The Set of All Things Not Identical to Themselves

Violin week, I guess

2010-04-29T13:53:00.004-04:00

NPR's music blog ran a feature on five jazz violinists that Felix Contreras thought you should know. There's two I'd add to the list:

Joe Venuti: the most glaring oversight. If it wasn't for Grappelli's later career (when he finally branched out to genres of jazz other than gypsy), I'd probably place Venuti at the number one spot on the top violinist list without hesitating. Here's the audio for a recording of Venuti and Lang.

Interestingly, Venuti got bluesier with age.

This is reminiscent of the second violinist I'd have wanted in a top five, Stuff Smith. Where Venuti approached jazz like every song was a concerto for violin, Smith adapted New Orleans clarinet-like lines to the unique characteristics of the violin.

In another post at NPR, contemporary violinist Mark Connor talks about music education. I'm not sure about his goal to "re-brand America's various musical traditions as American classical music." But I'm all for recognizing music from the Mexico through the Northern Territories as North American music and paying more attention to how genres mix and musicians exchange ideas across supposed borders. The old style of field work - trying to find the oldest, most local-sounding players to record - really misses out on what's most exciting about American music: the number of ingredients that come together within it and the way it continues to evolve. That said, I'd be interested to hear these students, because the usual result of formally teaching violin students jazz or folk music is that they learn the melodies but not the feel or color. Learning the tunes by ear is a start, but I wonder if the deluge of styles will mean the students won't quite learn what separates the rhythm of a strathspey from swing or blue notes from the bent notes of Scottish and Irish music that originated in the imitation of bagpipes.

Sunday Music: Songwriting, Math, and Spirituality

2010-04-11T14:45:00.006-04:00

This week's last.fm top five: Feist, Folk Implosion, Sarah Vaughn, The Smiths, and T-Rex and Josephine Foster tied for fifth. Rather than talk about these fine folks, I'm in the mood for something completely different.

This afternoon my Google Reader feed served up Jeff Shattuck at Cerebellum Blues and his question, "Can an atheist be an artist?" Shattuck's post is actually about how religious (or, worse, "spiritual but not religious") artists give credit to the divine for their creations and why Shattuck finds this odd. The climax of the post comes in the last two paragraphs:

Last, and least, all these great songwriters proclaiming how their works are divine makes me sound like a total ass when I talk about how I think my songs come from me, thank you very much!

And that’s my point: because of the way artists talk about how they create, namely, some deity does it for them, a perception has been created that true artists are somehow closer to god than the rest of us. Well, for the record, I do think I am an artist and do not think there is a god of any kind.

If you'll bear with me, I'm going steer away from the cultural aspects and get geeky by saying that I see music in the same way that I see mathematics. Like a great song, there's something that seems supernatural and otherworldly about mathematics that some call “spiritual” or “transcendental,” and I think the connection runs deeper than just in the emotions the two elicit.

In this blog, we've seen how mathematics has been used - lazily and incorrectly - as proof that god exists. This view misses that a mathematical statement is true only in terms of its own rules (or axioms). If you change the rules, you change which statements are true and which are false, and the new rules still fall under the domain of math. It's a lot like how an English sentence is grammatical according to English grammar but not according to Russian grammar, even though both are human languages. There may be, as Chomsky proposed, a universal grammar which allows English, Russian, and every other human language, but even that needn't include every conceivable language (like Dolphin, Crow, or Vulcan). We could continuously find new ways to construct languages without changing our definition of language just as we develop new fields of mathematics without changing its definition.

The sidestep into language is a useful analogy because it's more intuitive to see how Russian and English folk music are as different as the languages. Each folk tradition has its own internally consistent patterns, but neither is any more musical than the other just as neither language is more or less grammatical. Just like Tolkien and Trekkies construct artificial languages, film composers have created specific sound palettes for fictional worlds. Some mathematicians (like those who work in the ) do these "what if" experiments all the time. It's essentially a game to see which alternative routes are useful or interesting, and the endeavor is just as legitimate an expression of humanity and creativity as music. It just happens that the objects involved in mathematical games (chiefly numbers) make them far more useful than musical games (and their equivalent reduction to pitches and divisions of time).

I brought up the game/puzzle aspect in an interview recently. (Do note that I was attributing the puzzle mentality to Jonathon Coulton's approach to songwriting, as I've written about before, and not Linnell's view of listeners. But it makes sense that way too.) This is also the frame of mind I'm speaking from whenever I say that literature, music, and the visual arts all work on the same principles. We can talk about space between notes, colors being in harmony, and literary leitmotifs. This is a lot like abstract- or meta-mathematics, where everything boils down to concepts like ordered sets and relationships. (MarkCC brought this sort of art-math connection not long ago here.)

One example of a musical game is trying to create new chord progressions that “work.” The relationship between music and math here is expressed most perfectly in attempts to write a generative grammar of jazz chord sequences. I won't go into the details, but suffice to say that in Western popular music - from Vaudeville to Bieber - there are only a handful of stock chord progressions that work. You've probably seen or heard humorous examples like this rant.

When you think about the relations and functions of the chords, rather than the specific notes or the instruments playing them, it becomes clear why this is the case. This is much like how there are only so many ways to organize an English sentence at the level of subjects, verbs, and objects. The variety – and the actual art - come in as one twists the form by replacing stock chords with new chords that have the same function. Bebop took this to extremes by extending harmony until nearly every tone was supported by nearly every chord, but one of the fundamental misunderstandings about this is the belief that this exercise freed or liberated the soloist. Rules weren't being eliminated, they were being created. If you imagine a music-making machine, boppers were adding more knobs (or discovering unused knobs). This increased the options but also made things more complicated for the person running the music-machine.

You're lucky it's not online or this talk of knob-twisting would have me veer toward typography in a reference to Hofstader's “Metafont, Metamathematics, and Metaphysics” (reprinted in Metamagical Themas), one of the best essays I've read this past year. What I took from it is that parameterizing art like this doesn't rob it of its creatively. There isn't a single ideal song, and there will always be undiscovered “knobs” that have been left at the same setting for millennia until one person comes along, tweaks it, and makes the result work. Even though music and mathematics are games in my view, they're much more open-ended than checkers or Hungry Hungry Hippos. You only have to look at musique concrete to see evidence for that.

All of this is how music becomes “transcendental” for me and how I explain where my songs come from without recourse to the divine or the spiritual to explain art and creatively (if those explanations even work). Before anyone says I've left out the emotional aspects, I don't think there's necessarily an either/or choice between treating art as a formal game and creating emotionally-engaging works. My favorite artists do both. I took the original question as a challenge that atheists could write the sort of music that others describe as spiritual or transcendental (the “closer to God” kind), not that atheists lacked human emotions or the ability to express them.

Shorts: Science Fandom

2010-03-21T15:30:00.003-04:00

Not quite random selections from the week:

Normal Science talks about science fandom. (Whatwhat?) Follow the links if you aren't familiar with the two debates under discussion. Enlightening stuff.

On a not dissimilar note, I finally listened to Michael Mann on Point of Inquiry (sadly Grotheless). Under discussion: how media coverage and denialists fail to cope with the history and breadth of the case for AGW.

Rationally Speaking tackles one of my sore spots once again, Krista Tippett Some day I will try to decide whether her fluff is simply meaningless or actually harmful.

Sunday Music: DJ Shadow and Dan the Automator

2010-03-21T14:58:00.004-04:00

This week's top five as tabulated by last.fm: De La Soul, Portishead, DJ Shadow (w/ Dan the Automator), Amy Winehouse, Belle and Sebastian.

I mentioned over at 52 Songs that US denizens have a tendency to avoid music from other cultures or containing lyrics in something other than English. There are a few exceptions. College undergrads majoring in a foreign language tend to obsess over one or two artists singing in that language. Anime-fans can get really into Japanese pop music. And a certain sort of geeky music lover stumbles onto Bollywood soundtracks. (In fact, I'm surprised the AV Club doesn't have a "Gateway to Geekery" feature on it.)

I was turned onto the Bollywood from a KCRW interview/guest DJ session with Danny Elfman where he played a few selections from Khal Nayak (which I have sitting here waiting for me to find the time to watch it). Along with the Asian Underground trend, a renewed interest in Bollywood soundtracks. I don't listen to as much proper Asian Underground anymore (and always preferred North African influenced music anyway), but the DJ Shadow / Dan the Automater tracks spun this week were from Bombay the Hard Way, which remains an albums that I frequently play when coding or doing data-entry. I'm not even sure what either producer contributed. Here's "Theme from Don", which sounds simultaneously like 1998 (the year Bombay was dropped) and Isaac Hayes style funk.

Sunday Music: Bessie Smith

2010-03-14T16:37:00.004-04:00

This week's top five: Echo and the Bunnymen, Lemuria, Bessie Smith, The Presidents of the United States of America, and Fotheringay.

Here's Smith with one of her signature songs, "St. Louis Blues," in her only known film appearance.

The arrangement - possibly by the song's composer, W. C. Handy - is very atypical for Smith's recorded work, although it may fairly represent what her appearances in larger stage shows may have sounded like. Her recorded career begins with small-group sessions based almost entirely around her singing the melody with only a little improvisation from a horn or two around her alto voice. Later recordings introduce more musicians and fleshed-out arrangements.

Smith occupies that wonderful gap between blues and vocal jazz that I like. She's representative of what's now called "classic female blues," and from my (young) standpoint, it looks like their stories were ignored by blues and jazz historians for being an impure amalgamation too influenced by record companies afraid of black male blues singers (who have always defined the blues tradition). It's become apparent that female singers like Smith were well-regarded and drew huge crowds (not just white record company owners). Smith was included in the Ken Burns's Jazz and her fame and contemporary influence was adequately noted, but that documentary's Whiggish construction of jazz as its own microcosm failed to really tell stories like Smith's (or W. C. Handy's) because it focused too much on their virtuosity and humble beginnings, rather than how they grew as musicians.

Here's Smith with something more representative of her 20s output:

And here she is with back up from a dance band (Buck Washington's in fact):

Sunday Music: A Mix

2010-03-07T13:26:00.006-05:00

This week's last.fm top five: Tommy Peoples, Yusef Lateef, Steeleye Span, The Beach Boys, and Jelly Roll Morton's Red Hot Peppers. Some of the numbers were inflated due to an iTunes/iPhone/Last.fm double-scrobbling mix-up. I don't have much to say on any of these today, so here's the short version.

Jelly Roll Morton: I've been meaning to sit down and fully absorb the Alan Lomax collection that Rounder released. Morton's personal myth-making is probably going to feature in another project I'm working on.

Steeleye Span: More Brit folk rock. Here they are with "Lark in the Morning."

Tommy Peoples: Discovered thanks to Altan and my exploring of their roots. Peoples is one of the best living outputs from the Donegal tradition. Here's part one of a documentary on him.

The Beach Boys are the sort of band on whom everything has been said before. In case you haven't seen it yet, here's a Youtube channel breaking apart their classic album, Pet Sounds. tape by tape. Here's "Wouldn't It Be Nice."

Sunday Music: The Buggles

2010-02-28T15:37:00.003-05:00

This week's top five: Taraf de Haïdouks, The Buggles, Steeleye Span, Talking Heads, Eurythmics. Quite the unexpected 80s week!

Like everybody and their grandma, I first heard The Buggles through "Video Killed the Radio Star." The Buggles were primarily multiinstrumentalists Geoff Downes and Trevor Horn. A few years ago, I went through a new wave phase and picked up 1980's The Age of Plastic. I wasn't disappointed by what I heard.

Possbily because it was around this time of year that I first heard it, the album has wintry associations for me. Where Devo's futurism came with a campy candy shell and Kraftwerk's was cold, robotic and alien, The Buggles looked on the present with the nostalgic perspective of an unsatisfied future. This is underscored by the seamless blending of traditional and electronic instruments, especially in the doubling of synth parts with female vocals. The Age of Plastic brings this across through its excellent pop production sensibilities that bring to mind both Phil Spector and Mozart.

Aside from the big single, "Elstree" also captures the future-nostalgia and the use of synths to fill in for the voices and timbres of traditional instruments and part-writing.

The synth strings and the harplike arpeggios are status quo for synthpop, but its the "woodwind" synth countermelodies that create The Buggles' signature sound. It's touches like that which should earn the band a reputation greater than that of a novelty song writing one-hit wonder. I've been recommending the album to everyone I think will listen, but it's yet to really spark the same response from anyone. Here's hoping a little more spaghetti on the wall might stick.

Shorts: All over the place

2010-02-23T11:56:00.003-05:00

Jerry Fodor and Massimo Piattelli-Palmarini are questioning whether natural selection is capable of producing symbol-manipulators or language. Babel's Dawn reviewed the book.

Steven Novella calls attention to an economic study of early 20th century snake oil.

Machines Like Us reports on a study linking General Intelligence to specific well-connected regions of the frontal and parietal lobes.

Plans are in the works for an Eddie Condon documentary, according to Jazz Lives.

3 Mustaphas 3 : live!

2010-02-23T11:46:00.003-05:00

Neither the greatest recording quality nor the best of performances, but after being a fan for ten years, it's great to finally see 3 Mustaphas 3 on stage.

Playing the Greek classic: "Anapse To Tsigaro"

Playing "Linda, Linda":

The videos show them being slightly more indulgent then their nearly-always tasteful recordings, but their passion and respect for the music is on fine display here.

A Radiophonic Workshop doc

2010-02-22T13:43:00.006-05:00

I spent yesterday afternoon watching The Alchemists of Sound, a 2003 BBC documentary on its Radiophonic Workshop department. My fellow Americans probably know of the Workshop mostly through the Doctor Who theme and the parody/pastiche of its output that forms the soundtrack to Look Around You. Highly recommended, despite the creepy man in blue in the background of every interview shot.

Here's part 1 of 6.

People keep asking what End Times and I will do when Lyndsy leaves for France in August. Well... I wouldn't be surprised if synths and musique concrète played a role in at least what I turn to next.

Sunday Music: Altan

2010-02-21T16:24:00.006-05:00

Top listening this week: Altan, John Hartford, Adam and the Ants, The Smiths, and Andrew Bird's Bowl of Fire. Since The Staggerer's released our CD last night, I decided to go the celtic route.

Here's Altan with reels from John Doherty.

Last week, I briefly lamented the end of the experimentation in British folk rock. The 90s saw the same thing happen again as a pan-celtic genre developed. Altan didn't arrive on the scene as early as the Bothy Band or Planxty, but they forged their own highly influential sound and repertoire made distinct by the influence of Donegal traditional fiddle playing and by the unique lineup: the twin fiddling of Mairéad Ní Mhaonaigh and Paul O'Shaughnessy, Frankie Kennedy's flute and his understated harmonies, the propulsive rhythm section in Ciarán Curran and Mark Kelly, and after Kennedy's death, the addition of Dermot Byrne on accordion. Altan's not-so-secret weapon was the infectiously joyous voice of Ni Mhaonaigh, often joined by the voices of the lads to good effect.

In its first ten years, Altan was the sort of band where the combined strengths of the members together created something greater than a simple sum of the parts. They explored new and exciting textures. The band's work mirrored what was just begin to stir in Americana/bluegrass at the time. Sadly, just like the American counterparts, Altan's efforts culminated in creating a new generic sound due in part to the sudden and unexpected commercial potential of Irish music following Riverdance, but along the way inspired virtuoso upstarts in this new subgenre, such as Solas.

Altan and I fell out with 2000's Another Sky, which I no longer even own a digital copy of. I remember feeling things had become too bland, too predictable, and the guests - Jerry Douglas, Bonnie Rait, the string section - too emblematic of that "yes, we are trying to get spotlighted by NPR" attitude. I get the impression that, if it had been released a year later, it would have featured the O Brother style cover art that dominated folk and bluegrass music artwork for the next five years.

The New Adventures of Sunday Music: The Decemberists

2010-02-14T13:47:00.003-05:00

It's time to pull myself away from Mighty Boosh on demand and slap on my ol' blogger hat. Writing yields more writing I find, and I'm in serious need of writing motivation. And so, on with the Sunday Music! My lasf.fm top five this week: The Decemberists, Dame Darcy, Big Mama Thornton, The Goofus Five, and Van Dyke Parks.

The Decemberists dominated because I finally got around to watching an old KCRW Morning Becomes Eclectic video of theirs that had been waiting in my iTunes podcast queue behind a dozen TED Talks and BBC documentaries. And as such, I found myself revisiting The Hazards of Love, which had been in my short list of albums of the year (but lost out, as you can read here in the FW Reader). So I'm beyond fashionably late to the Hazards party, but the point of these Sunday Music pieces have been as much about exploring new music as closely examining old favorites.

The Decemberists w/ Shara Worden - "The Wanting Comes in Waves / Repaid."

Both Worden and lead singer/songwriter Colin Meloy seem to be having monitor issues here (you know those expressions all too well if you've ever suffered a bad stage), but Worden pulls it together to deliver those powerful soaring vocals that pushed the album up my top 2009 list (admittedly, a very short list).

The Decemberists have a lot of what I look for in a band. The current line-up is full of talented musicians, all real pro's at their instruments. (Keyboardist Jenny Conlee alone deserves more credit than she usually receives.) They take risks. Even when they repeat themselves ("The Chimbley Sweep" -> "The Mariner's Revenge Song"), the second attempt aims farther than the original and is usually better crafted besides. This is a band who - on the whole - learns from their mistakes and will probably leave behind a solid body of work, regardless of what the naysayers have been saying since first complaining that Picaresque failed to sound like Castaways and Cutouts.

Sadly - like those naysayers - what I view and what the band views as their mistakes don't always match up. I stuck by them through the Crane Wife debates of 2006/2007. Where others focused on the prog and arena rock, I clearly heard the sounds of Pentangle, Fairport, and my other British folk favorites - influences on The Decemberists that I had always heard and that Meloy himself was then drawing attention to through interviews. Still, I had to agree, I didn't much like the intro to "The Island" either, and it seemed clear to me that the band was writing music to be performed in front of the larger crowds they were growing used to. Certain subtleties of tone, harmony and rhythm don't translate well all the way back to the cheapseats, and the band seemed to be turning toward repetitive rhythms and those powerful sustained chords of the least interesting subgenres of rock.

With this album, I'm finally ready to admit it. Aside from a few interludes, Hazards relies far too heavily on the arena rock, butt rock, or whatever you want to call it. Witness, for example, what they do with what could be a quite lovely folk melody in "Won't Want for Love (Margaret in the Taiga)."

Becky Stark's vocals are perfect for the song, but the accompaniment mostly contrasts the four-to-the-floor thump of the verses with that barely syncopated rock rhythm (which for unknown reasons I forever associate with the arty side of 90s alternative). The final product works, but it feels too simple, like they rushed into the arrangement. We get an ABABCBBBB... where the C is all to brief, where we're clearly meant to want to sing-along through every chorus, and where the themes don't really develop. These are hard things to do (and things I beat up myself over every day), but the band had all the time they needed to prepare the album. At some point someone should have said, "As fun as this is, we're ending the song exactly where it started. It's just "O, Valencia" again. Let's see if we can do something else right here."

I'm mostly saddened by all this because 1) there are some otherwise great songs on the album and 2) with all the instruments and talent at their disposal, there's really no reason for them to always rely on overdriven guitars to give a song a sense of power or for the melodyless guitar shredding solos that spot the album. One of the best aspects of British folk rock from the 60s and 70s was that how it involved a wide variety of instruments, to the point that the first decade of bands each invented its own sound and textures. (By the end of the 70s, things settled down and a single uniform folk rock sound developed.)

So, The Hazards of Love: addicting enough that I'm still listening to it but in some ways a disappointment. Still, I find myself looking forward to whatever the band attempts next.

New Blog

2009-02-19T12:04:00.001-05:00

My musical commentary has moved to this blog. And when I'm not reading Kant, I've mostly been thinking about music these days, so that's all the blogging I've been doing.

Everything counts in large amounts

2008-12-19T13:16:00.004-05:00

Today's xkcd comic:

That set me off wondering, what was most influential or valuable in my high school days? Being enrolled in two philosophy courses this semester, I've lately found myself thinking about an art teacher who caught me reading How the Mind Works and how what he said was so far off the mark: I'm definitely not more the philosophy type than the scientist type. If someone who knew me quite well at the time could miss that badly, I wonder how far off the curriculum was? What did I do that really counted during my college career?

