Author: VD

Catkiller! thinks rather highly of TIA:

In recent years, the intellectual foundation has been laid for the cultural and political ascendence of the right. Forget all the electoral ups and downs of the GOP, for they are little more than the final death throes of the old struggle between two sides in a staged match. A change is coming because the curtain has been lifted and the Wizard is just now finishing his pleas to pay no attention to the man behind it.

Powerful books have been written recently that will change this country as they have in the past. Common Sense convinced American colonists, among other things, that one need not blindly follow a king to please God. Narratives on the Life of an American Slave showed the intellectuals of its day what one of their own had to go through in order to become one of them. Today, we see the blooming spring created by books such as Jim Powell’s FDR’s Folly and Amity Shlaes’ The Forgotten Man which have defintifively put to rest the notion that left-wing economics saved the United States from collapse. Philip Hamburger’s Separation of Church and State has dispelled the myth that today’s concept of ‘separation’ is rooted in the same idea of anti-establishment religious liberty that animated the Founding Fathers. And Jonah Goldberg is turning the conventional political spectrum on its ear with Liberal Facism. If we give weight to these books as they warrant, those of us on the right will never again lack for an ironclad historical basis form which to contend with the left.

I’m confident that Vox Day’s The Irrational Atheist: Dissecting the Unholy Trinity of Dawkins, Harris, and Hitchens will take its place among this new canon as well.

Richarddawkins.netter Zarbi, on the other hand, seems to have been concerned enough about the book to lie about it, when he managed to even follow the arguments at all. Among many other things, he fails to understand that Richard Dawkins’s failure to properly define complexity can’t reasonably be blamed on me. The amazing thing isn’t that his self-refuting review manages to be almost entirely unrelated to the actual text of TIA despite its length, but the fact that some dim-witted atheists seriously consider it to be a substantive rebuttal.

I have to say that having read the book, it is still hard to determine what “dissect” is intended to mean. The best I can come up with is “try and show they are wrong about lots of stuff”. Well, fair enough. No-one should be surprised if three (or five?) atheist writers don’t make a mistake or two over the years. The problem for Day is that he is attempting to see dogma where there is none. You don’t score points by pointing out fallibility when there has been no claim of perfection, or by showing differences in the viewpoints of people who never claim any kind of unity. This kind of “straw man” approach is common in the book. But, anyway, how is this dissection attempted? Well, if one ignores the ad-hominem attacks that make up close to half the writing, it is by attempts to show that the Trinity are factually wrong in a considerable number of cases. In fact, a very large number of cases indeed. The book is apparently full of facts. There is no doubt that it has required a considerable amount of knowledge and research to write. The question is, is this mountain of facts relevant to the points being made? Well, much of the time, no. The facts are mostly used to very carefully take to pieces straw man arguments….

I feel I have dealt with sufficient chapters to reveal the nature of the book, and how the author’s case is put. There is much more to the book, but this is a review, not a full-length response. I shall leave that to others with more time and patience! I think the pattern here is clear. Day has attacked the “Trinity” with vigour, passion and energy. But his aim is poor, and he mostly puts considerable effort into dealing with positions that are clearly straw men, or that he seems to have simply misunderstood. There may be a book to be written about the phenomenon of the so-called “New Atheists” that deals with weaknesses in their arguments and their views. That book may well be useful, to help the debate about religion to proceed productively. “The Irrational Atheist” is certainly not such a book.

I’ve posted Zarbi’s review on the TIA forum, and below it I’ve also posted a list of 42 of the specific arguments addressed in the book, 12 of which were specifically made by Richard Dawkins – including the one Dawkins himself described as the central argument of The God Delusion – and 22 made by Sam Harris. I believe each argument is accurately and fairly described when it is not quoted in full, so I would be very interested in knowing precisely which of those 42 arguments Zarbi considers to be straw men. I tend to suspect that he doesn’t actually believe any of them are and that he is blatantly lying when he writes that I am “dealing with “positions that are clearly straw men”. Sam Harris’s forthright responses to my questions should suffice to prove that this is not even remotely close to being the case.

And since apparently it’s necessary for some of the dimmer brights, let me explain that by “dissect”, I mean to take apart, closely examine and adjudicate the factual and logical legitimacy of the arguments made by the three – no five – individuals. And for further clarification:

Unholy Trinity: Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens
New Atheists: Dawkins, Harris, Dennett
Four Horsemen of the Bukkakelypse: Dawkins, Harris, Dennett, Hitchens
Atheist Icons: Ingersoll, Russell, Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, Dennett, Onfray

I have the weirdest fans on the planet. All the atheists have their somber talking heads and interview clips, meanwhile, I’ve got this, courtesy of the Mad Aussie.

TIA#3 is definitely Spacebunny’s favorite. She just walked into my office saying “Bow-tch-bow-bow-tch-bow-bow”. It’s probably just as well Richard Dawkins is doing his best to ignore TIA, I can’t even imagine what the old guy make of one of these videos. I actually recorded a short spoken bit a few weeks ago, intending to YouTube it, but I’m terrified of letting Jaime get his hands on it.

