comes to explaining the very large number of fertilized eggs that get miscarried, but Tollefson explains that kind of case as "not a moral wrong" because "this is something that just happens." By opting for this direction, Tollefson ties himself very strongly to the notion that morality is inseparable from intent. Leaving aside the subtler questions of why, in that case, we should give "moral respect" to something incapable of intending anything, Tollefson still runs into problems with this somewhat unintuitive ethic.

In the very next question, one interviewer asks whether or not "the question of having a child to begin with—the decision to conceive a child—[has] a moral dimension to it." Tollefson answers affirmatively, saying, "if you’re intending to get pregnant, you should not be drinking excessive amounts of alcohol for the period of time you are getting pregnant... people probably [also] have a responsibility if they are trying to get pregnant to have adequate nutrition." He even goes so far as to call these obligations "a kind of ethics of conception," thus cementing them as having a place in his moral outlook. But remember, things that "just happen" - i.e., that happen without anybody meaning for them to - are "not moral wrongs," which would very much seem to imply that women who unwittingly undernourish themselves or drink too much while pregnant would escape blame. Still, though, there might be some wiggle room: maybe if a pregnant woman intends to get smashed, for instance, she accepts responsibility for all the consequences of that action, even those unknown to her. Though Tollefson could perhaps have tried to loosen the connection between morality and intent, he does not. Indeed, towards the end of the interview he makes it very clear that morality follows intent in an extremely strict way: "If I try to help somebody across the street because I want to take their money, as opposed to help somebody across the street because I want to help them out, I’m doing two different things."

Besides setting up an inescapable contradiction for himself, this thinking also undermines an attack that Tollefson makes on pro-choice advocates. He accuses such advocates of hypocrisy because "many people find [sex-selective abortions] morally repulsive, even people who are in principle in favor of legalized abortion." In order to embark on this kind of argument, Tollefson must establish that all abortions bear a significant moral resemblance to each other regardless of the contexts in which they happen. However, that's precisely the premise that he denies when he asserts that morality follows intent. If street-crossing-for-altruism and street-crossing-for-theft are two different things because of intent, obviously abortion-for-sex-selection and abortion-for-anything-else are two different things.

Ultimately, though, the debate turns on the question of moral status. One popular move against Tollefson's life-at-conception strategy is to say that (a certain kind of) brain activity is essential for the kind of protections that Tollefson wants embryos to have. Though one would think that this move would be familiar to Tollefson, his response to this argument sets a new mark for weirdness. "The presence of brain activity," he says, "is not a being-changing event… it doesn’t change something from being nothing." Insofar as I know, no theory of ontology permits this kind of reasoning. Tollefson, it seems to me, could mean one of two things. Either he could mean that the presence of brain activity doesn't change one physical thing into another physical thing or that it doesn't change one metaphysical thing into another metaphysical thing. The first case is a simple misunderstanding: nobody wants to say that brain activity makes certain bodies human, just that it makes humans people. As for the second case, he's just wrong. Minimally, having brain activity is the metaphysical difference between being a thing-with-brain-activity and a thing-without-brain-activity. Moreover, he himself argues that physical changes can beget moral ones, as his position depends on the idea that a sperm and an egg are worth less separately than they are together.

As much as it pains me to see Tollefson's apparent inability to live up to his job title, I confess that I'm way more confused by Harry Jackson, Jr.'s article about the pope's recent advice regarding condoms. For those who somehow don't know, pope Ratzinger accused condoms of contributing to the spread of AIDS in Africa - despite, of course, all evidence to the contrary. Jackson confidently asserts that "the Pope was right this time," but his confidence is altogether unjustified. The sum total of his argumentation seems to be the following claim: "a responsible and moral attitude toward sex would help fight the disease." Bizarrely, Jackson continues on to blame the current AIDS epidemic in Washington DC on a lack of condoms, guessing "that many people are not even trying to use condoms." He does not, unfortunately, take the time to reconcile these two notions.

It reveals a great deal indeed about the human mind that an ostensibly mentally competent adult could be led to believe that condoms have anything to do with moral attitudes just because an old guy in a big hat says so. I never thought I would have to make this point, but a condom is a latex or polyurethane object mass-produced in factories and sold in corner pharmacies whereas a responsible moral attitude is a mental state, composed at most of an arrangement of brain tissue and electrical impulses and generated spontaneously and (probably) uniquely by an individual. Having one of the two, in short, says nothing whatsoever about whether you have the other. Maybe Jackson is just reasoning that if starfish aren't stars or fish, and if peanuts aren't nuts, and if bioethicists aren't necessarily biologists or ethicists, then condoms aren't condoms - but, on the other hand, maybe he's just a moron. I leave it to my readers to make their own conclusions on that matter.

A major tenet of fiscal libertarianism is that there exists a very strong prima facie right to own all the money in one's paycheck. On this assumption, taxation becomes theft of a relatively serious sort. It should be no surprise, then, when the parts of American conservatism that issue from libertarianism make noises about the immorality of taxation, such as in Star Parker's article in which she decries "the ease with which politicians can expropriate hundreds of billions of taxpayers' funds." Unfortunately for Parker, moral grandstanding and reasonable argumentation are not the same thing, and she only pulls one of those two off successfully.

As her lone piece of evidence, Parker points to "a new study, released by an organization called the Property Rights Alliance, called the International Property Rights Index. The study examines 115 nations worldwide and examines the correspondence between prosperity in a country and how secure private property is there." The results, she says, demonstrate that "[t]he more secure private property is in a given country, the more prosperous it is." Parker goes on to indict the federal government for having "legalized theft" in the form of taxation, thereby creating "a country where our private property is no longer safe and the very government that supposedly exists to protect it has become the thief we have to worry about." Normally this would be where I go over the whole correlation/causation thing - see e.g. here - but in this case I don't even have to go that far.

