Why Do They Always Lie?

Take a committed theist, ask him or her to say something about atheism, and just wait. The lies will come pouring out of their mouth like water from a fountain.

This article by Peter Berkowitz, who teaches law at George Mason, and is a "senior fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution", is no exception. How many lies can you find?

It starts in the smarmiest possible way, taking a cliché from Ecclesiastes to argue that the new wave of atheism books (which Berkowitz calls, unimaginatively, the "new new atheism") is confirmed by "biblical wisdom". This is the equivalent of the traditional response of the theist when an atheist makes a good point: ignore it, and say "God loves you anyway".

Next, Berkowitz sneers at Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and other atheist writers by describing atheism as a "profitable business" --- as if writing books that people want to read is somehow morally objectionable, and as if religious organizations haven't been raking in the tax-exempt cash for years.

We have to wait until the fourth paragraph before we get the first outright lie. Berkowitz claims "... the new new atheism proclaims its hatred of God and organized religion loudly and proudly from the rooftops". The only problem is, atheists don't hate the Christian God or any other god, any more than we hate the tooth fairy or the Easter bunny or Emma Bovary. You can't hate something that doesn't exist, and fictional characters don't inspire hatred the way real dictators do. Atheists might hate how a misguided belief in a deity or deities causes people to misbehave, and we might hate the division that religion causes, and we might hate some institutions of organized religion (and have a good reason to do so), but we don't hate Berkowitz's god.

The fifth paragraph has another lie. Berkowitz claims "[The new new atheists] contend ... we can now know, with finality and certainty, that God does not exist..." Really? Is that really what they say?

Nope. Take Richard Dawkins, for example. In The God Delusion, he makes the point that you can't know with certainty that there is no god. On page 51, for example, Dawkins defines a strong, or category 7, atheist as someone who says "I know there is no God, with the same conviction as Jung `knows' there is one." He then says "I'd be surprised to meet many people in category 7" and that he does not count himself in this category. He says he is "in category 6, but leaning towards 7 - I am agnostic only to the extent that I am agnostic about fairies at the bottom of the garden." A category 6 atheist says, according to Dawkins, "I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there."

There is much more to dispute in Berkowitz's piece, but I confess I grow weary at the weak excuses he uses to prop up religion, the straw men he erects to attack Hitchens, and the transparently sneering rhetoric. Hitchens, Berkowitz says, "shows no awareness that his atheism, far from resulting from skeptical inquiry, is the rigidly dogmatic premise from which his inquiries proceed, and that it colors all his observations and determines his conclusions." But modern atheism isn't a dogmatism, since it offers no creed to rigidly adhere to, only a disbelief in the creeds of others. To call this dogmatism is to insist that the barefoot man really does have a secret cobbler he visits on the side.

Berkowitz can't resist implying that his religion would never, ever result in the nasty kind of violence we see emanating from Islam: "today's bestselling atheists suppress crucial distinctions between the forms of faith embraced by the vast majority of American citizens and the militant Islam that at this very moment is pledged to America's destruction." What he fails to see is that that American majoritarian faith also results in reprehensible violence. To name just three examples from the last year:

• Charles Carl Roberts, home-schooled by religious parents, killed 5 and wounded 5 more Amish schoolgirls in October 2006 because he was angry at God.
  
  
• Brian K. White, a religious musician, beat to death a 75-year-old former Soviet political prisoner in New Jersey because the man refused to buy his religious CD's.
  
  
• Joshua Royce Mauldin, who claimed he was called by God to be a minister, seriously burned his 2-month-old daughter's face by jamming her in a microwave.
  

Berkowitz concludes by claiming, "Of all the Bible's sublime and sustaining teachings, none is more so than the teaching that explains that humanity is set apart because all human beings--woman as well as man the Bible emphasizes--are created in the image of God". Berkowitz may feel this is "sublime" and "sustaining", but I just regard it with sorrow. What could be more responsible for our ecological crisis than this silly, deluded view that man is somehow elevated above everything else in nature?

If this mess of lies and foolishness is the best the theists can offer, then the atheists have already won.

Innumeracy In "Zits"

The July 12 2007 panel for the "Zits" comic strip has the main character, Jeremy, computing how much he's getting paid.


Panel 1: "I can't believe I'm getting paid ten bucks an hour for this!"

Panel 2: "That's like, five bucks every half hour!"

Panel 3: "Or 16.6¢ per minute ... or, uh... only .0027¢ per second."

Panel 4: "Time flies when you're having fun, but it totally drags when you're getting paid by the hour."


Which one of the authors of this strip, Jerry Scott or Jim Borgman, can't divide?

Added July 23 2007: I received the following reply from Jim Borgman:
"You're right. Jeffrey. Sorry for the error. Maybe we should have you
look over our syndication contract?"

Literal Answers to Rhetorical Questions

As mentioned on Weekend Edition, here is a funny page giving literal answers to rhetorical questions, many inspired by popular songs.

But the number of examples is not very large. We need some other examples. Here are a few:

---

Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?

Joltin' Joe is buried in Holy Cross Cemetery in Colma, California.

What's new, pussycat?

Nu is the frequency of a wave in physics, an Egyptian god, a Chinese ethnic group, and a former Burmese prime minister.

---

Can you come up with some more questions and answers that deserve to be on that page?

Intelligent Design: The Scientific Theory That Improves Your Bottom Line

I see that William Dembski, fresh from raking in thousands of dollars for not testifying in the Dover trial, has now branched out into explaining his business savvy to the masses. Look at this announcement for a conference at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary for a conference entitled "Intelligent Design in Business Practice: How design assumptions impact management, leadership & organization".

This page has more details. Since ill-conceived ideas like this have a history of vanishing without a trace, I'll repeat the description below:

Successful business leaders are intelligent designers, guiding organizations along innovative paths to achieve ends otherwise unattainable. Intelligent designers are not micromanagers, who short-circuit the freedom and creativity that organizations need to thrive. At the same time, intelligent designers do not encourage unbridled autonomy, which sets organizations adrift, causing them to lose focus and discipline. By striking a proper balance between guidance and autonomy, intelligent designers promote a synergy between organization and leadership that can actualize undreamt possibilities. Intelligent design for now is best known as a scientific alternative to Darwinian and self-organizational approaches to biological origins. This conference brings together scholars and business leaders to discuss the implications of intelligent design for business practice. In particular, this conference will explore how design principles shape the beliefs of leaders about the people they lead, the nexus of innovation, the incentives to entrepreneurship, and the methods for managing organizational change. The overarching theme of this conference is "the business leader as intelligent designer."

Wow. A conference not to miss! Probably they can have breakout sessions entitled "Destroying Darwinism for fun and profit", "God wants you to be rich", and "Street theater: fruitful career choice?"

A Mystery Story by Joseph Shallit

My father, Joseph Shallit, was a journalist who also wrote short stories and books. Here's a short story he published in 1947, in Dime Mystery Magazine, called The Witch's Way. It is evidently based on some experiences he had in the Philippines while in the Army in World War II, and was anthologized as recently as 10 years ago, in the volume 100 Crooked Little Crime Stories.

Academic Vanity Scams

Today I was delighted to receive a letter from the American Biographical Institute (ABI) nominating me for an award.

"Dear Dr. Shallit," it began. "You have been chosen for a distinct honor that is unparalleled in regard to this Century's historical records... Your nomination is endorsed by the Governing Board of Editors for Great Minds of the 21st Century."

For only US $395, I learn, I can get a "Hardbound Luxury Keepsake Issue of the 2007/2008 Edition of Great Minds of the 21st Century embellished with gold engravings". For US $595, I can get a "Great Minds of the 21st Century Medal, a two-inch diameter medal stamped from a solid piece of metal with a hand crafted die and bearing the image of Great Minds of the 21st Century also finished in a radiant golden tone". For US $295, I can get a "Proclamation Plaque, a beautiful two color 8 1/2 inch by 11 inch certificate hand inscribed with your name and chosen citation proclaiming you as a Great Mind of the 21st Century and confirming your inclusion in this reference title."

How pleased I was to share such a prestigious award with someone like Tan Man Ho. Not.

Yes, it's an academic vanity scam.

No legitimate award requires you to pay for anything related to the award, and no legitimate institution would send a prestigious award announcement via bulk mail.

Believe it or not, a lot of people fall for this "nomination" and send off hundreds or even thousands of dollars for books and plaques commemorating awards and titles that exist only in the remarkable and lucrative imagination of the American Biographical Institute. (The "director" of the ABI also runs related organizations such as the "United Cultural Convention" (UCC) and the "World Academy of Letters" (WAL) .) My nomination letter helpfully includes a section where I can nominate ten colleagues (presumably suckers even more gullible than I am) for their own special recognition: a vanity scam combined with a chain letter.

This Wikipedia article helpfully summarizes some of the bizarre titles that people accept, such as "Ambassador of Grand Eminence" and "Genius Laureate of the United States".

