Defending Science Against Religionist Calumnies

or, Science and Religion: How not to Understand Their Relation.

Saturday’s Globe and Mail (May 22) includes an interview with novelist Marilyn Robinson and a review of her recent book, Absence of Mind, by John Gray, emeritus professor of European Thought at L.S.E. As is typical in the press’s treatment of attacks on atheism and science, there is a striking confluence of attitudes between Ms. Robinson and Dr. Gray: both are desperately eager to criticize science in general, and especially anyone bold enough to suggest that our understanding of the world and ourselves should be grounded in a scientific approach. Both of them might have done better at this if they had a good understanding of science in the first place. Then at least they might have been able to say clearly what they believe religion has to offer us, and how it complements the scientific world view. Instead, their remarks merely reiterate familiar distortions and gross misunderstandings of what science is and what it has taught us about both the world and ourselves.

Science aims to describe and explain the world and its workings. Unlike religion, it does not promise a path to goodness. Yet in her interview Robinson complains that ‘(a)ll the world’s most appalling weapons are the creation of scientists’, as though this were a failure of science. Both weapons systems and the improvements in health, nutrition and comfort that developed countries have achieved show that science works as claimed: it provides descriptions of the world that we can exploit for our own purposes, whether good or evil. Science doesn’t aim at perfecting humans, or even try to tell us what human perfection would be—those aims belong to religion, though it’s worth noting in passing that religion has not been generally successful at achieving them.

In a remarkable display of what must be either ignorance or interpretive legerdemain, Robinson asserts that the creation story of Genesis I is “surprisingly consistent with the Big Bang, with the emergence of life in progressive stages, and with the remarkable phenomenon of speciation.” This is a disgraceful bit of pandering. The Big Bang has nothing to do with waters, separating the heavens from earth, or ‘letting there be light’; if Robinson can connect the language of Genesis I to a high-energy quantum soup in which all the forces were indistinguishable and space-time itself part of the soup, her hermeneutical skills are also, no doubt, more than good enough to transmute lead into gold. Genesis’ ‘progressive’ stages of creation are utterly incorrect about the order of appearance of different forms of life in the fossil record. And what evolutionary accounts of speciation are anticipated in Genesis? Allopatry? Vicariance? Pre-evolutionary scientists like Linnaeus held, in good biblical form, that each sexually-reproducing species began with an initially created pair. Did they miss something in their reading of the Bible? Could a better Biblical exegesis have pointed us towards the truth before Darwin? Or is Robinson just reading evolution into her bible now that science has discovered and documented the evolutionary story of life?

Robinson complains, of the so-called ‘new’ atheists, that ‘(n)ew thinking is precisely what is never found among them’. This is a pretty cheap shot for such a distinguished author, since the label “new atheists” was not adopted by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett or Christopher Hitchens: it was placed on them by others , to mark them as a new generation of forthright atheists who were prepared, as atheists have been (with some caution, given the penchant of religious authorities for torture and execution of heretics) for millennia, to criticize religion’s claims to authority and to defend a humanistic world view that accepts the primacy of science as a source of knowledge about the world (not as a source of values). Robinson is right on the main point, as most contemporary atheists would agree: there is nothing particularly new in the new atheism. But this only makes her distorted account of it the more shameful.

Openness to new evidence is indeed the heart of science—and scientific views of the world have changed and continue to change rapidly, from the introduction of quantum theory and general relativity in the early part of the twentieth century to the emergence of the Big Bang model of cosmology and the modern synthesis in evolutionary biology to plate tectonics and the biochemical revolution that just last week gave rise to the first organism with a wholly synthetic genome. All these developments have been driven by detailed engagement with empirical evidence and the tight constraints that scientific theories impose on evidence by the inferences they license. If we are ever to develop an understanding of the human mind, it will be through the sciences, and real progress on neurological function, psychological development and the evolutionary roots of the complex, layered human central nervous system continues to be made. If science cannot answer every “essential question” (and remember, science does not purport to tell us what is or is not valuable, good and worthy), a harder question for Robinson remains: why should anyone turn to religion, with its chequered and often brutal history, for those answers?

Robinson claims that the new atheists’ argument (whatever she thinks that is) would “fall to the ground if they were to own up to merely proceeding from a clutch of favoured assumptions”. This is an odd criticism coming from someone who describes herself as a Christian: does she really want to go toe-to-toe over claims of the virgin birth or the resurrection? But what are the ‘favoured assumptions’ she thinks these atheists are making? The success of science in illuminating our world is beyond question; grounded in persistent, common-sense observation and the development of theories that allow us to predict and explain so much of what we observe, science has produced agreement on a wide range of questions that were once undecided, from the workings of the solar system to our own evolutionary origins. And it has put that agreement to effective use, from space probes navigating the solar system to the detection of Neanderthal genes amongst some modern human groups. Surely an approach to knowledge that has such a record deserves quite a lot of credit.