In the actual report, which sadly is a pdf, the authors make sure to explain that their measurement of a country's property rights system involves three components: that country's legal and political environment (the strength of law, etc.); intellectual property rights (copyright and patent protection, etc.); and, yes, physical property rights. While this last category includes "judicial protection of private property, including financial assets," it also focuses a great deal on land economics, such as the lease and registration of territory. A good indication of just how much Parker overstates her case can be found in the paper's exhibits 2 and 8, which list countries by overall ranking (what the paper terms the International Property Rights Index, or IPRI) and physical property rights ranking (PPR) respectively. If Parker's cash-centered view were really an accurate reflection of the study's results, one would expect countries with high tax rates to suffer in those rankings, but in fact the opposite happens. The Scandanavian countries, for example, all outrank the U.S. in both IPRI and PPR, as do several other European countries infamous in conservative circles for their socialist leanings (we're in a tie for 15th overall and 13th in PPR, just for the record).

Regardless of whether the correlation in the paper indicates a causation one way or the other, then, Parker's argument is way off. First and foremost, taxation is treated as a minor variable by the study, if indeed it's included at all - note that they specify judicial protection of assets, which may exclude legislatively approved taxes altogether. PPR, the category into which taxes would fall, also just so happens to correlate the most weakly with GDP (see exhibits 14-16). Finally, a significant amount of data exists that defies the taxation/prosperity link that Parker wants to establish. Whatever actual influence taxes have on the results of this paper, then, Parker blows it totally out of proportion.

Some of you - well, at least one of you - should remember a post of mine from about a year ago in which I totally destroy Alvin Plantinga's evolutionary argument against naturalism. I usually refrain from using words like "totally destroy" with regards to arguments that professional philosophers generate, but in this case the shoe definitely fits. Plantinga assumes statistical independence where none could possibly exist, arbitrarily selects estimated probabilities that suit his purpose, and finds ways to ignore those parts of evolutionary science that have the potential to wreck his argument. It's a sad commentary on the state of philosophy that this kind of thing gets any play at all, but in fact that underestimates the scope of the problem: Plantinga's sophistry in this matter has now spread to the point of being entrenched in the literature. Stephen Law addresses it, Plantinga debates it with skeptics,* and even dim-witted pop apologists like Kenneth Samples rip it off.

Beginning with the premise that "optimists live longer than pessimists," Samples tries to argue that "evolution can cause a person to believe that which is false in order to promote survivability" and therefore that "a person [cannot] trust that evolution will give true beliefs about the world." It's interesting that he should take this particular road, because there seems to be a glaring problem: evolution doesn't operate on the survivability of individuals but rather of groups. Samples solves that problem, though, by simply mashing the two together:

"Belief in God (though in reality a false belief, and even pernicious in nature according to Dawkins) nevertheless promotes survivability (or at least a longer life span).

Conclusion: False beliefs may at times promote the survivability of a species more than true beliefs."

Longer life spans for individuals, in other words, means better survivability for a species. Sadly for Samples, this is just not true. Humans, for instance, lose their virility at what is now a relatively early age, which means (at least on a simplistic view of population dynamics) that individual lifespans do not automatically match up with the health of a species.

In fact, though, it's not really fair to take a simplistic view of the situation. Samples seems to, so it's tempting to simply stop here, but that wouldn't be fair. Though old animals - specifically, old humans - can also serve an evolutionary purpose for populations, I'd rather not keep chasing that idea because it gets too complicated: remember, Samples's argument relied on this idea of false but helpful beliefs, not specifically on the supposed evolutionary helpfulness of old individuals. Rather than try to work out each and every last probable evolutionary consequence of a false belief in a god,** I'll just look at the evidence. Religion, it seems, correlates negatively with IQ, negatively with wealth, and positively with "societal dysfunction." This is not, of course, to say that religion causes all or any of these problems - I, for instance, don't think it does. But these results directly oppose what one would expect if, as in Samples's argument, false religious belief was actually an evolutionary boon: if humanity had to whittle itself down to either the strongly religious or the strongly secular, these results indicate that the latter group would be vastly more likely to survive. Though there was almost certainly a period of time when society-wide religiosity correlated strongly with the evolutionary fitness of that society, that time seems to have passed.

On top of his initial conflation between individuals and species, then, Samples errs in thinking that the evolutionary success of some false beliefs at some times suffices to show that all of an evolved creature's beliefs are suspect. Moreover, unless he can establish a case for general skepticism with respect to evolved beliefs, he would have to produce a plausible and at least somewhat evidentially supported account of how a false belief in evolution - the belief he wants to undermine - could either be evolutionarily beneficial itself or else be the product of other evolutionarily beneficial attributes. Given his abysmal failure to do so in the case of false belief in a god and given his total lack of understanding of what it's reasonable to expect from evolution, it doesn't seem likely that he'll be able to pull of his Plantinga imitation any time soon.

**Although it would help, I needn't assume here that belief in any particular god is false: enough people believe in mutually exclusive gods that my evidence will be mostly reliable even if one of those gods exists.

I wonder if this is the first time in history that an entire post has been used as a footnote. I hope it is. See also Be reasonable.

Of particular interest here are four new wrinkles: "why think [that a creature's beliefs] would be in any way connected with the circumstances of the creature in question?" Answer: because evolutionary belief mechanisms rely on biochemistry, which in turn relies on physics. It is therefore literally impossible for beliefs not to be connected at all to "circumstances." There's a question about how it would be connecetd, but that brings us to...

Number two: "even if the beliefs in question are maximally dependent, probabilistically speaking, P(R/N&E) [the probability of reliability given naturalism and evolution] could not be greater than ½." Only if we buy the argument from ignorance that any given belief has a 50% chance of being true. Especially given that Plantinga thinks that strictly subconscious behavior (involuntary reactions, say) have to be systematically reliable, he should be able to figure out that any conscious behavior built upon subconscious behavior structures - which is to say, all conscious behavior - has at least a very reliable basis. If so, 50% reliability seems like a brutally unfair estimate.