Here are a few people, some notable, some not so notable, who have fallen for this solicitation, or from similar ones from the "International Biographical Centre" (IBC) in England:

Irving John Good, the renowned mathematician and statistician, lists on his CV the following dubious honors:

• "International Order of Merit" from the IBC
  
• "Man of the Year" from the ABI
  
• "Most Admired Man of the Decade", from the ABI
  
• "500 Leaders of Influence", from the ABI
  
• "International Cultural Diploma of Honor", from the ABI
  
• "The Key Award", from the ABI
  
• "American Medal of Honor", from the ABI
  
• "Hundred Most Intriguing People of 2002", from the ABI
  
• "Congressional Medal of Excellence", from the ABI (How much do you want to bet that the US Congress had nothing to do with this award?)
  

Timothy Goodwin, who is a "web analyst/developer by profession, a systems analyst, computer hardware technician, computer programmer and karate practitioner", has so many "awards" from the ABI and related organizations on his web pages that I can't list them all. Just a few highlights:

• "Ambassador of Grand Eminence", ABI
  
• "Congressional Medal of Excellence", ABI
  
• "Genius Laureate of the United States", ABI
  
• "World Medal of Freedom", ABI
  
• "One of the Genius Elite", ABI
  
• "Da Vinci Diamond Award", IBC
  

Helpfully, Mr. Goodwin also has a web page showing off all his medals.

Mr. Goodwin is listed as a "Life Patron of the International Biographical Association", which is probably more true than he realizes. I wonder how much he's paid for all those plaques and medals. Patron, indeed.

Erhard Kremer, a mathematician at the University of Hamburg, lists more than 20 honors from the ABI or the IBC, including "Genius Laureate of Germany 2005" (ABI).

Jagdish C. Ahuja, a statistician at Portland State University, lists 19 awards from the ABI and the IBC, including being named "One of the Genius Elite" and "Ambassador of Grand Eminence".

The pastor of Christ Church in Pleasanton, California, Robert W. Evans, is evidently not above a little worldly recognition: `In 1992, Dr. Evans was selected as the “Most Admired Man of the Decade” by the International Biographical Institute, and in 1993 he was selected as the American Biographical Institute’s “Man of the Year.” '

Paul Bartlett Ré, an artist at the University of New Mexico, "has been the recipient of a dozen major awards honors, including The Legion of Honor from the United Cultural Convention, The Order of American Ambassadors and The Genius Laureate of the United States, The World Lifetime Award from the American Biographical Institute, and The Da Vinci Laureate and Hall of Fame from the International Biographical Centre in Cambridge, England."


Although most who accept these honors seem to be men, a few women also display them with pride.

Dana Barry, a researcher at Clarkson University, lists on her web page the following nominations:

• "Woman of the Year", ABI
  
• "Leading Educator of the World", IBC
  
• "International Peace Prize", UCC
  
• "Einsteinian Chair of Science", WAL
  
• "International Educator of the Year", IBC
  
• "One Thousand Great Scientists", IBC
  
• "One Thousand Great Scholars", IBC
  

Sandra Breitenbach, a researcher at Oslo and Amsterdam, lists many of these awards. Just a selection:

• "American Hall of Fame", ABI
  
• "Great Minds of the 21st Century", ABI
  
• "Da Vinci Diamond", IBC
  
• "International Cultural Diploma of Honor", ABI
  
• "International Peace Prize", UCC
  
• "Ambassador of Great Eminence", ABI
  

Even the former president of Richard Stockton College, Vera King Farris, a woman with many genuine accomplishments, lists, apparently without irony, her “The Lifetime Achievement Award for Excellence in Higher Education” from the UCC.

The UCC even awards a "Noble prize" (check the spelling; Alfred Nobel had nothing to do with it). Among its recipients is Shri V. K. Choudhry, a creator of horoscope software. I can think of no one more deserving.

The number of people who have accepted these "awards" (do a web search) is really remarkable. I guess everyone, particularly in academia, craves a little (or in some cases, a lot of) recognition. As for me, I guess I'll have to settle for "3rd place - egg carrying contest", that I received in 1962. But it did come with a nice ribbon.

Liars for Moses

So many fundamentalist Christians end up lying to defend their faith against evolution that it's easy to forget that other flavors of theist also play the same game.

Read this column by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, for example. In it, he repeats some of the dumbest creationist lies about evolution, such as

1. The second law of thermodynamics is in contradiction to evolution
   
   
2. Nearly all mutations are deleterious
   
   
3. Gould's theory of "punctuated equilibirum" means "giant leaps" in the fossil record
   

Add in the usual misunderstanding of what it means for evolution to be a theory, and the curious charge that "many scientists who harbor an unreasonable objection to faith are making science into a new religion", and the resulting mix shows Boteach to be about as smart as your average fencepost and not as honest. Perhaps sensing this, he includes a comment where a physicist praises him for his sagacity.

Just another liar for Moses.

Kirk Durston: Apologist for Genocide

Kirk Durston is a graduate student in biology at the University of Guelph, and the director of something called the New Scholars Society. This Society's mission statement is

"TO PROMOTE CHRISTIAN SCHOLARSHIP IN EVERY FIELD, WITH A SPECIAL INTEREST IN THOSE AREAS WHERE PHILOSOPHY, FAITH, AND SCIENCE INTERSECT, ESPECIALLY THE PROBLEMS AND ISSUES THAT ARISE OUT OF THAT INTERSECTION.

TO PROMOTE THOUGHT AND DISCUSSION WITH RESPECT TO THE SPIRITUAL ASPECT OF LIFE.

TO BE A RESOURCE TO THOSE FACULTY AND SCHOLARS WHO HAVE AN INTEREST IN DEVELOPING THE SPIRITUAL AREA OF THEIR LIVES, FROM A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE."

You can find their "statement of faith" here. It's the usual fundagelical claptrap about the bible being "uniquely, verbally and fully inspired by the Holy Spirit, and that it was written without error (inerrant) in the original manuscripts."

Durston is active in fundagelical affairs. For example, look at this interview supporting intelligent design. How many misrepresentations can you find there?

Durston spoke last Wednesday, June 20, at the University of Waterloo on the topic "Is Genocide Wrong? What are moral absolutes and where do they come from?"

Durston made the usual nonsensical argument that moral absolutes exist, and that they only make sense if they come from a god. He claimed, for example, that if morals are relative, we would have not justification for claiming that the Nazi genocide of Jews was wrong. He claimed that those who follow "traditional moralilty" are happier and more successful. He insisted that Christians have a lower divorce rate than non-Christians. However, Durston's claim is at odds with a Barna survey that showed that atheists and agnostics actually have the lowest divorce rate (21%). When asked about this, Durston dismissed the evidence, invoking the classic "no true Scotsman" fallacy by claiming that many people say they are Christian when they are actually not.

Durston surveyed various ways to obtain moral guidance, but totally omitted a naturalistic approach to ethics, namely the view that ethical principles are part of our evolutionary heritage. There is a reasonable amount of evidence for this latter view, such as the work of primatologist Frans de Waal (e.g., Chimpanzee Politics, showing that chimpanzees apparently have a moral code) and the field of evolutionary psychology (e.g., Robert Wright, The Moral Animal). In general, his presentation was barely at the level of freshman philosophy paper.

But the most repulsive part of Durston's talk was when someone from the audience asked why Durston's condemnation of genocide would not apply equally well to the god of the Old Testament, who indulged in genocide himself, in particular the genocide of the Canaanites. Suddenly Durston's tune changed. Instead of condemning this genocide, Durston sought to justify it. Genocide was OK, he claimed, if his god ordained it. Indeed, he said that the only thing that prevented him from going and out murdering people for his advantage was his religious belief.

If God ordained genocide in our modern day, Durston said, he would obey. However, he said he would have to be very convinced that this call was correct. God would have to appear to all Canadians in an unmistakable way. If that happened, we would have to obey and kill those we were instructed to.

If there is any better example of how fundamentalist Christianity is morally bankrupt, I can't think of it. Any crime, no matter how vile, is OK if their god commands it. What else but religion could make a good person become an apologist for genocide?

Addendum (added October 26 2007): Kirk Durston has asked me to post this clarification regarding his views on genocide. He agrees that he would participate in genocide if God ordained it, but he says the conditions must be extremely stringent: it must be that (for example) God simultaneously appears to every Canadian, in an impressive and undeniable show, so that every single Canadian is convinced of his existence (even atheists) and also convinced that God wants us (for example) to kill Americans. Only under these very strong conditions, he says, would genocide be permitted.

In my opinion, I already summarized this view in the paragraphs above, so I don't understand the need for the "clarification", but I've added it anyway.

Dembski Misrepresents Me - Again!

Although I wrote a long critique of William Dembski's work back in 2002, he has never really addressed those criticisms.

