When Atheists Have FAITH In Science

"You would have to be remarkably resistant to brainwashing to resist the claim - endlessly repeated - that we are our brains. The notion that our consciousness, the self to which successive moments of consciousness are attributed, our personality, our character, personhood itself, are identical with activity in our brains is so widely received that it seems downright eccentric to profess otherwise." - Raymond Tallis "Aping Mankind"

Until this last weekend I have never understood why theists say that "atheists have faith in science", or that "science is our religion."

I do now.

For some, those analogies are anathemas. "How could that be true?", they cry. "Science is a process," they argue. "It's a collection of models which best fit the observations we make of the world around us. It is driven by research and evidence. We don't need faith to believe it. The evidence is there!"

The problem comes when atheists start to defend science like it can never be wrong. They really do start to sound like Christians defending the Bible, or Muslims defending the Qur'an. Science for these people isn't the nebulous constantly shifting and improving body of "best models we have at the moment" we all know it is, for them it's rigid, and certain. No more so than the people who have come to believe the all-pervasive, yet pseudo-scientific belief that "we are our brains" and therefore we do not have conscious free will.

I can already hear many of you shifting in your seats and a few gasps of air have been gasped in an incredulous manner as that last bit sank in. Yes, I did say that the evolutionary psychologist position that we are our brains is nonsense. It is a scientifically religious concept, or Scientism if you like.

If you want to believe that we humans are only a by-product of trillions of sodium-potassium exchanges in the neuronal matter of our brains then fine, stop reading now and go grab a coffee, or have a lie down. For those of you who aren't fooled by this homeopathic account of consciousness and actually want to understand where I'm coming from, strap in.

When I suggested this idea to an atheist on Twitter recently I was immediately branded a "closet-Creationist", accused of being insane, Called "Mr Black and White" (whatever that means), and because I have a disability which affects my memory (I'm not kidding) I was called a liar. Apparently he's all for us being our brains until faced with the evidence that one key component of fibromyalgia (which I suffer from) is memory-loss, which according to him I don't suffer from, instead I'm just choosing to lie to him. If we are our brains, as suggested, I cannot lie to him. I cannot reasonably be held responsible for any action I take because, according to him, I am the victim of an evolutionary drive to do whatever it is I'm currently doing. So, even if I was I would not be lying to him, my brain would be. I'm absolved of all guilt. So the statement "there are no murderers, only victims of brain activity" is also a valid according to this neuromaniac. It rather makes you wonder doesn't it? But, this does illustrate one underlying principle of Neuromania, similar to a condition we see in theists all the time, which we call "cherry-picking of facts!"

What do we get when we point out that God wasn't a nice guy in the Bible?
Lots of Bible passages cherry-picked to show he was (or that Jesus was) and personal insults.

What do we get when we point out contradictions in the text of the Bible?Lots of apologetics, and links to websites and blogs and videos teaching us ignoramuses why these contradictions aren't contradictions. And personal insults.

What do we get when we claim Jesus was likely a mythical god and not a real person?Lots of Bible passages claiming to describe him as real, links to the Gospels, more videos, articles written by believers and so on. Oh... and personal insults.

Guess what I got when I told this fellow that neuromania was a thing and we are not just our brains?

You guessed it... Cherry-picked studies, links to books and videos which supported his views, and the aforementioned incredulity and ad hominem attacks... exactly what we've all come to expect from theists.

People who think science is awesome (myself included) must also realize that science isn't definitive. There are many faults with it. Almost every study suffers from a degree of bias. Most scientists go to great length to iron out these biases, or at least own up when their sample-size isn't as big as they'd like, or when people dropped out of the study, or when something didn't otherwise go to plan, or even when they weren't meticulous enough, but there are people who perform studies with such tunnel-vision that they publish without noticing even the basic flaw in their methodology, or results. Their premise is incorrect to start with, or their conclusions are all wrong at the end.

One of the key "we are our brains" (WAOB) studies is Libet's experiments which showed that our brains "light up" on an EEG moments before we are aware of the desire to move a hand. This suggests that the brain activates our hand movement before we are even aware that we have actually made the decision to move it. This study was flawed for a number of reasons but it completely forgot that it is entirely possible that the area of the brain controlling the hand movements lit up because it had been told to, by the mind of the subject being studied. A conscious decision activating the brain which fed-back a confirmation code, which the participants mistook as the decision itself, which then led to the hand being raised.

Think about that. There are a few scenarios worth considering:

One :
The areas of our brains which control hand movement lights up.
We become aware of the need to move our hands.
We move our hands.

Two:
The areas of our brains which control hand movement lights up.
We become aware of the desire to move our hands.
We decide to move our hands.

Three:
Our minds tell our brains to activate our hands.
The areas of our brains which control hand movement lights up.
We become aware of the decision to move our hands.
We move our hands.