The wife of a vet writes about the dilemma facing veterinary practices:

I appreciate your columns and often forward them to others. My husband will be receiving the one on the threat of women to real science. He is a veterinarian who graduated from vet school in 1967. He has 9 years of college science: a BS, a DVM and a post-doc degree. His graduating class of 57 had about 8 women in it. Now the vet school has about 100 per class and about 8 of them are men. Women work when it is convenient for them, as many of them go on to become wives and mothers. Because they work part time, they do not expect, nor get, the kind of wage that a male head of household needs to bring home. This depresses the wage level for the rest of the vets. Men are leaving the profession – at meetings, the attendance is mostly women and a few graying men. It is almost impossible for his boss to find a relief veterinarian to fill in so someone can go on vacation or keep a medical appt. Practices are for sale – and no one is trying to buy them. Women are very good at medicine, but men are the ones who pick up the animals to put them on the exam tables and who seem to know that you cannot take all day to decide on what course of action to take with a difficult case. In time, women won’t go into the profession either: coming out of school with $80,000 in debt and not being able to make that amount of money in a year or a year and a half is not much of a prospect. As my husband says, “I don’t get paid enough to know what I have to know to do this.” He repairs a cruciate for a small fraction of what it costs to have it done on a human – same with hip repair, ovariohysterectomy, etc., etc.

This is an interesting email because it corresponds with my own anecdotal evidence. The lady closely describes the situation of a friend of Spacebunny’s, who happens to be a married, former part-time vet who only practiced for four or five years. But at least the vet schools are selling more paper, that’s good for the economy, right?

But is the end result garbage or not? Bad Astronomy asks for a direct response, ergo he receives one:

Where did I say matter had anything to do with equality?

You didn’t, it was implied in your inaccurate statement that “evolutionary biology does in fact explain our concepts of justice, equality, and freedom”. Feel free to correct me if I am incorrect and you believe either 1) equality is a material substance, or, 2) you believe that equality does not exist. Otherwise, my assumption that you believe in the existence of an immaterial thing called equality stands. Do let us know your position on the matter.

You were the one conflating our not knowing what makes up dark matter and energy with abstract concepts of justice and equality, not me.

Absolutely. That’s why I said that you didn’t “realize that science is undermining the basis for materialism.” I certainly don’t hold you responsible for things I am saying you don’t realize.

And you were wrong in your premise and your application.

As for the premise, that’s possible, of course it was based entirely upon your initial statement. If that premise is wrong, then logical conclusion is wrong too, naturally. So, are you now saying that it is not true that “everything you can see, taste, hear, touch, just sense in any way… is less than 5% of the whole Universe”? I presume you are now saying that what cannot be sensed in any way can nevertheless be observed. Have these observations of dark matter and dark energy taken place since 2004, when this list of scientists declared that “The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed– inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples.”?

Let’s just cut to the chase, BA. Are dark energy and dark matter material or immaterial phenomena?

It’s entirely possible that I’m wrong, of course. If dark energy and dark matter are material phenomena, then one can’t reasonably use them to criticize belief in the existence of other phenomena that are not material. My impression, based on your statement about how we cannot sense 95 percent of the universe in any way, was that dark matter and dark energy are immaterial. This impression was supported by the statements of other scientists and by the nomenclature; not being a cosmologist, I simply make use of the information I am provided.

Turtle Power! And going back even further, here’s an interesting bit on doing Nintendo ports before the days of 8-bit power.

Disenchanted ex-richarddawkins.netter Dominic Saltarelli draws our attention to a group of cosmologists who would appear to agree with my position on the need for science reform:

The big bang today relies on a growing number of hypothetical entities, things that we have never observed– inflation, dark matter and dark energy are the most prominent examples. Without them, there would be a fatal contradiction between the observations made by astronomers and the predictions of the big bang theory. In no other field of physics would this continual recourse to new hypothetical objects be accepted as a way of bridging the gap between theory and observation. It would, at the least, raise serious questions about the validity of the underlying theory….

n open exchange of ideas is lacking in most mainstream conferences. Whereas Richard Feynman could say that “science is the culture of doubt”, in cosmology today doubt and dissent are not tolerated, and young scientists learn to remain silent if they have something negative to say about the standard big bang model. Those who doubt the big bang fear that saying so will cost them their funding.

This letter was published four years ago, so I’m curious whether both Bad Astronomy and the signers of the letter are correct and that dark matter and dark energy have been observed in the intervening time, whether the signers are incorrect and they had been observed previously, or whether Bad Astronomy was incorrect and it has not been observed. I should appreciate it if anyone with the appropriate credentials would deign to explain this seeming dichotomy.

It’s interesting, too, to see that so many self-identified skeptics so readily abandon all skepticism whenever the magic word “science” is mentioned. The ironic reality is that doubt is usually honored by Christians, but it cannot be tolerated by scientists.

On a related note, the latest scientific charade is beginning to fall apart. Scientists and science fetishists may hate it that a part-time rebel scientist such as myself should so confidently express contempt for the current consensus, but you don’t need impressive scientific credentials or even to make use the scientific method to recognize when a group of people are attempting to BS everyone else, you simply need to keep your eyes open and possess sufficient experience with human nature.