However, he's been happy to insult me -- at one point calling me a "maniac", misrepresenting a conversation I had with Ruse, and misrepresenting the reason why I didn't testify in the Kitzmiller case.

In a recent interview, William Dembski misrepresents me again. He says: "Jeff Shallit, for instance, when I informed him of some work of mine on the conservation of information told me that he refuse to address it because I had not adequately addressed his previous objections to my work, though the work on conservation of information about which I was informing him was precisely in response to his concerns."

That's not accurate. Here's what I actually said in my e-mail message of March 3 2005:

I already told you - since you have never publicly acknowledged even
one of the many errors I have pointed out in your work - I do not intend
to waste my time finding more errors in more work of yours.

I find your failure to acknowledge the errors I have pointed out
completely indefensible, both ethically and scientifically.


It's not a matter of "adequately address[ing]" something, it's a matter of publishing a retraction to claims that are demonstrably false. At that point in time, Dembski had not done so, although eventually he did get around to admitting that the centerpiece calculation in his book was off by 65 orders of magnitude.

If Dembski thinks I have some obligation to read everything he's written and give him extensive comments, he's wrong. And, of course, those who do make the effort to wade through his pseudomathematics get labeled as "obsessive" - that's what he called Richard Wein.

You just can't please a creationist.

Groundhog Day

We have groundhogs in our backyard. It started with one, but now there are babies (see the photo).

Groundhogs, also known as woodchucks, are marmots; their scientific name is Marmota monax.

While I enjoy seeing them, my wife is not so happy that they are eating up the garden.

When the babies get a little older, we'll try to trap them with a live trap and relocate them.

America is Doomed

When travelling, I like to read the local newspapers.

On our way back to Canada from Utah, we spent the night in rural Illinois. The local paper, the Bureau County Republican carried an article about two young women who recently entered the 2007 State 4-H contest in Urbana, Illinois.

Heather and Hannah Pierson gave a speech entitled "Raindrops Keep Falling on My Back". According to the newspaper article,

The girls' speech was about raindrop therapy for horses using essential oils.

"We apply then to certain areas of the horse, like the pressure points," Heather said. "It's used to calm them down, to help realign their spine and helps their immune system."


Now, you might wonder why a horse would need to have its spine "realigned" to begin with.


Hannah said they learned about the therapy a couple of years ago when their mother had a toothache. A neighbor gave her an essential oil, and the toothache was gone ina few hours. Then the girls watched a video on the subject.


Wow. A video! No wonder these young women are such experts in equine medicine.

My guess is that these girls have been suckered by a mixture of the quack therapy of Donald Gary Young or Heather Mack and homeopathy.

But, never fear, you reassure me. Certainly such foolishness. could not win a prize.

Wrong. The Pearsons took first place.

With such incompetence on display, it was not a surprise to learn that the girls are creationists.


Heather said her speech was about the evolution of the horse versus creation, and she had to do lots of studying to prepare.

"My mom bought me three books, and I also get things off the Internet," she said.


Wasn't there anyone advising these young women about quack health claims, or the scientific method, or the importance of evidence beyond the anecdotal?

America is doomed.

Here's a Journal I Won't Be Subscribing To

Today I received an invitation from Emerald Group Publishing to subscribe to the International Journal of Numerical Methods for Heat & Fluid Flow. I have to admit, the topic is quite far from my research interests, and so I wouldn't dream of subscribing to it just for that reason alone. But something about the solicitation made me want to look more closely.

The letter inviting me to subscribe was headed, in large-point type, "Subscribe today and receive £75 worth of Marriott Cheques!"

What kind of journal, I thought, would use such a blatant marketing ploy, offering me the equivalent of US $147 worth of hotel vouchers that, according to the flyer, "can be used for accommodation, dining, spa or golf, in any of over 2,600 luxurious Marriott Hotels world-wide!"? The flyer adds "Go on - treat yourself!"

The mystery was resolved when I consulted the cost of subscription. For volume 17, issues 1 to 8, I would have to pay US $9,899 for one year of this journal. I'm used to exorbitant subscription prices, but this is ridiculous. No wonder they can afford to give away $147, when they're charging nearly $10,000 a year.

Everyone who is involved in this journal, from the publishers to the editorial board, should be ashamed of themselves. There is simply no rationale for such a price, other than making bucketloads of cash. Professional societies publish analogous journals for as little as $200 a year, and there are many electronic journals offering analogous content entirely free.

I am particularly offended by the idea that by subscribing, I would receive hotel vouchers to "treat [myself]". I would venture to guess that most people who make the decision to subscribe are not paying out of their pocket, but rather using grant, university, or industry funds -- in which case providing the subscriber with personal benefits could be seen as unethical.

I encourage all academics to boycott journals like this one, sending their scholarly work to journals that charge sensible prices, particularly electronic journals with free access.

A Parthenogenetic Lizard

Here's a picture I took of the Plateau Striped Whiptail ( Cnemidophorus velox), a lizard I saw in Chaco Canyon, northwest New Mexico.

Plateau Striped Whiptails are unusual because, like several whiptail species, they are primarily parthenogenetic; that is, females usually reproduce without the assistance of males.

Parthenogenesis in Plateau Striped Whiptails was first noted by biologist T. Paul Maslin [Science, 132 (1962), 212-213], who collected these lizards and found 102 females and only 2 males, both juvenile. Because of the presence of 2 males, Maslin cautioned that parthenogenesis was not conclusively established. Later, however [Copeia (1971), 156-158] Maslin reported raising whiptails in captivity without the presence of males, thus establishing parthenogenesis beyond doubt.

Another interesting thing about whiptails is the difficulty in distinguishing one species from another, so take my tentative identification with a grain of salt. In 1906, Hans Gadow wrote "Most of the 'species' are so plastic, so variable, that they may well drive the systematist to despair. Not two authorities will, nor can, possibly agree upon the number of admissible species." [Proc. Zool. Soc. London 75 (1906), 227-375; note that this reference is given incorrectly as "Proc. Roy. Soc. London" in several places online]. When a creationist natters about "fixity of species", this is a useful comeback.

There's a volume called Biology of Whiptail Lizards that's not in our library at Waterloo, but is at Toronto. I've ordered it by interlibrary loan. For those who don't want to wade through it, there's a summary by Donald Blanchard available.

Why I Won't Be Voting for Ron Paul

If you read Reddit, or Wikipedia, you might think that Republican presidential candidate Ron Paul is the best thing since sliced bread. After all, he "believes in maintaining and restoring civil liberties". He's "both deeply principled and wholly uncompromised". He's "honest". Sounds great, right?

Unfortunately, he's also a total loon.

He's anti-choice. He's against human embryonic stem-cell research. He wants to return to the gold standard. He would deny US citizenship to those born in the US to illegal immigrant parents.

If that's not enough, read this piece, entitled "The War on Religion", penned by Representative Paul. In it, he subscribes to the absurd claim, advanced by the wacko right, that there is a "war on religion", conducted by "the elitist, secular Left". He claims (falsely) that the US constitution is "replete with references to God". (Actually, the Constitution, a profoundly secular document, does not mention "God", "Jesus", "Christianity", or "Savior". It does have one reference that could be construed as religious; namely, the formulaic "Seventeenth Day of September in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven" at the end.)

Having a president that is deeply principled can be a good thing. First, though, I'd want to make sure his principles are based on reality, not some bizarre Christian persecution syndrome.

Why Are Atheists Always Described as Militant?

Gustave Flaubert wrote a lovely book, Dictionnaire des idées reçues, published posthumously in 1913. (The title roughly translates as "Dictionary of Platitudes".) In it, he poked fun at, among other things, nouns that are nearly always accompanied by certain adjectives. Germans, he noted, are always described as "blond", a professor is always "learned", and jealousy is always "unbridled".

In a similar vein, the comedian Robert Klein once noted that President Garfield is nearly always described as "shot by a disappointed office-seeker". Klein went on to claim that if you look up Garfield in the dictionary, it says "See office-seeker, disappointed".

The intelligent design crowd plays the same game with "Darwinists". They never refer to their ideological opponents as scientists or biologists; they are nearly always "Darwinists", or, as Wesley Elsberry has pointed out, "dogmatic Darwinists".

Now look at this otherwise unnoteworthy article by Associate Press religion reporter Rachel Zoll, about the reaction to recent books by atheists Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens. Notice anything, well, trite about the title? Yes, it's the "militant atheist" platitude. Atheists must never be described as intelligent, thoughtful, friendly, questioning, or thought-provoking. Instead, they must be described as "militant".

From the meaning of "militant", you might expect that Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens are burning down churches, or at least leading protests, stirring up crowds with their fiery rhetoric. You would be disappointed, of course. What Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens have done is write books. Hitchens is more of a curmudgeon than a militant, and Dawkins and Harris are both rather mild-mannered. Nobody is leaving their public events carrying torches and singing the atheist analogue of the Horst Wessel song.