Third: "consider some member m of [a] hypothetical population in a bathtub with an alligator. Suppose m holds false beliefs, believing at the time in question that the alligator is a mermaid, or even that he's sitting under a tree eating mangoes. Will that adversely affect his fitness? Not just by itself. Not if m has indicators and other neural structures that send the right messages to his muscles, messages that cause his muscles to contract in such a way as to bring it about that he hops out of that tub. It's having the right neurophysiology and the right muscular activity that counts." This should be obviously problematic: how can an evolutionary system (in this case, a belief-generating mechanism) continue to evolve when it's totally disconnected from all pressures? By definition, it cannot. This kind of belief system, then, cannot have been selected for and indeed would be selected against: by Plantinga's own premise, such a belief system would be totally disconnected from the kinds of behavior a being like this would engage in. But any belief-generating system requires energy, which means that creatures with behaviorally impotent random-belief-generating facilities would follow the same behavior patterns on average as creatures without such facilities - only less efficiently. (That is, they would require greater resources or else behave less effectively, or both.) Since efficiency is a mark of evolutionary fitness, this means evolution would, contrary to Plantinga's claim, select against these kinds of belief-producing mechanisms (assuming, that is, that such a system could even arise in the first place). In fact, though, this kind of sci-fi scenario is Plantinga's best bet: as soon as he links behavior to belief at all, everything falls apart.

Observe: "Suppose m has a certain belief B. B has NP properties that cause him (it) to leap out of the tub, thus frustrating the alligator. B also has NP properties on which its content supervenes. B causes the behavior it does by virtue of that content: if it hadn't had that content, it would not have caused that behavior. But the content needn't be true; and indeed there is no reason to think it would be true." True enough in a lone case, but evolutionary strength requires something much stronger: systematic adaptability. I think this is probably where Stephen Law is eventually going, but either way it should be clear that systems are only as generally adaptable as they are reliable. Since the scientific process of belief formation has proven to be highly adaptable, there's an extremely good chance that it's also epistemologically reliable.

Put more precisely, systematically generated beliefs are (by virtue of being systematically generated) reliable in certain types of situations and unreliable in others. Call the first set of situation types R and the second U (note, I guess, that either of these sets could in theory be empty). The more that situations in R are important with respect to adaptability and situations in U are unimportant to the same, the more adaptable a belief system will be - if situations in R don't have the power to make a member of a species more adaptable, members of that species won't be any more evolutionarily fit as a result of following that belief system; and if situations in U have the power to make members of a species less adaptable, members of that species will be less evolutionarily fit as a result of following that belief system. In general, then, evolved beings with evolved belief systems will tend over the long term (this is very important) to develop those belief systems so that they correlate reliability more and more strongly with importance with respect to adaptability. Again, one has to admit that scientific thinking is extraordinarily adaptable and has been around for a good long while, from which one can pretty strongly guess (depending on the strength of the correlation) that it's also epistemically reliable. QED.

[Added 3/27/09: Out of completeness, I really should point out that Plantinga could simply argue that some fundamental piece of data that we think we know is just wrong. He could say, for instance, that we're the very first species ever to have belief formation mechanisms this complicated and that an unfortunate side effect of this is that our reckoning of time is way off: this would provide both a general reason to doubt our knowledge and specifically a way of replying to many of my above objections. But this kind of case is indistinguishable from the brains-in-a-jar case, which Plantinga himself cannot escape. I therefore consider this route to be a Pyrrhic victory at best for this argument, and on the assumption that Plantinga doesn't want to turn this into a philosophical murder-suicide I'll say that he won't bother with this kind of thing.]

Return to the original post.

Imagine my surprise when, browsing through townhall.com's seemingly endless series of articles deriding Obama's budget, I found one that actually used real numbers. Incredible, right? Well, don't get too excited yet - in this case, what seems to good to be true really is. Terence Jeffrey, the author of this piece, attacks Obama for partially basing his budget on the premise that "[f]or the better part of three decades, a disproportionate share of the nation's wealth has been accumulated by the very wealthy." In order to do this, Jeffrey sought out the most recent Census Bureau report on household income (warning: pdf) and used it to compare the latest year in the report to the earliest year in the report. The problem? The latest year is 2007 and the earliest is 1967.

For the mathematically disinclined, "the better part of three decades" means somewhere between 25 and 30 years, whereas the difference between 2007 and 1967 is 40 years. In other words, the statistics Jeffrey wants to use are irrelevant by at least a whole decade - 12 years, really, if we want to pile on (it is, after all, not 2007 anymore). But the really shocking part about this whole thing? People on townhall.com think this argument deserves 4 stars out of 5. Granted, that might just be rounding error - assuming they have just as much trouble counting as Jeffrey does, it's entirely possible that they meant to give it -8 stars out of five and just screwed up. For some reason, though, I am not inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt.

Apparently it is "pretend that Rust Belt Philosophy is relevant" week - first Mariano makes an inauspicious return to my blog and now Kenneth Samples thinks he has something clever to say about one of my posts. [Edited 3/19/09 to add: and Richard Brown! How could I forget poor Richard? And then edited again 3/20/09: and now Alex Pruss comments, too, albeit positively. Crazy.] Well, I've had just about enough of that. Since Mariano is a troll, I won't bother with him. Samples, on the other hand, writes for a real website and has books and stuff, so I consider him fair game. Today I'll look at another piece he wrote for the Reasons To Believe think (cough) tank in which he tries to defend his faith from the "common skeptical objection to Christian apologetics...that theists engage in a god-of-the-gaps form of reasoning."

After defining the basic problem, Samples immediately swerves away from his stated purpose and goes on the offense. With almost a paternalistic air, he encourages his readers "to notice how entrenched naturalists are to their mindset and worldview." Since "some naturalists express excessive confidence that [scientific discoveries in] the future will explain reality," Samples levels the charge that they themselves participate in what "might even be called 'naturalism-of-the-gaps' reasoning." For now we have little choice but to take Samples at his word - we'll fix that in a moment, don't worry - but even then it's hard to see how this is at all relevant. Naturalism could indeed be the least logical metaphysical viewpoint in existence and that would still not make theism any more plausible. To be more precise, what naturalists do or don't do has no bearing on what theists do or don't do, so this tu quoque argument is totally out of place in a defense of theism.