Compare this to the record of religion as a source of knowledge, wisdom and moral principles: Genesis includes two obviously conflicting creation stories, neither of which fits the detailed scientific accounts that we now accept; it also includes an impossible flood-legend, and (to quote Mark Twain) upwards of a thousand lies. Far more grievously, the history of religions’ claims to offer moral insight and direction for personal improvement is not impressive. Tradition-bound institutions guard their power and conceal great sins while continuing to claim absolute moral authority. Of course different religions offer differing stories and positions on all these questions—and they demand their followers accept their stories and positions without question, comparison, or efforts to reason out why one, rather than another, is right about the place of women, the morality of homosexuality, the use of birth control, or the proper treatment of apostates.

The scientific model of reasoned persuasion, grounded in evidence and discussion, would be a better starting point for moral inquiry: as David Hume noted long ago, we share many basic moral tendencies, including altruistic concern for others (demonstrated amongst monkeys and even mice in the form of reluctance to press a food-reward lever that administers a shock to a neighbouring animal). Evolution even provides good explanations for how such tendencies could have arisen: kin-selection and reciprocal altruism allow self-sacrificing behaviour that benefits kin or that is responded to in kind by others to be selected for. A discussion of ethics in which human well being and real evidence of what contributes to human well being come first sounds to me like something worth having—and something more likely to lead to agreements and compromises than iron-age doctrines grounded in regrettably authoritarian and misogynistic cultures. Of course it wouldn’t be easy—but it’s something philosophers have been pursuing for a long while, it underlies the enlightenment political institutions that have spread democracy, imperfectly, around much of the world, and it has even made some concern for public welfare and the common good an intermittently effective force in politics. I’ll put that up against the pie-in-the-sky promise of being born again and raised to the kingdom of heaven any day.

As for the review, well, it’s no better. Larding her work with overblown praise—“Absence of Mind is one of the most thought-stirring inquiries into fundamental questions that has appeared in many years” (I can only suppose Gray simply hasn’t read very much)—Gray’s only quibble is that Robinson thinks humans are very special, a thesis he claims is shared by the new atheists: “Dawkins and his followers believe that consciousness makes humans categorically different from their animal kin” He doesn’t document this claim, which is unsurprising since it’s false. And he’s apparently upset that (as he puts it) “these idealogues insist (they always insist) that consciousness emerged without any kind of supernatural intervention.” How else does Gray propose to explain the emergence of consciousness? Does waving the phrase ‘supernatural intervention’ over the process add anything to our understanding of consciousness? Surely studies of phenomena like blindsight, the timing of neurological events in the course of decision making and the cognitive capacities of fish, chimpanzees and other animals offer far more interesting and helpful hints! Or would Gray prefer the Noachian story of the rainbow to the physical facts of raindrops and refraction?

But the weakness of Gray’s own views emerges full-blown in his conclusion: “Before the emergence of complex forms of life, the environments that humans and other animals experience weren’t simply unperceived. They didn’t exist. Will we ever fully grasp the unimaginably strange process whereby the physical universe has spawned these virtual worlds?” It’s hard at first to make sense out of this. Gray’s reference to virtual worlds suggests it is the ‘inner’ worlds of experience that didn’t exist until complex life arose—and that, of course, seems perfectly sensible. But Gray regards the inner worlds of experience as really outer worlds, constitutive of our environments, not merely how we experience them. Hence the superficially outrageous claim that our ‘environment’ didn’t exist until we and other living things came around to experience it. But in the end this is a simple, and simply feeble, appeal to ignorance. Science can’t tell us in advance what we will or won’t understand fully in time. We now understand why the flux of solar neutrinos at first seemed much less than it ought to be. But to know in advance that we’d figure this out, we’d pretty much have to have had the solution in hand in the first place. The status of consciousness and its relation to physical goings-on in the brain is a philosophical perennial—but that doesn’t mean there won’t be a scientific resolution of the problem. After all, philosophers struggled for centuries to give accounts of physical events like the fall of bodies and the motions of the heavens—and now we actually understand them pretty well. Brains are very complicated things, transforming the storm of photons entering our eyes into sight (both conscious and unconscious) and molecules in food and air into tastes and smells. But there is nothing to be achieved by sitting back, marveling at it all, and exclaiming that science can’t ever unravel these processes—and wisely, Gray doesn’t even claim that it can’t. How that sustains his endorsement of Robinson's empty-headed critique of science is the real mystery here.