After three days of what the chairman called “the kind of free-spirited debate that is virtually absent from the global warming alarmist camp”, the 500 delegates issued the Manhattan Declaration, stating that attempts by governments to reduce CO2 emissions would “markedly diminish further prosperity” while having “no appreciable impact” on the Earth’s warming.

This inevitably attracted the kind of hysterical abuse that has become so familiar from warmist fanatics, tellingly contrasting with the measured arguments put forward by the scientists present. One was Anthony Watts, the meteorologist who last year famously forced Nasa’s Goddard Institute to correct a fundamental error in its data on US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s but the 1930s.

As I have said from the very start, Global Warming is nothing more than another science fraud designed to foster greater central government power. It’s not the first, it won’t be the last. The first clue should have been that the greatest champion was a politician turned propagandist. I’m just surprised that it’s taken the real scientists so long to unmask the charlatans. Note that even as its scientific justification fails, the Fourth Reich is taking a page from both the warmingmongers and the New Atheists in trying to blame nonexistent Global Warming for imaginary wars.

Big Bill encapsulates the inevitable decline of secular society:

Bottom line, science roolz and y’all are going extinct. Why? You don’t make babies, and the Muslims and evil Christians and Jews do. “God” tells them to.

You manufacture and live in such a materialistic, mechanistic, consumerist world that your own women don’t want to bear your children, they would rather scr*w a vibrating battery-powered plastic stick if they want to come rather than take a risk at having more than 1.2 of your children, well below the replacement rate of 2.1 kids.

You are right in one respect: humans are just animals and have the moral significance in the Universe (sans God) of pond scum. Thing is, having established that, your women don’t want to collectively waste their lives squirting out and raising the moral equivalent of pond scum when the alternative is Having Sex, Eating Food, and Buying Fun Stuff.

Succinct. Vulgar. Accurate. In a word, brilliant. And speaking of succinct, Sam Harris has responded to my list of seven questions for him derived from TIA. I’ll post them once I have his permission to do so; his answers are candid and somewhat surprising. One thing that has been settled is that the man is not intellectually dishonest, he clearly didn’t know about the electoral data that turns his Red State argument on its head.

Not even a woman scorned is as upset as the would-be scientific expert who is ignored as irrelevant:

If the producers of Expelled are so confident that they can make a strong case of conspiracy against scientists, then before they start showing this to uninformed politicians, they ought to screen it before scientists and historians and philosophers of science, who will be able to judge it on its merits.

Because, PZ, as we’ve already seen with TIA, whenever someone does make a strong case against secular scientists or atheists, these self-proclaimed champions of intellectual discourse suddenly go silent and try to pretend they’ve never heard of it. Dawkins was happy to write posts about TIA being “a flea” before it was published, Harris was perfectly happy to answer questions via email before it was published, a number of richarddawkins.net atheists were announcing their intention of doing chapter by chapter rebuttals of this little flea book… some of them even started on them.

And then, upon discovering that they were confronted by a strong case that they didn’t have the means to credibly answer, they all fell silent. You yourself, PZ, were offered a copy of TIA for review, but you weren’t interested, you’d rather just complain about the Creation Museum, the employment practices of fourth-rate colleges, and not being offered pre-release screenings of documentaries than address a substantive and detailed refutation of your atheist icons. So, how in the name of St. Darwin of the Galapagos are the producers of Expelled not justified in doing likewise and ignoring you and your fellow scientists?

Furthermore, it’s generally not left to the condemned to judge the case against him on its merits.

UPDATE – Since he’s not busy watching movies, it seems PZ has the time to weigh in on the matter of dark matter.

The amusing thing about some of the atheist potshots at TIA is the way it shows that they’re afraid to quote the very bits they’re complaining about. I’ve seen several complaints that I call Christopher Hitchens a drunk, but they never provide the quote because that would demonstrate that it’s not Hitchens’s drinking that is the relevant aspect of the quote, but rather his reliable, verifiable and factual wrongness.

In the The Irrational Atheist, Day employs some truly beautiful insults along with scathing rhetoric and his usual razor-sharp logic, factual analysis, and wit, to disarm, mock, and bludgeon his “Unholy Trinity” of Dawkins, Hitchens, and Dennett, as well as others. Read Joe Carter’s 60 second review at the Evangelical Outpost, where he quotes what is quite possibly the best insult I’ve ever heard:

On a totally trivial note, it might interest you to know that TIA is now paired by Amazon with the very book for which Crown Forum rejected it. I’m pleased with how it all worked out, but I can’t help but wonder if a bigger publisher would have made it more difficult for the Unholy Trinity to maintain the pretense that it doesn’t exist. Probably not.

But as I’ve said before, while they can avoid the book, they won’t be able to ignore the arguments it contains much longer. It’s been interesting to note that while the downloads have continued at about the same rate, the percentage of LIT and PDB downloads have increased in the last week. To me, that appears to indicate that those outside the blogosphere are beginning to hear about the book.