Returning to his actual thesis, Samples seeks to solve the skeptic's challenge by claiming "that most sophisticated Christian theists don't engage in a god-of-the-gaps form of reasoning. Rather, Christian scholars appeal to God as an inference to the best explanation." Samples doesn't seem to notice that he has just inadvertently saved naturalism: if theists can aim to extrapolate their view from the available evidence and thus avoid "-of-the-gaps" reasoning, naturalists can do the same. Having thus undermined his first erroneous argument, Samples tries to replace it with one that's even more laughable. A defense of theism that relies on extrapolation, he says, "is very similar to the way detectives, lawyers, historians, and scientists reason. For example, scientists sometimes postulate ideas that are unobservable in order to explain the data that is observed (consider dark matter)." As fun as it would be to let Samples make a positive comparison to people whose reasoning he explicitly distrusts, there are two glaring problems with this analogy.

Though he intimates otherwise, the process by which scientists "postulate ideas that are unobservable" is not to just make shit up. Theoretical physicists (or chemists, or biologists, or whatever) have extensive and highly reliable mathematical systems with which to make these postulations - indeed, dark matter comes from exactly this kind of process. Theism, on the other hand, uses only highly suspect philosophical arguments, which usually lack not only predictive reliability but also independent (i.e., non-theological) support. Bad though the analogy is in describing how these postulations form, it fares even worse in describing what happens after that. Whatever faith we have in detectives, lawyers, historians, and scientists comes from one simple idea: testability. When someone in one of those categories puts forward a hypothesis, we can use it to predict the existence of certain kinds (and only those certain kinds) of evidence - fingerprints, testimony, documents, and so on. Put simply, theism fails utterly to do this. If and when Christian thinkers agree on one and only one interpretation of, say, Genesis, Samples might have a point, but until then this analogy is utterly broken.

With his last gasp, Samples tries to put all of these problems behind him and just get down to the business of explaining why Christianity "moves from the data, facts, evidence, and phenomena of the world to draw the most consistent and plausible explanation for these realities." He points to five areas in which Christianity "accounts for the array of realities in nature and in human experience": the universe, abstract entities (like math), ethics, humans, and religious phenomena (from which I'll exclude miracles, as those beg the question). Very well: let us pretend that the Christian worldview sufficiently explains those things. Why should we then conclude that it is the most consistent and plausible explanation? Surely Samples needn't eliminate all other conceivable competitors, but he hasn't really addressed naturalism seriously and he gives literally no consideration to any other alternative even though many (including ones very much like Christian theism) exist. Further, why should we worry about only those five things? A naturalist could just as easily draw up a list of five things that theism ostensibly has trouble explaining, but the challenge is in pulling together all the evidence, not just five arbitrary parts of it.

Given all of these errors, it's incredibly tempting to just reject Samples's argument out of hand - and I think we should. But before we do, I want to point out one more problem with it: even if we give him the benefit of every doubt, this whole argument has taken place at too abstract a level. Although the phrase "God of the gaps" refers in some sense to a single phenomenon, the fallacy's actual use varies significantly from case to case. If his argument had succeeded, it would've been interesting to see whether his general claims actually applied to specific apologetic arguments. I suspect they wouldn't have, but it's instructive nonetheless to remember that any given fallacious argument that infers God from a gap is fallacious because of attributes specific to that argument. Just like Samples cannot successfully use the words "best explanation" to bludgeon his critics until he backs them up with relevant details, the phrase "God of the gaps" isn't some magical tool with which to win arguments. Used properly, though, it is a legitimate and very powerul accusation - and one that deserves a far more serious (and less painfully stupid) treatment than Samples gives it here.

I'm going to make this quick, because I find this entire subject to be tiresome. The line these days is that Obama's budget - and sometimes also pieces of legislation that aren't his at all - match the New Deal too closely and that we ought to reject them because the New Deal failed. Strangely, nobody seems to want to say why the New Deal failed, just that it did. To make up for that, I went and did a very little bit of research and came up with this summary of a paper by Harold Cole and Lee Ohanian. It's worth reading in full, but here's the important bit: "Ohanian and Cole blame specific anti-competition and pro-labor measures that Roosevelt promoted." The idea is that Roosevelt handcuffed companies to legislation that would force them to produce overpriced goods (because of those "pro-labor measures") that nonetheless weren't particularly valuable (because there was less competition). (A similar argument can be found here: "The centerpieces of the New Deal were the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) and the National Recovery Administration (NRA), both of which were aimed at reducing production and raising wages and prices.")

Conservative commentators and politicians echo at least one of these points when they say, as Ben Shapiro does, that Obama is like FDR in that "he recommends unionization in order to boost wages." They also, however, have a great deal to say that has nothing whatsoever to do with any recognized economic theory of the Great Depression. Shapiro, for instance, also offers up the common conservative argument that we ought not fund banks because "after the stock market crash of 1929, the Federal Reserve pumped cash into the system." This kind of thinking takes the analogy way too far, though: if the only economic historians who criticize the New Deal do so for two specific reasons, it's deceptive to say that Obama's plan will fail because it resembles the New Deal in ways totally unrelated to those two reasons. Even on the one point that matches the economists' arguments that they cite, these conservative critics ignore key differences between Obama's plan and the New Deal.

While Obama does want higher real wages for workers of the same sort that often raise production costs, he plans on counteracting these by relieving companies of the burden of paying for health care. Large portions of his plan are also designed to increase, not decrease, competition - in health care, for example, but also in government contracting, and education, and tech-reliant industries. Furthermore, FDR (so the argument goes) distorted the market by linking his pro-labor measures that businesses wouldn't normally like to pro-trust laws that those same businesses salivated over. Even if Obama's stance on production costs were exactly the same as FDR's, then, there would still be a question about whether or not his legislation would have the same effects. It's certainly fair to question whether Obama's plan would be effective in these proposals, but it's patently disingenuous to make his plan out to be a carbon copy of the New Deal by reporting only the similarities between the two.