In all three cases the EEG lights up moments before an awareness is felt and then the hand is moved. Exactly what Libet saw.

If your argument is that we move our hand exclusively because the brain tells us to and we have no conscious control over that action, you're ignoring the possibility that the brain is being told what to do by something outside itself and the decision was in fact entirely our own; and that deciding to do something involves the subconscious as much as the conscious parts of our minds, and the non-physical as much as physical parts of our brains. It's a bit like arguing that workers on the factory floor make the shoes their boss tells them to make, whilst forgetting that the factory output is controlled by market forces. If you only have a method for assessing the actions of the factory boss, you're missing half the picture aren't you? In the above second case the brain tells our hand to move and we decide to do it, so there is an active participatory control mechanism in place between the brain and the hand. In the third instance the brain is being controlled from somewhere else which cannot be examined.

You can only test for things you can test. Aren't we telling theists that all the time? We admit openly that we could be wrong. There might be a god. However, given that we cannot test for one it can be assumed that there isn't one. And yet, the WAOB crowd refuse to accept that, since we cannot test for the mind, we could be wrong about there not being one!

If we are our brains and we have no conscious control over anything we do, we cannot be any more in control when we are awake than we are when we are asleep. We cannot be any more in control when we perform neurosurgery to cure a person of epilepsy than we are when having an epileptic fit of our own. This makes no sense at all.

I hope you can all understand how ridiculous that notion is though, because our legal systems can. After all, I wonder how many WAOB fanatics would be willing to stand up in a Court of Law to defend a paedophile accused of rape and murder, by stating for the record that he is under the complete control of his brain, carrying out only evolutionarily dictated actions (or actions determined by damage to otherwise normal areas of the brain) and therefore cannot be held responsible, so should be allowed to go free without any punishment?

Any takers?

Let's be honest here for once, shall we? The WAOB concept is all fine in principle, but not a single one of us truly believes it when taken to its extremes, any more than we think a theist would truly believe in a god when we take her beliefs to their extremes. We know what we think of ourselves, we can direct other people to become aware of our emotions, of other things in our spacial environment, or talk in the abstract about so far incomplete ideas. We can experience guilt, which we may or may not chose to use to change future actions. We can fight our supposedly evolutionary preference for 0.7 hip-to-waist ratioed women, or women from our own class, caste or "race", to settle down with a rotund, or skinny lady from the opposite side of the colour spectrum to our own, just because she has a similar sense of humour, or likes the music of Schubert and knows how to make a great omelette! Yes, I do know that all of these things can be explained, it is claimed, by evolutionary psychology, but it really is just the scientific equivalent of theistic apologetics isn't it?

When we look for someone who is similar to us they say it's because of our evolutionary compulsion for tribalism. Yet, When we look for someone opposite to us they say it's because of our evolutionary drive to widen the genepool. I call this having a bell for every tooth. We can find "research" to support every position under the Sun, so why bother with any of it?

The bottom line is that I think, rather than the declaration "We are our brains!", the very best we can do, if we want to remain honest and, most of all, consistent, is make the claim that "We could be our brains!" And, if you decide that makes me a closet-Creationist, insane, or whatever else.

There's apparently nothing either one of us can do about that.



For an in-depth study as to why Neuromania is wrong, see Prof. Raymond Tallis' excellent book "Aping Mankind: Neuromania, Darwinitis and the Misrepresentation of Humanity." This blog represents an incredibly simplistic view of the arguments against scientism. If you only go by what I've said, I really feel for you. You need to look for better evidence than what I've said. You, more than anyone, need to read Prof. Tallis' book. :)


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My 5 Top Tips for Atheists

Hi... it's been a while.

It has been suggested that I write a post about how to deal with being new to the wonderfully liberating world that is atheism.

I have been an atheist for 30 years. It started when I was bored one summer in 1985 and decided to read the family Bible. It was a big, old, leather bound thing with a family tree in the front of it and lots of illuminations (Bible-speak for drawings.) So, once a day I settled down in the spare room to read the book, from cover to cover. About half way through reading Genesis I became an atheist. To this day I fail to see how anyone with any sense can make it through the first two chapters of Genesis and not immediately realize that the book is fiction. I finished the Old Testament (OT) and gave up, only to go back to it a few years later when we started doing work on the New Testament (NT) in school. Trust me when I tell you that the content of the book bares little or no resemblance to what teachers and preachers tell you it says. No wonder the Christian community spends so much time and energy (and money) on apologetics... but more on that later.

Paganism crept in shortly after this, but it was always of the atheist variety, that being a belief that the "gods and goddesses" of the religion are nothing more than archetypes (see Jung) for the ways in which we express ourselves and look forward to new challenges. A less wank-tastic version of the "think like a lion become a lion" crap they try to make you do at 'self-improvement' seminars.