Two-Tier University System

Like most of her columns, Margaret's latest attack on the Canadian university system is a mishmash of prediction, prescription, and wishful thinking. Her prescription is that Canada move to a two-tier university system consisting of a few elite research-centred institutions and a majority of teaching centred institutions. Her prediction is that Canada will continue to have a one-tier system but with fewer tenured research faculty and more of the teaching load covered by untenured sessional instructors without PhD’s. And her wish is that, in any event, university faculty will get their comeuppance.

Her prediction is based both on (1) the pressure provincial governments are placing on universities to increase enrollments while reducing costs and (2) the public perception -- which Margaret is helping to engender -- that university faculty are overpaid and under-worked and that much of their research (especially in the humanities and social sciences) is of little or no value. Since Canadian universities have already been evolving in this way for a number of years, Margaret's prediction that they will continue to do so is neither particularly controversial nor interesting.

Her prescription that Canada move to a two-tier system does require some comment, however. She presents two separate arguments for this conclusion, neither of which are compelling. First, she claims that the principle job of the university and college system is to efficiently deliver mass undergraduate education to 30 or 40 per cent of the population,” and that the current research model that most universities adhere does this very inefficiently. And second, she argues that the benefits of much of the “marginal” research done on the current system are “remarkably obscure.” These arguments reflect a remarkable ignorance of both the nature and value of universities.

Contra Margaret, universities are not primarily teaching institutions, but rather are centres for the development and interchange of ideas. This, of course, includes undergraduate teaching, but it also involves a whole lot more. The teaching-centred institutions in Margaret's proposed two-tiered system would be universities in name only. What she is really proposing is a vastly reduced university system and a vastly increased college system in which most post-secondary education would occur. Moreover, the value of a university is not ultimately measured by the impact of the research (or teaching) carried on their upon the broader society in which it is located. Centres of the free and unfettered development and exchange of ideas are valuable in their own right. Some of the ideas developed in such an institutions do, of course, have a positive societal impact; others range from downright stupid to even dangerous. But the mere fact of their being places in which such ideas can be freely developed, explored, and exchanged is what gives universities their value.

Canadians may ultimately decide upon a reduced university system. Or they may decide to allow the trend of offloading undergraduate teaching onto sessional instructors to continue. Hell, we even decide might to fund our universities to the extent that all undergraduate teaching is performed by tenured or tenure-stream faculty (with small class sizes and in properly equipped classrooms -- a guy can dream, can't he?) But however we decide, our decision ought to be an informed one. Margaret's not helping

Margaret and Diversty Redux

There are two separate questions:

1. Is diversity in the workplace an end in itself or simply a means of combatting unjust discrimination in hiring and promotion?

2. Are hiring and promotion quotas and/or diversity training effective means of achieving these goals?

Re. 1, my own view is that workplace diversity policies should be viewed as a means of combatting discrimination rather than an end in themselves.

Re.2, since hiring and promotion quotas are prima facie unjust, they should be utilized only for groups who continue to be subjected to serious discrimination. Although mildly irritating, there is nothing particularly unjust about being subjectived to diversity training as a condition of employment. But such techniques are, in general, not likely to be particularly effective in instilling non-discriminatory attitudes in the workforce.

Upshot: although the tone of Margaret's column may warm the cockles of the Neanderthal heart, she's not entirely out to lunch on this one.

One paragraph -- three fallacies

One paragraph, three fallacies -- you go girl:

"[1]In this case, [students are] only repeating what they've been taught. [2] For years, they have been told that discrimination is the highest crime of all. [3] Today, this is commonly interpreted to mean that everybody has the right to be free from any kind of insult, upset, or perturbation that might pose a challenge to their peace of mind ..."

1. On the basis of nearly 20 years of teaching at 3 different universities, I can assure you that that very few students are inclined to simply accept as gospel truth whatever their professors tell them. And most of them would be insulted by the suggestion.

2. I am sure that many professors have told their students that unwarranted discrimination -- i.e., that not based on relevant differences -- is a bad thing. It is, after all, a bad thing. But the "highest crime of all" -- worse than rape, murder, genocide? That's just crazy talk. Even if the odd professor has made a claim along these lines, it would almost certainly be hyperbole.

3. Even if discrimination were the highest crime -- which it isn't -- that wouldn't entail that any insult, etc. counts as discrimination. Issues having to do with the nature of discrimination are simply orthogonal to issues having to do with the seriousness of discrimination. Even if the "common" interpretation is common, it's certainly not well motivated. And, well, probably not very common either.