Or, "I wish I could more precisely manipulate fonts in the titles of my posts." Either way, with thanks to George Carlin.

Today we return to a new favorite subject of this blog, Dr. Jeff Mirus and his vice-like grip on the Catholic Culture website. Last we saw him, he was saying...well, something about fasting. In between all the contradictions and general sniveling, it was hard to attribute anything like a coherent argument to Dr. Mirus. This time, sadly, things will not go much better, a fact hinted at by the ominous presence of more talk of fasting towards the end of Mirus's most recent column. Besides the fact that, as we've seen, he seems to not really know what he's talking about when it comes to fasting in the first place, it is not at all obvious how he plans to connect "the pervasive media culture" to the concept of intentionally depriving oneself of food.

Mirus, in case you couldn't guess, is not so much a fan of the media. "Too often," he says, "we allow ourselves to be driven less by a medium’s moral content than by the superficial entertainment it provides." As often happens, Mirus's language here will give away the game later on - remember the word "driven." To "avoid sources of entertainment that offend against" his values, Mirus follows his wife in obeying what he calls "the 'living room' rule: If we would not permit guests to behave a certain way in our living room, then we will not permit television, movies, Internet, radio[?!] or music that portrays that same behavior." Except, not really - he's fine with watching "somebody blowing up cars in a high-speed chase" and "military battle[s]," he just wants to excise "media offerings that are obviously morally dangerous or that more subtly portray false values as normal and acceptable." One is sorely tempted at this point to ask why media with explosive car chase scenes don't qualify - surely Mirus doesn't actually endorse the explosive car chase as a legitimate problem-solving method? - but in fact no such questioning is needed, as the rest of Mirus's argument spools out just enough rope to hang him.

The cracks in Mirus's position begin to show when he refers to TV and so on as "passive entertainments" which only support "the unreflective absorption of whatever entertains us when we’re too shallow or too lazy to do anything else." Rather than experiencing media in this way, Mirus says, we should spend "more time on disciplined activities" (annoyingly, he leaves these alternative activities unnamed) and/or "spouse and family activities." By now, things have come almost completely undone for Mirus. Let's start with the easy one: the internet, at least at this stage in its development, is not just another one-way interaction. Moreover, as a practically limitless public data repository, the internet has more deep intellectual content than any library or museum Mirus cares to name. Whatever the 'net is, then, it surely isn't just a source of passive, vapid entertainment. This is not to say that Sturgeon's law doesn't apply, but if Mirus wants group-friendly (even family-friendly) interactive content he could do a lot worse than the internet.

Music might be the next most obvious candidate for disciplined, group-oriented entertainment: containing as it often does both music-strictly-speaking and poetry, colloquial-music can easily give way to the kind of cooperative high-culture experience Mirus wants (again, Sturgeon's law notwithstanding). Even TV and movies and I guess non-music radio programming work this way. Most art is lousy, yes, but even if only a tiny fraction of art was worthwhile (however Mirus chooses to define that) it would allow Mirus to engage in the kind of disciplined, family-oriented activities he praises so highly. Maybe more to the point, a great deal of the art that reaches the depths that Mirus desires does so precisely because it prominently features behavior one would not permit in one's living room.

It seems increasingly clear now that Mirus is just flat wrong. Maybe he has a point about a lack of deeper meaning in the car-chasing, martial-adventuring segment of contemporary narrative art, but this by no means entitles him to the claim that - and now we come full circle - the only way to avoid this is to "simply turn off the switch," which he calls "another form of fasting." As mentioned earlier, he could instead choose to seek out only worthwhile art, of which there should be no shortage even for someone as warped as Mirus. Even without having the background to interpret art qua art, though, he could choose to turn bad art into a good opportunity to discuss sociology or linguistics or memetics or even math. Ultimately, though, the problem seems to be that Mirus doesn't actually want to put any effort into art.

Return now to that telling word, "driven": if Mirus really allows himself to be passive in the face of art, he's doing it wrong. In particular, without actively engaging art he has no way of knowing whether or not it "portray[s] false values as normal and acceptable." After all, one of the trademarks of art is irony, the ability to say one thing and mean another. Though he claims that the perniciousness of art causes him not to observe it and therefore causes his ignorance, his argument in fact works the other way around. By remaining inert in his own interactions with art (which he admits is fundamental for him), he spares himself the work required to gain knowledge of the actual content of that art. With this kind of ignorance in hand, one can do little more than produce a blinkered, half-assed argument, which is exactly what happened: art by default is worthless and evil and base, Mirus says, but the stuff I like is okay. Somehow, I don't think that Mr. Carlin would've been impressed.

Though it has its flaws, the analogy between brains (or minds, if you prefer) and muscles works quite well from time to time. Just like some physical feats seem to be so incredible that one can hardly imagine being able to pull them off without hours and hours of practice, some mental actions speak to a significant amount of time devoted to their perfection. Excellence in chess is maybe the most obvious example of this, but the mental diverges from the physical in that one can also teach oneself to be extraordinarily bad at something. The impressive stupidity of someone like Ray Comfort - whom I can link to directly without any fear that my readers will find him at all persuasive - indicates a level of ineptitude that easily exceeds any comparison that could be made with physical clumsiness. Comfort, one feels, must spend his time actually looking for new and creative ways to not argue correctly - if not, why is he so darn good at it? Having never read her blog before or since it may be a tad hasty for me to say this,* but Megan McArdle's analysis of the Cramer/Stewart interview makes me very suspicious that she, too, does illogic exercises in her spare time.