I'm not sure when the juxtaposition of "militant" and "atheist" became a cliché. The earliest citation I've been able to find so far is a 1928 book review of Edward Lucas White's book Why Rome Fell by Elmer Davis. Davis wrote, "Militant atheists ought not to read it; they will be too likely to swallow it all uncritically."

Whatever the origins, the term "militant atheist" eventually became a description to be used whenever the writer wanted to express disapproval about nonbelievers. Madalyn Murray O'Hair was often so described; a 1970 article in Time sneered at her attempt to found a new church. True, O'Hair was, by all accounts, a nasty person. However, when she was killed in 1995, obituaries routinely referred to her as "militant". Her murderer, however, was not so categorized.

When Jerry Falwell died recently, newspaper obituaries rarely described him as "militant", even though the adjective fit him much better than mild-mannered atheists like Harris. Ironically, however, the Associated Press obituary by Sue Lindsey, referred to Falwell's father and grandfather as "militant atheists".

Flaubert would have appreciated the "militant atheist" cliché. In Dictionnaire des idées reçues, he reported the following platitude about atheists: "A nation of atheists could not survive." Sadly, that cliché is still prevalent today among the morons of the Religious Right.

Added June 6 2007: over at Pharyngula, commenter Jurjen S., whose command of history is evidently better than mine, tells me about the League of Militant Atheists, an anti-religious group in the Soviet Union from 1925-1947. Probably this is the source of the term "militant atheist"; indeed, many of the 1920's citations for this phrase discuss actions in the Soviet Union.

Added January 4 2011
Google's n-gram viewer

http://ngrams.googlelabs.com/graph?content=militant+theist%2Cmilitant+atheist&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3

has now revealed some earlier uses of the term: the earliest I have found is from Progress: a monthly magazine of advanced thought, Volume 6 edited by George William Foote, in 1886. On page 466 he writes "He was not only an Atheist, but a militant Atheist..." Perhaps this is the earliest usage of the term. But as the google n-gram viewer indicates, the term really took off in the 1920's, with the rise of the "League of Militant Atheists" in the former Soviet Union.

Oddly enough, the term "militant theist" gets no citations at all.

Creationist Crackpots Create Canadian Museum

If there are any Recursivity readers from Alberta, I'd like to hear about their impressions of this new creationist museum that recently opened near Calgary.

Darwinism = Fascism?

You know the intelligent design advocates are losing the game when they have to refer to Darwinists as fascists.

They've been playing this silly game for a while now, and Wesley Elsberry has been collecting these comparisons; see here and this article by Elsberry and Perakh.

Here's the most recent example of this kind of over-the-top rhetoric. Local ignoramus Denyse O'Leary calls Darwinists "brownshirts". With an epithet that strong, you might expect something really awful. Perhaps Larry Moran has been beating up ID advocates in the streets of Toronto? Setting fire to their homes and businesses?

No, the offense in question was that someone in Toronto put up posters about the BBC documentary A War on Science, Evolution vs. Intelligent Design showing at the local theatre, and happened to put a few in a location that Denyse didn't like. How... awful. Why, that's just the same as the Nazi brownshirts!

Of course, O'Leary offers no evidence at all that it was "Darwinists" that carried this dastardly deed. I'd be willing to bet it was someone who works for the theatre.

But maybe I should be kinder towards poor Denyse. In the comments to her article, she reveals that she didn't know the origin of the term "brownshirt" and suggests "blackshirt" instead. What a command of history Denyse has!

That's Denyse, the deep thinker and charitable Christian, for you.

Theist Crackpottery Invades CACM

Communications of the ACM (CACM) used to be an interesting publication. Back when I was a teenager, I remember reading articles such as Ritchie & Thompson's on UNIX, and Aho & Corasick's on string matching using automata. Later, CACM published breakthroughs like RSA, and the Turing award lecture of Kenneth Iverson.

Now, however, I barely find CACM worth reading. True, occasionally the "Inside Risks" column has something interesting to say, but most of the articles seem to be about software systems. For example, the April 2007 issue has articles entitled "Consumer Support Systems", "Designing Data-Intensive Web Applications for Content Accessibility Using Web Marts", and "Managing Risk in Offshore Systems Development". Long gone are the days when one could actually find an algorithm or a proof in CACM.

However, the April 2007 issue did carry one item of interest: a long, rambling, and incoherent letter to the editor from one Tim Croy of Houston, Texas, entitled "Stop Chasing the AI Illusion".

Croy starts by praising the Turing award lecture of Peter Naur, an embarrassingly cranky piece of work. Although Naur won his award for "fundamental contributions to programming language design and the definition of Algol 60, to compiler design, and to the art and practice of computer programming", he chose instead to talk about artificial intelligence (AI) and its perceived inadequacies. Naur has been apparently peddling these ideas for some time, but hasn't been able to get them published in a reputable venue, so he put them in his Turing award lecture.

Next, Croy goes on to say that AI "is based on an article of faith (held by atheistic materialists) that the human person is merely a highly evolved biological machine it is theoretically possible to replicate as an electromechanical machine, or computer". (Note the terminology shared with intelligent design crackpots.) I don't see why this is "an article of faith"; I see it as a working hypothesis that seems to be widely supported by our current knowledge of neuroscience, physics, and computer science.

Croy then goes on to claim that dropping a pencil is proof of the existence of God. (I kid you not.) Here's what he says:
"We have discovered the `what' and the `how' (description) but not the `why' (cause). Forgetting this distinction, when someone asks why the pencil falls to the table, we mistakenly answer `gravity'. In the realm of description (physical science) the experiment is a demonstration and confirmation (proof) of the theories of motion and gravity. But in the realm of causes it is a proof for the existence of God."

Wow.

Croy concludes that "Naur also aimed much-needed light on the dishonesty, not to say totalitarianism, of the American academic-scientific establishment."

Whenever you hear anyone raving about the "dishonesty" and "totalitarianism" of the "scientific establishment", better get out your crackpot-o-meter. "Dishonesty" here appears to mean "they refuse to publish drivel in their journal".

CACM has really jumped the shark with the publication of this letter.

Towards a Canadian Republic

I'm an American citizen who has lived in Canada for nearly 17 years. People often ask me, why haven't I adopted Canadian citizenship? After all, it's now possible to hold dual citizenship; both my kids, for example, are dual citizens of the USA and Canada.

My answer has always been the same: I'll seriously consider becoming a citizen when Canada removes one citizenship requirement: that I swear allegiance to "Her Majesty the Queen Elizabeth the Second, Queen of Canada, her Heirs and Successors".

As an American who is proud of the republican tradition (small "r" in "republican", please), the citizenship requirement that one swear allegiance to a person seems unappealingly feudal to me. Paul McCartney famously observed that the current Queen is a pretty nice girl, but that doesn't mean I want to swear allegiance to her. As for her heirs, Prince Charles seems like a sanctimonious git, and he'd be one of the last people I'd swear allegiance to. And who knows what further heirs might be like?

Now a Toronto lawyer, Charles Roach, has brought a class action suit against the requirement. This press release argues that "the government should not force people to swear to things they don’t believe in to gain citizenship".

I entirely agree, although I don't know how strong his legal argument is. Canada's Attorney General, though, is not convinced, and apparently is trying to have the complaint dismissed on the grounds that it is "frivolous".

Canada should follow the lead of Australia and remove this archaic and childish requirement.

Canadian Libel Law Needs Revision

I've written before about how Canadian libel law stifles open and robust public debate on the issues. Canadian politicians such as Tony Clement, Jacques Parizeau, Lucien Bouchard, and Brian Mulroney have all engaged in reprehensible libel suits meant to stifle criticism and investigation of their activities.

Now there's yet another disgraceful example. Wayne Crookes, a Vancouver businessman and former Green party organizer, is apparently suing Wikipedia, Google, and openpolitics.ca for libel for articles about him.

In the US, such a suit would have little chance of success because of the "public figure" exception. Crookes is clearly a public figure and the public is not served by attempting to censor the discussion about his record.

For more about Canadian libel law, read Kimberley Noble's Bound and Gagged.

Why Respect Religion?

The latest issue of Canadian Humanist News has this quote from American journalist H. L. Mencken:

"The most curious social convention of the great age in which we live is the one to the effect that religious opinions should be respected. Its evil effects must be plain enough to everyone."

Mencken's warning seems appropriate when we read this utterly ridiculous opinion piece by Cardinal George Pell of the Catholic Archdiocese of Sydney, Australia.

Pell claims that global warming is "nonsense" purveyed by "zealots" who paint "extreme scenarios to frighten us". Pell knows that global warming is nonsense, because "January also was unusually cool".