Anyway, since I am not new to this game I will let you new atheists (not to be confused with "New Atheists"*) into a few secrets on how to handle your new life.

Many of you reading this will not be in the liberal and accepting position I was in. My father is an ignostic aptheist, which is someone who literally does not see the point of gods and therefore doesn't give a hoot about them. My mother, was and still is a Christian, although she has not seen the inside of a regular church for as long as I can remember, except for weddings, baptisms and funerals. So, my dad puts up with my talking about atheism and theism but considers the subject to be entirely boring and my mother listens with polite amusement. I am 42 now, with kids of my own (both self-declared atheists) so what can she say, eh?

I know this might seem like a dream come true for many of you. There are those who cannot speak up for fear of harm, isolation and financial loss. I worry about you guys. It boggles my mind that a religion (and they all do this) which talks about caring and accepting everyone, puts so many caveats in place to prevent people from leaving. There are a number of reasons why, but the biggest one has to be what social psychologist Irving Janis affectionately call "groupthink".

"Groupthink occurs when a group values harmony and coherance over accurate analysis and critical evaluation. It causes individual members of the group to unquestioningly follow the word of the leader and it strongly discourages any disagreement with the concensus." - Psychology Today

For this reason I am not here to tell you how, or when, to 'come out' as a non-believer. That is for you to decide, based on your circumstances and perception of the results that might follow from such an action. My advice is to hold fast and remember that atheism is growing quickly and social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook are providing some great resources and bringing people together. You are NOT alone. Atheism is becoming more normal, and the proof of this can be seen in the recent escalation in religious people and groups becoming more vocal about their faith, and declarations of whole countries which are seeing a decline in religiosity being "Christian countries" by various politicians.

All I can tell you is that (on the whole) the atheist community are very supportive of recently deconverted atheists and the level of tolerance found here is infinitely higher than in any religion.

In with being asked to write this was a tacit request for advice on how to deal with internet theists who flood the cables with apologetics and nonsense. So here are my top 5 tips for dealing with theists online and in real life:

1. Remember that YOU do NOT have to prove anything. 

The theist is the one making the positive claim that a god exists, and therefore the onus (no matter what they tell you) is on them to prove it. Apart from saying "I don't believe your claims." you really do not have to say much else. You can be as dismissive as you like. Often I like to treat them like some drunk who tells you that they are a secret agent, or an alien. A "Really? That's interesting, but oh... look at the time... gotta run!" is all you need to say. You can block the ones who just will not quit talking at you. "So what?" is a powerful phrase.

"Atheism isn't true" - "So what?"
"So GOD is!" - "So what?"
"So YOU have to listen?" - "OK, why?"
"If you don't YOU WILL BURN IN HELLFIRE!" - "Yeah? So what?"
"You're LOST and need to be FOUND again! Find SALVATION in the arms of JEEEEEEEEEEZZZUUUUUSSS!!!" - "Yeah? OK. Whatever. See ya round mate."

The more people of this ilk start to realise that we don't care what they think and/or say, the more agitated they get, but eventually one or two do start to wonder why we don't care and look for answers. If they do so with an objective mind they usually deconvert. Trying to get a theist to be objective can be difficult. Though, that's perhaps how you got here. Hi... welcome to sanity.

2. Learn how to ask the right questions.

Let's say you have decided to engage with the theist and argue your point with them. My advice to you is to learn about Socratic Questioning, either from Dr Peter Boghossian's book "A Manual For Creating Atheists", or the excellent YouTube video series on Street Epistemology by Anthony Magnabosco. This line of thinking is extremely effective at dealing with theists.

The hardcore "hell and brimstone" types hate Socratic questioning because no matter how hard they try you just keep requesting more detailed information. This "lunatic fringe" cannot understand why you are deflecting their nonsense back at them, and even the "scholars" eventually start to hate it when their knowledge runs out and they are either forced to ignore you, go around in circles or get angry. In each cases you have won the debate. You'll get used to a lot of toys being thrown from a lot of prams on this journey.

3. Be patient. 

Many of the people you come across are victims of their own religion's brainwashing scheme. Think back to when you believed the nonsense. You may still harbour fears about losing your soul, burning in a fiery lake, or being tortured forever. Religious bullshit can be very hard to wash off.
Ask yourself how would you want to be spoken to? You have an advantage in that you have been there too and so you know how it feels to believe those things, and be in their situation. I know that for some people enlightenment came when someone ridiculed them and they got pissed enough to go looking for counter-arguments and found only common sense staring at them (like Jerry DeWitt and Matt Dillahunty) but for many telling them they're stupid only makes them more likely to entrench themselves in their beliefs.