She takes a token shot at Cramer before criticizing "the Jon Stewart video that touched this off" as being "clearly misleading" because "half of [Stewart's original clips] were anchors and reporters simply quoting someone else." Moreover, she says, "Stewart carefully claims he's just an entertainer, so he has no obligation to hew to journalistic standards on things like quoting out of context," which "in some sense he's doing exactly what Cramer is--making powerful statements, and then when he gets called on him, retreating into the claim that well, you can't really expect him to act as if he were being taken seriously." Given this line of thinking, one would not be at all unreasonable to think that McArdle never actually watched the Cramer/Stewart interview or even, for the most part, the Daily Show in general. For all the people who've leveled the accusation that the Daily Show purposefully decontextualizes people to make them seem dumber than they are, not one has got the charge to stick - indeed, Cramer himself tried to catch Stewart in such a misrepresentation just a few days before their interview, to which Stewart replied by simply filling in the context. But McArdle's major error is that she just doesn't get it.

While she takes pains to point out that CNBC's anchors were "simply quoting someone else," that's precisely what Stewart doesn't like about them. "I'm under the assumption," he says in what may be considered the thesis statement of his interview, "and maybe this is purely ridiculous, but I'm under the assumption that you don't just take their word for it at face value. That you actually then go around and try and figure it out." For a CNBC anchor to "simply quote someone else" is exactly for that person to "take their word for it at face value," so it's really very difficult to see why McArdle thinks this factoid will harm Stewart's position. On the other hand, maybe McArdle simply has no problem with credulous journalism - after all, she does say that Stewart is "exactly" like Cramer "in some sense." Again, though, this seems to miss the point: Stewart makes powerful skeptical statements, whereas Cramer (and by extension CNBC generally) makes powerful credulous statements. Stewart never argued that journalism, even entertaining journalism, cannot make powerful statements; he just that it cannot do so in order to turn people into sheep. McArdle could try to defend her original argument by claiming that a show like Stewart's turns people into sheep just as readily as a show like Cramer's, but she would be well-served to avoid this turn because it simply won't work - shows like Cramer's say "buy stock x now," but what iron-fisted demands does Stewart make of his audience?

Her thorough lack of comprehension extends to the very end of her article when she accuses Stewart of trivializing "financial journalism" on his show. To most anybody, it should be clear that Stewart, properly speaking, only does one kind of journalism: journalism journalism. Though at times this requires him to apply journalism to financial journalism, it also takes him to sports journalism, political journalism, science journalism, entertainment journalism, random-famous-person journalism, and, in a practical orgy of meta-, other people's journalism journalism. Somehow, though, this fact manages to escape McArdle. Without understanding the premise behind the Daily Show or the plainly stated positions that Stewart expresses on a show-by-show basis, McArdle's argument comes off very much like a pissy theater review written by a monolinguist in a foreign country. No matter how incisive one's mind may be, there is essentially no way to come off as anything other than thick if one insists on attacking a work without first understanding its foundations.

*Especially having just name-checked Ray Comfort. Just to be clear: even if I'm right about McArdle, I don't believe in any way that she's even in the same ballpark of wrongness as Comfort is.

When you learn to touch-type, people try to make it attractive in all sorts of lame ways. They make it into a video game with Mario, they give you "fun" practice sentences, they tell you how much easier it'll be to get a job if you can type - blah blah whatever. The real reason everybody with a computer should learn to touch-type is that, sooner or later, something will come along that you'd like to type something about but that is so stupid that it blinds you with rage whenever you think about it. (I assume here that this "you" person has standards of some sort - otherwise, anything goes.) Doubt this if you must - although really, after the Bush presidency, why would you? - but I speak from experience.

Yesterday I looked at an extraordinarily stupid argument about the ethical boundaries of cloning in which the author, either because he actually does not know the meaning of simple English words or just because he's a sophist, tried to argue that all cloning happens for the purpose of reproduction because the dictionary definition of "clone" is sorta kinda like the dictionary definition of "reproduction." That was a bad, bad argument and it made me die a little inside, but it doesn't even hold a candle to the almost miraculous level of idiocy present in the arguments about cloning that I read today.

Let me get the easy stuff out of the way first. While "science cannot answer questions like 'When is human life worthy of respect and protection?'" by itself, Mona Charen gets no points for saying so because her very next sentence is, "Those are inherently political questions that can only be answered by the whole society." I'm relatively certain that this is actually the polar opposite of what Charen wants to say, both as a theoretical matter (if we all decided that human life wasn't worthy of respect or protection when it was named John, would that really mean that it was okay to kill people named John?) and in this particular case (given that she's in the minority). Even if she really did mean it, it's a fallacy - her kind of ethics isn't amenable to alteration by popular vote. But whereas Charen only wants brute facts to reshape morality, David Harsanyi evidently wants morality to reshape brute facts. He thinks "opposition to embryonic stem cell research is not the equivalent of opposition to 'science' [because o]pponents have an ethical position that concerns policy." Regardless of how ethical or policy-centered this position may be, the position is nothing other than "I am against scientific research of this sort." Shoving morality in an opponent's face is a relatively popular move these days, but that doesn't make it any more valid. In precisely the same way, opponents of gay marriage oppose equality, drug prohibitionists oppose freedom, and stem cell paranoiacs oppose science. Denying this only dumbs down the resulting debate and ultimately weakens the case against those things: if the moral danger is as real as these people say it is, they should emphasize that by pointing out that it outweighs even the most fundamental of moral precepts (in these cases, equal treatment under the law, non-coercion in the absence of harm, and searching for knowledge).

As I said, though, that was the easy stuff - small fries, really, compared to the argument that both Charen and Harsanyi make about Obama's position on stem cells and cloning. Charen comes at it with that most favored tool of the ignorant, the rhetorical question: "Would the president be in favor of easing human suffering if it required using the organs of, say, 6-month-old fetuses? ... What if human cloning [past the embryonic stage] could get paraplegics to walk again or deliver diabetics from a lifetime of needles? What if the federal government's refusal to fund such research caused 'some of our best scientists (to) leave for other countries that will sponsor their work'?" Harsanyi, too, seemingly can't find a way to say what he means without putting a question mark at the end of his sentences: "What if cloning held the potential to cure some menacing ailment or appreciably enhance our quality of life? Would it be less scary? Less wicked? Would you support it then?" Just in case this indicates that they're in the middle of losing their ability to communicate with anything other than rhetorical questions - say, due to over-training for an appearance on Whose Line Is It Anyway - I'll respond in kind.