Books that counted
Principia Discordia by Greg Hill and Kerry Thornley, Zenarchy also by Kerry Thornley, and T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism by Peter Lamborn Wilson writing as Hakim Bey. Oddly enough, these were all books that I only found out about and acquired due to their distribution on the fledgling world wide web. I can't decide which was more important, but all three influenced me politically and religiously by means of presenting something simple and completely outside the box of 90s revivalism.

The Sandman by Neil Gaiman et al. Made me appreciate both comics and fantasy again and convinced me that they could be written and analyzed at a more theoretical level than I had been exposed to.

How the Mind Works by Steven Pinker. I may not have grown up to be an evolutionary psychologist or even a bona fide cognitive scientist, but it's largely due to this book (and subsequently reading its prequel, The Language Instinct) that I became aware of linguistics.

Classes that counted
Latin: I was a B/C/D English student my first two years of high school. Then I took a semester of Latin and shot back up into the A's where I'd spent my elementry and middle school years. Through making syntactic and semantic arguments explicit, Latin made me interested in the structure of language and convinced me that something was wrong with our language arts education program. I would go on to study English education mostly as a result of this class and reading How the Mind Works.

Music Theory: I didn't go on to study music formally, but that class taught me the vocabulary (literal and musical) behind all the things I had only implicitly known before.

Activities that counted
Jazz band. Playing jazz showed me the horizons of music and kept me from being satisfied with three chord rock (even if I did and still like it).

Reading. Seriously. So many high school students stop reading for fun. I learned a lot that way about dozens of subjects that wouldn't be presented to me in class until college (if then).

Not doing drugs. Yeah, ok, it's no more of an activity than not-stamp-collecting is, but class issues aside, it's amazing the difference in outcomes between those students who do and don't.

Records that counted
I think I'll save this for a future post and go into more detail.

Shorts: It's Tricky

2008-12-15T15:00:00.004-05:00

Over at Mr. Verb, a state senator-elect in Arizona wants to rewrite the history of good (aka white) immigrants.

Over at Echidne, Suzie tackles media language and rape, focusing on the use of victim. Part 1 here and a followup here.

Good Math, Bad Math reviews what tautologies are, being a benefit for Dr. Egnor.

Secularism and Anti-Science

2008-12-15T13:09:00.003-05:00

This Los Angeles Times opinion piece by David Klinghoffer sparked the interest of Massimo Pigliucci over at Rationally Speaking. I recommend reading them both or at least the latter if you're short on time.

It was pointed out to me at a CFI conference last summer that atheists/secularists/etc devoting too much time to religion. A member or two of the Secular Alliance of IU has spoken up that complementary and alternative medicine should become a focus of ours (a potentially controversial move in this town). I agree and would add that CAM is in general part of larger issues in the public understanding of science.

Anecdotes from Australia and the not-too-long ago study that showed people who reject traditional religion are more likely to hold other paranormal beliefs (such as astrology). A fair number of people do not reject religious beliefs because of the philosophical, scientific, or historical arguments that persuaded many of us. They reject traditional religion because it is pompous, self-righteous, and fails to make the mysterious personal. Criticisms that they frequently lob at science as well.

As seen in the Klinghoffer piece, there's a pervasive belief that science either fails to address or cannot address vitally important aspects of the human condition. While we can easily point out where an individual misunderstands the scientific literature on a topic, what is difficult to persuade mystery-seekers of is that no one can address some of these issues. The failures and blind spots of contemporary science are not a license to invent other explanations or a means to justify of "ancient wisdom."

The critical thinking tools that we use as non-theist naturalists champion are applicable to both religion and paranormal beliefs that haven't been as codified. I am not suggesting that we abandon critiques of religion. I believe religion does need to be opened up to critique, particularly where it interferes in politics, education, and scientific progress. But given the current numbers, we are far more likely to find allies among theists who belief in ghosts than among atheist ghost-hunters.

Shorts: Science Brings Out the Big Guns

2008-12-13T14:02:00.003-05:00

Clearing up some open Firefox tabs. Which means it's time for shorts again!

William Lane Craig's Kalam Cosmological Argument received attention from J. Brian Pitts and the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science. See it here (requires Acrobat). Craig responded here.

Michael Egnor and Steven Novella have been going back and forth over physicalism, neuroscience, and the hard problem of consciousness. See Novella's recent post for the update. Recently, notable philosopher David Chalmers has chimed in to comment on Egnor's misuse of Chalmer's more famous arguments. Egnor responds here.

Heretics on This American Life

2008-12-13T13:52:00.002-05:00

A recent This American Life episode focused on the fascinating story of Reverend Carlton Pearson. Pre-final madness kept me from posting this first and Daylight Atheism got to it first. The episode comes highly recommended.

Pearson's ministry's website is here.

Creation Museum: video

2008-12-10T20:44:00.000-05:00

SAIU trip to the Creation Museum from Secular Alliance on Vimeo.

Meh continued

2008-11-24T11:10:00.003-05:00

It seems meh's dictionary entry has angered some folks at Topatoco. Beware bystander passive-aggressivism.

Creation tripping

2008-11-22T14:15:00.002-05:00

I recently went to a Creation Museum with a student group. Check it out here.

Welcome to teh dictionary

2008-11-20T11:33:00.005-05:00

A few days back the National Post reported on the addition of meh to the Collins English Dictionary with an article that featured some odd notes on other words from teh internets, notably teh. The tone of the article is mostly "if meh can do it, why not all these other patently silly innovations", but what struck my eye were the items selected and the descriptions thereof.

On teh

Or, there's always the purposely misspelled words, such as "teh," a variation of "the," which is seen frequently on sites like Cute Overload and has the impressive ability to become a gerund, as in: "This is teh suck".

At least the author noticed that teh is purposefully mispelled (at least some of the times). As I noted in my undergraduate thesis (seriously) teh seems to be an indicator not only of definiteness, but of some superlative, unique, or ideal status. Teh suck means something like "sucking as much as possible" (and doesn't include a gerund in any sense I'm familiar with). I'm not sure why Cute Overload was mentioned, but hat tip to them as they brought my attention to the article. This usage seems to be more closely related with online gamers or Anon in my mind.

(EDIT: It appears the gerund comment originates in the Wikipedia entry for teh. In teh suck, teh is part of a nominalized verb phrase, which are normally formed with the present participle and called gerunds. Whether you want to call teh suck a gerund phrase I'll leave up to you, but the article without the head most definitely isn't a gerund in and of itself.)

One odd characterization was the way netspeak uses repeated characters.

there's the intentionally superfluous use of the letter Y to convey a sing-songy form of excitement, as in: "Heyyy! Can't wait to partyyyy!"

Is this really limited to y in anyone else's online idiolect? Surely at least everyone who allows yyyyy... allows other vowels, but I know I've even seen this applied to final consonants.

And one more requisite (possible) misattribution:

And of course, thanks to Perez Hilton, we also have the expression, "Loves it" instead of "Love it."

Didn't this expression originate in teen girl speak? I hesitate to guess, as I'm sure I was a latecomer to the expression. This has to at least predate the Perez Hilton site because I know I've heard Paris Hilton say it on television and I strongly doubt she'd have borrowed it from Perez.

The Return of Sunday Music (on a Monday, of course): Classic Rock?

2008-11-17T11:28:00.004-05:00

Saturday saw me on a long car ride with several people from the SAIU (report forthcoming). Before we'd even left campus, my mp3 player shuffled its way to a track from the Afro Samurai soundtrack by RZA, and I was immediately asked whether it represented my musical taste. (I think I replied offhandedly that "everyone likes the RZA".) The person asking said something about how she figured I was a classic rock fan. I said of all the music out there, that's probably what I like the least.

And, of course, I thought about that statement through the day and about how idiosyncratic taste can be. I might have forgotten the exchange altogether if I hadn't woken up in the mood to listen to Bat Out of Hell the following day.

"Bat Out of Hell." Meat Loaf. Live.

I've only recently been persuaded to re-listen to Meat Loaf, and as yet, this is the only album of his that I listen to non-ironically. (Bat Out of Hell II earns a few 90s dance party plays on occasion.) Despite the years of punkdom telling me that I should consider it overproduced and bloated, it's actually those operatic and prog aspects of the album that attract me.

I can easily do without Led Zeppelin, The Who, Aerosmith, and most of the other bands that get spun on classic rock format stations. I have no desire to hear George Thorogood ever again. (Seriously.) Steely Dan, Pink Floyd, Yes, and others I remain undecided on mostly because I've listened to so little.

In fact, to no small degree, it's seems to be blues rock which turns me off the most,despite my liking the blues (at least up until the 40s). The groups I like from the 60s and 70s tend to move away from the blues roots of their music: King Crimson, Hawkwind, David Bowie, Sparks, Can, Kraftwerk.

A portion of "The Golden Void." Hawkwind.

This song would be right at home sitting next to an allegedly post-rock track like "East Hastings" by Godspeed You! Black Emperor.

But blues influence is an arbitrary line as the likes of Jethro Tull are no strangers to my stereo (not to mention the oodles of soul, neosoul and R&B on my hard drive). Sometimes I think it's the overly "masculine" approach of many classic rock bands. Balls to the wall sound, straightforward lyrics, and lack of introspection (intellectual or musical) is what tends to determine which 80s punk groups I prefer (Husker Du over Black Flag, for example). And yet I can tolerate Iron Maiden and Journey.

As stated in my post on Feist last spring, I think my tastes can be summed up as liking music that is 1) the adventurous and/or 2) well-crafted. On occasion, I'll listen to the best of early Hall and Oates for the latter. On other occasions, I'll listen to the best and worst of Devo for the former. And in an act like the Eurythmics, the two are sometimes joined (though they also had their greatest misses). When it comes to a great deal of classic rock, adventurousness is tossed out with rock conservatism. A group like AC/DC never had to change their basic formula. And well-crafted? Perhaps that's where the infamous guitar noodling on top of a simple three-chord blues patterns removes points: I'd much rather listen to Muddy Waters explore in the 40s than listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd tread water.

This still leaves out an explanation for why I dislike some groups (notably Zeppelin and The Who), but perhaps asking for a complete explanation is too much.

It doesn't contage the mind: How to write a negative review

2008-10-26T12:11:00.001-04:00

A friend passed this along to me. A set of clippings from a Japanese reviewer that are brilliantly inventive in their negativity.

The theys have it

2008-09-18T22:48:00.004-04:00

Last night, I came across this passage from midway through A Clash of Kings.

It took him [Weese] only three days to earn the place of honor in her nightly prayers. "Weese," she would whisper, first of all. "Dunsen, Chiswyck, Polliver, Raff the Sweetling, The Tickler and the Hound. Ser Gregor, Ser Armory, Ser Ilyn, Ser Meryn, King Joffrey, Queen Cersei." If she let herself forget even one of them, how would she ever find him again to kill him?

(Ser is "Song of Ice and Fire" speak for a knight's honorific.)

The first time I read the passage, I interpreted both him's as referring to Weese. It was only the oddity of that interpretation that made me realize the pronouns were the generic masculine. Until that line, I had already known that my dialect was incredibly permissive of singular they. Just this morning I found myself using they in a reply to an email which specified the gender of the student I meant to refer to. (I fixed it only to make sure it didn't look like I hadn't read the original email closely.) What I hadn't realized is how much I had come to expect it and what that meant for anaphora resolution. Even removing Queen Cersei from the list doesn't seem to salvage the sentence for me. A generic person - even from a list of guys - is still they to me.

Although it should be said, "how would she ever find them again to kill them" in that context is equally odd because of the them in the preceding clause. The first reading I get is that forgetting just one would mean that the girl would fail at killing everyone on her list. I would have to change the line to something like "how would she ever find that one again to kill them" so that that one intervenes between the two them's.

Ah, the foibles of English, as a German-born violinist I once knew might say.

Sunday Music: Curtis Eller

2008-08-31T23:59:00.003-04:00

Well! Now that I'm back at my own computer, preparing for school and another all-too-short semester, how about some late Sunday Music?

Curtis Eller. "Sugar in My Coffin." Live at Dr. Sketchy's.

A nice performance that picks up as it goes along and the audience gets involved. A wonderful spoken part in the middle.

I still have yet to pick up a couple of Eller's albums so I can't quite comment on his growth as a songwriter, but I've spun his Taking Up Serpents Again more than a few times in the last year. Like many of the new folk/Americana acts appearing these days, he seems to take a slightly detached (some say 'ironic') approach to his craft. Though his stage presence is full of life, it seems that he typically writes about experiences of others, particularly historical figures (Lincoln above, Amelia Earhart and Buster Keaton also get songs on the same album) or characters immersed in the sort of America one doesn't expect from a NYC native (like the snake handling of the title song).

There's nothing inherently wrong with this. It describes some of my favorite acts as well (Tom Waits, the Decemberists), and there certainly wasn't any shortage of folk, blues and country being written internally within the recording and sheet music industries of the Big City even during the supposed heydays of the genres. But it seems to me that many of these genres are still waiting for another American songwriter who has genuinely lived an interesting life through the highs and lows of our culture and stumbled onto some interesting ground without having searched for it.

Which, of course, brings me to fellow banjoist, John Hartford.

John Hartford. "Steamboat Whistle Blues."

I became a fan of Hartford after hearing only his performance on Béla Fleck's second Tales from the Acoustic Planet in 1999. I bought and borrowed Hartford's 70s albums quickly after as well as his more recent Ed Haley fiddle albums. The man wrote charming, original music that was deeply rooted in tradition and his own obsessions. Despite rarely writing a true love song, everything he did seemed to come straight from his strange, strange heart.

One of the things missing in the NYC trad school is being in touch with the techniques of the old guard. Hartford was a veritable encyclopedia of American traditions, particularly when it came to fiddle and banjo styles. Like the movement from regional traditions to a generic 'celtic music' in the seventies, the movement toward a generic 'Americana' has removed much of the liveliness and diversity. (The same happens in other genres as well. Witness the recent boom in 'gypsy music' that seems ignorant of so much Roma music.)

I can't help but feel with artists like Eller that their banjos are props. It's certainly hard to imagine Eller without his banjo, but something about the way he plays it seems generic and impersonal. His technique is neither traditional nor new. There's few echos of Doc Boggs and even fewer voicings never heard before.

But I'll grant that Eller knows his own voice quite well, but then, the power of a song - the part that makes it iron-clad in Hartford's terms - is often what the song allows others to re-interpret. A rather zen-like strength in bending.

Oh, and Hartford also knew how to kick it up on stage too.

Teachers and Critics

2008-07-28T00:19:00.000-04:00

A week ago I returned from the 2008 CFI Student Leadership Conference. Lasting from Thursday evening until Sunday at noon, the conference saw a wide variety of lectures, discussions, and activities. Saturday and Sunday in particular were filled with information useful to leaders of community and campus groups. The three other officers of the IU Secular Alliance who attended and I will have plenty to work on and discuss before September brings about the return of the student body.

Although there were a lot of positive things I could write about (the discussion on representation and diversity could warrant a blog of its own), I felt like there was one leftover thought from Friday's sessions that I needed to exorcise, a thought that briefly came up today during a "Russell's Tea Party" here in Bloomington.

Despite reminders throughout the weekend that the conference was not an atheist conference, during the Friday sessions there was an inordinate amount of war rhetoric, sometimes subtle and sometimes plainly stated in the "us vs them" terms of allies and enemies. I'm certainly sympathetic to the notion that we are engaged in a culture war, but as advocates for a democratic process and reasonable debate, the metaphor seems like an inappropriate way for us to characterize the relationship. Do we really want to play the role of religion's adversary? Is the purpose of the skeptical/secular community to be simply critics and fact-checkers?

I think we have more to offer. We possess the narrative that relates us to our world, and it's not simply a narrative of facts, its a narrative about how we know what we know, about how we are constantly able to learn more, and about how anyone, anywhere, can expand our knowledge about ourselves.

As critics and antagonists, a number of our voices are failing because they speak without listening. Not a small percentage of vocal atheists have a tendency to define the terms of religion for the religious and ignore the many different forms of belief. Just as creationism varies from YEC to Deism, even the various traditions of a single religion like Christianity runs from those who believe they know their god's will to those who treat religion as a learning experience. When some atheists insist that religion is purely dogmatic or based on blind faith alone, it leaves out the many believers for whom naturalism and debates with nonbelievers are means toward understanding their god and our place in creation, and it leaves out those who have had deeply moving personal experiences.

To avoid such strawmen, we need to let the religious be in charge of their own definitions. We need to become aware of the disagreements between theists and begin our work there. The most important questions we can ask are "how do you know this?" and "how would you know if you are wrong?" More likely than convincing believers to deconvert is the possibility that we can convince believers that they can gain a better understanding of their religion if they adopt an improved method of verification. Contemporary disagreements show that the problem of communication isn't just an abstract proof, it's something religious groups and individuals struggle with daily. It's at the very heart of the translation issues that divides denominations and keeps grammars in Biblical Hebrew in stock at Christian bookstores.

In fact, that's a prime example of an area where we can do better. Everyday people are interested in learning more about the life of Jesus and early Christian history. This has spurred The Da Vinci Code and the many books that debunk it into the bestseller lists. With all of the multiple theories put forward, one can't help but find some common ground with any particular individual, no matter what they believe: at least some version of the Jesus story must be false in their view. The question is how they determine which are false and which are true and why their preferred theory passes those tests.

In American education, there has long been an on-and-off focus on constructivism: the concept that complex ideas aren't memorized so much as they are reconstructed within the mind of an individual student as they become familiar with the evidence and continuously evaluate the idea. In a constructivist's classroom, students are treated less as robots being fed code and more like miniature scientists set on the task of demonstrating some claim. It shifts the instructional focus from "ix X right?" to "how could we know X?" Many of the topics that come up in a religious debate are best served by the constructivist approach, especially as neither side typically has access to all of the data. We cannot show that Jesus never existed (if we even wanted to), but we can help show that if we accept the evidence for a life of Jesus as described in the Gospels it would lead us to criteria that demand we accept many other claims about the ancient and modern worlds that many Christians would be reluctant to accept.

Of course, this approach has the possibility of appearing smarter-than-thou, as if we are educators and possess all the answers. But this is a misunderstanding of both education and our position (albeit not a misunderstanding held by believers alone). We do not have the answers and never will. Skepticism isn't founded on statements like "Bigfoot doesn't exit" or "remote viewing is bullshit." Modern skepticism is about questioning the validity of the processes and reasoning that lead to claims and the acknowledgment that human psychology is predisposed to think irrationally without safeguards. A war narrative seems inappropriate for what should be a negotiation between multiple voices in a secular, democratic state. We are not here to combat the religious. We are here to show how effective homespun science is uncovering reality.

Sunday Music: The Pogues

2008-07-27T22:41:00.003-04:00

The Pogues. "The Body of an American." Studio version in lieu of the classic SNL performance. Lyrics here.

If I did a chronologically ordered series on the bands that changed my life (or at least my conception of music), R.E.M. would beat out The Pogues by a few years. If it was ordered by importance of effect, my current obsession with American roots music of the 1920s and 30s would probably force me to place some other artists higher on the list. But there is absolutely no question that the first time I heard If I Should Fall From Grace With God left an incredible and probably permanent impression on me that colored my last years in high school and first few years of my undergraduate days. I would study Irish mythology, write papers on the likes of Joyce and Donleavy, and even start my own celtic punk band, The Sods, all as a result of semi-randomly checking out IISFFGWG from the local library.

So bear this as warning that my characterization of The Pogues and their importance in the Grand History of Everything might be slightly overstated.

Despite the literary references of MacGowan's lyrics and the eight-person arrangements of their middle period, The Pogues made the (still newly named) celtic music scene seem far less cerebral and "artsy" than the 70s folk-rockers which I had rediscovered in my parents' record collection. The Pogues were at once intellectual and yet stubbornly low-brow. Like a pub quiz penned by Behan.

Although polls on email lists and message boards tend to favor Red Roses for Me and Rum, Sodomy and the Lash, the lineup that recorded "Body" and IISFFGWG was my favorite. They went on to record two subpar albums (although there really are some hidden gems inside Peace and Love), but I'm willing to defend their experimentation and excesses as the very same aspects that made them great. At the time considered one of their faults by folk purists, that they worked with nontraditional instruments (piano accordion, five string banjo, drum set) only added to their originality. Even when they tried on other genres ("Fiesta", "If I Should Fall...", "London Girl") it rarely felt like they were falling into the trap of doing things the way they've always been done. (Well, except for throwaway recordings like the Sex Pistols knock-off "Hot Dogs with Everything"...) Each album, each song, the band reinvented itself. Much unlike many "pure" folk bands, the interplay between Finer, Fearnley, and Woods in particular stands out as the three seemed to negotiate their roles song-by-song rather than filling parts by rote. (And if the SNL version were available, one would be able to hear Woods' characteristic cittern noodling around the melody as he reinvented his part once again in live performance.)