4. Follow your own path. 

Are you interested in evolution and science? If so, then read, read, read! Lots of great books by many great authors are out there waiting for you to pick them up and read, or listen to in the car on the way to work. For some good recommendations follow people like David Smalley, or Aron Ra, or ask me. If you are not interested in evolution, or science you don't have to be. Only theists equate atheism with an interest in science and technology. You might prefer art, literature, music or any number of other things.

When you find a theist who argues that atheism is not true because evolution is false just ignore them. For one, they are using a form of logical fallacy and for another, who cares? You don't, right? Evolution isn't your thing, so just don't worry about it. Your non-belief is probably founded on your realization that the evidence for a god just doesn't stack up. It has nothing to do with science. Even if evolutionary scientists have it all wrong, the claims of the theist are no more likely to be true. In this vein I often ask that very question: "If evolutionary scientist are mistaken, how does that affect the claims made by theists about creation?" You'd be surprised how often that's met with silence, or a lot of words thrown together which don't make any sense to anyone but the person who said it (word-salad.)

It's not your job to argue FOR evolution, or any argument FOR your position at all. See point 1. The argument "Evolution isn't true, therefore Yahweh!" is no more valid than "Jelly isn't true, therefore Sasquatch!"

5. Look for inconsistencies.

When one theist makes a point, try to remember who it was who made that claim, or said that thing. For instance, if one of them says gays are evil, then make a mental note. Then, when someone else, says that gays are misguided, or putting on a show, you can point towards that other guy and say "I've heard *insert name of other person here* say *whatever he/she said*, why do you think you are right and not him/her?" or something to that effect. The point being that if theism were true and there WAS a god out there telling his subjects that ONE truth they all claim to be privy to, why do they all take up such different, and often opposite positions on things?

It's helpful, though not essential, that you learn what is and what isn't a logical fallacy. Matt Dillahunty's videos and episodes of the Atheist Experience and David Smalley's Dogma Debate are great resources.

If Christianity was uniform across the board its claim might have a bit more weight to it, but with around 40,000 versions (denominations) of it out there in the world we can be sure that, they can't ALL be right and they're probably all wrong. If one theist is really good at being consistent you can contrast his/her views with that of another and watch as the "he's wrong I'm right" arguments start.

These are my "top-tips", though other atheists approach debate in entirely different ways. I'm not always so kind to believers because their BS is so damn stupid the only thing I can offer them is my impatience.

I hope these ideas have been helpful. Thanks for reading. As usual, all comments are welcome.


*New Atheists is a term, usually used derogatorily against atheists who are vocal about their disdain for religion and the use of faith over good reasoning. Basically its used to describe any atheist who, when told to shut up by a preacher or imam, says "NO!"

The Evolutionary Road to the Present and Beyond

WARNING: THIS IS A LONG POST. 

READ IT IN BITS, OR GET A COFFEE AND DIG IN!

I am frequently amused, and often appalled, at the Creationists who come on twitter claiming that "evolutionists" are living in a fantasy world if they believe we evolved from a common ancestor to monkeys. Let that sink in for a minute... Creationists, who believe that a magic sky-daddy poofed the universe and the Earth into existence at the same time and created every living thing on the Earth, including us, his special creation, believe that we live in a fantasy world.

Amazing!

We get everything from the classic line born out of sheer ignorance of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection, or TOE for short: "If we evolved from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?"

Oh for flip's sake... really? Almost all bisections of the animal tree occur because of some sort of physical separation. So in our case the most likely scenario is that a large number of the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees got separated from the others in their group... we can speculate how to our heart's content... and their evolution, due to the change in their environment, possibly a once arboreal species now found itself on flat lands instead, came as a result of needing to adapt to the new conditions, or die.

This evolution took millions of years... as did the evolution of the rest of the species on the other side of the divide.

That ancestor is now extinct through necessity. A species cannot evolve en masse and keep the exact traits of its former self. That's just basic evolution 101.

 The other one they now seem to be focusing on is: "There is proof of microevolution and that fits in with our 'theory' of species being able to adapt, but no macroevolution has ever been observed so that cannot be true!"

These, and I'm struggling to not call them imbeciles, cannot [or will not] get their head around the fact that in science the terms macroevolution and microevolution simply have no weight at all. No true scientists use those words. Creationists should know this, because they send enough people on scholarships to proper university biology courses so that they can proclaim that an increasing number of evolutionary biologists [aka their plants] support Creationism. On those courses they are told that these terms are invalid.

On that last point they are correct, though as someone pointed out Pluto takes over 200 years to do one orbit of the Sun, but how can we prove that it does given that we live for a maximum of 120 years?

We extrapolate data from what we see in the laboratory, and these days we use DNA evidence to support the theory. We don't even need the 250,000 fossils we have to prove anything. The DNA supports our theory perfectly.