But the worst is yet to come. In arguing against human causation for global warming, Pell states, "We know that enormous climate changes have occurred in world history, e.g. the Ice Ages and Noah’s flood, where human causation could only be negligible."

That's right. Cardinal Pell thinks that Noah's flood was an actual, historical event.

Can someone explain to me why this kind of moronic religious commentary deserves any respect at all?

If Fascism Comes to North America, High School Principals Will be Leading the Way

There are good high school principals. I remember one I had that was willing to break the rules and allow me to enroll in a high school chemistry class even though I was rather young.

But many high school principals seem to be fascists-in-training. All over North America, high school principals are abrogating the right of students to speak their minds, even out of school.

By now, most people have heard about the "bong hits 4 Jesus" case. That case, which is currently before the US Supreme Court, high school student Joseph Frederick unfurled a nonsenical banner with the message "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" while the Olympic torch passed through his town. His principal, Deborah Morse, confiscated the banner and suspended him. The outcome of that case is still pending, but we can depend on authoritarians like Scalia to side with the principal.

In another case, Bloomington, Minnesota Principal Steve Hill confiscated a student's Blackberry pager and erased photographs he had taken after a protest at the school. Ironically, the name of the high school is Thomas Jefferson High School.

Principals don't always win, however. In another case, the Indiana Court of Appeals has ruled that a student cannot be ruled a juvenile delinquent for criticizing her principal, using 4-letter words, in an online forum. Judge Patricia Riley found that the student's speech was protected by the Indiana Constitution.

Principals clearly have a lot of authority, and they can and should wield that authority inside the school in a responsible fashion. Students have the right to political speech, and what students do outside the school is their own business. Instead of being so thin-skinned, principals should use these kinds of events to teach the students a thing or two about the importance of free speech in an open society. By doing so, they would earn the respect of their students far more than any respect gained from the usual two-bit authoritarian posturing.

The Discovery Institute Lies Again

That fountain of lies, the Discovery Institute, has produced yet another lie.

In an opinion piece published in today's Dallas Morning News, John West and Bruce Chapman claim that comparing intelligent design proponents to faith healers or Holocaust deniers is absurd because "Faith healers and Holocaust deniers are not on the faculties of reputable universities. Scientists who support intelligent design are."

Well, Messrs. West and Chapman, welcome to my university, the University of Waterloo, which is consistently rated as the number 1 or number 2 comprehensive university in Canada. We have, on our faculty, Clifford Blake, a professor who claims that he has a supernatural gift to heal people. I wrote about his claims in three blog posts: Number 1, Number 2, and Number 3.

Messrs. West and Chapman also must think that Northwestern University is not reputable. Northwestern has a man named Arthur Butz on their faculty. Butz is the author of The Hoax of the Twentieth Century, a book claiming that the Holocaust is a hoax.

So the Discovery Institute lies again. Big surprise.

Here's what Messrs. West and Chapman should have said: "Like faith healers and Holocaust deniers, supporters of intelligent design can be found at many reputable universities. Their claims, however, say more about a dogmatic adherence to religion or nationalism than they do about a dispassionate search for the truth."

Rick Warren, Clueless Hypocrite

Newsweek has printed a debate between minister Rick Warren, author of The Purpose Driven Life, and atheist Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith. Although I don't agree with Harris on everything, he certainly gets the better of nearly every exchange. Warren, on the other hand, comes off as a clueless hypocrite. Here are few excepts from their exchange, which, thanks to Newsweek's unpleasant site design, requires one to manually page through 10 pages of text.

Harris points out, "There is so much about us that is not in the Bible. Every specific science from cosmology to psychology to economics has surpassed and superseded what the Bible tells us is true about our world." Warren has no response.

Warren claims, "I believe [the Bible is] inerrant in what it claims to be." What? Has he never read any lists of contradictions to be found in the Bible?

In response to Harris's description of natural selection, Warren asks, "Who's doing the selecting?", proving he has no understanding of evolution. When Harris answers, "The environment. You don't have to invoke an intelligent designer to explain the complexity we see", Warren comes up with this non sequitur: "Sam makes all kinds of assertions based on his presuppositions."

Warren then describes his reason for believing that God answers his prayers: "One of the great evidences of God is answered prayer. I have a friend, a Canadian friend, who has an immigration issue. He's an intern at this church, and so I said, "God, I need you to help me with this," as I went out for my evening walk. As I was walking I met a woman. She said, "I'm an immigration attorney; I'd be happy to take this case." Now, if that happened once in my life I'd say, "That is a coincidence." If it happened tens of thousands of times, that is not a coincidence."

This is the sort of post hoc, propter hoc reasoning that leads people astray in so many fields, from reason to medicine. I never pray, and yet beneficial coincidences happen to me, too. Warren seems to have this childish conception of his god as cosmic favor-granter, routinely rearranging the universe for his personal benefit.

About the virgin birth of Jesus, Harris says "I consider it such a low-probability event that I—" and Warren cuts him off, saying, "A low probability? When there are 96 percent believers in the world? So is everybody else an idiot?"

Warren seems to think the probability of an event is related to the number of people who believe in it. Then we get this exchange:


HARRIS: It is quite possible for most people to be wrong—as are most Americans who think that evolution didn't occur.

WARREN: That's an arrogant statement.


But later we get this:


Interviewer: Rick, let's be blunt. Is Sam's soul in jeopardy, in your view, because he has rejected Jesus?

WARREN: The politically incorrect answer is yes.

HARRIS: Is that the honest answer?

WARREN: The truth is, religion is mutually exclusive.


So in other words, according to Warren, it's "arrogant" when Harris says it's "possible" most people could be wrong about religion. But Warren admits that he thinks (not it's "possible", it definitely is the case) that everyone who doesn't believe in Jesus has "their soul in jeopardy".

Now I've justified my charge that Warren is a hypocrite. How about clueless? Well, consider this exchange:


WARREN: ... I say, "God likes order," and the more we understand ecology, the more we understand how sensitive that order is.

HARRIS: Then God also likes smallpox and tuberculosis.

WARREN: I would attribute a lot of the sins in the world to myself.

HARRIS: Are you responsible for smallpox?

WARREN: I am responsible to do something about it.


Here Harris is clearly asking, is Warren the source, the cause of smallpox? But Warren misunderstands, choosing a different meaning of "responsible". Deep inside, he probably doesn't want to deal with the implications, which is that the god he worships as all-good is also the source of this scourge.

Rick Warren, clueless hypocrite.

An Incompetent Plagiarist

I edit a mathematics journal, the Journal of Integer Sequences (JIS). It's a completely free online journal, where submission, refereeing, and publication are all done electronically.

Recently I got a submission, and, as usual, I sent it to a referee for his opinion. I was a little surprised to get the following response (redacted so as not to display any names):


Dear Professor Shallit:

I downloaded and read [the submission] by [Mr X]. Also in JIS, there is another article by the same name, which I wrote in 2000... Unfortunately, [Mr. X] is a plagiarist. He literally copied and pasted my article. If you peruse the two articles yourself, you will see what I mean. His is mostly a verbatim copy of mine. The only instances where [Mr. X] deviates from my article are when he adds his own results. His results have two qualities: one, they are trivial cases of the main result from my paper (which was a simple result in its own right), and two, they are written awkwardly, as though by somebody who does not know how write about mathematics. This is by far the most ridiculous "submission" to a journal I have ever come across. I am speechless. If you wish, I can still write a formal referee's report; please let me know.

All the Best,

[The Referee]

PS This is priceless. Here's a guy who plagiarizes an article, and then submits it to the very same journal from which he plagiarized the article in the first place!


I don't think I need to add anything more.

Canadian Preachers Rake In the Cash from Gullible Flock

From the Toronto Star, one of the few newspapers in Canada that still does some investigative reporting, comes this appalling story about a family of Pentecostal preachers that have been apparently raking in tons of cash from their poor parishioners.

According to the Star, Paul Melnichuk and his sons Tim and Tom "lead lavish lives in contrast to the mainly working-class black families that make up the bulk of the church."

"Between them, the pastors have amassed a real estate fortune worth about $12 million. Each owns a multi-million-dollar country estate north of Toronto (Tim's is worth as much as $5.5 million), they share a Florida vacation villa, and the pastors and their wives drive luxurious cars – among them a Porsche Cayenne SUV, a Lexus RX 330 SUV and a Mercedes-Benz CLK 320 convertible."

Melnichuk's Prayer Palace claims to fund charities, but "a continuing Star investigation into Canadian charities has found the church devotes little money to charitable work. In fact, the church's most recent financial statements show that only $9,443 was spent on 'benevolent and charity' activities in 2005. The church's annual 'missions' fluctuate between $500 and $36,704 in the past few years."

The Star deserves a lot of praise for investigating these creeps. But the parishioners don't seem to care: a follow-up article reveals that the reporters who blew the whistle were called "wicked" by congregants. But these letters from Star readers show not everyone is fooled.