Don't you dipshits realize that the entire point of the stem cell research that Obama supports is to avoid these kinds of absurd sci-fi scenarios? What kind of crazy fucking disease could only be cured with six-month-old fetus organs anyway? (Does it involve Cthulhu, maybe??) Don't you think we would've figured it out by now if the only effective way "to cure some menacing ailment" or "get paraplegics to walk again" involved mutilating fully-developed humans? Haven't we had access to fully-developed humans for, oh I dunno, the entire history of medicine? Is there a drastic fully-developed-human shortage that I just didn't hear about, or what? If, in other words, you think you're qualified to judge Obama but you don't know any of this stuff about how embryonic stem cells are the "gold standard" candidates for "the generation of cells and tissues that could be used for cell-based therapies" and many other valuable pursuits, what in God's name are you doing claiming not to be anti-science? Doesn't it qualify you as being "against 'sound science,'" Charen, or "an anti-science troglodyte," Harsanyi, to go around asking leading hypothetical questions that pointedly ignore everything actual scientists actually say about the actual science they'll actually be doing? Don't you think, to sum this all up, that the people who listen to scientists are in the best position to make a realistic ethical judgment and the people who ignore scientists can only offer fantastical dystopian scenarios that by their very definition miss the point of the debate entirely?

In many ways, this is the mirror image of the problem that fueled Jon Stewart's ruthlessness last night. On Stewart's view - which I am sorely tempted to agree with - financial reporters know too much and care too little, which leads them to talk with an air of authority behind which lies only a child-like credulousness. The stem cell hand-wringers represented by Charen and Harsanyi have this problem in reverse: they care too much and know too little. Critical journalism is a good thing - a great thing, even - but it only works if the journalists in question aren't too lazy or stupid to look for the facts that will either assuage or reinforce that criticism. Since the facts in this case have been out in the public for a good long while now, Charen and Harsanyi have no excuse for basing their arguments on nothing more than feverish speculation.

As much credit as people have rightly given Obama for his recent decision to support embryonic stem cell research, there has been a resounding silence over his slightly crazy claim that "cloning for human reproduction...is dangerous, profoundly wrong and has no place in our society, or any society." Silence, that is, except for the brave and stupid objections of one Terence Jeffrey, who calls Obama's stance "self-evidently absurd." See, Jeffrey knows that "Merriam-Webster defines 'clone' as 'to make a copy of,'" so he thinks "cloning" must mean "making a genetically exact 'reproduction' of the person cloned." It'd sure be nice if actual issues were simple enough to solve just by looking up words in a dictionary, but the depressing reality is that they also require things like thought and research and proper context.

Leaving Jeffrey and his inexplicable devotion to reference books behind, we come to an even less scientifically sound argument. The argument, one of Alex Pruss's, deals with mind/body dualism, but I'm going to skip all the boring introductory parts for a reason that will soon become clear. His conclusion hinges on what he calls a "clever construction. Imagine a world w₁ which contains a planet much like earth, where history looks pretty much like it looks on earth, and which also contains a Great Grazing Ground (GGG), which is an infinite (we only need: potentially infinite) impotent region. Moreover, by a strange law of nature, or maybe the activity of some swampaliens, whenever an organism on earth is about to die, it gets hyperspatially and instantaneously transported to the GGG, and a fake corpse, which is an exact duplicate of what its real corpse would have been, gets instantaneously put in its place on earth." But wait, it gets better: "inside the GGG, immortal and ever-reproducing aliens rescue each organism on arrival, fixing it so it doesn't die, and even make the organism capable of reproduction again. Furthermore, they do the same for the organism's descendants in the GGG. The GGG is a place of infinite (at least potentially) resources, with everybody having immortality and reproduction, with the aliens shifting organisms further and further out to ensure their survival." I have questions about how this is supposed to matter at all - you can read all about these in the comments on Pruss's post - but ultimately it just doesn't matter. This scenario is so patently goofy as to be a parody of itself.

Forget the fact that Pruss also proposes something called an "impotent" region (denoted R), the defining characteristic of which is that "no event or substance in R can affect anything outside R." Forget too that his GGG is supposed to be one of these, which would violate more physical laws than I have time to list here. Forget also the faster-than-light travel, the immortality, and the part where large, very organized chunks of matter spontaneously pop into existence ex nihilo on a regular basis (so much for the cosmological argument, I guess!) - let's just talk about the magical alien medicine. It's just clownish to say that every organism on the brink of death could be brought back to life and full reproductive health, and it's even crazier to say that this would somehow ensure that "there is no selection." We've seen this kind of thing from Pruss before and it wasn't any more convincing then: the formulation "If x, then a view I don't like is false" only matters at all if the x in question is possible. Wildly imaginative stories like this one, on the other hand, are just massive distractions.

Thankfully, today's last argument has no pretensions to that particular brand of grandiose reasoning. A little over a week ago, the Orlando Magic played the Phoenix Suns in what was billed as a matchup between two "Superman" players. One of them, Shaquille O'Neal, has a long history of complaining bitterly about the practice of flopping, loosely defined as exaggerating one's reactions so as to create the impression that an opposing player initiated excessive contact. If that definition isn't doing it for you, try this. That's a video of flopping in action - notice that Shaq fell back in the manner that he would have if the other guy (Dwight Howard, Superman #2) had plowed right through his chest even though no such chest-plowing-through actually happened. After the game, Howard's coach made several disparaging remarks regarding that flop, perhaps with the intent of baiting Shaq into defending himself. Either way, Shaq did respond, with a fantastic combination of insolent personal attacks and clumsy dodges. He called the opposing coach "a front-runner," "a master of panic," and "a nobody" for starters and then explained that he (Shaq) was innocent because "flopping is falling and crying and complaining to the ref" and "doing it more than one time." Or, translated into a vocabulary that matches the maturity level of Shaq's argument, "NUH UH I DIDN'T FLOP, I DIDN'T EVEN MEAN TO! AND ANYWAY YOU'RE FAT AND STUPID AND I HATE YOU!" Not that I'd say this to his face (or, I guess, his mid-chest), but that's probably the most fun I've had watching someone squirm in a long, long time. The only bad thing about this whole thing is that I won't get to watch him try again in the playoffs.