I often wonder how these people think, but then I read the webpages they point me to and realize that for the most part they don't think. They parrot off the stuff they hear at church, which is in turn parroting stuff that people like Ken Ham dream up between snorts of cocaine and threesomes with hookers in desert road motels. Perhaps I'm being too harsh there, but you know these people aren't straight arrows, and most of them aren't even happy about not being straight.

Think of a a hundred miles... what is a single mile made of? Yards and inches. And each inch is made up of sixteenths. So, we know that a sixteenth exists because we can see it. We know the inch exists, because we can see that too. But, imagine that the hundred miles ahead of us is over bumpy ground, so we lose sight of it every so often. Got it?

If you're happier you can use metric.

OK. So we can look down that road for maybe four hundred yards, then the road dips. We can see the equivalent of say, 2300 years of our history before the road dips for a while and pops up at about the 3500 year mark. This happens over and over along this road.

As an example. We get to see snippets of our past laid out on each of the sixteenths of the inches which make up this road. "Macroevolution" is the same as "microevolution" in the same way that this fictional road is the same as the sixteenths of inches which make it up. As each bit of the road comes into view we get a view of our past and we get to examine that to work out what could possibly have happened in the dips. In the past we had to dig up bits of that history and examine the finds. Such as dinosaurs and human settlements and geological samples. We would search caves, deserts, meadows and mountains trying to find examples of things lost to the earth over vast swathes of time. On that point, just as an aside, we do know how long it takes for earth to cover stuff, so we can roughly date a find according to how far down we had to dig for it.

I know I'm labouring that point a little but you know that not everyone gets this stuff the first time around.

It takes a great deal of skill to work out what we're seeing when we find a dinosaur fossil, or part thereof. It's not guesswork as some of the Creationists will tell you. It's careful examination, recreation and experimentation. As technology has improved we can now use computer data to recreate these creatures, based on careful anatomical examination. We use microscopes to determine all sorts of features unseen to our unaided eyes. Not one single scientist working today gets away with just guessing stuff.

Even Professor Richard Dawkins has to present his work to other scientists for them to hack it to bits when it deserves to be. Yet Creationists laugh at Dawkins for his proposition that there was once a collection of land masses known as Pangaea, and that through a process of separation and drifting the continents moved away from one another to where they are today.

I am really not sure how Creationists can justify their position on this idea of Pangaea, because we know that the continents are still moving today and we measure the distances between them occasionally to make doubly sure. If we work backwards from the now and use the rate and direction of the continents' drift to calculate the position of each in the distant past we get Pangaea. It's really that simple.

Also, another side note, doesn't the Bible refer to land being a single mass which was separated by rivers and oceans? Isn't that a vague reference to Pangaea?

So we're looking at this road and seeing bits of it, trying to work out how everything happened in the dips from the stuff we can see. When we don't know exactly we say things like "this may have happened", or "could" or "perhaps this", and this uncertainty, which is entirely valid and honest in the context of science, seems to set the Creationists on fire. They are satisfied that they have the answer and are arrogantly positive about it: "The evidence is in the book!" they say, demanding that we accept that the Bible is evidence rather than the claim which we all know is the case.

Look, I don't care if the Bible is a million years old, I don't care if it was written by gold-plated angelic goat herders using giant, jet-black heron feather quills and unicorn blood, on the skins of sacrificial eunuchs, there is absolutely nothing in the Bible which can be taken as prima facie evidence for anything. Nothing. The Bible is, and always will be, a claim that the stuff in it happened. Most of it is not supported by evidence of any sort.

Sorry to have to tell you Creationists, but despite what you've been told there are NO corroborative contemporary accounts of anything Jesus is said to have said, or done, and the fact remains that the Bible is now and forever a work of fiction.

That's not blasphemy... that's just a fact.

I'm not even sure that Creationists really understand some of the implications of some of the texts, but I'll deal with that another time. The purpose of this post is just to raise an analogy which explains why scientists have to use uncertain terms to describe past events and evolutionary processes.

Despite our uncertainty over many dips in the road to our past, we do now have a helping hand. We have a traveler which has been to mostly every part of that road and has now finally reached us. I'm not talking about the crocodile, which seems to have been around for a gazillion years. I'm talking about deoxyribonucleic acid [DNA].

DNA has been with organisms for a very long time. It has been handed the baton from RNA and run with it all the way through history. A really interesting part about DNA is that some of its constituent parts may have formed in Red Giant stars. This means that when Creationists are poking us for evidence of abiogenesis on Earth, they're ignoring the idea that we might well have come from outer space! Hee hee!