Healing Prayer at the University of Waterloo, Part III

Clifford Blake is a professor at my university, the University of Waterloo, who has been making some very strong but dubious claims that he has the power to "heal" people by touching them, praying for them, and anointing them with oil. He is giving a series of four lectures sponsored by the University of Waterloo Recreation Committee. In this post I summarize his third lecture. My comments are in red. For summaries of previous lectures, go here:

Part I
Part II

Session 3 took place on February 23 2007. There were about seven attendees. Professor Blake began by discussing his promise to provide some hard evidence for his claims. He had agreed to provide some "before" and "after" x-rays demonstrating that he really could heal people of serious afflictions, such as broken bones. Now, however, he admitted that he only has an "after" x-ray, not "before", so there is no way to check his claim. He excused this by saying that doctors don't want to give out x-rays. He knows his healing works because he has letters from patients - people know what they have experienced with him. People with an open mind allow themselves to receive healing. He once administered healing to a woman with a knee problem; afterwards her problem would solve. Doctors, said Blake, would ignore evidence of healings by just saying the original diagnosis was a misdiagnosis.

Claims of miraculous healings can only be substantiated by detailed evidence, something that Professor Blake has not been able to provide. Non-physicians are notoriously bad at assessing their own medical problems, and the placebo effect can account for many claims of healing. Misdiagnoses are another possibility. All these alternative explanations must be ruled out before we can accept faith healing claims.

Professor Blake then began the subject of his talk: the "healing virtue" and how to get it. According to 1st Corinthians, Chapter 12, Blake said, people get the "healing virtue" by gifts. He called attention to verse 4 (I think he meant verse 9), which says "to another the gifts of healing by the same Spirit". Different people are endowed with different gifts. Those who pray believe there is a god and ask for healing.

How can the "healing virtue" be transmitted? According to Mark 5:21 (seems to be miscitation), healing virtue can be transmitted from one person to another. When one is performing healing, one is sensitive to what the other person is experiencing. The healee will feel a tingling or heat sensation.

The healing virtue can move out of an article of clothing (Acts 19:12, where Paul heals with handkerchiefs and aprons).

In response to a question, Professor Blake said that "life itself is energy", and stated that, like Paul, he heals with handkerchiefs.

According to Acts 5:12-15, even the shadow of Peter was enough to heal people.

There needs to be activity on the part of the person who wants healing. According to Mark 16:5 (I think he meant Mark 16:18), " if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover." I'd really like to see that drinking deadly things stuff. I wonder if Professor Blake would quaff a glass of Drano to show he cannot be harmed.

Healing takes place in different religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, etc., not just Christianity. It works by the laying on of hands and the use of anointing oil. This is similar to what naturopaths do (and just as effective, I'd wager).

Every illness has a herb that can cure it. No evidence provided for this strong claim. This is what pharmaceutical companies do, go to foreign countries and seek herbs. Once the active ingredient is extracted, it can be dangerous. Professor Blake says his sister had a supernatural gift, the "word of knowledge", that enabled her to find healing herbs.

In the Old Testament, Moses was instructed to make healing oil using olive oil, cinnamon, myrrh and calamus. (He seems to be talking about Exodus 30:22-25.) "I can tell you as a fact it is not symbolic. I give it to students -- a student who had difficulty remembering stuff - it has potency of its own. I use it in my meetings", Blake said.

In James it is said "anoint them with oil" (probably referring to James 5:14). You can use any oil but the potency will not be that of the oil of Moses.

Sometimes healing takes place and sometimes not, but only the right recipe will work. "The mixture itself has potency. I know it has potency," Blake said.

"I've had students -- Buddhists from Thailand - who came to me and afterwards, in a vision someone came to him and showed him the results he needed for his thesis. He was about to be kicked out of the Ph. D. program. Two weeks later he came in and said he was ready. 'I want your god', he said. He became a Christian in my office, right away," Blake claimed.

"Another student, a Hindu, ran out of class with panic attacks and anorexia. The student was supposed to go to a sanitorium. I advised her not to go. She eventually got well. 'I want your god', she said, and she accepted Christ. 'I would have died if I did not come to you.' Her parents gave me a big hug, saying 'So you're the professor who saved my daughter's life. Take her to church with you!' "

People can see the love God has for everybody. "I don't know the mechanics of how it [healing virtue] travels. Whether we have scientific proof, the proof is in you. When you walk without pain, there's the proof."

"Why is there so much resistance to it? Because we have been taught to accept scientific proof. If we can't measure it, it doesn't exist. There is no conflict between true science and faith. I've seen corroboration."

"People from different races come from one root. DNA confirms this, and it says this in Scriptures. Scripture says, somewhere in Iraq there was a dispersion. The genetic tree confirms this. In my lectures I show two maps, one from Scripture and one from scientists, and they agree."

Different truths, said Prof. Blake, will not collide. When it comes to faith, it's not something you can touch. If you are educated it becomes more difficult. Some people believe healing was only in the time of the Bible. But he knows it is happening now. When he began to use healing oil, he got more consistent results. Fasting intensifies healing gifts. Some people have been working with herbs to cure diseases doctors said were incurable.

In my opinion, this session was more of the same: lots of claims with no serious evidence to support them.

Psychics Fail Again

Ah, Britain! Land of reason. Charles Darwin. Bertrand Russell. Home of freethinkers. Richard Dawkins. Nicholas Humphrey. Those of us stuck in theocratic North America can only look to our comrades across the ocean with fondness.

Well, maybe not entirely. A report from the Daily Mail states that Britain's Ministry of Defence hired novice psychics and spent 18,000 pounds to try to find Osama Bin Laden using remote viewing. (Actually, the article reveals somewhat less: that an "Asian individual" was the target of the experiments.)

More tax money wasted, and another psychic failure.

Carnival of Mathematics

Recursivity is featured in the first Carnival of Mathematics. Enjoy!

"Healing Prayer" at the University of Waterloo - Part II

Yesterday I attended the second session about "healing prayer" conducted by University of Waterloo professor Clifford Blake. For my summary of Part I, see here.

The audience consisted of two other people and me, the token skeptic. Before the talk started, new rules were announced. No questions would be allowed during the talk. After the talk, one question each would be allowed. (I presume these rules were directed at me, based on the fact that I corrected several misstatements of fact in the previous talk.) These rules were quickly discarded, however, when the person who announced the rules herself asked a question in the middle of the talk.

In this session Professor Blake addressed "healing" methods recommended, as he understands it, in the Bible. He started by mentioning healings he has conducted at the University of Waterloo; he was interviewed about these healings by David Mainse of the Canadian religious TV program, "100 Huntley Street".

Most, if not all, religions have a holy book, Blake said. But, according to him, the Bible has been interpreted incorrectly. He made some disparaging remarks about current medical practice, and then stated that he doesn't appreciate it when hypotheses are presented to students as facts. (I think he was talking about the theory of evolution here, but he didn't elaborate.)

Genesis teaches us that God is a creator with infinitely more knowledge or intelligence than any human. We should try to be moral, holy, and just, just like God. (But I guess not infinite, like God. Because then there wouldn't be any room to move about.)

God has power and intelligence, so do we. If we are close to the Creator, we can create new body parts, too. (Now that's something I would like to see.)

Blake defined a miracle as "an unusual event with immediate impact".

God promised he would heal us (Exodus 15:26).

How was healing done in the Old Testament? Not everyone could do it. Men were prophets and had special gifts. As examples, he cited Elijah and Elisha. Leprosy was healed in 2nd Kings 5:10. And Elisha prayed that his servant's eyes would be opened to ; this is an example of intercession. (Blake said this was in 2nd Kings 17:21-22, but it actually seems to be 2nd Kings 6:17.)

Elijah interceded to have a child come back to life. This is an example of biblical healing - a prophet or man of God intercedes on behalf of someone else.

In the Old Testament, direct commands to heal are rare. In the New Testament, they are common.

Jesus has god-like qualities (sinless, etc.) This is how Christianity differs from other religions.

A true Christian can prevent other people from hitting them. Their opponent's arm will be unable to move. That's another unbelievable claim I'd like to see demonstrated!

In Luke 6:6 a man has a withered hand. In Luke 6:10 Jesus heals the hand. The command is issued directly to the affected part.

In Luke 4:33,35 a man is possessed by the spirit of an unclean demon. Today we would call such a person crazy. Jesus rebuked the demon and it was driven out.

Can disciples of Jesus do this kind of direct command? Yes, in Matthew 10:1. In John 14:12 it is said "You can do what I do and even greater." Yes, and in Mark 16:18 it is said that the true believer can drink any deadly thing without harm. Now that's another demonstration I'd like to see!

In Acts 3, Peter tells a man to get up and walk. This is not intercession, just a command.

Blake next discussed the Benson et al. study showing no effect of intercessory prayer, and laughed. "Come to my meetings and you will see miracles," he claimed.