Which really is simply to say, "Bible interpretation." As much material as I could find for this blog just looking up exegetical arguments, I find Bible interpretation to be a rabbit hole down which people fall without a bottom or even a surrealist world metaphorically based on British politics to stop their descent. Today's argument thankfully doesn't focus very much on the actual interpretation itself, so I'm making an exception. It comes from the Prosblogion, which has done very well recently in posting about things not directly related to the problem of evil. In the post, AP* Taylor writes in response to Richard Dawkins that one of Dawkins's criticisms of Christianity falls victim to the "tendency, when interpreting scripture, to make hasty generalizations."

For once, I actually agree here. I unfortunately cannot find the entirety of what Dawkins said (as it's in a book I don't have easy access to), but here's the part that Taylor quotes:

"Science is based upon verifiable evidence. Religious faith not only lacks evidence, its independence from evidence is its pride and joy, shouted from the rooftops. Why else would Christians wax critical of doubting Thomas? The other apostles are held up to us as exemplars of virtue because faith was enough for them. Doubting Thomas, on the other hand, required evidence. Perhaps he should be the patron saint of scientists."

Pushing past the trademark Dawkins snark, I do think that this lone example is insufficient to prove his point. Taylor tries to prove this by looking more closely at the text itself, and he may or may not have a point in doing so. Again, though, I'd rather not quibble over matters of textual interpretation - going from the actual John 20:29 to either his (1') or (1'')** is not as intuitively implausible as some leaps I've seen people make, but then again, that's what makes it a rabbit hole. As I say, though, Dawkins does go too quickly if this one story is his lone (or even just his main) example: the test of faith that faced Thomas and the other Apostles is nowhere near as demanding as the one that modern Christians must deal with. Moreover, Dawkins talks of religion in general, which he cannot rightly address just by examining one religion. Insofar as the small piece of text Taylor provides accurately represents Dawkins's real argument, then, Dawkins says too much. That, however, does not stop Taylor from piling on and, in doing so, saying too much himself.

Playing the role of grammarian, Taylor emphasizes that Jesus spoke "in the past tense": "blessed are they who have not seen and yet have believed." This leads Taylor to believe that Jesus's statement "is meant just for Thomas and the Apostles." Moreover, Thomas did have evidence, Taylor says. "Thomas's sin is not that he demands evidence, but that he will not accept the evidence he is given, namely the evidence of the eyewitness testimony of his brothers and sisters" who "believed not on blind faith, but rather on the basis of having seen for themselves, or on the basis of knowing others who had seen for themselves." In other words, Taylor thinks Dawkins is not just overhasty but also factually mistaken about the events of John 20.

There are only two problems with this, but they're big problems. Go back and read the way that Dawkins introduced his argument: "Science," he says, "is based upon verifiable evidence." While his terminology needs some tweaking, the gist of that statement should come through loud and clear: science operates only on evidence type x. Religion, he continues on to say, does not operate on evidence type x. While Dawkins could perhaps have chosen a more robust and descriptive vocabulary than "verifiable evidence" and "independence from evidence," we should all know more or less what he means - that is, even without him laying it out, we should have a pretty good idea about what falls under evidence type x. If we have such an understanding, we'll know immediately that the evidence that Taylor cites, testimony, ain't it - in fact, Taylor himself seems to understand this when he says "that those who believed on the basis of the Apostles [sic] testimony [did so] because they loved and trusted in the other Apostles" [emphasis mine]. As warm and fuzzy as that may make Taylor feel, scientific evidence is precisely the sort that you don't have to love or intentionally trust in. As far as disputing Dawkins on his own terms goes, then, Taylor's argument fails.

Things go from bad to worse when Taylor tries again to identify the target of Jesus's words. "Dawkins," he reiterates, "is clearly wrong to assert: 'The other apostles are held up to us as exemplars of virtue because faith was enough for them'. As far as I can tell they believed not on blind faith, but rather on the basis of having seen for themselves, or on the basis of knowing others who had seen for themselves." Here again Taylor pushes for the idea that the blessed believers did indeed have evidence of the sort that Dawkins wants. Since we've already looked at the reasons why "the basis of knowing others who had seen for themselves" doesn't count, I'll skip that part and focus instead on "the basis of having seen for themselves." Though that most certainly would qualify as scientific and very convincing evidence - indeed, scientific observation implies little more than seeing for oneself - it also just so happens to contradict the very premise of the discussion. In his rush to shore up the faith that the Apostles displayed, Taylor apparently forgets that Jesus blessed those who have not seen and excluded from that blessing those who had. For the simple reason that these two things directly oppose each other, Taylor cannot claim both that Jesus blessed only people who believed on evidence strictly less strong than seeing for oneself and that Jesus also blessed people who believed on the basis of seeing for oneself.

It's relatively common to look for an extra rhetorical edge at the cost of weakening or distorting the logical structure of one's argument, but both Dawkins and Taylor take that phenomenon to new heights here. I can't say for sure whether this is a direct result of bickering over a line from a holy text, but I have my suspicions. Dawkins wants to talk about the brute fact of religious observance, but he does so by invoking (perhaps wrongly) one story from one part of one book of one religion's texts. To rebut him, Taylor misrepresents Dawkins and then trips over his own feet trying to interpret that same lone story, all the while referring not to religious practice but religious theory. For something that's ostensibly made up of words that, when assembled, form a coherent and relatively obvious meaning, it sure is funny how much trouble people have when it comes to working with the Bible.

*Not as in Associated Press or Advanced Placement, presumably, although you never know.
**John 20:29 "Then Jesus told him [Thomas], 'Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.'"
(1') "Blessed are those who have no evidence whatsoever and yet have believed."
(1'') "Blessed are those who will not have evidence in the future and who yet will believe."