These days, there are many Pogues imitators with neither the passionate genius of MacGowan nor the musical skill of the other members. Brutish, cartoonish meldings of generic celtic melodies with generic punk bands are no strangers to stages at places like the Warped tour. So much did the jock-rock version of "paddy punk" disillusion me that I more-or-less abandoned playing any sort of celtic music for years once I quit The Sods (and although there were other issues, it probably had some effect on my lack of motivation for finishing the second album).

When I began playing accordion with The Staggerers this summer, I rediscovered how much I loved The Pogues. Even after ten years of fandom, I'm still able to learn from them. The St Pat's day ruckus and "Fairy Tale of New York" karaoke at Christmas time really does the band no justice.

Shorts: The John Tierney Experience

2008-07-16T11:47:00.005-04:00

A New Frontier for Title IX: Science - John Tierney, NYT (requires registration). Esteemed national organizations shoulder the burden of affirming whether the so-named title has being applied within select disciplines. Once again, answers and opinions are provided without indication of means for independent verification. Several responses inevitably followed.

Women In Science - extra edition - FemaleScienceProfessor. A description of some experiences of being a scientist and a woman.

Teh Laydeez Jus Don Liek Teh Scienz - PhysioProf, at Feministe. - A more thorough analysis is difficult to conceive.

Women and Technology: The Ugly Truth - Sylvia Ann Hewlett, via Evelyn Brister. Wherein one may read of the reasons women terminate their employment within science and technology fields.

Male Scientist Writes of Life as Female Scientist - Shankar Vedantam, Washington Post. The classic tale of gendered life as experienced by a single individual.

Feminism and the X-Files (My Ode to Dana Scully) - by Starzki6 in Feministing's community forum. On a final and positive note, an admirably precise compendium of five true and sufficient rationales for admiration or our lady of skepticism.

Shorts: Ignorance, mathematical and linguistic

2008-07-11T12:33:00.005-04:00

"Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language
and cognition" - to appear in Cognition. Wherein the authors consider the effects of one's lingua mater upon the system with which one pursues and internally represents the mathematical arts. A paper remarked upon recently by Mark Liberman of Language Log Plaza.

Is Linguistics a science? - SGU forums. A debate on the matter between individuals with various levels of informed consideration. Including one long-winded post by the present author.

"I like feeling stupid" - FemaleScienceProfessor. An analysis of the role of ignorance and an acceptance of it in the motivation of scientific inquiry.

Naomi Baron: "Always On" - The Diane Rehm Show. A discussion upon technology facilitated communication and its potentially overstated devastating effect on the disposition of common working people toward proper English grammar.

Sunday Music: Devo

2008-07-06T10:06:00.000-04:00

Devo. "Love Without Anger." 1981. From New Traditionalists.

"Why believe in things that make it tough on you?"

Devo is one of those bands almost everyone knows (largely thanks to "Whip It") but few know much about. They have the same sort of cleverness to their act that make TMBG so endearing to geeks and The Decemberists either adorable or intolerable. On the surface, their shtick was based around advertisement depictions of American life, retro-futurism, reductionist lyrics, and cheesy synthesizers, but the act was always more than a gimmick. At the core, Devo has always been a performance art criticism of the "everything is ok, please keep shopping" reaction to the evils of the modern world. In the particular case of their founding, in reaction to Kent State.

Complete with their own corporate anthem, Devo's public persona was used to parody the consumerist lifestyle and at other times to deliver indictments with all the suppressed anger of young John Lydon. Devo's political messages were too often buried under unfamiliar geek references (early computer culture, The Church of the Subgenius), minimalist lyrics, and as much camp The B-52s' wardrobe department. Yet, aside from its usefulness as a means of keeping the act entertaining, the gimmicky nature of their proto-culture jamming was in the end their most effective form of critique.

A few months back, the problem of sincerity in music was debated over in The Onion's AV Club forms. The point was being made that Ryan Adams' bizarre, attention grabbing public persona was in many ways more sincere than other songwriters of our time. Steve Hyden argued that we don't actually want sincerity. While discussing the dourness in early TMBG lyrics in the Gigantic documentary, John Linnell made a point that its often more moving to hear someone hide their feelings than to bear them all in publicly and openly. Sincere or not, Devo's ability to take their fear, anger, and depression and turn it into a comic theory of humankind's devolution is where their art lies.

Other classics: Freedom of Choice, Beautiful World, and the sarcastically anti-evolutionary Jocko Homo. Also: Weird Al's spot-on parody/tribute Dare to Be Stupid.

Shorts: On the discriminating tastes of the modern reader

2008-07-03T12:22:00.007-04:00

Nurture Your Inner Psychic - No Paranormal Powers Required! - Inkling Magazine. The secret to astounding mentalist feats revealed chiefly in the separation of personal sensibilities from the evidence under consideration.

Sex Difference Evangelists - Slate. An exercise in death-defying skepticism wherein one discovers a minority of women have "female brains." Marvel at the speed at which innatists draw conclusions from non-replicated studies, if you dare!.

The Paranoid Style in American Science - Slate. Wherein the inductive and unsettled nature of science is found to be a prime target for the incredulous and their transported goalposts.

Actual Infity - gyre & gimble. Being a description of different means of conceiving the infinite, and further evidence of a promising new blog.

Geese from Barnacles - Laelaps. A humorous tale of misadventures in the natural sciences.

Atheists, fundamentalists, and the rest

2008-07-02T11:06:00.008-04:00

I forget who leveled the accusation, but I've heard it said that atheists tend to acknowledge and respond to fundamentalist branches more than religious liberals. If I remember correctly, this was said to be particularly true of the "New Atheists" (a term that seems to mean "atheists I don't like" to believers). Despite polls showing that at least some fundamentalist like beliefs are more common than many liberals admit, I felt some sympathy for the claim. Certainly an issue with someone like Hitchens is the non-empirical approach to religion that overlooks religious diversity. One doesn't get a glimpse of either the breadth or depth of human religious experience from his writing, and for that apparent lack of understanding, his arguments suffer.

Yesterday PZ Myers pulled out the stops and picked apart an interview with Karl Giberson with the same fervor one expects from him. Read it if you haven't.

Quoth PZ:

He is not a literalist looking for a bearded man in the sky described in the bible, but instead has this vague metaphorical notion that if he melts down the bible in the philosophical flux of his personal beliefs, he'll be able to extract something ethereal and true from its words — a beautiful, loving, personal god who thinks he is really, really important and wants to give him eternal life in a paradise. That's his Madonna-in-a-pita, his credulous imposition of an expected pattern on the swirling chaos of generations of ravings and noise and poetry that is the Christian faith. I suspect he is sincere in his delusion.

[...] It's all pareidolia, pure and simple, and there is no reason given that we should respect that — it's simply assumed that all matters of faith deserve reverence.

Once literalism is abandoned, all that seems to be left is one's intuition, which leads to self-serving bias. From my outsider perspective, it seems as if liberals take from the literature that which they feel is true. When the supposedly Big Questions are discussed, I don't see the important questions being asked:

How do we know this is true?

How would you know if it wasn't true?

Considering the number of supernatural explanations for events that we have eliminated, I don't see how a supernatural explanation for what Giberson experiences as religion is any more likely than a supernatural explanation for Our Lady of the Cheese Sandwich.

Though their targets are often literalists, the questions on the epistemology of religious claims asked by even the least empirical of the New Athiests seem to apply. Why not Zeus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster? How do we know we can trust your intuition and not that of someone else? What methods of evaluating sources apply in syncretic or salad bar practices? Outside of an extremely liberal position like that of many Unitarians, it seems to me that even a liberal Christianity has its basis in at least the Gospels being true, and as Greta Christina points out, it's not clear to me that even these are accepted in full even without questioning their historical worth.

Personally, I don't mind others practicing their religions so long as they respect the rights of others to do - or not do - the same. I've backed off from religious topics in part because I feel the need to regroup and find a strategy that allows nonreligious and the liberalists to fend off the literal-minded together. But at the same time, I think our culture is ready to progress to a period where we can be publicly skeptical of any public figure who claims to know answers to the Big Questions. It's not about being hostile, it's about uncovering the truth and acknowledging the limits to our knowledge.

Conclusions only acquire worth through the method used to reach them. It's not clear to me that the religion of someone like Giberson represents anything more than wishful thinking, and I don't see any reason to respect it intellectually.

Idealizing the Language-Thought Connection (Pseudolinguistics and Ideal Languages, Part 4)

2008-07-01T23:18:00.006-04:00

The as-yet unaddressed topic in this series is the phrase "ideal languages". Nearly as commonplace as the belief that one's community doesn't speak a dialect (though neighboring communities do) is the belief that one's mother tongue is somehow more eloquent, more precise, more logical, or somehow better by another measure than other languages. I do not use ideal language in the Early Modern sense (though I hope to write on that phenomenon in the future), but rather in the sense of a pride (often national or religious) associated with some tongue.

In the same way that we note how obsessed Eskimo are with snow (they aren't really) or the way we puzzle over how Germans can have a word for that (its the morphology, dummkopf), we sometimes speak with pride about aspects of our own language. By a little folk reasoning through the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, those aspects become aspects of the national culture as well.

French has a very logical structure, therefore one can't help but reason logically when speaking French.

Italian is a beautiful language, therefore Italians are beautiful and/or great admirers of beauty.

The reasoning can even be turned against speakers of other languages.

German is an angry sounding language, therefore Germans are an angry people.

If one accepts that language and culture influence thought and one also accepts certain generalizations or stereotypes about a group or language, then such conclusions follow. In folk linguistics, one passes over details such as the sounds of German being spoken outside of parody or war movies or that the structure of French is a hodge-podge of over a thousand years worth of conflicting trends.

Sometimes the object of affection is not even the national language. Though I didn't address it at the time, this sort of reasoning appears to lie behind much of the writings on Edenics that I looked at when researching that post. As it seems to be tacitly assumed, if the ancient Hebrews were YHWH's chosen people and he communicated to them through their language, then studying the language can bring us closer to god. Hebrew, the Adamic language, and angelic languages have had their admirers over the centuries as well, and like Mozeson, more than a few have attempted to show the connection between them and their native tongue. One sees the same thing in other aspects of culture. Medieval Irish monks prefaced pagan myths with stories of Noah's flood and how some of his descendants settled Ireland. Such ideology is not always so innocent, however. In the present day, Hindu nationalists have placed great emphasis the Indo-European background of India and the Indo-Aryan origins of the Hindi language as a distinction between their culture and that of Muslims in the region.

In the next post in this series, I will look at the so-called Alphabet effect. You can read the first chapter of the book by the same name at the author's homepage and, I'm somewhat embarrassed to say, a review of mine from several years ago on Amazon.

Shorts: Talking apes and dancing robots

2008-07-01T12:59:00.004-04:00

Catching up on the RSS feeds, here are some posts that stuck out:

Can apes really talk? - Slate. Short video on (non-human) primate language research. The ending gets to the big question: defining language and the difference between recognizing symbols and producing new ideas with them.

Does music help us learn language? - Cognitive Daily. On whether finding word boundaries with nonsense words is made easier by setting the words to music. Original article here.

Neurotic. Robots that pogo to punk music.

The inherent problem of scientific theories - Think Gene. Chiefly that we can never eliminate all possible alternative explanations. And a reply at Evolving Thoughts.

A neurological approach to skepticism - NeuroLogica. A the inner-workings of human memory and how it applies to skepticism.

A religious history of American neuroscience - The Immanent Frame. At the boundaries of religion, technology, and science and some historical notes on psychophones and other religious fads.

Sunday Music: They Might Be Giants

2008-06-29T23:00:00.001-04:00

They Might Be Giants. "They'll Neeed a Crane." From Lincoln.

I spent most of today packing, driving, unpacking and, at various times, eating. Consequently, words and screens hurt my brain right now. I spent most of the trip listening to the buildup to the finale of The Amber Spyglass on audiobook and yesterday's SGU podcast, but this CD got a little limited play too.

Updates?

2008-06-22T17:44:00.002-04:00

Tis summer vacation here, and I've been keeping busy with music and other things that tend to happen offline. (Such as re-reading the larger part of The Sandman.) As a consequence, I haven't been keeping abreast of either traditional news or the blagosphere.

I do intend to continue the pseudolinguistics series of posts. I was hoping to acquire some reference material from local used bookstores these last two months, but that plan failed. While I wait to order a few books, I will probably delve into the world of angelic languages for a post or two.

Sunday Music: The Boswell Sisters

2008-06-22T17:08:00.003-04:00

The Boswell Sisters. "When It's Sleepy Time Down South" (Rene/Rene/Muse). Clip from a Fleischer film by the same name.

I don't have much to say on this one. I spent the early afternoon putting together a comp of Louis Armstrong's Hot Five and Hot Seven recordings, and somehow ended up listening to the Boswell Sisters. I couldn't find a link to the entire cartoon this video is from. You can see a touch of the always-recognizeable early Fleischer look as cartoon versions of the sisters run to the bench. Reportedly, Eddie Lang is the guitarist. Some of the runs definitely sound like his touch.

The Boswell sisters represent the aspect of the 20s and 30s that I like the most: oftentimes songs had genres but bands and musicians didn't. You were just as likely to hear minstrelry from a group of female white pop singers as Broadway showtunes from a poor black harmonica player. The brilliant and surprising arrangements, the tight harmonies, and the astonishingly talented sidemen (like Lang) are just cherries on the top. Unfortunately, being of that time period was also the group's undoing: aside from Connee's solo work, the sisters mostly stopped performing once they married.

For more information on the sisters, check out Bozzies.com. Including a few poorly recorded but educational podcasts on musicological aspects of the Sisters' sound. A few other YouTube treats:

A version of their frequent opener, "Heebie Jeebies."

A humorous short film with the sisters, "Close Farm-ony."

A cover of "Crazy People" by the Ditty Bops (and the end of another tune, and a little intermission).

Sunday Music: Hand Drums, Hippies, and Béla Fleck

2008-06-15T17:21:00.004-04:00

The context: Most of the friends I see regularly in town I met through high school or I met through being a part of the local music scene, particularly the more-or-less "punk" side of the scene. A few weeks ago, a pair of "hippies" were present for a small porch party with the punk friends and the discussion turned to hand drums and whether or not they could ever rock. After some thought, I came up with three criteria underwhich they can potentially rock.

The drum is being used with full respect to the tradition in which it originates and with adequate knowledge of the the theory and rhythms of that tradition and is not being used to add a touch of exoticism to the music.
The drum is being played with some degree of technical ability and isn't being played to prove the (rather Eurocentric) point that all people are natural musicians until we're taught otherwise.
The drum isn't being used as part of a sham-shamanistic or otherwise syncretic religious practice.

An example of these rules being violated is the following: Rusted Root "Send Me On My Way" from 1994 (embedding disabled). Although I understand the band might contain one or two ethnomusicologists among the regular lineup, the mix of faux-African pop sing-a-longs and imagery from American plains cultures can't help but reek more of ganja than respect.

On the other hand, there's this.

Béla Fleck and the Flecktones. "Hoedown" (Aaron Copland). From Live at the Quick. 2000.

In this performance, Sandip Burman is given the space to play the tabla as he chooses both in the song and in a demonstration of the bol technique for teaching rhythms. Not every incorporation of foreign instruments needs to be a lesson for the audience, but the band should at least pull as much away from the experience as one imagines the Flecktones doing after touring with musicians like Burman. Although the music on their album Outbound was incredibly dense, they still found ways to work with the tones of each instrument and styles of their players.

I often tell musicians the story of when I saw the Flecktones on this tour. Normally, a concert inspires me to keep playing, but the technical ability of the Flecktones made me envious and dispirited. I doubted I'd ever be able to play with their level of skill.

Late Sunday Music: Bix Beiderbecke

2008-06-09T14:22:00.004-04:00

My apologies for the absence of posts recently. I've been on a prolonged vacation, and music and friends have been keeping me busy. I've been slowly teaching some early jazz songs to two of the musicians I played with last summer. It's been enjoyable but slow going. So in light of that and in celebration of finding a trumpet player:

Bix Beiderbecke and His Gang. "Sorry" (Howdy Quicksell). 1927.

Outside of fans of 1920s jazz, few could ascribe sounds and players of that era to any city except New Orleans. But it wasn't New Orleans that was the center of broadcast and recorded jazz: the hearts of the national jazz sound were Chicago and New York. Like the Ramones in England in the 1970s, when groups like the Original Dixieland Jazz Band and their records spread across the north in the late teens and early 20s, they left a wake of inspired young musicians. Among them were Bix Beiderbecke and the other young men who went on to form the Wolverine Orchestra.

Beiderbecke always ranks high among jazz cornet/trumpet pioneers, and though his recordings and story endured for decades after his death, he seems to have fallen from the popular history though his name occassionally pops up (such as in the decent 1991 biopic Bix). Louis Armstrong - as the stronger personality, showman, and band leader - has overshadowed Beiderbecke in history, but the latter and other Chicago and New York players' sweet, rich tones and complex, sometimes impressionistic arrangments prefigure the sounds that the big bands would continue to explore in the 30s.

Not to overlook Armstrong's technical abilities as a performer, but it's quite tempting to draw a line separating two sides of early jazz between the "pop" Broadway fare of Armstrong and the romantic artistry of Beiderbecke (who even composed Debussy influenced piano solos in his spare time).

The belated Day of Reason post

2008-05-04T12:55:00.003-04:00

This was intended to be submitted to a local paper for May 1st, but finals got in the way. So here it is:

The National Day of Prayer that some Americans will celebrate today (May 1st) not only violates the establishment clause of the Constitution but represents an act of negligence on all our parts. Among large populations within the United States, magical thinking persists despite all evidence against its efficacy. The common acceptance of traditional intercessory prayer and the success of non-traditional supernatural movements like Scientology or The Secret demonstrate that rationality has failed at eliminating our tendencies toward confirmation and selection biases even among those who reject fundamentalist and literalist wings of mainstream religions. While occasional lapses into magical thinking often have no negative effect, it can lead to tragedy when left unchecked.

Recently in Wisconsin, two parents were charged with second-degree reckless homicide because they failed to take their daughter to a doctor for her undiagnosed diabetes. Despite their daughter’s severe physical symptoms, the parents thought she was suffering from a “spiritual attack.” Throughout the weekend leading up to her death, they lovingly stood by her as any parent would, but they did not believe modern medicine would be more effective than prayer. If they had believed otherwise, their daughter would still be alive today.

By continuing to accept magical thinking as innocent or reasonable, we are all partially responsible for this girl’s death. Our culture needs to become actively critical of to whom or what we ascribe success and failure and how we think about probable and improbable events. Supernatural diagnoses and treatments should be evaluated with the same standards we use to judge modern medicine. With Scientologists, The Secret, and faith healers preying on our friends and relatives, we must develop rational defenses against the sorts of magical thinking that we know to be false or else more children will die from our negligence. Worst of all, though we know medicine could have treated this girl’s diabetes, many of us would have ascribed even that outcome to the grace of a supernatural agent. With our capacity to reason, we owe our children more than this. We owe them a culture that is well-informed on known cognitive biases and openly critical of suspicious claims, no matter the sensibilities that might be offended.

Please, join the many around this country asking for a National Day of Reason to replace this Day of Prayer. We believe we can do better than wishful thinking, and the evidence is on our side.

Sunday Music: Pentangle

2008-05-04T11:54:00.005-04:00

"Light Flight." Pentangle. Live on the BBC, c.1970.

When I was 15 or 16, I had been playing jazz in school for a while, and in my search for new music I discovered my local NPR station, which played jazz in the evenings. Not long after, I happened to tune in on a Saturday evening when Julia Meek's Folktales and The Thistle and Shamrock still shared a double-bill locally. In that age before MP3, I was in the habit of taping better radio programs for later listening. I remember three songs distinctly from that particular tape.

A field holler about a slave who learned to read which I've never tracked down since.
"Four Stone Walls" by Cappercaillie
A song by Pentangle that featured harpsichord, which I still haven't tracked down.