Building blocks of DNA (adenine, guanine and related organic molecules) may have been formed extraterrestrially in outer space. Complex DNA and RNA organic compounds of life, including uracil,cytosine and thymine, have also been formed in the laboratory under conditions mimicking those found in outer space, using starting chemicals, such as pyrimidine, found in meteorites. Pyrimidine, like polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), the most carbon-rich chemical found in the universe, may have been formed in red giants or in interstellar dust and gas clouds. - Wikipedia [DNA]

Now that we've unlocked the secrets of our own genome we can read the DNA strands with relative ease. To the point where we are now using our knowledge to modify babies DNA to make them immune to certain genetic diseases. Something God forgot to do.
In our DNA we can see markers which we see in other ape species on out side of the divide, but not in other apes from the other side. We can trace our retroviral markers and figure out what changes have been made to the genome to make us happen, and make chimps happen.

This is not guesswork, this is bona fide science using the tools now available to us. Tools which can now see the very building blocks of life in full colour. We can see inside crystals, and pick out previously invisible specks of evidence from all around the world. We now know there was never a global flood. The Noah story is just another myth, which another thing the Creationists cannot accept.
We weren't created as a separate species from the Earth and women aren't the product of a man's rib. For starters there's no way you'll get a an XY being by taking parts of an XX being. Perhaps the other way around could be argued, but not that. Also, why would God create a woman if his goal was to have Adam and his "companion" look after the Garden of Eden? Surely another man would have done just as well, if not better. Men have similar strength profiles, unless you're going to include bodybuilders, or the Basques. Two men could have happily kept that garden in tip top shape forever. A woman was in fact an unnecessary addition.

The whole Creation thing is a load of hooey. For starters there's two versions of it, which Creationists seem to purposely ignore, or claim that the two opposing timelines are versions of the same event. I'd not want one of them defending me in a court that's for sure, if they can't see basic facts like that.

Evolution is a progression, one sixteenth at a time, until we cover the 100s and 1000s of miles into the past. It's like when we look at a prairie rising up to become a tall hill. The upward sweep of the lowlands forces us to ask a question... where does the hill start and the prairie end? Likewise with evolution, when precisely does species A become species B and how? What were the changes and what was the final straw which prevented the two species from being able to interbreed?

Where does the hill begin? Where do humans fit in on the future of the evolutionary tree? What will we become? Will we create a technological supreme being as has been predicted? Will we eventually be ruled over by this TechnoGod? Will the science of the future create what the Creationists have been telling us is already real?

Who knows? We don't... but one thing is for certain, Creationists really have no idea at all.

Evolution, Creationism and the Argument From Authority Fallacy

Hello again. I'm writing this post because of another chat I had recently with a Creationist on twitter. It seems this keeps on happening.

The conversation took many strands, which is never ideal, but I'll try to summarize each one as best I can. 

One of the strands included a look at the Argument From Authority Fallacy (AFAF). The chap kindly directed me to a site which details the whole fallacy in detail.

The AFAF goes like this:

1. Person A is (or is assumed/claimed to be) an authority on subject S.
2. Person A makes a claim C about S.
3. Therefore C must be true.

Unfortunately the chap I was chatting to failed to acknowledge much of the fallacy's components in his own argument.

One of the sites included a refutation of vestigiality. According to Dr. Jerry A Coyne, who is an authority on evolution, vestigiality is "diagnosed not by its usefulness, but because it no longer has the function for which it originally evolved" ['Why Evolution Is True' (2009)] 

Dr Coyne goes on to describe the fact that humans still have an extensor coccygis muscle attached to our coccyx. This is the exact same muscle which is found in monkeys and other mammals which have tails. In humans the muscle has no function despite it still being attached to our skeleton.

In the article on the Creationist site highlighted above, written by Dr Don Batten and Dr Jonathan Sarfati they state that: "it is in principle not possible to prove that an organ is useless, because there is always the possibility that a use may be discovered in the future." This is clearly not true of the extensor coccygis muscle, unless of course humans have yet to grow tails. To be honest I wasn't sure I was inclined to read any more of this article, but I struggled on.

The next point to be raised was about why emus and ostriches are flightless despite having wings. The article suggests that: 

1. they derived from smaller birds which could once fly (which is one form of evolution the Drs claim is acceptable within the Creationist model.)
2. they do have a function other than flight.
3. the Creator uses the same model for all birds regardless, and therefore all birds have wings.

Dr Coyne does not disagree with the second point at all. In fact he explains the exact same thing from an evolutionary standpoint. Ostriches use their wings in courtship displays (as do other birds), and to maintain balance, (as do other birds), and to threaten its enemies, (as do other birds.) So in fact the ostrich has wings which perform all of the function of other birds' wings except flight... perhaps then  the problem isn't that the wings are badly adapted for flight, but that the rest of the bird isn't... but that's just my wacky idea!

All flightless birds have wings, but the kiwi has only tiny wings buried deep under its feathers which are just remnants of their flying ancestors' wings. Totally useless for any of the above adaptations.