Museum pieces

Margaret Somerville says, "Legalizing euthanasia causes death and dying to lose the moral context within which they must be viewed." The moral context to which she refers is the presumption of an inviolable sanctity of life; and the slippery slope of legalization she invokes is one wherein this putative sanctity loses its trumping force in moral decision-making. This is, of course, all old hat -- her argument might even be described as quaint but for its often deleterious impact on people's lives and deaths.

Even if life had some such sanctity, contra Somerville, considerations of pain and suffering, social isolation, autonomy, and, yes, even health care costs could provide relevant grounds for overriding it. But the putative sanctity of life is merely a religious relic: a museum piece rather than the centerpiece of serious public -- or even academic -- debate.

Yes, euthanasia legislation is a thorny business. A delicate balance needs to be found between respecting autonomy in life and death decisions, preventing abuse, and protecting lives that remain valuable to those leading them. And uncomfortable as it may be, the costs of sustaining unsalvageable lives may relevant as well. Reverting to a medieval morality, as Somerville would have us do, is unlikely to be of much help here.

Note: now that Rex has gone (at least from the pages of the G&M), I seem to be reduced to criticizing various Margarets. To any charge of sexism that might ensue, I simply appeal to the authority of Margaret Wente when she "argues" that "silent sexism" is a mere chimera created for self-interested reasons by the victimization industry.

Reproductive rights and Publicly Funded Fertility Treatment

Margaret's target this time is public funding of fertility treatments. In particular her concern is with women who hold off on having children until they have established careers only to run into difficulties getting pregnant at their relatively advanced ages. What she objects to is the argument that the government ought to pay for in-vitro fertilization treatments for such women on the grounds that women have a right to get pregnant. While acknowledging that women have such a right -- "Well, sure, of course" -- she denies that this entitles them to public funding for their fertility treatments.

For a change, Margaret is at least onto something -- the distinction between positive and negative rights: the fact that women have negative reproductive rights -- rights to government non-interference in their reproductive decisions -- does not entail that they have positive reproductive rights -- rights to government assistance in achieving their reproductive goals. But the logical point does not establish that women are not entitled to government aid, only that any such entitlement does not simply follow from the right to non-interference.

Now, of course, government resources -- that is, tax dollars -- are limited and have to be divided among competing interests. But insofar as we are genuinely committed to gender equality -- and, hence, don't think women should be forced to choose between career and family -- we are obliged dedicate a portion of these resources to aid women in achieving their reproductive goals. This does not entail that fertility treatments for women who have put off having children need to be publicly funded -- the money might be more effectively spent on programs, such as subsidized daycare, which enable younger mothers to pursue their career goals. But it does entail that women who desire to pursue both career and family are entitled to a share of government resources to help them do so.

Settling some Science

Once again Margaret Wente is hyperventilating over hot new talking points in climate-change denial circles. During an interview, climatologist Dr. Phil Jones said that CRU temperature data shows the increase in global temperature over the last fifteen years is ‘less than statistically significant’.

To quote Homer Simpson in a similar state of mind, whoo hoo! A real climate scientist is saying that global warming might not even be happening! It’s all over, this is denialism’s wet dream on a plate (ugh)! Right? Well, no. Dr. Jones said, truthfully, that warming over the last fifteen years falls just short of being statistically significant. Ms. Wente is over the moon about this: “Hello? When other people say that, they’re called deniers”, she proclaims. Not so. This is a trivial result, a product of the short period and the wide year-to-year variation in global temperatures. The warming over this period, as measured by CRU, falls short of being statistically significant.

This means that the possibility of the observed warming being due to chance variation in year to year temperatures is not ruled out with 95% confidence. The rate of warming, at about .12 ^oC per decade, is slow enough that a chance pattern of year-to-year variation over the last fifteen years that just happened to finish as much warmer as that period did has a probability higher than 5% (in fact, as Dr. Jones pointed out in his interview, this probability is just barely over 5%).

This 5% probability is the standard threshold for ‘statistical significance’—but it’s not a magical line handed down from on high; it’s just a choice about how much evidence we standardly require before rejecting the hypothesis that an observed correlation is due to mere chance. If we suspect there’s a real effect (and we certainly do in this case) then we go looking for more data to check. The larger the sample size, the better your chance of significant results. And, lo and behold, over the last twenty years observed warming in the CRU data is statistically significant! (It’s also worth noting that we are now in a deep solar minimum, but 2009 was still the second warmest year on record—it’s funny how facts about solar output are important to deniers when they might help to explain observed warming, and completely neglected when they don’t.)