Despite being of mostly English, French, and Dutch ancestry, I immediately bit the Celtic bug that was swarming through the folk community at the time. Somehow it took me a few years to finally acquire and listen to full Pentangle albums, but I spent the 90s in awe of Fairport Convention, stolen from my mother's old records, and contemporary groups like Altan, The Pogues, and Solas.

Pentangle more-or-less embodies what I like most about "world" music, when the term is meant to refer to the actual genre rather than a lumping together of all music traditions that don't fit in other record store racks. In "Light Flight", the vocal melody is unmistakably tied to English folk music, but the harmonic and rhythmic structures of the band is unmistakably jazz-influenced. Wikipedia draws a link to Dave Brubeck's work. Unlike a lot of contemporary folk rock groups, Pentangle and many other 60s and 70s British folk rock groups didn't hide their folkiness under a flat and heavy rock beat. They used the blended elements from jazz, rock, and other folk traditions to highlight the natural qualities of the music.

Literary Criticism and the Sciences

2008-04-28T20:31:00.006-04:00

My attention was recently pointed toward "The neuroscience delusion" by Raymond Tallis*, which reminds me of a few reasons I had when I decided to pursue linguistics over literature. At some point in the last half a century, schools of criticism began to resemble the state of Israeli politics as represented in Monty Python's Life of Brian. In the search for new schools of criticism, all sorts of other fields were plundered for whatever fresh ideas could be found, and quite often those ideas were incorporated in a misunderstood form. The most notorious case was chaos/complexity theory, but the misuse of Saussurean and Chomskyan linguistics seems to be getting attention lately, as recently mentioned over at Mr. Verb thanks to articles like "French Theory in America."

Its because of all of this that I've lately found myself avoiding the term "fuzzy logic" in conversation in preference for "paraconsistent logic" and/or "multivalued logic" when describing one current research interest. Sometimes it's better to be opaque than overstood.

(*The piece ends in an anti-reductionist bit. But I agree nonetheless with the sentiment that these critics do literature a disservice in the way that they borrow from neurology.)

Sunday Music: Tom Waits

2008-04-27T10:45:00.002-04:00

"Chocolate Jesus." Tom Waits. Live on Letterman. Probably in 1999, part of the tour in support of Mule Variations.

This song sums up what I like the most about my favorite period in Waits' songwriting. I've never particularly enjoyed his earliest period, and while his Frank Trilogy (Swordfishtrombones, Rain Dogs, Frank's Wild Years) was undoubtedly a necessary step for him to reach the frame of mind that he found in the early 90s, there's something about these albums that kept me at a distance. I couldn't quite name it until I saw the film Big Time, wherein Waits takes on the role of performing the Frank character. I realized that these albums are a little too showy and over-the-top for my taste. Sometimes in a more Vaudevillian form, sometimes in the form of what feels like weirdness for weirdness sake.

To be sure, Waits has never lost those characteristics, but beginning with Night on Earth, Bone Machine, and The Black Rider, the aspects of Waits' music that I admire finally shine through. The arrangements and production techniques become more focused on servicing the song than simply providing atmospherics. The lyrics and instrumentation begin to reflect more influence from American folk musics.

Although Black Rider is probably my favorite because of the mythological influence of the libretto, I have to admit that Mule Variations probably captures those aspects the best with some great songs and some great performances. As does "Chocolate Jesus." Its a faux-gospel, light-heartedly looking at America's sometimes insincere religious expressions. In the Letterman performance, the band manages to combine the blues and ragtime with a distinctly non-traditional element (most apparent in the keyboard). Waits' use of the megaphone - far from its use to announce protest anthems in rock, a la R.E.M. - actually manages to add to the old-timeyness, by emphasizing the mids-heavy sound of old 78s.

Sunday Music: Antony and the Johnsons

2008-04-20T13:46:00.003-04:00

"Fistful of Love" by Antony and the Johnson.

Antony Hegarty's music was another discovery of mine from last summer. Sometime near the beginning of last semester, I Am a Bird Now made its way onto my work computer. Like "Fistful of Love," his songs often begin delicate and quiet then crescendo into a soulful shout chorus - which is exactly the sort of album I need in the morning when I'm still sipping my second coffee. Before you notice you're no longer yawning, you're singing along and hoping not to be overhead in the next office.

The abused but optimistic narrator of "Fistful" reminds me of Throwing Muses, whose songs often describe dysfunctional or one-sided romances. I detect more than a touch of early Smiths influence in Antony's work, not only lyrically but also in the smart but understated arrangements. However, I fear Antony may prove a one trick pony: although he has a great sense of melody, his songs are mostly interchangeable. I hope his forthcoming album shows some artistic growth and proves me wrong on that.

Psychics and the Law

2008-04-20T13:36:00.002-04:00

Via Daylight Atheism and Reuters.

UK law may change such that psychics/mediums/healers/etc may be prosecuted if they cannot demonstrate their abilities. About time, I say.

Quoth Ebonmuse:

No legitimate pharmaceutical company can claim its drugs can cure some illness unless it goes through multiple rounds of double-blind testing to prove this. Food companies can't claim their products can prevent heart disease unless there are well-designed studies to show it.

Why should psychics and miracle-hawkers be held to a different standard? Why not make faith healers and psychic surgeons go through double-blind studies that track recovery rates? Why not put cold-readers and mediums to the test?

Taking the words right out of my mouth. I only hope prosecutors have enough foresight to bring in expert witnesses with experience.

Edenics update

2008-04-15T00:34:00.007-04:00

Interestingly enough, it seems at least one person at Answers in Genesis disagrees with Mozeson. Link.

There are obviously some conclusions Wieland draws that I and most linguists would disagree with, but it is interesting to note the disagreement among creationists. I wonder how those who reject at least some of the methodology and dominant theories of historical linguistics and archeology resolve debates over the evidence?

Edenics (Pseudolinguistics and Ideal Languages, Part 3)

2008-04-15T00:05:00.003-04:00

The story of the tower of Babel is a rich and enchanting myth full of the conflicts between order and chaos and between the gods and humankind that characterize much Mesopotamian and Levant mythology. When one considers the amount of pre-scientific philological work that examined the myth, it is no surprise that even today many modern popular books on linguistics reference the tower (quite often on their covers). It's also no surprise that some within the contemporary creationist movement has sought to establish the historical accuracy and linguistic plausibility of the myth. Biblical literalism - in part or in whole - requires a Biblically-supportive linguistics as much as it requires Biblically compliant biologies and geologies.

While I cannot speak for the degree to which his work is accepted by the larger creationist community, Isaac E. Mozeson has stepped forward to fill the linguistics gap in modern creationist narratives. He has authored at least two books on the subject: The Word: The Dictionary That Reveals the Hebrew Source of English (1989) and The Origin of Speeches: Intelligent Design in Language (2006). At present, I only have access to the first of these. I may acquire and review the second at a latter date. Mozeson also publishes articles at the website Edenics. While without the pages of data contained in The Word, the website offers his hypotheses in full detail for free if you wish to sample his writing before or after reading this post.

As its full title suggests, The Word sets out to demonstrate that English ultimately descends from Biblical Hebrew. Mozeson has later revised this hypothesis to say all languages descend from Edenic (the language spoken by Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden), his apparent intention being to distinguish Edenic from Biblical Hebrew, which, as a result of several centuries of change, may not be identical to its ancestor. In deference to the revised theory, I will use the word Edenic throughout.

In The Word, Mozeson conflates two related but not identical goals. The first of these is that of the etymologist: Mozeson attempts to rewrite the conventional history of many English words to show that their original source is Edenic. Some of the etymologies suggest a direct relationship (or at least show no medial stage), and others suggest Edenic left its imprint on a language from which English has borrowed, which English is related to, or from which English has descended. Unlike some of the best etymological dictionaries, Mozeson provides only partial histories and no usage citations. While not a feature in most desktop dictionaries, the carefully gathered and dated citations in dictionaries like the Oxford English are part of what make them great references for historical linguists. These citations provide data on when a word was first recorded and on how a word's pronunciation or meaning has changed over time.

To the lay dictionary user, The Word's lack of detailed etymologies for each word may make economical sense, but this allows Mozeson to suggest etymologies that make little historical sense when the full history of each word is explored. For example, the word woman first appears in print as the wifman (c. 1000 CE). Mozeson gives the possible Hebrew cognates WREHEM 'damsel' or 'womb'. Obvious questions arise: where did the /f/ come from and where did it go? Where did the /n/ come from? To convince anyone of his alternative etymology, Mozeson needs to supply well documented answers. Likewise, while Mozeson admits the immediate New World language etymon for skunk, in suggesting that these descend from Edenic (cf. Hebrew tsakhun 'to stink'), he neglects the evidence that the Manhattan and Algonquian words are composed of independent morphological pieces. The final /k/ in skunk originates in an Proto-Algonquian word for fox that combined with a word for urination (šek). If the account is to be believed, the Edenic word was broken into unrelated pieces in Proto-Algonquian and then recombined just in time to be borrowed - in whole no less - by English.

Mozeson's second goal - which does not seem to be stated directly in The Word - is to demonstrate that Edenic is the mother of all human languages. I'm hesitant to be heavily critical on this issue with only The Word at hand because he makes no effort whatsoever to support this hypothesis in a convincing manner. However, considering the text of the foreward, I'm left believing Mozeson did feel he had sufficiently supported this claim with accepted methodology.

With all my idol breaking, I have remained too true to conservative linguistic rules to be be iconoclastic. I am grateful for my brief training in linguistics, and for the century of research into Indo-European roots that often made my discoveries possible. (p. 1)

Although inevitably related to the search for accurate etymologies, it is altogether a separate task to reconstruct proto-languages and earlier forms in a single language. Individual words may have widely divergent etymologies. That crag originated as a Welsh word for rock has no bearing on any other English word, but to claim that English (or any other language) descended from the same language as Hebrew requires an analysis that is concerned with details above volume. Primarily, it requires the identification of phonologically plausible rules that relate the oldest English words available to their Edenic sources. Words borrowed from other languages (whether they originated in Edenic or not) are simply distractions. Mozeson excuses himself from this level of detail in incredibly problematic ways.

In the introduction, he dismisses vowels from his analysis entirely.

Vowels are certainly interchangeable, and ought to be largely ignored when comparing words from different languages. In effect, Biblical Hebrew has no vowels; the vowel leters in English (A, E, I, O, and U) are chaotic contrivances that help to make English a nightmare to spell. (p. 7, see note at bottom*)

Being no phonetician, I could forgive Mozeson for expressing reluctance to examine vowels but to ignore them entirely is absolutely unacceptable, particularly when one is making such a radical claim. Vowel changes account for the majority of phonological change in language, and that is what Mozeson should be documenting: regular change in the sound system of Edenics that led to English. By leaving out an account of vowel change, he sidesteps a large chunk of the available data and leaves out a great deal of necessary explanation. True, he could tentatively convince others without closely examining vowels (as other historical theories have), but that is not what he says in the quote above: he thinks vowels are "interchangeable", arbitrary. I won't dwell on this point, but its importance cannot be overstated.

Thus, the majority of Mozeson's comparisons rest of similarities between consonants. Many of the most famous and successful hypotheses of 19th century historical linguistics concern consonants, but there is one key difference between these hypotheses and Mozeson's: they propose sets of changes that affect phonemes across all words in a language, Mozeson proposes changes that affect words. The confusion is clear when Mozeson cites one of the most famous 19th century linguists, Jacob Grimm, in support of his methods.

Grimm's Laws, established by the same Jakob Grimm (d. 1863) who brought us those grim and bloodthirsty fairy tales, allow linguists to compare and historically link all letters formed by the same part of the mouth. D and T are called dentals because the tongue must touch the teeth in order to make the sound. Just as M and N are interchangeable nasals or sounds made in the nose, so D, T and TH may be considered the "same" letter. (p. 6)

Again, that word "interchangeable." Neither Grimm's Law nor any other description of sound changes in Indo-European languages provide room to link just any sound with others produced in a similar place or manner. Grimm proposed a cycle of sound changes that affected the entire inventory of Germanic sounds. D and T didn't randomly interchange: Proto-Indo-European /d/ became /t/, just as all voiced stops became voiced stops, and /t/ became /th/ just as all voiceless stops became voiceless fricatives**.

Mozeson's lack of establishing regularity in sound change allows him to link various Edenic sounds to more than one English sound, and vice-versa. It broadens the possibility that he will find correlations: based on its place of articulation, the sound /d/ could be correlated with /t/, both /th/ sounds, and /n/. The same is true for nearly every sound in Hebrew (except only ayin and aleph, so far as I can see). Mozeson does not make all of these leaps, but he has not ruled them out either. This makes his theory unfalsifiable: there's no way for anyone to propose exceptions or identify inconsistencies.

Mozeson also allows suspicious amounts of metathesis of consonants in support of his hypothesis. Metathasis is a linguistic phenomenon in which two or more sounds switch places. As mentioned on the Wikipedia page, in English this frequently happens around r's (e.g., when one says comfterble for comfortable). Some languages make use of metathesis for regular phonological or morphological reasons (e.,g., for inflection or to derive new words from old roots). In all cases, metathesis occurs for a reason, even in the English examples. Mozeson, on the other hand, offers no hypothesis to predict when one can expect to find it. Not only does this make his larger hypothesis less falsifiable, it also makes it overproductive to the point of vacuousness.

Without any specific mechanisms limiting the possibilities in sound change, it's no surprise that Mozeson is able to correlate many English words with Biblical Hebrew words: where there is no look-alike readily available, a small reordering or deletion dramatically increases the chance of finding one.

The foreword and introduction to The Word are full of Abrahamic ideology and jabs at linguists for failing to come to the same conclusions he has.

Because the majesty of Hebrew is only faintly visible in its offspring, it is no wonder that intelligent men can still maintain that most words are arbitrary and meaningless, or that language is the result of cavemen grunting. Of course, some of these same brilliant academicians will insist that a chimp at a typewriter will come up with a Shakespearian sonnet if given enough time (about eight billion years). (p. 4)

He even goes so far as to attribute the accepted account to racism because it separates 'white' Indo-European languages from Afro-Asiatic languages. He simply overlooks that this separation is based on both clear systems of sound changes within families and no clear connections across families despite years of trying. Instead, as with creationist argumentation, there are simply allegations of academics sweeping contrary evidence under the rug.

for the past several decades, Western historical linguists have been the proud Dr. Frankenstein creators of a proto "Indo-European" language that curiously favors the Germanic element. Who would research Hebrew as the root language when even the Ph.D's in Semitics hung Hebrew out on a limb called West Semitic? Nobody uncovered a clay tablet of Proto-Semitic, but surely, the argument went, Hebrew evolved from older more cumbersome languages. The de-evolution of words, and the ongoing corruption of humankind, was simply not considered. (p. 2)

There are no Proto-Semitic tablets because that language (if it existed) was spoken before the invention of cuneiform. Linguists do not seriously consider the "de-evolution of words" in most cases because living languages are constantly growing due to innovation and borrowing. The only languages we regularly see "de-evolve" or become measurably simpler are dying languages spoken in places like Central America where children no longer use the local language in all social contexts.

Like creationists insisting that a global flood is plausible without doing all the necessary math, Mozeson insists that Edenic is a possible ancestor for all human languages without doing the documentation and modeling necessary to demonstrate his case. I can only second what was suggested by Sabzi Aash in this thread:

This is my suggestion for Mozeson. It's the most logical thing to do and the fact that he hasn't done it can only be labeled "suspicious". Forget about English. Just prove that Aramaic or Phoenician or Ugaritic, or even Arabic, comes from Hebrew. These languages are so similar to each other that if one of them were the source of the others, it should be a cinch to demonstrate. If he could show that every linguist had gotten such a basic relationship wrong, that alone would turn the field on its head, and then he'd have a basis to go on to greater claims.

That this has not been done yet is as telling as the lack of paradigm-shifting research coming from the Discovery Institute.

* Biblical Hebrew, the spoken language, certainly has vowels. What Mozeson means is that the Biblical Hebrew written language is based on consonants (although it does have some vowel markings). Except in academia, its rare for new words to be coined based on writing conventions in another language. That Mozeson confuses spoken and written languages is rather telling of the poverty of his linguistics training.

** Other rules were at play. So my saying 'all' here overlooks some mostly-understood complications created by context and other concurrent changes.

Sunday Music: Feist

2008-04-13T12:12:00.000-04:00

Friday, I had front row tickets for Feist. Thursday, my apartment saw the arrival of a new instrument that happens to be identical to the glockenspiel in the video below. So who else could I pick this Sunday?

"I Feel It All" and a snippet of "The Park". Leslie Feist. Live on Jimmy Kimmel.

There isn't much to be said about Feist that most in-the-know music fans haven't already heard. She gets her share of nay-sayers, particularly among some recording enthusiasts who dislike the odd mix of close-mic'd and room sound that characterize both Let It Die and The Reminder. The alternation between the baroque pop and the understated acoustic ballads seems particularly suited for enchanting both the average listener and the indie cynic.

I was a late comer to Feist. Broken Social Scene released their first album in 2001, when the music world was still in the grips of the mindless pop music that the end of the 90s had ushered in. I was firmly convinced that I was never going to hear a new rock band I'd like and more or less quit looking. That attitude changed in time to hear Feist last spring during the buzz that The Reminder started generating upon its release.

An ex once criticized me for having a double standard with pop music. I like both the simple (Violent Femmes, Morphine) and the heavily orchestrated (Belle and Sebastian, Tortoise), but I complain about anything that I perceive as falling in-between. Most middle ground comes off as being either not genuine or not creative enough. Although I wouldn't call her studio albums sloppy, Feist represents the sort of pop music that captures both of those sides: a sort of careful simplicity. Deliberate understatement in wide open chords, interweaving counter melodies, and lush harmonic extensions all where appropriate. I'm not sure how much of that is Gonzales and the rest of the band and how much is Feist herself, but the end product is beautiful.

The show Friday night was fantastic. Feist had a visual artist in her company who created shadow images on a large screen behind the band.

If you like that sound too, I recommend you check out not only more Feist (including this KCRW performance), but Gonzales's "Solo Piano" album.

The Descent of Languages (Pseudolinguistics and Ideal Languages, Part 2)

2008-04-11T12:00:00.001-04:00

This is part two in a series that began here with a general account of two common types of argumentation one encounters when dealing with pseudoscience. Before I begin debunking some specific historical linguistic accounts, I thought I might need to explain in some form what historical linguistics is all about (or at least, explain a little bit about some of what it's about...).

Since at least the days of Classical Greek grammarians, people have been aware of similarities between languages. Although others had attempted to systematically demonstrate the resemblance between two or more languages, Sir William Jones is most often credited with inventing the idea of using such comparisons to reconstruct a proto-language, a theoretical ancestor to modern languages known only through the evidence it left in its descendants.

All spoken languages change. One has only to listen to Beowulf or The Lord's Prayer translated into Old English to realize that the English spoken today hardly resembles the English spoken in the 10th or 11th Centuries. While change in language is often brushed off as corruption or degeneration, what is truly surprising about language change is how regular it can be, particularly when it is below the level of salience. We all note the introduction of words like truthiness or email, but few of us notice how the vowels in our speech subtly change decade to decade, generation to generation. The differences between languages that are related by a common ancestor are not entirely accidental: with careful study, one can rules that underly the relationship between words in each language that represent the changes those languages underwent since they split.

When the Roman empire fell, Latin speakers in France, Spain, Portugal and elsewhere were left disconnected from one another to varying degrees. Over time, the Latin spoken in these places diverged from the Latin that had been spoken in 5th Century Rome and earlier. While pure-blood Romans may have considered these divergences a result of the Celts and other inferior races attempting to speak the glorious Latin tongue, linguists can note a great deal of regularity in the changes that took place. That is, far from being chaotic or purely random, the changes follow rules. Consider the following sets of words.