Can everyone heal? Not necessarily - you have to receive power and authority from God.

Prayer causes changes, but not necessarily the ones that Benson et al. were measuring. I asked, how can you tell the difference between prayer causing no changes and prayer causing changes that cannot be measured. Prof. Blake replied that prayer could make the following kind of changes: a doctor that you weren't getting along with in the hospital could suddenly be re-assigned to another shift.

Healing comes when an individual has gift and authority and issues a command. Healing can even occur among non-believers, when it occurs as a sign of God's power. Blake said he had students who were Muslims and he healed them. He healed panic attacks in a Hindu, and he has healed Buddhists.

Most healings take place, however, when the healer has a gift. He said prayer and fasting could help: "Prayer and fasting are a Christian's daily bread." (I particularly enjoyed the image of fasting as bread; viewing not eating as eating.)

If you pray, you will see consistent results. (At this point I reminded Prof. Blake of his promise to bring evidence of his healings to this meeting. He replied that he said he would bring it, but not to this meeting. Maybe the next one?)

He gave another example of a woman he has healed. She was on life support in Toronto. He prayed for her and she went home from the hospital three days later.

A fellow with a "fractured knee" came to one of Prof. Blake's meetings on crutches. He walked out of the meeting without crutches.

Prob. Blake knows under what conditions healings occur. Faith works, but it can happen without. However, unbelief can block it.

At the conclusion of the meeting, I asked Prof. Blake (who wears glasses) why he didn't heal himself of poor vision. He replied that poor vision is a natural condition of old age, and so he has never tried. Besides, he said, healing himself doesn't work well, there is some kind of "short circuit" that prevents it. But he said he would try to heal himself of poor vision.

I was very disappointed not to hear about the "special recipe" of "herbs and oils" that one must "anoint" someone with to get healing, as Prof. Blake told me after the last session.

Citing Bible stories as facts and post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies seemed to be the main arguments. Contradictory statements were given; healing can take place in the presence of unbelievers, but unbelief can block it, too. Needless to say, I was unimpressed.

J. Scott Turner Misses the Mark

J. Scott Turner, a professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science & Forestry in Syracuse, New York, has a this dumb opinion piece in the January 19 2007 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Since a subscription is required to read this (your university probably has a subscription), I'll excerpt a couple of the dumber remarks:

Also amusing is the spectacle of independent-minded scientists' running
to college administrators or the courts for help in defining what is
science and what is permissible discourse in their classrooms.

...

Faced with all that hue and cry, I almost want to say: "Friends,
intelligent design is just an idea."

...

The strain's very persistence invites the obvious question: If Darwin
settled the issue once and for all, why does it keep coming back?
Perhaps the fault lies with Darwin's supporters. Rather than debate the
strain on its merits, we scramble to the courts or the political
ramparts to expel it from our classrooms and our students' minds.



"Intelligent design" may be "just an idea", but ideas have consequences. Exactly the same could be said about racial inferiority, or national socialism, or totalitarian communism, or a number of other concepts -- they are "just ideas", too. * Being "just an idea" doesn't mean it doesn't have destructive consequences.

"Intelligent design" is a science stopper. Once something is explained as "designed" by a disembodied invisible "intelligence", we can proceed no further in our inquiry. Intelligent design proponents themselves state that science is not allowed to pursue the identity or motivation of the designer.

Turner's claim that scientists are "running to ... the courts for help in defining what is science" seems wildly off base. Is he really not aware that the issue in Dover, for example, was not "what is science", but whether intelligent design was essentially an endorsement of religion in the classroom? The 1st amendment doesn't even mention science. It wasn't scientists running to the court, but parents who don't want fundamentalist religion shoved down their children's throats.

Turner asks, "If Darwin settled the issue once and for all, why does it keep coming back?" The answer is obvious to me, but he doesn't even mention what is staring him in the face: the dominance and power of intolerant fundamentalist religion in North America. Evolution is a challenge to their beliefs. As James Watson wrote, "Today, the theory of evolution is an accepted fact for everyone but a fundamentalist minority, whose objections are based not on reasoning but on doctrinaire adherence to religious principles."

Turner's answer to his question is that scientists are at fault. But if this is true, he has to explain why the creationism issue virtually doesn't come up in places where fundamentalists have little power, such as Scandinavia. With Turner's reasoning, it must be that Scandinavian evolutionary biologists have some superior explanatory power over their North American colleagues. My explanation better fits the facts.

As for not debating the issue, exactly what does he think we have been doing? Has he read Mark Perakh's book, Unintelligent Design? Or Kenneth Miller's Finding Darwin's God? Or Why Intelligent Design Fails, where Wesley Elsberry and I contributed a chapter?

I'd give Professor Turner a C- for poor understanding of the issues.

* For the particularly dense reader let me state that I don't think that "intelligent design" has consequences as pernicious as those of the other ideas I listed. I give that list only to signal that saying something is "just an idea" is not terribly enlightening commentary.

The Phony War on Christmas Arrives in Waterloo

The new editor of our Faculty Association Newsletter, David Wang,
has fired the opening salvo (go to page 3 and read the editor's message). For those who don't feel like reading it in full, here's one of his remarks:

'I was recently in a local coffee shop that was decorated to the hilt but had only "Happy New Year" on its window. To say that this was annoying would be an understatement.'

Well, that make sense to me. I mean, who could disagree that it is the obligation of every coffee shop to honor the Christian religion? There's a law that says that every coffee shop must be decorated every December with tacky reindeer, elves, and tinsel, right? And be sure that the message "Merry Christmas" is displayed prominently, for the penalties are severe -- if you do not comply, then some patrons might be annoyed! None of this "Happy Holidays" or "Happy New Year" nonsense.

Strangely enough, though, there does not seem to be any similar obligation for coffee shops to celebrate Hanukkah. This is clearly unfair. Jews should demand that every coffee shop display a large, 5-foot, lighted dreidel.

Wang goes on to say,

'...in our society, freedom of religion increasingly is equated with absence of religion. This is a very dangerous trend.'

Again, who could disagree? What could be healthier for a society than that every religious believer -- be he Christian, Muslim, Jew, Sikh, or Hindu -- demand that his religion receive universal societal acclaim, and be annoyed when this does not occur? Why, that would never result in any violence, would it?

The Greatest Innovation of Theoretical Computer Science

Spiked magazine has asked me to contribute 200 words on the subject of the "greatest innovation in my field". Here's my answer:


In theoretical computer science, the greatest innovation is the realization that algorithms are mathematical objects, and can be rigorously analyzed in terms of their consumption of scarce resources, including space, time, and randomness.

One of the first to analyze an algorithm was the French mathematician Pierre-Joseph-Étienne Finck (1797-1870). In an 1841 book, he showed that the Euclidean algorithm for computing the greatest common divisor
of two integers uses a number of division steps that is linearly bounded in the number of digits of the inputs. Finck's work is all but forgotten today, but I discussed it in a paper in Historia Mathematica in 1994.

In recent times, much of the credit for the development of algorithm analysis certainly belongs to Donald Ervin Knuth (b. 1938), who in a series of books entitled The Art of Computer Programming, popularized many of the tools now used routinely to analyze algorithms. Almost overnight, algorithm analysis changed from a purely engineering approach involving coding and testing, to a rigorous branch of mathematics where the challenge is proving theorems.

Is Science the New Religion?

My local newspaper (and I use that term generously), the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, has reprinted this George Johnson article from the New York Times. The original headline, as given in the NYT, was "A Free-For-All on Science and Religion". But the Record chose to give it a different headline: "Could science be the new religion?"

Here's my response:

Dear Editor:

With regard to "Could science be the new religion?", Record, December
27, 2006:

I'll believe science is the new religion when

- we exchange gifts on Darwin's birthday
- we get a national holiday to commemorate the discovery of DNA
- scientists get the same access to the White House as Billy Graham does
- St. Mary's Hospital hangs pictures of Pasteur in all its rooms
- and the Record devotes as much space to science coverage as it
does to religion.

Until then, let's keep them separate.

My University Sponsors "Healing Prayer" Sessions

My university, the University of Waterloo, is sponsoring sessions on "healing prayer". Imagine my surprise!

Here are the details: our university has a Recreation Committee. Most of they events they sponsor are things like outings to the local ski hill, or ASL classes. However, they have also been sponsoring some more questionable events, featuring topics such as Reiki, therapeutic touch, and Feng Shui.

The most recent event was a session on "healing prayer". Here is how the session was described on the UW Recreation Committee (UWRC) web site, until recently:

Monday, December 18, 2006: "Life Series" - Healing Prayer with Dr. Clifford Blake (First of Five Lessons). Humans have battled sickness, disease and calamity as long as they have been on earth. Lesson 1: A survey of some spiritual healing methods. An opportunity will be given to share experiences. Cost: no charge.