When Drs Batten and Sarfati try to claim that the fact that a vestigial organ, or limb, undermines evolutionary theory they miss the point entirely. "Evolutionary theory doesn't say that vestigial characters have no function" says Dr Coyne, " It is vestigial not because it's functionless, but because it no longer performs the function for which it evolved... Indeed we expect that ancestral features will evolve new uses: that's just what happens when evolution builds new traits from old ones."

When you admit, as the Creationists do that the wings of the ostrich now have new functions besides flight aren't they saying that these changes are adaptations, and aren't adaptations part of the evolutionary process?

Further in the article the Creationists claim that it is only possible to devolve and not evolve. That means that in the Creationist model it is only possible for organisms to lose function and not evolve new traits which gain function. They argue that once a bird has devolved to become flightless it cannot re-evolve to regain its flight. This is possibly true. I personally don't think I know of any animal which has regained past lost abilities, but then I know that the process of evolution only works in the direction of conferring an advantage to the organism within its current surroundings. So if a bird needs to feed on the ground then it is likely to become flightless. Unless its source of food learns to live arboreally, or fly, the bird is unlikely to ever need to go back to flying! That's just how evolution works.

It's worth going back to the AFAF for a second and take a look at the two sides I've presented here. Dr Jerry Coyne holds a PhD in Evolutionary Biology which he gained from Harvard, one of the USA's premier universities and has authored over 115 refereed scientific papers. He is an authority on evolutionary biology. Now let's see what the other side looks like shall we?

Well... Dr Batten is a horticulturalist, and Dr Sarfati is a physical chemist. Neither of them have any qualifications in evolutionary biology and so are not authorities in the field of evolutionary biology.

So to quote the AFAF web page sent to me by the Creationist on twitter:

"This sort of reasoning (AFAF) is only fallacious when the person is not a legitimate authority in a particular context... If a person makes a claim about some subject outside of his area(s) of expertise, then the person is not an expert in that context. Hence, the claim in question is not backed by the required degree of expertise and is not reliable. It is also very important to note that expertise in one area does not automatically confer expertise in another. For example, being an expert physicist does not automatically make a person an expert on morality or politics." [my emphasis]

So the Creationist has already fallen foul of his own accusation aimed at me that, since I accept the truth of evolution I am committing the Argument From Authority Fallacy, and yet in actual fact, since the authorities I accept my information from are experts in their field I am not committing that fallacy at all... I am merely accepting the word of someone whose accomplishments in the context I am defending are beyond doubt. This is a valid exercise.

I was sent another link to an Answers In Genesis page the author  Dr David Menton (an anatomist not a paleornithologist - see above AFAF notes on relevant authorities) writes that Alan Feduccia, a noted paleornithologist has refuted the idea that birds evolved from therapod dinosaurs but if you go back a bit in the article you'll find this:"While evolutionists now agree that birds are related in some way to dinosaurs, they are divided over whether birds evolved from some early shared ancestor of the dinosaurs within the archosauria (which includes alligators, pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, ichthyosaurs, and thecodonts) or directly from advanced theropod dinosaurs (bipedal meat-eating dinosaurs, such as the wellknown Tyrannosaurus rex). " [my emphasis]

So... the article goes on to refute the line of thinking which brings us to an evolution from therapods, and does so quite eloquently and rather convincingly I have to say. Me being no expert and all that. However, I can read, and I noticed that the AIG writer rather skimmed over the line of thinking proposed by one, Alan Feduccia... where have we seen that name?... that birds are evolved from archosaurs. In fact, Prof Feduccia's inclusion in the AIG article is a classic tactic of the Creationist movement. They find the current widely accepted theories and find the one person amongst the throng who disagrees, then elevates them to great heights as the ultimate authority on the issue at hand. Feduccia is in the minority, but his ideas might have merit. Unfortunately for the Creationists Feduccia's main argument is that therapods and birds have a common ancestor in the archosaur, so that means whichever way you look at it modern dinosaurs (birds) did evolve from earlier species, the only contention is which one?

Several times during the AIG article we are told that dinosaurs are reptiles, which is actually a misleading statement, since most of them did not exhibit characteristics that are particularly reptilian at all. It makes you think of scaly, cold-blooded creatures with four legs and flicking tongues. However, most dinosaurs had skin, not scales, walked on two limbs not four and were likely warm-blooded and highly socialized. So comparisons between reptile lungs and avian lungs, and between scales and feathers are invalid. Birds are recognized today as being bona fide dinosaurs by the vast majority of ornithologists and paleontologists. The evidence is there for those who truly want to find it.

So, atheists/skeptics beware when looking at sites such as Answers In Genesis, because the tactics are to seem very technical and scientific, but what they don't tell you is more important than what they do tell you.. and more important still is who is telling you! When talking about the Argument From Authority Fallacy the theists' side of the fence are almost certain to be the biggest culprits, so when they tell you that you are the fallacious one, remember that you are far more likely to find sources appropriate to the argument/discussion than they are.