Latin	Italian	Spanish	Portuguese	French	gloss
capra	capra	cabra	cabra	chèvre	goat'
	/kapra/	/kabra/	/kabra/	/shevr/
caru	caro	caro	caro	cher	dear'
	/karo/	/karo/	/karu/	/sher/
caput	capo	cabo	cabo	chef	head, top'
	/kapo/	/kabo/	/kabu/	/shef/
caro/carn	carne	carne	carne	chair	meat, flesh'
	/karne/	/karne/	/karne/	/sher/
canis	cane	can	cao	chien	dog'
	/kane/	/kan/	/kaw/	/shien/

Forgetting the spellings and concentrating on the pronunciations (given in italics below each word), one can create a set of rules that produce the modern form from the Latin ancestor. For example, whereas all of the other languages maintained the /k/ sound at the start of each word, modern French has a sound like English /sh/. Likewise, where other languages have mostly maintained at least some vowel in the second syllable (even if changing /o/ to /e/), French has lost all of these vowels entirely. While the internal consonants of Italian are mostly faithful to the Latin original, Spanish and Portuguese have regularly changed the /p/ sounds to /b/. If you've never studied phonetics, try saying "puh buh puh buh..." aloud to yourself to see how similar these sounds are. (You might want to wait until no one's looking. Don't worry, all linguists have been there.) The difference lies in whether the vocal cords vibrate. Today, linguists know that in a context between two vowels or other voiced sounds, there is a tendency for sounds like /p/ to shift to their voiced counterpart over time.

In the same cases, the French has replaced /p/ with /v/ and /f/. If you take the time, you might try a similar experiment with alternating these sounds with /p/ and /b/ and noting the contexts where French uses one or the other.

Given access to modern Italian, Spanish, and French, a well-trained linguist with no knowledge of Latin could in time construct a large number of Latin words by identifying the similarities and differences between the modern words and using their knowledge of universal tendencies in human language. There would be gaps in their knowledge (the intricacies of the noun class and case system, unpreserved verbal declensions), but the amount that could be reconstructed would still be impressive.

This process, called the comparative method, is what we attribute in part to William Jones. European linguists of the 19th century were able to reconstruct many languages that were never written, including much of proto-Indo-European, the language believed to be ancestor of most European languages, Persian, and Sanskrit. In some ways, it is very similar to what geneticists can now do with genomes when analyzing the relationship between species (indeed, biological metaphors underly many discussions of language families). Changes can be analyzed in part because, like genes as a unit of biology, phonemes and other linguistic units behave in ways that we can approximate with models that assume a great deal of regularity or rule-like behavior between generations.

Like pure descent-with-modification in biology, there are many well-known complications to the comparative method. As their equivalent of viral or bacterial DNA in the human genome, languages are hosts to borrowings from other languages that can, over time, completely obscure that language's relationship to its genetic sisters. (If you've never noticed how many English words are derived from French, Greek, and Latin roots, you may want to open a dictionary and see for yourself how great a change borrowing can impose on a language.) Like biological species, when a language is spoken over a large area, changes can be slow to spread from one population to another. The great deal of modern sociolinguistics is focused on directly observing how changes spread across geographic and class boundaries in real time or by reconstructing past trends. More often than not, these exceptions prove the rule in that they affect languages in fairly predictable ways, even if the rules that govern them are more statistical and less definite than those identified in comparative reconstruction.

Although the degree of evidential and theoretical strength behind any reconstructed proto-language is always changing, as is true of all scientific statements, the trust linguists place in any model depends upon the methodology used to reach it. As I'll attempt to demonstrate in future installments, pseudolinguistic claims often attempt to borrow the look and feel of historical linguistic argumentation and the comparative method without actually borrowing its methodology.

Nova: Cracking the Maya Code

2008-04-09T19:23:00.004-04:00

The Nova special on the decipherment of the Mayan writing system is now available at their website. It comes recommended from me, for whatever that's worth.

Looking at modern day graffiti, I sometimes wonder what future societies will think when they dig up examples. It will probably take as much effort on the part of archaeologists/linguists as the equally creative Mayan system has taken us. Thankfully, Spanish hasn't completely replaced Mayan languages and the phonetic clues were still available.

Sunday Music: Joanna Newsome

2008-04-06T15:45:00.003-04:00

"Peach, Plum, Pear" - Joanna Newsom. Live in 2004.

Newsom's performances on harp, piano, and harpsichord won me over immediately. The accompaniment makes great use of layered rhythms unlike anything in popular music outside of more adventurous funk. Her songs are as much reminiscent of Philip Glass and other minimalist composers as the African kora music Newsom sites as an influence.

In contrast, her voice had to grow on me, as seems to be the case for most fans. She's toned down the squeak in her voice on her latest album and live, but I can still see how giving her a chance takes the same sort of leap that listeners have to take with Tom Waits, Shane MacGowan, and Billie Holiday. (I chose the live version above rather than the official video in part because the live version does not feature the bizarre overdubs of the album version.)

I chose her this week because among the "New Weird Americ"a/"Freak Folk" scene Newsom stands out has having both a debt to traditional/folk music and a unique vision. Her pairing with Van Dyke Parks on Ys is natural and obvious. Whereas the 60s counter-culture adoption of folk music more or less updated old blues and country with a hip but musically uninteresting rock beat, Parks actually used the vocabulary of traditional Americana to express new musical ideas without "dumbing down" the music by placing it over a steady four rock rhythm. In the same way, while many other current folk rock bands simply play folk with an updated indie aesthetic, Newsom appears to be on the verge of creating something truly wonderful and new. Where others pile layers of traditional instruments on top of a guitar-bass-drum arrangement, Newsom works her magic into the melody and rhythm of the song itself.

If you want to read more, here's an interview from 2006 and another more recent one .

Standard Languages and the View From Outside

2008-04-04T23:56:00.003-04:00

There has been some back and forth over at Language Log on standard varieties of languages, their value, and this piece by James J Kilpatrick. In particular, this post by Mark Liberman got me thinking about how standard varieties of a language are actually used in relation to "nonstandard" varieties.

The degree to which standard forms are shared cultural norms could be debated. Certainly by imposing themselves in the mainstream media, standard varieties are at least accessible by nearly all of us, but the value that is attached to the variety isn't as universal. When a variety is not used locally, there's a tendency for it to become the subject of parody and ridicule at the local level. Sometimes the ridicule is directed at the speakers, sometimes at the perceived pompousness of the standard variety. Being able to express oneself eloquently is not the same thing as having something to say, and in communities where nonstandard varieties are spoken, standard varieties often bear an association with hot air.

When someone insists that using standard varieties leads to greater comprehensibility, I'm always reminded of the way British English is used in Irish literature from early in the last century and, in particular, the great, late Flann O'Brien, who had an amazing gift at parodying different registers. His books are littered with language that could have been lifted directly from academic papers from the early 20th and late 19th centuries. Here's a footnote from his novel The Third Policeman concerning a theory of the fictional philosopher De Selby.

Not excepting even the credulous Kraus (see his Do Selby's Leben), all the commentators have treated de Selby's disquisitions on night and sleep with considerable reserve. This is hardly to be wondered at since he held (a) that darkness was simply an accretion of 'black air', i.e., a staining of the atmosphere due to volcanic eruptions too fine to be seen with the naked eye and also to certain 'regrettable' industrial activities involving coal-tar by-products and vegetable dyes; and (b) that sleep was simply a succession of fainting-fits brought on by semi-asphyxiation due to (a). Hatchjaw brings forward his rather facile and ever-ready theory of forgery, pointing to certain unfamiliar syntactical constructions in the first part of the third so called 'prosecanto' in Golden Hours. He does not, however, suggest that there is anything spurious in de Selby's equally damaging rhodomontade in the Layman's Atlas where he inveighs savagely against 'the insanitary conditions prevailing everywhere after six o'clock' and makes the famous gaffe that death is merely 'the collapse of the heart from the strain of a lifetime of fits and fainting'. (more here)

O'Brien's work contains parodies of rural Irish culture as well (notably in The Poor Mouth, whose title alludes to adopting a lower class's speech), but it's hard to imagine his flights into De Selby's pseudoscientific fancies working in any variety of English other than a standard one. I don't have references at hand, but one can find examples of language varities being used to in some of the writings of Joyce, Donleavy, and, while not Irish, even Wodehouse, thinking in particular of the various moralizing aunts and uncles.

Standard varieties can also be incredibly inappropriate for many situations. Could you imagine if Mark Twain had written the following?

Those readers who are not acquainted with the book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer will be no more acquainted with this author. However, no prior knowledge will be necessary for enjoying the volume you now read. The forenamed book was authored by Mr. Mark Twain, who endeavored and succeeded in narrating those events with veracity but was no less tempted by embellishment than all men are at one time or another.

The point is also illustrated in this old Budweiser commercial. An epilogue to their "Whazup!" series (my apologies if this stirs up memories better left unstirred).

Like any other choice in language use, works in standard varieties are not always interpretted as "straighforward" or "universal" by all audiences. That's what good writers need to understand more than the peculiarities of any single variety.

Diversity and Framing

2008-04-02T13:04:00.008-04:00

On the framing issue, Chris C. Mooney has asked Where do we actually disagree? I think this is an important question, but maybe not in the way Mooney intended.

Science functions through disagreement. Sometimes we like to consider science as the sum of all our not-yet-falsified theories. Other times we like to focus on the abstract methodology that shapes all of our research. But at its core, science requires disagreements for it to function properly. A scientific theory gains value the more it survives intense scrutiny. When we talk about interpreting science for the public, we need to remember that the scientific narrative is a history of disagreements.

Where I disagree with Mooney and the other framers is in this (unstated?) assumption that there is one right way to reach the general public or any particular segment of the public. Education and communication do not work so neatly. Certainly we can hope to improve our methods by dialogging about them, but we will always need diversity in our approaches to reaching out. If we are all doing our part toward the public understanding in our own ways (and being reflective in the process), we might be able to reach a broader portion of the public simply through the diversity of our own voices. Shutting out voices runs contrary to one of the greatest lessons society can learn from science: diversity and openness work.

Maybe its the way that the framing issue has erupted (and the way Myers and Dawkins are targeted), but in my mind it seems like the framing arguments require we hold back on our already limited diversity. Certainly, a great communicator needs to tailor their message's form to the audience, but sometimes audiences find their communicator rather than the other way around. If we want to be true to our message, we need honesty and we need to encourage others to do their own thing.

I think the disagreements we have as scientists could play an important part in public understanding of science. One of the key problems we need to overcome is the misconception that we are all socially-awkward bearded old men in white coats. We know that scientists are not unified, neither intellectually nor culturally. Even within our areas of specialty, we disagree strongly and loudly with one another at every conference we hold. One failing of popular science sources is that these real debates do not often reach the public, who are instead given debates between scientists (or spokespeople for us, like Gore) and deniers with little to no role in resolving the controversy outside of media or politics. We need to get our real disagreements out there, as best we can, and show people how consensus is reached so that the next time we need to emphasize the consensus on an issue the public understands how long and involved the process was that got us there.

Somewhat tangentially: An unresolved issue I have with the framing position is that the frames audiences love most are too often bad for the message. How often have you turned on the TV and seen a programme on UFOs, crop circles, Big Foot, etc., and been disappointed by the lack of skepticism or consideration of real evidence? The public's desire for mystery and controvery makes these shows much less informative (often bordering on the disinformative). In the same way, the popular science frame of underdog research team versus Big Science actually undermines the public's understanding of how scientists work. I'm sure Nesbit, Mooney, and others don't want to spread disinformation, but we need to realize that accepting the frames already provided to us by the media/public can be counterproductive.

We need new narratives, and likely, we need narratives unlike any that have been worked to death since the Akkadian was up-and-coming slang. If such a thing can even be found.

I admit, I have no witty solutions or suggestions. I'm among those geeky white middle-class former Nader-voters who have given up on commercial media. Although I understand there are a few good shows out there (like Mythbusters, apparently), I personally can't imagine working with the news or documentary networks in their present state. The internet provides more diversity in opinion and more information. It's unfortunate that a medium so well-suited to the scientific narrative is as demographically limited as it is. I can only hope that those who work with groups outside our current reach let the rest of us know what we can do to help.

(Also, read SES for a more positive look at the framing issue in relation to African American communities.)

This post has been edited for clarity since posted. - BH, April 2, 8:09est

Sunday Music Blogging: Kayah & Bregovic

2008-03-30T12:22:00.006-04:00

I decided to steal the "Day X" meme and blog about music that helped me get through the week. It seems like a nice tradition to start, considering the amount of work for Monday or Tuesday I often need to begin Sunday afternoon.

"Ederlezi". Kayah, lead vocals. Goran Bregovic, arrangement (and the guy holding a guitar without playing it).

This traditional Romani song had a prominent role in the movie Time of the Gypsies, which Bregovic scored. I've been a fan of Bregovic since I heard a track from Underground played on Morning Becomes Eclectic when Danny Elfman was featured as a guest DJ of sorts. Still, it's a little strange to consider oneself a Bregovic fan. It's a bit like being a fan of John Lomax or Cecil Sharp. Bregovic rose to fame in his native (former) Yugoslavia with the rock group Bijelo Dugme. Bregovic began to receive more attention outside of the Balkans when his fantastic brass band scores began to appear in movies by Emir Kusturica and others. His scores are often less original than wonderful pop-friendly arrangements of traditional vocal and brass band music.

"Ederlezi" shows Bregovic's touch at its tenderest. Though the music is lifted up by the lively instrumental section, there's still a melancholic tinge to the entire song that even the pumping brass beat can't bury.

Regrettably, I don't know as much about Kayah's career except that she's a Polish singer who has worked in a number of genres. You have to love the dreadlock extensions though (or, you don't).

For the Moderate/Liberal Believers

2008-03-26T21:29:00.004-04:00

This is why atheists are becoming more vocal.

Stop abetting the persistence of harmful beliefs and there will be fewer "fundamentalist atheists" to worry about. You don't even have to talk to us to do it.

Some arguments that fall flat and why (Pseudolinguistics and Ideal Languages, Part 1)

2008-03-16T14:18:00.010-04:00

This is a prequel to a set of articles I have planned on pseudolinguistic claims made by amateur historical linguists. Most of these claims propose that some favored group either spoke the first human language, made some voyage or discovery earlier than supposed in mainstream linguistics, or played a pivotal but unrecognized role in the course of history. Before I begin, I want to draw attention to two archetypal forms of arguments that a purportedly evidence-based but specious argument can take. These will play a role in the discussion and might be immediately recognized by those who have watched any debate on pseudoscientific or supernatural claims.

The first type is often a combination of argument from ignorance and false dichotomy, essentially the argument that some rival hypothesis is currently incomplete. It is often coupled with an insistence that the rival hypothesis can never be complete.

Hypothesis A and Hypothesis B are potential descriptions of Phenomenon Z.

Hypothesis A does not explain some aspect of Phenomenon Z.

Hypothesis B states that Hypothesis A will never explain some aspects of Phenomenon Z.

Therefore, Hypothesis B is correct.

There are a few obvious problems with this argument.

The argument ignores Hypotheses C, D, E, . . .

The truth of Hypothesis B is not predicated on its ability to predict the same aspects of Phenomenon Z.

Evidence may yet be found that allows Hypothesis A to explain that aspect of Phenomenon Z.

The failure of this argument was recently brought to light in the debate between Myers and Simmons. Simmons argued that the hypothesis that species arise from descent with modification could not adequately explain the presence of order cetacea (dolphins, whales). At one point in time, this statement may have had some argumentative weight: marine mammals were clearly an aspect of the geographic spread of species that any hypothesis needed to explain and early evolutionary accounts were plausible but lacking in true evidence. However, the evolutionary hypothesis made predictions concerning the genetics, morphology, and geo-historical distribution of marine mammals and their ancestors throughout the fossil record. In time, these predictions were found to be true: as pointed out in the debate, we can now trace some important changes in the respiratory system of marine animals and their ancestors, among other aspects of their morphological history.

The supernaturalist's argument, on the other hand, does not predict

The morphological similarities and differences between marine and terrestrial mammals.

The distribution of mammalian fossils with marine and intermediary stage features.

Intelligent Design and other formulations of creationism offer no real explanations except to say that what-you-see-is-what-you-get: any distribution of species and features is an equally valid outcome. Its "success" rests entirely upon whether other hypotheses fail.

You can witness this argument in the current blog-debate between Steven Novella and Michael Egnor on materialist and dualist explanations for neurological phenomena. Egnor writes

If dualism is true and the mind is partly the product of the material function of the brain and partly the product of something else, then:
1) There will be some mental phenomena without brain function
2) As brain function is altered, the mind will not necessarily be altered
3) If the brain is damaged, then mental function will not necessarily be damaged
4) Brain development will not necessarily correlate with mental development.
5) We will not always be able to correlate brain activity with mental activity – no matter how we choose to look at it

The discerning will notice that Egnor's hypothesis does not predict which mental phenomena will not correlate with brain functions, which mental phenomena will not be altered by brain damage, etc., and instead its success depends almost entirely upon there being no Hypothesis C for the unnamed phenomena: e.g., that mental phenomena without brain function could be generated by other physical means. According to the current evidence, the materialist hypothesis doesn't even require that dramatic of a revision: so far there has been no evidence of any mental phenomena thats exist without neural function. In the post linked above, Novella does a particularly good job at debunking the one piece of evidence Egnor claims. Novella also points out one not so evident problem with Egnor's hypothesis: determining a lack of brain function rests entirely on the accuracy of contemporary methods for detecting brain activity. Like creationism lurking in gaps in the fossil record, Egnor's brand of dualism continually lurks just beyond of the resolution of brain imaging techniques.

Of course, there could be creationist and dualist hypotheses that do not resemble arguments from ignorance. I'm not familiar with any worth mentioning (e.g., that anyone familiar with the actual evidence would still think worth lengthy discussion), but I don't doubt some are out there. I also recognize Egnor may not be regarded as the most distinguished proponent of dualism: I tried to be careful in associating his characterization of dualism to him. Likewise, Simmons' beliefs about marine mammal evolution have been attributed to him, not all cdesignproponentsists.

There are even some hypotheses that have been accepted by at least portions of the early or modern scientific community that might be formulated this way. In linguistics, Noam Chomsky has famously gone on record as stating that he did not believe evolution possessed the means to generate a language faculty as developed as that of human beings, though he has not proposed an adequate counter-explanation (to my knowledge). His opinion did not stop biologists from looking, of course, and they have spent the last few decades uncovering bits and pieces about animal cognition that lays the foundation for alternative evolutionary hypotheses. A contemporary course that"taught the controversy" on the origin of the language faculty wouldn't likely include Chomsky's premature claim that, in essence, human language is irreducably complex. (Although I'm not sure how much weight it carries, Chomsky may have updated his position to say that language evolved from a reasoning module. There has been ongoing discussion on this over at Babel's Dawn, including this post.)

The second type of argument I want to highlight is more difficult to characterize. It essentially rests on weak or false correlations and other cherry-picked or "salad bar" assemblages of evidence. Although I see the first type of argument most often being used in support of supernatural claims, I must admit this second type is not at all unheard of in mainstream academic discussions.

In fact, the actual hypothesis of the argument is often a legitimate scientific hypothesis. It might be motivated by prescientific, ideological, or supernatural beliefs, but the question asked and solution proposed are typically within the realm of scientific investigation. By focusing on larger claims, the arguments often overlook long-accepted and repeatable measures and thus often require one to reject well-established and independent theories. Paradigm shifts do happen in science, but most often they do not require one to reject data, only hypotheses that did not work and idealizations that were inaccurate (and in many historical cases, long known to be inadequate by specialists).

(Side note: For a overly flashy but nonetheless interesting look at paradigm shifts in physics, take a look at this documentary on the atom: part 1 here. Note that although our (empirically motivated) conceptions of the atom changed, each shift in our understanding was accompanied by a new set of empirical oddities that the new theory did not address. Far from ignoring those problems, much work following the shift tried to tackle them.)

Well known pseudoscientific and pseudohistorical examples of this type of argument can be found in the creationist attempts to account for global flood and the apparent age of the earth. As always, Talk Origins has some excellent pages devoted to these topics: see The Age of the Earth, Radiometric Dating, and Problems with a Global Flood. Because the mainstream account of the age of the earth, the formation of geological features like the Grand Canyon, and the distribution of sedimentary layers rests on multiple independent lines of inquiry and well-known physical properties of matter, proposing a catastrophic or recent origin for any of these things means throwing out a great deal of other evidence upon which much of modern physics, chemistry, and biology rests. Proponents of a young Earth or global flood often attempt to defend their hypotheses from these problems one by one, but what their basic hypotheses ultimately require is a complete rewriting of many modern sciences at the most basic level and it isn't often that one sees these proponents suggesting adequate and functioning frameworks to replace the old. (And considering the amount of evidence in support of the mainstream views, one cannot but forgive scientists in these fields from continuing their work as if there is no evidence at all of a geologically recent global flood.)