Oddly enough, although the talk has since vanished from the UWRC web site, the first session was still held yesterday. (I have been trying to find out from the UWRC why the talk descriptions have vanished. So far, no reply.)

Reader, I ask you to look at my summary of what Prof. Blake said in his talk, and tell me, is this the kind of talk our university should be sponsoring? (My comments below are in red.)

First, some background. The speaker, Clifford Blake, is a professor in the Department of Management Sciences. According to this page, Prof. Blake "has counselling ministries in spiritual and psycho-social development, and the empowerment of individuals, with a special focus on youths. He is actively involved in preaching, teaching and counselling in his local church and currently operates an independent counselling and healing ministry. At the community level Dr. Blake presents seminars on Black History and the African Genetic root, based on a synthesis of Holy Scripture, DNA research findings and fossil discoveries."

He began by stating his talk would be based on his scientific and religious background. Prayer, he said, has been used for thousands of years to overcome difficulties. But it hasn't been used as Biblical teachings prescribe, and so the results haven't been as good as they could be. He spoke of his own ministry and testimonials about healings. A man who had cancer, he said, was healed through a combination of chemotherapy and his healing methods. It was the combination of all, he asserted, that resulted in the cure. He advocated "magnetic methods" and "energy methods"; combining them is more efficacious.

He cautioned that traditional methods [by this he evidently meant conventional medicine] are excellent when it comes to analysis, but one shouldn't take them without question. Get other opinions: what are the side effects?

He then asked for testimonials from the audience. One participant advocated "Kriya Yoga" as "the fastest way to God". The miracles that she witnessed "could fill volumes". Someone who had Parkinson's is now almost symptom-free. A woman she knew had a stroke and was mostly paralyzed, but thanks to Kriya Yoga, she has now recovered. Additional examples were given.

Another participant discussed her experience being on a local bus where the bus engine died. She prayed, she said, and the bus engine then started up. When you put you hand on someone and pray, you can feel electricity.

Prof. Blake discussed other examples of healings he has participated in. A person at the university with a relative with obsessive-compulsive disorder was "completely cured" after one month visiting with Prof. Blake. A student with
"fractured legs" was able to walk "immediately" after being touched by Blake. He acknowledged that he could not prove he was responsible for the healing, but "if someone has a chronic condition for many years, and improves after my sessions, then that's pretty good evidence". A woman has x-rays before and after proving that a fracture was miraculously healed. He can bring letters from a woman in British Columbia who had leukemia; after he gave her a prayer in a letter, she was healed.

Prof. Blake then said he did not counsel people to not go to doctors. He then discussed "facts": drug companies keep their side effects a secret. For example, he said a recent study in the US showed breast cancer was down because women had decreased their estrogen replacement therapy. He had a relative who died of breast cancer after taking this therapy.

He then asked, what is the 3rd highest cause of death in the US. It is "iatrogenic causes" [meaning caused unintentionally by a physician]. A study in JAMA, he said, listed 225,000 deaths a year come from these causes, including 12,000 deaths from surgery, 7,000 deaths from medication, 80,000 from nosocomial infections, and 106,000 from "non-error adverse effects". He then asserted that these figures are "restricted information" and is "not published in general". He claimed that in order to read this study, he had to state he was "Dr. Blake" in order to get to the web site, because it was only available to doctors and not to the general public. A participant from the audience stated that the results of such a study would never be published in the local paper, the Kitchener-Waterloo Record.

[The claim about "restricted information" is false. There was no need for Prof. Blake to represent himself as "Dr. Blake" in order to gain access, as our university has a subscription to JAMA (the Journal of the American Medical Association), which is available for free to all members of the university community. In a few minutes, I was able to find the "study" Prof. Blake was referring to. It is not a study, but a "commentary" by Barbara Starfield [JAMA, Vol. 284, No. 4 (2000), 483-485] that discusses a study, "To Err is Human", published by the Institute of Medicine in 1999. Contrary to Prof. Blake's assertion that this was "restricted information" and the participant's claim that the results would not be published in our local paper, I was able in a just a few minutes to find dozens of references to the study in mainstream media, including one in our local newspaper.]


Prof. Blake then went to discuss his sister, who died "because she had diabetes and her liver was irreversibly damaged from medication".

He then discussed results on acupuncture: 50-90% report relief. Tai Chi is also useful.

He cited a study that said religious practices are useful in lowering depression [Braam, Psychological Medicine V. 31 No. 5 (2001), 803-814]. He talked again about "energy" and I asked what he meant by energy.

Prof. Blake stated that energy is a "wave pattern" that makes up our bodies. When we are sick, it is because our organs are "not vibrating at the frequency they were designed to operate at". Doctors are working on that, he alleged. The laying on of hands works because it "corrects malfunctioning energy". But you can't always tell if healing works, because according to the uncertainty principle, introducing a measurement changes the way the system operates.

He described a man with severe knee problems that he saw. The man came in with a cane, Prof. Blake laid hands on him and said a benediction, and the man walked out without his cane. People live healthier lives with religion.

Audience members asserted that "drug companies were only interested in profits".

Prof. Blake asserted that "Einstein was a very religious person" and "wanted scientists to become more religious".
[ I pointed out that what Einstein meant by religion was not what most people meant. For example, Einstein said in a 1954 letter, "It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it."]

Prof. Blake concluded by saying in the next session, he would discuss how prayers can be more effective and how you can get more consistent results from prayers. In my informal talk with him after the sessions, he asserted that this was due to his special recipe for herbs and oils that one must anoint someone with in order to heal, and the fact that only specially gifted people (presumably Prof. Blake is one of them) have the power to heal.

Skeptics Canada Opens an Office

I just received some good news in an e-mail message from Skeptics Canada: they are going to open an office in Toronto starting on January 1, 2007. The office will be at 873 Broadview Avenue, just north of Danforth. This is a great step forward for organized skepticism in Canada. If you're interested in fighting against irrationality in all its forms, consider joining Skeptics Canada.

The Prime Game

First, the game.

Ask a friend to write down a prime number. Bet them that you can always strike out 0 or more digits to get one of the following 26 primes:

2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 19, 41, 61, 89, 409, 449, 499, 881, 991, 6469, 6949, 9001, 9049, 9649, 9949, 60649, 666649, 946669, 60000049, 66000049, 66600049.

For example, if your friend writes down 43, you can strike out the 4 to get 3. If your friend writes down 946969, you can strike out the first 9 and the 6's to get 499.

(There's not always a unique way to do this, and of course it works with some non-primes, too: if your friend writes down 35, which isn't a prime, you can strike out the 3 to get 5 or vice versa. But if someone gives you a number where you can't strike out some subset of the digits to get a prime on the list above, then that number isn't prime. For example, you can't strike out any subset of the digits of 649 to get a prime on the list, but 649 isn't prime.)

I published this strange result in the Journal of Recreational Mathematics in 2000; there's a copy on my papers page. Believe it or not, there's actually some interesting mathematics behind it.

Let's say that a string of symbols x is a subsequence of a string of symbols y if you can strike out some symbols of y (not necessarily contiguous) to get x. ("Subsequence" seems to be the preferred term in North America, but in Europe they call this a "subword". However "subword" is used in North America to mean "contiguous subblock".) The relation "x is a subsequence of y" is a partial order, meaning it shares the following properties of the ordinary <= relation on integers:

• x is a subsequence of x;
  
  
• If x is a subsequence of y and y is a subsequence of x, then x=y.
  
  
• If x is a subsequence of y and y is a subsequence of z, then x is a subsequence of z.
  

We now call two strings comparable if x is a subsequence of y, or vice versa; otherwise, we say x and y are incomparable. A set is pairwise incomparable if every pair of elements is incomparable.

Now, a very neat result about the subsequence partial order is that every pairwise incomparable set is finite. This isn't obvious, and it isn't true for every partial order. (For example, it isn't true for the order where "subsequence" is replaced by "subword".) You may enjoy trying to prove this.

We need one more concept: the minimal element. A string x in S is said to be minimal for S if whenever y in S is a subsequence of x, then y=x. Given a set of strings S, it's not hard to see that the set of minimal elements of S is pairwise incomparable. So it must be finite. And every string in S has the property that some minimal element is a subsequence of it.

Now, to get the prime game, let S be the set of strings representing primes in base 10. The list of 26 primes above is the set of minimal elements for S.

Determining the set of minimal elements isn't always easy. For example, if instead of the primes we use the decimal representations of the powers of 2, then no one currently knows how to compute the set of minimal elements. It's probably {1,2,4,8,65536}, but proving this seems quite hard.

A neat consequence of this result is that, given any language L, the set of all subsequences of strings in L is regular. We can't always easily determine the regular expression or automaton for L, but we know it exists.

Here's a link to a file of cards you can print, cut out, and perhaps laminate, with the prime game on them. Enjoy.