Thanks for reading. Please comment on this if I've missed anything or made any obvious mistakes.

                                                           ______________________

"Why Evolution Is True" by Dr Jerry A. Coyne was published in 2009 and is available at all good book shops.

The 2nd Law of Thermodynamics Argument

In a recent chat with a Creationist he attempted to use the age old, and incorrect, assumption that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics (2LoT) renders Charles Darwin's Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection (evolution) false. I did not engage with him because I wanted to think about my response, except to point out that the 2LoT applies only to closed systems, and the Earth is not closed. I suppose this blog article is my response. So...

It's probably a good idea to start with a brief explanation of what the 2LoT is and what it means for us before going too far into things.

The 2LoT states that the entropy of a closed thermodynamic system will always increase over time.

The Creationist argument stems from both a false definition of the word "entropy" and the incorrect idea that the Earth is a closed system.

The correct definition of entropy, with regards the science of thermodynamics, is that it is a quantitative measure of the total amount of energy not available to do work. So the 2LoT has absolutely nothing to do with evolution. It simply deals with the transfer of heat energy. However Creationists use a different definition which applies to the science of statistics and probabilities, which is that entropy is a measure of the randomness, or disorder, in a closed system. Whether they do this in an attempt to deceive, or mislead followers is uncertain, but I'm sure that is the case.

Using the Creationist definition along with their incorrect assertion that the Earth is a closed system, we are told that randomness and disorder, of all the systems on the Earth, increases over time. Well, what does this mean for their argument?

Creationists believe that the 2LoT shows that the universe could not have appeared by chance from nothing*, and that likewise animate life could not have sprung up from inanimate, non-life. They think that the Law prevents this because as the entropy increases these new organisms would be wiped out before they had a chance to mature and diversify.

However, let's look at the argument the Creationists are putting forward...

1. God created the universe out of nothing, or from his "Word".
2. God created every animal we see around us today in their mature form, from nothing... including humans and no form of evolution has ever taken place.

It looks very much to me like the 2LoT argument they put forward to counter evolution is destructive to their own mythology.

As I mentioned above, the Earth is not a closed system. It receives heat and light energy (along with other sources of radiation) from the Sun, and radiates heat and light back out into space, not to mention the stuff we send up into orbit and beyond and the stuff which occasionally crashes onto its surface from deep space. So the 2LoT does not apply to the Earth directly. However, the idea that the universe as a whole is a closed system may have some merit. Even if the Earth were a closed system the idea that such systems always fall into disorder is inaccurate because we observe random dust clouds settling in space to form planets and all of us have seen what happens when you shake a snow-globe, right? Eventually it settles down and becomes orderly.

So the argument put forward by the Creationists not only refutes their own beliefs but it is also untrue with regards the nature of the Earth and its inhabitants, by their own (incorrect) definition.

It only remains to point out that if the Earth is a closed system as per the Creationists' argument I believe that the 2LoT goes on to support evolution. They simply haven't thought it through.

In a system with a constant increase in disorderliness the transfer of DNA from one organism to its offspring would result in ever increasing changes and errors, which perhaps could wipe out a species (and therefore all species) pretty quickly, but at any rate would alter the next animal down the line each time they procreated. This means that the offspring of any animal would be changed slightly, so the animal which stepped onto the Ark would have descendants which are very much different to it today. It would be relatively difficult to argue that the lineage has remained stable in the face of the Law, once you've stated that the Law dictates that a state of chaos is the result of time passing. Even if you were to argue that the disorderliness had some sort of pattern to it you would be in the same boat of having to explain why your theory of increased chaos doesn't apply to organisms.

This change over time is the very definition of evolution... the only difference is that science states that the mechanism for evolutionary change is not simply random, due to occasional disorderliness in the DNA transfer process, but it is also driven by the need to survive and pass on genetic information to offspring.

So the next time a Creationist suggests using the 2LoT as an argument against evolution there are two things to bear in mind. Firstly, that their definition of entropy has nothing to do with thermodynamics, and secondly that their definition (if the Earth were a closed system) seems to support the concept of evolution more than it refutes it.

I hope this has made some sense, and is useful to you should you ever come across the 2LoT argument yourself.

___________________

I must insist that if you find any errors in this article that you point them out to me publicly on twitter, using @UBlasphemist, or using the comments section. I don't get offended or precious over my work, so feel free to make your point known to me. I'll happily credit any corrections which pass muster.

I used a variety of books and online sources to write this piece, but the most important was IronChariots.org, the marvellous brainchild of members of the Atheist Community of Austin, home of Matt Dillahunty and the Atheist Experience TV Show.

* It is important to point out that the Theory of Evolution does not address the origin of the universe, or any lifeforms which may develop within it. It has nothing whatsoever to say about either of these two things.