Another recently popular example is the 1421 hypothesis, which posits that Chinese explorers visited and mapped large parts of the world (including the Americas) independent of Europeans. Some of the maps in support of the hypothesis certainly demonstrate that Chinese cartographers had some information on Africa and Europe, but whether this information came from discovery by Chinese junks and not from shared contact isn't satisfactorily proven. The lack of precision in map making and writing of the era make analyses of books and maps open to subjective interpretation (e.g., in claiming a Chinese drawing resembles an armadillo). Accepting some of the evidence also means rejecting many established methods of dating and ascribing creators to archaeological sites (e.g., Newport Tower) and accepting claims on uncategorized or even uncategorizable material wholesale without supporting evidence (e.g., isolated undateable poettery fragments). Whenever possible, historians prefer to work with materials and accounts whose usefulness for supported or eliminating theories can be systematically and objectively demonstrated.

It is of course entirely possible that Chinese explorers visited the Americas, and such a hypothesis should be readily testable, but in the end, unlike the Europeans, there's no large patterns evidence to satisfactorily prove that they had been there and returned (e.g., no objectively Chinese settlements in the Americas, no evidence that trade was established and widespread, etc). Its this need for an identifiable pattern to the evidence that keeps these speculations from reaching the mainstream: the 1421 hypothesis doesn't tell us where we should look next. Proponents of this second type of argument typically grasp for as-yet unexplained phenomena and - instead of accepting that they might be unexplainable - stitch them together with weak threads to support their hypothesis. The unsystematic grab for evidence and loose explanations to tie everything together perhaps rightly remind one of conspiracy theorists for whom all actions by the alleged conspirators count as evidence for their theory. The sloppy nature of the argument (hand-picking evidence as it suits the researcher) often leads to false claims (for the 1421 hypothesis, that small pox spread in the Americas before Columbus), but to me, this tendency seems to be more a result of the type of thinking involved than a necessary requirement of the archetype.

The next post in this series will be on methodology in historical linguistics and a few accounts that mainstream linguistics reject. Hopefully, this introduction will help show how these pseudolinguistic claims are related to the pseudosciences and pseudohistories that readers are undoubtedly more familiar with.

Is agnosticism really the default position?

2008-01-26T16:31:00.001-05:00

This is somewhat in response to this thread at DC.

First, over the last few months I've decided to avoid the terms atheist and agnostic. Although I'm obviously failing here, this post will try to explain why I'm making the attempt.

There's something in the way that both atheism and agnosticism treat all god hypotheses as equivalent that bothers me. I can't imagine using similar terms in any other domain. There's also the complication that many people approach agnosticism as if it were a middle-ground between atheism and theism when its really on another scale altogether. When the question is whether or not one believes in any god, agnosticism is an irrelevant response. Agnosticism concerns knowledge, and for some god hypotheses we're all agnostic either by definition (for gods that are unknowable) or by ignorance (we've not been exposed to sufficient evidence either way).

The first kind of agnosticism applies even to our hypothetical gods for even they cannot know what is by definition outside of their fields of knowledge. For every god we're necessarily agnostic about, there's still yet an infinite set of gods out there that that god is agnostic about. As a personal description, the term simply states one's acceptance of that fact about the unknowable.

The second kind of agnosticism varies from person to person, supernatural entity to supernatural entity. It's a matter of pending human creativity in seeking evidence for each individual god hypothesis.

I also have a problem with the larger debate being framed as science vs supernaturalism (or dogmatic scientists vs dogmatic supernaturalists) in a way that implies one is true and the other false. The issue for me is methodology, not the specific claims. As someone engaged in science, my objective isn't to show that science disproves (or will disprove) all supernatural claims; that's obviously impossible, even if a few can be adequately demonstrated to be improbable. I'm fully prepared to admit some supernatural claims as true, given sufficient evidence. Rather, I aim to question those theists who dress their beliefs up as knowledge on the same epistemological grounds as scientific theories. Its not that I believe all scientific claims are true; in fact, I think the best only approximate truth and more than a few are simply false. But the methodology of science is the best way for entities in our position to evaluate claims. If we cannot approach supernatural claims with the same methodology, we are at a loss as to how to even evaluate one claim in comparison with another.

We have no reason to insist that agnosticism is anything more than a temporary position toward those supernatural claims that overlap with the physical world. Claims concerning interventionist gods, souls, free-will, etc can all be tested as we develop hypotheses and, with empirical support, theories. Of course we can never come to absolute conclusions, but we can begin to rule out the most probable theories until we're left with only the infinite set of hypotheses that are impossible to demonstrate (like invisible pink unicorns). At that point, I think we may as well accept whatever materialist explanation suits the phenomena best, but to each their own: its how the position is reached that's important, not what the position is. If one supernatural claim is adhered to more tightly than another without evidence to justify the acceptance of one and the rejection of another, there's something dishonest or impassioned happening in the reasoning that should have no place in a discussion aiming at objectively establishing the truth.

For those claims that do not overlap with the observable physical world, we have no way to discuss or evaluate them. Without evidence, we can't even state whether rationality and logic apply. (We'll never even be absolutely sure that our own universe is rational, much less anything beyond our experiences.) These claims are simply outside our field of knowledge by definition. No honest person has a position toward them other than agnosticism, regardless of whether or not they believe in any one claim. If any individual did acquire legitimate knowledge, then the claim has been removed from those claims about which we can only be agnostic. Suddenly we find ourselves in a position where more meaningful investigation can begin.

I don't believe that our inability to validate even the best scientific claims with absolute certainty is a reason to begin speculating on supernatural possibilities with abandon. Such speculation can be fun, but there's no a priori way to limit it. Considering all the contradictory possibilities, there certainly doesn't seem to be grounds on which one could legitimately use such speculation to justify violence, the denial of civil rights, or that any one claim is necessarily more sound than another. Its my concern that overstressing the possibility that some unknowable claims could be true may give rise to the public's willingness to respect faith in ungrounded speculation and to criticize those who dare point out that not all supernatural claims can escape empirical scrutiny. With a culture that values middle-grounds and compromises (here in the USA at least), even entertaining debate on the unknowable ends up sounding like an argument for some supernatural claim as being most probable simply because of the number of claims being put forward.

Supernatural claims differ in our ability to test them. Treating our current states of knowledge about the unknowable and about potentially knowable as equivalent is intellectually misleading. We should approach claims individually and avoid discussing universal default positions.

The Golden Compass and ID

2007-11-11T12:19:00.000-05:00

(For who have yet to read The Subtle Knife, this post may contain some spoilers. None are essential to the stories of Lyra or Will or the choices they make, but I felt you might want to be warned at the very least.)

I finished His Dark Materials a few years ago, and thoroughly enjoyed the books. I never hopped onto the Harry Potter wagon, nor any other recent children's series, but HDM intrigued me before I even understood the scope of the story (in fact, I may have been sold based on this fan drawing of Iorek). I enjoyed them so much that I bought an audio copy of the third book to entertain me on trips between my hometown and the university, and while listening to it recently, it occurred to me that Christians are missing out on an opportunity to use HDM for Christian ends but that this might actually be to their benefit.

For those who aren't familiar with the trilogy, the the major story arc is concerned with the development of sentience, the acquisition of the knowledge of good an evil, and the relation of the two to sin. Like Adam and Eve, the children's quest takes them to a point where they are tempted on a matter somewhat unrelated to the major objectives of the adults in the story (who are the one's out to kill The Authority, not Lyra, despite what some are claiming). The backstory and the explanation for much of the more magical elements concerns the development of consciousness in matter. The angel-like beings in the books were simply the first to develop consciousness, and The Authority, the very first, lied and said he'd created all of the world.

The books leave one question wide open: how and why did consciousness arise? The books give a partial answer, but it is still unsatisfactory for the elements involved need not have been there. In the eyes of ID proponents, the very existence of matter and consciousness in the stories demand a world-internal creator. The entire story could be read as false-prophet Authority facing his punishment for assuming a role not his own while the real watchmaker sits in the background watching his world tick. The books can (and perhaps should) be read as a warning to liars and those who presume to know more than they do or take a power that is not theirs. The books do not deny that reading.

Yet the reason why ID can be invoked to explain life and consciousness in HDM is exactly the reason it is rejected by scientists: ID makes no predictions. It could explain a world with half-human half-vulture harpies and simple devices that always tell the truth as well as it could explain our current world. That HDM is specifically intended to be a world where there is no creator but ID can still purport to explain that world is an example of ID's failure to explain anything. If it can be applied to the godless world of the book, how can we be sure that our world is not godless and the arguments IDists present are not just false positives?

To invoke ID (or the argument from infinite regress or any other popular theistic argument) in the world of HDM is to demonstrate their vacuousness.

Science, science, science

2007-10-16T13:11:00.001-04:00

I know I sound like a broken record sometimes, but I think illuminating the reasons why might be helpful at this point.

Edit: This isn't meant to be a conclusive list. I'm just trying to state some reasons for why my position is my position.

Reasons Why Science Is So F-N Cool
Science is open. Although the necessary credentials are needed to step anywhere near a particle accelerator, the process of science is technically available to anyone, anywhere, at anytime (barring economic or political oppression). A scientist is only as good as her work.
Science has no prophets. Spokespersons, yes. Heroes, perhaps. But no one whose work is taken as the literal word of the universe or the goddess.
Science is adaptive and evidence-based. Good scientific communities respond to the current state of the evidence. All conclusions are tentative, and all conclusions must be revised when new evidence is brought to light. A theory is only as good as the evidence it explains and no better than the evidence it can't explain.
Science is fractal in organization. The way science approaches small problems is the same way it approaches big problems. Any well-formed theory, no matter how large or small, new or old, can be tested against the evidence. Science takes no inference or presumption for granted (see the last point on that). There is no body of knowledge presumed to be immutable or fundamental to the scientific process. There are no scientists whose work cannot be challenged, no texts whose theories are safe from new evidence.
Science is self-correcting and self-organizing. If you attend enough scientific conferences, you will see that no matter how cut-and-dry a theory might seem and how well the evidence supports a researcher's conclusions, someone in the audience will have a problem with their hypothesis, their methods, their data, or their conclusions. The scientists most respected are typically the scientists whose work informs our observations on the largest unsolved problems or whose work approaches questions once thought solved in a radically new light. Thus, motivated scientists often tackle the most open-ended or most-essential questions in their field.
Science can prove that naturalism is the wrong approach to our world. Because of its reliance on evidence, science can eventually demonstrate (if not conclusively) that we do not live in a world with consistent structure. Modern physics is currently struggling with that very question, but as of yet, the evidence seems in favor of the scientific approach.

Reasons Why Science Isn't Always What We Hope It Could Be
Scientists can be obfusticating. Scientists most often work in highly specialized subfields asking complicated questions about complicated natural phenomena. The language they use in their work can be a barrier towards the openness of science and the public understanding of their work.
Scientists act as gatekeepers. Sometimes unfairly. Degrees, personal reputation, appearance, alma maters, and who was on your dissertation commitee too often matter much more than they should. Like any human, scientists can be petty, mean, or oblivious to the needs of others and act poorly when emotion is involved.
Scientists are constrained by natural limits. The scientist's place in space-time, human psychology, the scientist's culture, the scientist's position in soceity, and the finite resources allocated by society to the scientist impose limits of varying degrees on the types of questions that a scientist is likely to ask and the types of evidence a scientist can gather.
Science is constrained by philosophical limits. Without access to the entirety of existence, scientists can never deliver complete proofs in support of their theories.

Ann Coulter on Conversion

2007-10-13T11:01:00.000-04:00

Yeah, my apologies to Christians for even mentioning her name, but Ann Coulter got herself some attention this week while appearing on CNBC's The Big Idea.

In sum, Coulter said the host, Donny Deutsch, and all Jews should convert to Christianity and that the US would be a better place if we were all Christian.

I'm not sure why some folks found this so surprising. I'm always surprised that so many Christians are willing to not evangelize. My own parents, for example, politely never mention that my sister and I may be going to hell. If I didn't know any better, I would begin to suspect that they don't actually care about my well-being. But like scientist supernaturalists, it seems most Christians have a switch that allows them to ignore their religious beliefs when they aren't at church.

At DC it was asked how we can best debunk Christianity. I think the most effective way is to make Christianity culturally irrelevant. Non-Christians aren't likely to convince many Christians to leave the church through debate because the majority aren't interested in seeking out debate. But if we continue pushing political policies of tolerance or policies based on science that - for whatever reason - large numbers of Christians oppose, the religion will have to continue to change to survive as the culture changes. The Barna Group poll showed that for young people, heterosexism was a defining characteristic of Christianity, and in light of this generation's more-or-less tolerant attitude, that attribute made Christianity appear less favorable to them. By continuing to support endeavors that make contraceptives and knowledge about safe sex and human sexuality more available, we will make such things the norm. Luckily for us (but unfortunately for a large number of young Christians), evangelical leaders continue to push policies and practices that simply do not work according to best evidence. So long as these Christians hang their name around abstinence only education and opposition to environmental policies, they'll be effecting their own end.

For me, all of this serves to underscore the delusional aspect of supernaturalism. When you begin to remove yourself from an evidence-based understanding of reality, you're going to be wrong on occasion in such a way that is damaging to your central points. Even a more liberal Christian like John Lennox demonstrated that he had distanced himself and his beliefs from the historical process, which lead to some of the more serious faults in his arguments in the Dawkins-Lennox debate. When you oppose something based upon your understanding of eschatology or an purportedly absolute morality and then the culture or evidence shifts beneath your feet, you will begin to have difficulty finding new converts. Your beliefs will either need to evolve w ith the culture (e.g., the Catholic Church on cosmology) or face serious criticism and possibly extinction (e.g., the Catholic Church on contraceptives, which continues to hurt its image as leaders make belief-based assertions that no evidence supports).

Comments on the Dawkins - Lennox Debate

2007-10-12T16:27:00.000-04:00

(Link to audio for the debate.)

From akakiwibear in a comment at Debunking Christianity:

BUT both Dawkins and Lennox made good points that should have stimulated real discussion rather than the self affirming comments I read

I won't comment on other responses, but my initial opinion was that there was little to no actual discussion at all due to the format and that John Lennox's position alternated between factually false or (perhaps worse) entirely vacuous. But, assured by akakiwibear's comment that Lennox's statements are a fair representation of Christianity and while I'm sitting here too ill to go out and enjoy the weekend, I'm going to listen to the debate again and try to better understand and then respond to Lennox's position. I've been short on ideas for posts lately anyway. And despite being billed as "not a science vs religion" debate, I found the debate fits nicely into the questions I've raised in my last few posts.

First, a statement on the format. After the opening statements, the first portion saw the moderator read one of six quotes from The God Delusion representing the "six major themes" of the book, then Dawkins elaborated for five minutes, and Lennox responsed for five minutes. At the end, both participants were allowed a closing statement. The format provided Dawkins no time to respond to Lennox except his closing statement. This was frustrating for Dawkins and his supportive audience because Lennox's statements were full of mischaracterizations of Dawkins's arguments and blatantly fallacious arguments.

Opening statement.
Despite later stating he is not a post-modernist, that his god represents the "ultimate truth behind everything", and emphasizing that religion can be supported by evidence, Lennox opens by stating that each of us has individual answers to the big questions life throws at us. This may be true, but if truth is singular, then the answers to certain questions under debate must have one and only one correct answer. If Lennox truly believes religion should be debated in a rational way and that God does reveal himself in the universe and the Bible, then it seems to me the opening comment on individual answers was either his attempt at an opening line to a bland grade-school essay or counter to rest of Lennox's argument.

A mathematician and philosopher of science, Lennox states that his parents encouraged him to be intellectually inquisitive because of (not in spite of) their Christian faith. At this point, he doesn't state how the Bible or Christian doctrine encourage intellectual inquisitiveness (certainly the letters of Paul don't with their repeated appeals to his own self-declared revelatory authority). But the Abrahamic religious texts are numerous enough and the doctrines diverse enough that I'm certain there's some combination of interpretations and practices that will get that result. After all, the intellectual curiosity that spawned the Enlightenment arose from a primarily Christian culture, even if not all Christian cultures have produced similar results. Lennox asserts that Biblical Christianity doesn't raise a "firewall" between Christians and the truth, but it's hard for me to see how this can be the case considering the number of fundamentalist/literalist Christians who have difficulty accepting verifiable facts about our universe. Granted, I don't believe Christianity imposes any particular difficulty on discovering truth compared to other supernatural beliefs, but this assertion that Christianity or the Bible are clear and accurate revelations ignores the long history of variation in Biblical interpretation and the variety of Christian reactions to scientific discoveries and socio-cultural progress based upon those interpretations. Christianity is much more complex of a social phenomenon than Lennox wants to give it credit, and we'll see that this is a returning theme.

(Note: It wouldn't surprise me if Lennox would claim I've misrepresented his position here, but he said surprisingly little about the Bible and evidence for Christianity despite the fact that he made it the foundation for his argument. I was very disappointed in this regard. There will be more of this below.)

Counter to what I believe Lennox seems to be implying atheists believe, I wouldn't personally claim that atheism necessarily encourages rationality. Likewise, rationality only encourages an agnostic atheism as a default position in a world that does not provide the evidence necessary to prove any available religion (even then, rationality would deny coming to an absolute conclusion). Lennox briefly mentions that he studied "systematic exposure to atheism" in Eastern Europe during the Soviet era, but he will return to this point latter, so I'll save more for then.

Lennox states that he is opposed to any religion that asserts itself through force, including self-proclaimed Christian, and I think Dawkins and I can agree that we'd feel the same way about any atheism that asserted itself through force.

In any case, Lennox begins the debate by stating that the outcome should be determined by evidence. We'll see how he does in what follows.

First Theme: Faith is blind, science is evidence based.
Lennox agrees that science is evidence based and is correct to be so, but he asserts that some faith is based on evidence. According to him, faith is only as "robust" as the evidence that supports it. He agrees with Dawkins that blind faith can be very dangerous, but at the end of this section, Dawkins and Lennox debate the definition of faith. It seems clear that they're at least both distinguishing assertions based on evidence from those that are not. Whether we call an acceptance of the general model of evolution faith is really immaterial to distinguishing it from any belief that has no supporting evidence. What's agreed on here is that the strength of a claim is in the evidence that supports it.

On reasonable faith, Lennox states

faith in the Christian sense is not blind, and indeed, I do not know a serious Christian who thinks it is.

He claims part of the evidence for Christian faith is objective, based upon science and history. Unless I've missed something, he never provides a shread of this legitimate, objective evidence. The other part of the evidence for Christianity is subjective (experience). I would say that calling personal experience "evidence" is wrong or misleading, but Lennox makes no other references to this line of evidence either (except for the occasional appeal to personal in/credulity).

Lennox also states that

What is beyond science is not necessarily irrational.

For example, science cannot tell us whether a work of art is beautiful. I find this a rather ridiculous line of inquiry. For the example stated, the human experience of aesthetics is fully within the realm of science, and though I haven't read much work on it, I'm certain there are blossoming subfields in the cognitive sciences that focus on questions about the human experience of beauty. Of course, science cannot tell us whether a flower is beautiful, but neither can any less rational field of study. Science can however tell us whether a random selection of humans (perhaps from some specific culture) are likely to find a particular flower beautiful.

The other questions Lennox raises that are presumably outside the realm of science are of the sort who am I?, what is my purpose?, and where am I going? The very asking of these questions (in their broadest, metaphysical senses) assumes that there must be an answer, and I'm not entirely convinced that that is the case. Without further definitions and a body of knowledge currently beyond human observation, the questions aren't going to lead to insightful inquiry. That science cannot answer these questions is no surprise then because there is no way to answer these questions meaningfully (at present at least).

Lennox admits that Christians have been lazy in using the god of the gaps argument, but asserts that there are some gaps that science opens but cannot fill. As an example, he names the physical constants, which are certainly a mystery but not exactly one that science has no hope of answering. He makes a distinction between good gaps and bad gaps, but gives us no measure for determining which gaps are which. He brings up the point of Newton, which is rather disappointing. The gaps Newton insisted only a god could explain are gaps that are now being filled in. That Newton made the argument is no reason for us to continue using it, particularly since his case has ultimately failed.

Lennox also makes a comment that science came about because humans expected law in nature due to a belief in a supreme lawgiver. This may be accurate historically, but current psychology is uncovering a great deal of over-activity in the human cognitive systems for recognizing ordered or causal relationships. That humans expect there to be a lawgiver is no more an argument for a lawgiver than a child's intuition that liquids can spontaneously change volume and mass is evidence that liquids do not obey the law of conservation of mass and energy.