Also, if we use the GISS temperature measurements instead (which include wider coverage of the arctic based on correlations between measured temperatures over fairly large regions), the increase over the last fifteen years is statistically significant—that is, the probability of the observed increase being due to chance turns out to be a bit less than 5%. No doubt, this difference between the two main measures of global temperature will soon be a new topic of intense discussion in the denialsphere: how could our two best measures of earth’s temperature disagree on this basic question?

So if all the evidence we had for global warming was the warming over the last fifteen years in CRU data, we would be uncertain (by the arbitrary standard that rules out chance only when the probability of an observation being due to chance is less than 1 in 20). But the balance of probability would strongly favour warming. The odds of the observed increase being due to chance variation are less than 1 in 10, but not less than 1 in 20. Of course we have much more evidence than that, and the odds that the observed warming is due to chance when we look at more data and longer periods are far less than 1 in 20. Finally, on longer scales the warming grows more and more significant, that is, our confidence that it is not a matter of chance becomes higher and higher.

Ms. Wente’s excitement about Dr. Jones’s statement reveals nothing about climate science, but a lot about her ignorance of statistics and probability. Would she also be excited to know that if we consider only a few days in February and a few days in May, the temperature difference between the two months can easily fail to be statistically significant?

Along the way Ms. Wente once more tosses out a brief concession, admitting that anthropogenic global warming is settled. The ‘third position’ she now identifies herself with accepts “the underlying science, which says that climate change is happening and human activity is a factor”. Surely this implies that she does admit the science is settled? Of course not! Having conceded the conclusion she has resisted for so long, she continues to dismiss and belittle the problem we face. The science is still not settled for her, because her ‘third position” (endorsed, she claims, by unnamed experts) says that “threats of imminent catastrophe have been wildly exaggerated,” and “(w)e don’t know much about what might happen in the future, especially when it comes to specifics such as rising sea levels or regional droughts.”

There are indeed still questions about the details of just how much warming will result, and just how bad the consequences will be—and no serious defender of the science of global warming, from Al Gore to David Suzuki to James Hansen, Michael Mann and Phil Jones himself has denied this. But, pace Ms. Wente, this doesn’t mean we don’t know a lot about what might happen: the paleoclimatological record shows that the last time temperatures were just a few degrees warmer than they now are, sea level was meters higher. How quickly that rise in sea level occurred is not known, but nothing we know rules out a rapid rise in the near future: sea levels fall slowly as the earth cools, but they rise much faster during warming, and the resolution of our data doesn’t show a delay. Climate shifts can be dramatic in other ways too, altering rainfall patterns, disrupting life cycles for plants and animals and increasing destructive large-scale weather events. Both models and the past climatological record show that the climate can be very sensitive, and any major changes will be difficult if not impossible for many people and countries to cope with. Further, though the worst consequences may be delayed, our failure to act now can lock in drastic changes later: our descendants will suffer from our reluctance to make changes in our energy systems.

So Ms. Wente is pulling another fast one here—she is moving the goalposts. It wasn’t long ago that she disputed that anthropogenic global warming was happening, eagerly joining in the attack on Michael Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ reconstruction of past temperatures and questioning whether present warming is in any way exceptional. Now she accepts that it’s happening, and that it’s at least partly due to our greenhouse gas emissions. But she demands (before she’ll admit the science is ‘settled’) that we know just how much warming will happen, how soon, and what the consequences will be. But this is ridiculous: there will always be some level of uncertainty about these things: Ms. Wente has picked a reading of what it takes to ‘settle the science’ that implies the science can never be settled. This is a nice rhetorical trick, but pretty silly when you think about it.

Part of moving the goalposts is forgetting the past. Several years ago, Ms. Wente was similarly excited over the ‘Hockey stick’ debate, a short-term obsession of the denialsphere triggered by the prominence of Michael Mann’s reconstruction of past temperatures over the last 1,000 years. Ms. Wente gleefully announced that MacIntyre and McKitrick had shown Mann’s work was wrong and that current warming is not exceptional. But subsequent work by multiple climate scientists and a detailed review by the American Academy of Science have confirmed Mann’s pioneering work and extended it using different proxies and more refined statistical methods. (Worse for Ms. Wente, the Republican-led House ‘investigation’ of Mann’s work that led to the Wegman report attacking Mann’s work has been exposed as a set-up job, manipulated by Representative Joe Barton and others: see DeSmog and Deepclimate.) But it seems Ms. Wente has forgotten all about this episode. Past manipulations and the failures of denialist arguments simply disappear from her story, as she spins the latest ‘defeat’ for global warming science while pronouncing her own views to be moderate, sensible, balanced and wise. Isn’t it funny that her views also keep turning out to be wrong?