Second Theme: Science supports atheism, not Christianity.
(Seemingly disagreeing with the moderator's wording of the theme, Dawkins tries to re-characterizes this theme as something like: supernaturalism and naturalism are incompatible world views. He disagrees with Gould's non-overlapping magisterium model and asserts that a universe with a god should be distinguishable from a universe without a god.)

Lennox admits that the methods of science are appropriate for evaluating Christianity and claims that Christianity is falsifiable. I would very much like to hear how we can go about falsifying Christianity from his perspective, because it seems these experiments are long overdo.

Lennox claims that atheism undermines science because science requires a faith in the rationality of the universe. He is wrong on this: science only requires the assumption that the universe is inherently rational. Science is quite capable of providing evidence that the universe is irrational, and any good scientist would have to admit that, in the end, our the assumption of a rational universe could be wrong. In the social sciences, we often find earlier assumptions dispelled as new evidence comes in, sometimes in the direction of irrationality (or, to put more accurately, in the direction of increased complexity/chaos).

Throughout, Lennox is assuming that a rational universe requires a designer. If the universe is rational, it seems much simpler to me to state that this rationality arises from the inherent and immutable properties of matter and energy. This leads us to the issue of reductionism and Lennox's misrepresentation of it. He attempts to form a paradox when he states that atheism and materialism should lead us to question the very validity of statements made by matter-based beings. I'm not entirely sure why he thinks this paradox works, but it seems the only way to make it work is to deny both that physical entities can interact with other physical entities and that cognition is an emergent property of a sufficiently organized neural network.

Lennox also throws out the pointless tidbit that the Bible predicted that our universe has a beginning. Dawkins is quite right to point that the prediction isn't a good test for the truth of the Biblical account as there were only two possibilities to begin with. In this exchange, Lennox also overlooks that science's discovery that the universe has a beginning is an example of science being able to self correct itself, even when the corrections are perceived as irrational (e.g., science has indicated that our universe has a definite beginning, even though current logic tells us that leads to problems). Laughably, Lennox tells us that the books of Moses accurately describe the creation of the universe. Has he not paid any attention to the debates on evolution? From my understanding of the current historical evidence, the Talmud isn't even accurate in describing early human society or the early history of the Hebrews (Adam, Eve, the Flood, and the exodus plagues need to go, for starters).

Lennox also mentions the phrase a "universe created out of nothing", which is a tired assumption on his part. The singularity before the big bang effectively erased all evidence of what was in existence (if anything was) before the big bang. At present, we have no evidence from any dimension or entity that was not a product of the big bang. Lennox is invoking a "bad" gap here, and it's rather ridiculous of him to do so after condemning gaps earlier.

Third Theme: Design is dead, otherwise one must explain who designed the designer.
In this exchange, Lennox is of course right that evolution does not explain abiogenesis. Although, just as Dawkins simplified his argument so far that he missed that mistake, Lennox leaves out that contemporary theories of abiogenesis are well on their way toward explaining the process. (It's another bad gap, in other words. Have there been any good gaps yet?)

Lennox chides Dawkins for using the "old schoolboy argument" in the question who created god? I feel the need to derail this post by referencing the Firesign Theater's The Tale of the Giant Rat of Sumatra. On the first side, Hemlock Stones examines a coded message and remarks that any simple English school boy could solve it. He then asks his assistant to retrieve a copy of Simple English Schoolboy Codes (or some similarly ridiculous title). A simple argument is not necessarily a bad argument. In this case, Lennox's response left me wanting. He has simply defined a god that is beyond the realm of plausibility from which the question assumes without presenting any verifiable evidence to justify that leap. Until theists begin to earnestly formulate methods of independent inquiry into divinity and eternity, I'm afraid I can't accept an explanationless eternal creator. Considering how long this specific debate has been in circulation, I doubt it will be solved by any comment I have to make. So I will leave it at that, but if any one does have extra-Biblical evidence, please feel free to comment.

To support his position, Lennox makes an analogy that I found particularly lame: the one about scratch marks discovered in a cave. Dawkins is correct in his criticism on this: the creator of the scratch marks, a human, is a result of long and incredibly complex physical and biological processes. Furthermore, we have extensive evidence from independent lines of inquiry verifying that human beings do exist. We have no such evidence for eternal creators.

During part of this exchange, Lennox comments that physical structures like DNA, with a "semiotic" dimension to them, are proof of some god, but he is again ignoring the physical reality. The "meaning" of DNA - if we must call it that - is expressed in physical form. The relationship between signifier gene and signified biological characteristic have a direct physical relationship. Within modern evolutionary theory, this relationship hardly requires the intervention of a creator.

Lennox also ignorantly confuses complexity in the physical sense with his own difficulty in understanding a concept. Dawkins calls him out on this one, though he doesn't spend much time on it.

Fourth Theme: Christianity is dangerous.
Lennox states that he is ashamed of some Christians, particularly paying attention to the Crusaders. He claims that these men were not truly following Christ, but this particular debate reveals a fault on his part more serious than the No True Scotsman fallacy.

In asking us to imagine a "world without atheism", Lennox dredges forth the usual names of Mao, Stalin, and Pol Pot (though he thankfully leaves out Hitler). Regardless of what such figures and the movements they represent thought of atheism and regardless of whether they viewed it as the basis for their ideologies and campaigns, the simple point is that atheism has no doctrine. Lennox even tosses in a lie about Dawkins's claims, stating that Dawkins has insisted that atheists never engage in genocide or other horrible acts. Atheism has no universally accepted texts, and has here-and-there arisen independently throughout history. Nothing can be considered the necessary result of atheism because there have been many types of atheism, as there have been many types of religion, and to the best of my knowledge, a lack of belief in gods doesn't reliable predict personality archetype, political beliefs, or ethical judgments. For any human feature we can measure, it's likely that you'll find atheists at every point along the curve.

Like his lazy dismissal of earlier Christian doctrines as not truly Christian (despite their historical influence on modern doctrines and practices), Lennox is ignoring psychological and sociological diversity as meaningful predictors of human behavior and human beliefs. He specifically refuses to discuss anything Dawkins phrases in terms of Zeus or Wotan because these are "created gods", but he fails to see how his own religious beliefs and practices can be explained with equal validity as products of human imagination and culture. He's failing to look at his own religion objectively.

I admire that Dawkins has tried not to speak of individual acts of evil but only in general terms on the effects of supernaturalism on human actions, but I disagree that supernaturalism ultimately encourages evil more so than any other world view. Human beliefs and actions largely depend upon individual characteristics and the culturally environment in which that individual finds herself. Certain beliefs may lead to violence moreso than others, but I'm not convinced supernaturalism is one of those beliefs.

Fifth Theme: We do not need god in order to be good or evil.
Lennox once again misrepresents Dawkins's argument, asking and answering a question he alone raised:

Can an atheist be good? Of course.

At last moving on with the evidence that he mentioned way back at the start, Lennox believes that our common moral core is evidence for the Biblical claim that we are moral beings made in the image of his god. With all the interesting studies being done on altruism and deception among social animals, I'm surprised he can honestly maintain that belief.

Lennox questions whether we can have a foundation for the concepts good and evil without a creator, and correctly quotes The Devil's Chaplin on the fact that science cannot provide a solution. Science can explain why we have the perception of events being good and evil and anthropology can relate our varying experiences to cultural phenomena. Like many Christians who have commented on the failure of atheism to provide a foundation for morality, he seems particularly unable to give up the idea that morality requires a logical or absolute foundation despite the lack of evidence supporting such an idea. (If commenter wishes to continue to assert that absolute morality exists, be warned, I will expect a functioning model of human-absolute interaction.) Like others, Lennox ignores that Christian morality has continously been evolving in response to other cultural pressures, that other cultures consider Christians immoral (say, for eating meat), and that absolute morality introduces a paradox of a creator who either arbitrarily decides what is good or evil or is limited by an external source of morality.

During this exchange, Lennox asks how there can be any part of us that can rebel against our genes and thereby once again tellingly equates the atheist view with his particularly limited approach to reductionism. Each time he makes the mistake, I'm further convinced that he hasn't truly attempted to understand the physical phenomena involved but

Lennox also states that a pitiless universe removes the very categories of good an evil, because there is no absolute on which to define them. If that's the case, then I posit that the lack of absolutes also removes the categories Christian, Marxist, and John Lennox. Does this require Lennox to make his god the source of these categories as well?

Sixth Theme: Christian claims about the person of Christ are not true.
Here Lennox makes some laughable claims about the universal acceptance of the Gospel of Luke as history, even referring to the author as Luke. I'm not sure how to even respond to that.

Lennox picks at Dawkins's characterization of Christianity as being an expression of ingroup/outgroup morality, and I'm not personally interested in that debate. Nor am I interested on whether miracles violate the laws of nature or not. The former is a historical and sociological debate, which Lennox, Dawkins, and myself aren't informed enough to enter (and I'm not particularly thrilled with the way they've set up the discussion). The latter is, in my opinion, utterly nonsensical to debate as the religious can simply define a miracle as whatever they like.

Lennox makes the usual criticism of Dawkins for not reading theologists and for quoting laypersons instead. It's my understanding that Dawkins's was less concerned with the theologists who have defined their god out of the picture than with the fundamentalists and evangelicals who are doing real, measurable damage to our world and culture. Like most of philosophy, I tend to find that theologists tend to argue well but have difficulty selecting verifiable and meaningful premises from which to argue. I don't feel qualified to enter the debate on the historicity of Jesus and his miracles.

Concluding Remarks
Lennox's concluding remarks on the garden misses the entire point on the distinction between the supernatural and the natural. He makes one final appeal to that evidence promised to us by saying "the evidence is all around you." Right. And I thought we agreed we weren't invoking the god of the gaps argument?

Lennox's less than stirring discussion of judgment day and ressurection is an astounding let-down after hearing about his evidence-based faith. Christ's resurrection, he claims, is the "central evidence" of his faith. Hearing that, I felt robbed of my time. That's the proof I was waiting to hear? His final remark left me speechless in its vacuousness.

If there is no ressurection, if there is no life after death, the terrorists will have gotten away with it.

I don't want to repeat some of Sam Harris's less than truthful generalizations, but... the terrorists don't believe in life after death?

Maxwell's Demon and the Soul

2007-09-30T15:48:00.000-04:00

Over at DC, Lee Randolph has been writing about how neuroscience provides grounds for reasonable doubt over the beliefs that we have free will and that we can all be held equally accountable for our sins: two recent posts here and here. The Christian response so far has been to assert that we won't be held equally accountable come Judgment Day, but this response completely dodges the apparent counter-evidence to the theory of free will.

Being engaged in science myself, I'm never content to let one side dominate the discussion without providing other sides the chance to test its predictions. Thus, while riding my bike today, I traipsed upon an architecture for experiments that could potentially reveal evidence for the soul or whatever transcendental entity theists' believe supplies free will.

But first, some background on the inspiration.

In 1867, James Clerk Maxwell described a thought experiment about a "demon" that could violate the second law of thermodynamics, which we should remember states that a closed system of two bodies in contact and with equal temperatures will never reach a state where one body has a significantly higher temperature. This is the law that gave us the concept of entropy: over time differences in temperature, density, and pressure become diminished across an isolated system.

Here's Maxwell's description of the demon, taken from the Wikipedia page.

... if we conceive of a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course, such a being, whose attributes are as essentially finite as our own, would be able to do what is impossible to us. For we have seen that molecules in a vessel full of air at uniform temperature are moving with velocities by no means uniform, though the mean velocity of any great number of them, arbitrarily selected, is almost exactly uniform. Now let us suppose that such a vessel is divided into two portions, A and B, by a division in which there is a small hole, and that a being, who can see the individual molecules, opens and closes this hole, so as to allow only the swifter molecules to pass from A to B, and only the slower molecules to pass from B to A. He will thus, without expenditure of work, raise the temperature of B and lower that of A, in contradiction to the second law of thermodynamics.

If you've ever read The Calling of Lot 49, then the description will sound familiar (its occurring to me now that the section may have been Pynchon self-correcting his previous amateurish obsession with entropy documented in Slow Learner).

Maxwell's demon is, of course, an impossible entity in the physical world. The Second Law only applies to an isolated system, and Maxwell's conclusion to the thought-experiment fails to include the demon itself within the system. To perform its actions, the demon - as a physical entity - would be as much involved in the system's sliding toward a state of equilibrium as the molecules in A and B.

Yet if the demon, like its namesake, is not a physical entity and not subject to the physical laws that apply to the molecules or the vessels, then the Second Law could be violated. An observer from within the system could identify that some supernatural effect was taking place by the evidence available to them without needing to describe the specific mechanisms that allow the demon to sustain itself and interact with the physical world. The observer couldn't describe the the demon but only its effect on the material world.

If the soul allows humans to have wills that are free (at least to some degree) from material causality, then our souls must act like Maxwell's demon in some sense. The soul must allow neural impulses to proceed unhindered in some instances but not others, but being separate from the physical world, there's no physical requirement for the soul to balance the energy consumed and the energy expended. The purpose of the soul is less specific than Maxwell's demon, but we might expect to see that energy is added to the system extra-physically when the brain makes moral decision and that the energy added may be proportional to the complexity of the dilemma or to the desire of the individual to do the immoral act.

Directly observing the brain and the circular system interact at this level of detail is still a difficult task, but our methods for studying the body are improving all the time. Given a specific hypothesis and the funding, I'm sure the next decade could see at least early trials performed and the methodology refined until the real experiments can be done.

Regardless of how soon the work is done, these experiments could provide solid evidence for a concept that is now currently sustained through faith alone. Current material evidence and prevailing scientific attitudes suggest that our minds are purely the product of our physical brain. If Christians and other theists wish to assert otherwise, it might be beneficial for them to close the empirical gap rather than continue to assert their position by appealing only to faith, ancient writing, and fear that a material universe provides no absolute morality.

Insurance Language

2007-09-26T23:43:00.001-04:00

Wading through my insurance policy, I found the line:

Covered Medical Expenses for pregnancy, childbirth and complications of pregnancy are payable on the same basis as any other Sickness.

That's a bizarre defintion of sickness that they're working with. I would search to see how common that might be, but I imagine 99% of my results would be about morning sickness.

The Abrahamic Religions and Intersexuality

2007-09-17T18:28:00.000-04:00

Rather than continue to inject comments on this subject over at Debunking Christianity, I felt it appropriate to build up my case in a post here.

So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. - Gen 1:27

Doth not even nature itself teach you, that, if a man have long hair, it is a shame unto him? But if a woman have long hair, it is a glory to her: for [her] hair is given her for a covering. - 1 Cr 11:14-15

In several places, the Old and New Testaments and the Qur'an make it clear that the Hebrew and Christian gods intended that there be two human sexes with a distinct gender role assigned to each within the religion and within the ideal family structure. For a member of either of these sexes to perform the other sex's gender is a shameful or sinful thing. This model was the dominate view within European and Middle Eastern societies since that time as it has been in many other cultures. With the advent of empirically driven medical sciences, many within these societies have come to acknowledge the fact that other cultures have long recognized: among all sexually dimorphic animals, there is room for "error" when primary and secondary sexual characteristics are expressed in an individual.

Among homo sapiens, around 0.018% of all children born fall within that margin of atypical sexual development and are born with ambiguous genitalia or other mismatches between external phenotype, internal body chemistry and structure, and genotype. Due to social norms and the success of behaviorist psychology, the dominant approach by European and North American medicine to these children over the past century had been to "fix" their genitalia when they displayed outward signs of their condition. Often this meant simulating the outward appearance of the female organ due to an assumption that living as a female with lessened reproductive capabilities would somehow be less distressing than living as a male with an atypically small penis. The professionals involved assumed that conditioning during childhood would cause the child to develop in the assigned gender role. The number of cases that were successful cannot be determined, but the number of cases where a gender was chosen unsuccessfully are building. You can read more about the current state of affairs at the Intersex Society of North America's website.

A few things should be noted here:

I am not discussing transsexuality, where an individual of one sex identifies psychologically as another gender. Although intersexuality is often included under the blanket transgender label, the causes of the two conditions and their manifestations are different enough to distinguish them.
Like the rest of us, individuals with disorders of sex development tend to identify as one of the genders typical in their culture. The majority of intersexed individuals in the United States, for example, identify as a man or a woman and not as a third gender because our mainstream culture does not recognize more than two genders. I do not see this as a contradiction of my point, as I am discussing sex, not gender. The first is biological, the second is a combination of the psychological and social.
I understand that what I am arguing poses no problems for theists who have left the exclusivist or literalist wings of monotheism and recognize that all ancient books are human documents and subject to human failings.

My question is: when the documents one is supposed to accept as divinely inspired law maintain that sex is a discrete category and the biological reality is something else entirely, how does one reconcile the difference? What becomes of the strict gender roles when their biological basis is shown to be a failed hypothesis?

When raising a child with fused labia, no uterus, and an enlarged clitoris, do we require them to cover their head or not in prayer? Should they wear hijab? Can they become a priest? Who are they allowed to marry? Do any answers change if they undergo masculinzation at puberty? What if they identify with that masculine identity but had been raised a girl up until then?

Today we might recognize an individual's specific disorder and prescribe hormones or other treatments to help them achieve a semblance of sexual normality and restore some function. Individuals in the past may have been wrongfully condemned or punished because they were unable to seek similar treatments. Who is at fault: the individual, their contemporaries, or the authors of the religious texts that insisted there were discrete sexes and condemned homosexuality and gender atypical behavior?

On the Limits of Science

2007-07-24T00:51:00.000-04:00

Before I make it to bed, I have a few random comments on the limits of science and scientists.

Religion and Science: Are they Insoluble?

Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe wrote a clever piece here. The relevant quote:

DID YOU hear about the religious fundamentalist who wanted to teach physics at Cambridge University? This would-be instructor wasn't simply a Christian; he was so preoccupied with biblical prophecy that he wrote a book titled "Observations on the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John." Based on his reading of Daniel, in fact, he forecast the date of the Apocalypse: no earlier than 2060. He also calculated the year the world was created. When Genesis 1:1 says "In the beginning," he determined, it means 3988 BC.

Not many modern universities are prepared to employ a science professor who espouses not merely "intelligent design" but out-and-out divine creation.

The teacher turns out to be Sir Isaac Newton. Jacoby is making the case that if Dawkins and Harris have their way, scientists with religious beliefs will be dismissed or not hired and that science itself could suffer. Predictably, the article calls for each side acknowledging the other.

To be sure, religious dogma can be a blindfold, blocking truths from those who refuse to see them. Scientific dogma can have the same effect. Neither faith nor reason can answer every question. As Newton knew, the surer path to wisdom is the one that has room for both.

The question I want to ask is what does faith bring to the table? How did Sir Isaac Newton's religious writings advance religious knowledge? How was Christianity bettered by his life and work? In what ways did Newton's faith in the Bible improve our understanding of the age of the earth? When the religious answer questions about our world using ancient texts they accept on faith, how do we objectively evaluate one text or one interpretation in relation to others if science isn't to interfere?

I will guess that "scientific dogma" refers to the assumption of materiality underlying scientific methodology. When has this failed science or humanity? When has religion needed to correct scientists in their models of reality? From my admittedly limited knowledge of the history of scientific thought, it seems that the fact checking scientists have done for each other has yielded greater results than the feedback received from religious thinkers.

What Jacoby appears to want is for science to leave religion alone, to leave some questions to religious faith. He's not the only one asking for this.

Science and Mystery

Over at ScienceBlogs, Wyatt Galusky has written about science and mystery.

Perhaps few would credit a mystical explanation over a more antiseptic scientific one, especially if one had designs on reproducing or controlling such a phenomenon. But, still, don't we stand to gain with the retention of mystery? Or, rather, don't we lose when we forget that, no matter how powerful our conceptual schemes and how finely parsed our analysis, mystery remains? Let me point to some coalescence of thought on the subject.

The post includes an anecdote about a doctor who was struck by lightning and afterwards experienced an increased appreciation of and desire for music. The post concludes:

In Sacks' article, he notes that, when offered the chance to have neurological tests done on his brain to suss out a neurological basis for his musicophilia, Cicoria (an orthopedic surgeon by training) demurred, preferring to see his new found musical love as a mystery, and an act of grace.

What was gained by leaving this mystery alone (if it is indeed a mystery)? Did Cicoria or Galusky consider that submitting to the tests might one day help a patient with the opposite problem, the inability to perceive or be moved by music? Or is that a mystery that shouldn't be touched as well? If scientists are to purposely leave gaps in our knowledge so that we can step back and admire the mystery and/or let religion, mysticism, or aesthetics find answers unhindered, how is knowledge or the human condition improved?

If I disagree with Harris and Dawkins, it is in their methodology. There is excellent work being done in the sociology and psychology of religion, and society could only be improved, I think, were this knowledge to spread. If Newton were to apply for a job in astrophysics today and expressed the views he held in his life, he would rightly be denied a position. The case for the time frame of our universe's birth and growth is too overwhelming to consider such radical alternative theories to be on the same grounds. Likewise, I hope respectable universities would not hire a philosopher of religion who believed all religions are subject to cultural change and environmental pressures except for their own particular faith.

In my personal experience - and this appears to be the case for some other scientists - my appreciation of the world is only increased as I learn more about it. Many of my fellow linguists are full of anecdotes about their young children struggling with language. This doesn't interfere with their love for their children (I hope!), but it is simply a expression of that amazement each linguist has for the complexities of human language. Despite two centuries of work in linguistics, the field has enough mystery left that I doubt I'll ever be out of a career.

I suspect that one reason many psychologists and sociologists studying religion have not joined the campaign to eliminate respect for religious beliefs in the public sphere is that these scientists picked their subject because of a deep fascination for it. They likely recognize that religion and society interact in such complex ways that the broad generalizations made by both sides are inherently faulty.

Cain't Got No Time: Grammaticality Judgments at the Edge of Acceptability

2007-07-23T02:04:00.000-04:00

After avoiding listening to her for months (I might read Rolling Stone when I have a free copy lying around, but I tend to be selective in acting on its recommendations), I was eventually put into a situation where I found myself listening to Amy Winehouse. Specifically, her song "Rehab." While the music appeased the musical ear, something flagged down the attention of my linguist's ear. See if you can hear it just after 0:36 in the YouTube link, and again at 1:23.

Unless I'm mistaken, Winehouse sings

I cain't got seventy days.

And later

I cain't got the time

All of the lyrics printed online that I can find transcribe both lines with ain't, but I hear a velar obstruent before the ain't. I wasn't aware that the "southernism" cain't was recognized as a "Americanism" across the pond. If any British English speakers have insight on this, please let me know.

Now I know those of us from Northern Indiana like to think we speak "plain" English, but the fact of the matter is my dialect has as much in common with southern US dialects as it does with more eastern dialects. So it's not the word cain't that caught my ear but its use. For those unfamiliar with the word, a quick Google search on "cain't" produced the following examples.

I'm just a girl who cain't say no.
Oh you cain't getta man with a booooook!
Poor Bill, He Cain't Help It.
I CAIN'T QUIT YEW!!!
Cain't you do nothing 'bout them weeds?
Make 'em an offer they cain't refuse.
I Cain't Get No Wireless.
Cain’t yew afford no gas?
It just ain't fair if you cain't cheat!
Ya cain't get thar from hee-yah!
Why cain't we get the FDA to label food made in China?
Prussian Blue: Them thare girls cain't sing.

The word means essentially the same thing as can't but perhaps more forcefully negative. Some of the results returned by the search clearly mock the word (and by extension, its users) and some results are even references to other song lyrics (Rodgers and Hammerstein's "I Cain't Say No"). Did Winehouse appropriate the word cain't to add authenticity to her fake soul vocals only to use it erroneously? I thought a few Google searches would prove that hunch.

The only search result I could find of "cain't got" was on a German LiveJournal page.

you cain't got no chance with cupid

In contrast, "cain't get" returns 715 results as of this posting, one of which was quoted above. Why the difference? A speaker of more prestigious dialects might point out that got is not an infinitive whereas get is, but the got here is being used as a verb denoting possession. As in "I got five weeks left." In at least my dialect, some negative auxiliary verbs can appear before this verb: don't got, ain't got, haven't got. Others cannot: *can't got, *won't got. Could there be a statistical effect intervening, flagging the construction as ungrammatical when what it means is "I haven't heard this before"?

I gathered some quick google stats on the likelihood of cain't appearing with verbs of possession in comparison to other negative auxiliaries.

	don't	can't	ain't	cain't	didn't	couldn't	wouldn't	Totals
got	428,000	13,000	2,240,000	1	96,700	687	630	2,779,018
%	15.40	0.47	80.60	0.00	3.48	0.02	0.02
get	84,100,000	46,700,000	28,800	715	17,500,000	6,420,000	2,250,000	156,999,515
%	53.57	29.75	0.02	0.00	11.15	4.09	1.43
have	340,000,000	2,930,000	49,600	45,900	44,300,000	3,070,000	17,100,000	407,495,500
%	83.44	0.72	0.01	0.01	10.87	0.75	4.20
own	2,130,000	142,000	523,000	5	444,000	25,300	47,000	3,311,305
%	64.33	4.29	15.79	0.00	13.41	0.76	1.42
hold	2,370,000	2,020,000	1,990,000	4,910	727,000	1,120,000	433,000	8,664,910
%	27.35	23.31	22.97	0.06	8.39	12.93	12.93
buy	7,060,000	2,160,000	2,870,000	3,930	2,070,000	443,000	1,050,000	15,656,930
%	45.09	13.80	18.33	0.03	13.22	2.83	6.71
find	2,170,000	51,000,000	6,340,000	13,400	2,580,000	4,060,000	547,000	66,710,400
%	3.25	76.45	9.50	0.02	3.87	6.09	0.82
Avg %	41.78	21.25	21.03	0.02	9.20	3.92	3.93

Based on these numbers, there appears to be a dis-preference for cain't got, cain't get, and cain't own. Whether that difference is significant remains to be determined with better data. Only the one of these strikes me as sounding ungrammatical. This raises interesting questions for the ways in which statistical feedback informs grammaticality judgments. I doubt the differences of the chart can be accounted for solely by semantics.

One interesting result is that ain't got appears much more frequently than would be predicted from the other patterns. This might be a matter of informal style favoring aint' over don't. The possessive meaning of got is less likely in more formal styles. Another factor could be that ain't got is preferred over ain't have. Perhaps for formality reasons.

Principles and Faith

2007-07-15T15:52:00.000-04:00

Recently, other blogs have attempted to define faith and scientific knowledge in ways that demonstrate the two are not the same. (See "You don't need faith to believe the principle of evolution") An example of how scientific principles are developed occurred to me just a few minutes ago, which I thought I'd share.

We begin with a proposition, principle, theory, assumption, or even a belief if you like, since we'll assume the speaker believes it: "Whatever one puts into a refrigerator will be there when one opens it again."

This statement would be an excellent hypothesis for a scientific investigation because it is readily testable. One can open the door, and see that the items are either there or not. The hypothesis is readily generalizable as well, one can test with a variety of items, a variety of refrigerators, and a variety of individuals. Several experiments can be done to test for all sorts of conditions and combinations.

Now let's say the hypothesis is shown to be wrong in at least one experiment. The refrigerator is opened and a specific item is missing. Possible hypotheses might include the item turning invisible or disappearing on its own, but these would require significant alterations of well established principles. After doing some investigative work, we might determine that a flatmate removed the item. When more items go missing, we might discover that every time it was another human agent who removed the item and that they always removed it between our placing the item in the refrigerator and opening it again (assuming, for sake of argument, that we have extraordinarily honest or sloppy flatmates). Eventually we will amend our hypothesis: "Whatever one puts into a refrigerator will be there when one opens it again unless an entity has removed it during the interval."

Now suppose we place green leaf lettuce in the refrigerator and forget about it for a month. When we open the vegetable drawer again, we will find black spotted and wilting lettuce instead of the delicious and crisp lettuce that we placed there. More experiments will demonstrate that many items left unattended for long lengths of time will slowly undergo change and that the rate of change is dependent on the temperature setting and type of item. We can amend our hypothesis again: "Whatever one puts into a refrigerator will be there when one opens it again unless an agent has removed it during the interval. Items are subject to continual degradation depending on conditions including temperature, the type of item, and the air-tightness of the item's container."

This theorizing sounds painfully obvious to adults, but remember that most humans learn this theory of conservation at a young age. You can actual watch children progress through stages when first they realize that objects are permanent (do not disappear when they cannot be seen) and later that the volume of a liquid does not change with the shape of its container. (Many adults still have trouble thinking in terms of conservation as the term is used in the physical sciences, but that's another matter.)

The progression of our hypothesis demonstrates why scientific theories are subject to continual revision and why a good hypothesis is one that makes predictions that can be tested. If our hypothesis had been "whatever is found in the refrigerator will be a subset of items placed therein" it would have lacked explanatory power. That is, it fails to explain the hows and whys of the changes taking place. If our original hypothesis was "Whenever we open the refrigerator, what will be inside will be what Zeus wills to be inside", we would never have professed beyond that formulation unless we were given unmitigated access to Zeus's will and then began to investigate that (but, of course, Zeus's will is beyond human comprehension). Even if our flatmate had taken some food, we could still argue that that had been Zeus's will and not need to add additional clauses. Or we could argue with equal validity that our flatmate had violated Zeus's will and then feel justified in taking punitive measures.

This is the problem many of us have with beliefs held on faith alone. The religious begin with a proposition that they accept on faith (Yeshua was the legitimate messiah, Paul was divinely inspired, Mohammad was divinely inspired, the Hadith of the Cloak is valid, Zeus causes lightning, Kuan Yin refused to enter Nirvana). When required, evidence is selected to prove the statement of faith and contrary evidence is explained away (Zeus willed Melissa to take the last pita. Zeus only wills milk to spoil after a few weeks.). Very rarely will the proposition itself be modified (e.g., the emergence of Deists who believed Jesus was wise but not a miracle-worker).

When some IDers/Creationists argue against evolution, they often display a lack of understanding about the difference between a hypothesis and a statement of faith. No living biologist would expect everything Darwin wrote about evolution to be true. Scientists do not end debates by quoting him (though they make look toward his writings in search of inspiration or to wonder at how much he predicted on weak evidence was actually proven with the developments of genetics), nor are there active schools of philosophers debating the proper interpretation of his writings. If a fossil or living creature was found that was half-dog/half-grass and did not fit into our current biological classification morphologically or genetically, then the current theory of evolution would be thrown for a loop. Its possible that explanations could be found that explained the odd hybrid and preserved much of the current theory, but it would not be without considerable effort, testing, and modification of our knowledge about the process we call evolution.

On the other hand, religious faith is not subject to the same kind of revision (though it certainly changes, those changes often resemble other cultural changes and not changes in scientific knowledge). If a religion predicted that it was the only valid method for approaching an absolute source of morality, one might make the prediction that its adherents should be more moral by their own standards than adherents of other religions. If that observation was not born out in the data, the faithful could invent all sorts of justifications that may or may not have been elements of the original faith. From Christianity, one frequently hears that even Christians are sinners and therefore won't necessarily be more moral, but still insist that they have personally felt the holy spirit's touch at important moments or that atheists are by nature immoral.

The same is true for historical events that the religious accept on faith. That there is no independent evidence corroborating the story would not shatter their faith. They would argue (quite logically) that one cannot prove a negative in such a situation. But they might hypocritically deny similar stories originating in other religions have occurred as described on the basis of "common sense" or their faith.

This is the point where those who approach the world from a non-religious perspective reach impasses when we argue with the religious. A proposition held on faith and not subject to revision or review based on evidence is a proposition that is difficult to disprove. One can argue that the proposition is unlikely or unnecessary to explain the data (as most "evangelical" atheists are content to do), but is not the same thing and the faithful know it. When the interpretation of Zeus's Will is subject to extreme disagreements, it becomes even more difficult for the non-religious to suggests tests of those principles as there is likely to be some group that disagrees with the interpretation selected for testing.

In the scientific community, when two groups support theories that contradict one another, the outcome is determined by the strength of the theory in predicting new evidence. More than occasionally scientific communities will adopt theories that turn out to be erroneous, but it is most often those same scientific communities who discover the faults in the theory. Among the faithful, beliefs that contradict each other are typically determined by the strength of each side in converting others, military or colonial campaigns, trade radiating from key economic or cultural centers, and other means of cultural dispersion. Religious faiths have had difficulty in spreading when there is no social or economic advantage to their adoption. (To be fair, the adoption of science as a methodology frequently spreads in a similar fashion, but because science is based on logic applied to the natural world, there is nothing preventing scientific methodology from being developed twice except time and the dwindling numbers of pre-industrial societies. It is less likely that a religion identical to Christianity would develop independent of old-world denominations.)

Where the faithful (sometimes) find fault in scientific principles is that they are always an incomplete picture. In the real world, we would have to make an assumption that a human agent stole our food because human agents are not always honest. When it comes to matters like this, scientists must assume what Dr. House is fond of arguing: patients lie, but symptoms never do. This is why scientists in many fields often seek a variety of lines of inquiry into a problem to determine independently that some principle is true. For example, we would use video recordings to watch the refrigerator or an analysis of the kitchen trash can's contents in addition to conducting interviews of flatmates. We cannot date fossils through direct observation, but by using a wide variety of independent dating methods and finding that the majority converge at similar dates, one can establish the likeliest time frame.

The Life Update

2007-02-21T02:14:00.000-05:00

So folks may be streaming over from LiveJournal and MySpace in the two by two's now, so here's the big update on things not related to invisible men.

School
Classes and related studies have been soaking up lots of my time. I've been reviewing the theoretical, mathematical, and historical foundations of modern linguistics. Right down to topics like set theory and predicate logic. Classes are going very well. I was complemented for introducing a change of topic after leading the class Monday: we ended up discussing some of our views on theoretical syntax, and I got to say my little bit about admitting data driving theory, which is the major thing the professor and I agree on. It was a refreashing change of pace from the morphophonetics we normally discuss.

Speaking of such, my paper for advanced phonology did better than I imagined in my best estimates. Much better. Nearly all of the comments I received were the thoughts I had inbetween turning it in and getting it back. Semantisc, the one class I had been looking forward to for over a year, has been a let down. But I will be given the incentive to study MRS in more detail. Now to finish my statement of purpose...

And write that grammar of Moroccan Arabic to back up my possible dissertation project...

Music
3 Mustaphas 3 are bubbling through my headphones as I write this. I should really write more reviews here. I may have to do that. Maybe it was working with John and Adam over break, but I've been turning to metal more than I ever did. It's really the last popular genre I haven't already gotten bored with. At the same time, Bauhaus, The Smiths, and Echo & The Bunnymen have been getting steady plays.

I picked up the guitar for the first time in a while today. I've been considering a number of projects, but I really don't have the time to devote to anything. Today I mostly played some Phil Ochs and Woody G, the original (union) gansta. And a Miller Sisters tune or two. I swear I will make them work for my voice if I die trying.

Literature
I'm still picking my way through Baudolino. I've begun Scott Atran's In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion, and it's been fascinating. Just not as important to me right now as Mathematical Methods in Linguistics. For some reason, I was almost tempted to read the first of the Gormenghast books, but I should really finish something else first.

Writingwise, I've been picking at an untitled fantasy world and a couple of scripts. Nothing firm or immediately forthcoming. The fantasy world has been a long, slow process. It incorporates stuff I sketched out as far back as 10 years ago, but I've been careful to build up a world that I'll be 100% satisfied with. I'll probably write a bit more on the fantasy traps I see elsewhere and how I mean to avoid them.

Fun
My free time has either been spent trolling religious and anti-religious sites and message boards. Or watching movies. Babel, Casino Royal, The Royal Tennenbaums, and Resevoir Dogs made the last couple of weeks. Babel was exceptional among the new movies I've allowed myself to see. Casino Royale made me wonder what Tarentino would do with the spy genre. The idea of Bond as a semi-sociopath as he was in the movie just screams for someone to come along and take it further, like Leone did with the cowboy genre.

Question Faith, Part II will come someday. I swear. Just waiting for the energy to strike.

Gospel Story Quiz

2007-02-19T15:50:00.000-05:00

I found this quiz hilarious. If only it explained itself at the end.

Replies to Beast Rabban

2007-02-16T17:20:00.000-05:00

These are my replies to a discussion here that has grown too dissassiated with the original post.

Beast Rabban, you seem to have misunderstood a few of my comments, so most of my responses will be clarifications.

Firstly, yes, I understand that there is a separation of church and state in the Constitution. However, the interpretation given to this is that the Founding Fathers wanted 'freedom of religion', rather than 'freedom from religion'

I've never seen a document from any of the founding fathers that suggested that. If you know of one, please let me know. There's quite a lot of evidence that some of them were specifically not the god-fearing Christians today's moral-reformers make them out to be. For example, from the Treaty of Tripoli that John Adams signed into law: “[T]he Government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion...” And certainly Jefferson would have accepted "freedom from religion" as a legitimate interpretation: “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God.”

It might, therefore, be beneficial to non-Christian children to learn the basic tenets of Christianity in order for them to understand, and not be excluded from, the common culture of their nation.

I'd agree with that more strongly than you might imagine. However, prayer in school is not an effective pedagogical means of doing that. Neither is direct religious instruction. Historical, literary, psychological, and anthropological methods would suit better in an educational setting.

Then there is the question of what constitutes 'meaningful instruction'. As a Christian, I'd strongly argue that religious education does constitute exactly this.

I assumed that - like in every school I attended or taught in - when a portion of the students are excused to participate in some religious study or activity, those left behind are give worksheets or other busywork that are not only contraindicated by many studies on effective practices but aren't even graded, since most of the class is out of the room at the time. Effectively, while some students are singing about Jesus, the other portion are learning nothing.

You mention in connection with history lessons on comparative religion teaching facts, rather than opinions or guesses. Presumably you mean that in their approach to religion, an atheist, philosophical physicalist approach be made to religion, rather than a religious interpretation. This is, however, merely another opinion or guess.

I'm not entirely sure what your accusing me of here, but by facts I mean things like "this is was X believe, this is what X do" with a focus on the real and meaningful divisions and issues within each religion (e.g., not teaching Islam as "normal Moslems versus terrorists" but from the more important division between Sunni and Shi'ite). I've seen people of a Christian background pay lipservice to religious diversity without ever making an effort to understand how religion functions in other cultures. To avoid that, I think a thematic rather than geographic approach to units would do much better (e.g., a unit on religious revelation, another on religious responses to modern biology or physics, another on how religions adapt to changing social contexts). The comparative aspect would come across much better that way.

Also, historians will tell you that history isn't about facts, but argument and interpretation, and the histories of different events and periods can vary widely, all based on the same basic facts.

Yes, and a good history class presents the different viewpoints held by historians and lets students come to their own conclusions - conclusions that should be drawn from evidence, not simply religious insight.

History is only one aspect of what I'd want the class to cover anyway. Social psychology and cognitive science should have nearly equal roles.

Regarding the teaching of religious history, this might actually strengthen religion, particularly in the field of science.

Yes, perhaps. Remember though, that its only recently that anyone in US society has even been able to say that they are atheists freely and publicly without suspicion, and even then we had the brief setback in the 1940s-50s when all atheists were presumed to be communists. There was even a tradition among deists in claiming that atheism was a logical impossiblity. That Christians have been and are involved in European science is expected in such a climate.

I wonder whether the relationship between religion and science would do better in a history class or science class. I have a feeling that a history class would neglect to show things like how even great mind's like Newton have historically used religion - the existence of god in particular - as a filler for the gaps that the contemporary theories failed to explain. These explanations - though common - are routinely dismissed as not being scientific, since they make no empirical claims. Just like ID is being dismissed today by mainstream biology.

Proofthatgodexists.org

2007-02-15T18:42:00.000-05:00

I’ve seen this site listed by quite a few Christians recently, so I took a look at it yesterday. What follows is a brief sketch of my first reactions.

Existence
The author never defines existence. This is no simple problem. Consider the following sentence.

Prince’s album Camille will never be released.

There are two definitions of album that are relevant here: 1) a physical object of recorded media and 2) a collection of songs released together. Neither of these definitions can apply in the sentence because the album, as such, does not exist. Yet Prince scholars accept the sentence as, sadly, true. Some, but not all, of the songs for the album were recorded, but the project was abandoned before it was finished. Yet if we talk about the album, Prince fans will understand the referent, though none exists in the material world. I wonder, does the author of proofthatgodexists.org agree that the album exists in some sense?

The definition of existence is troubled not only by things that were nearly material, but by things that never were or will be.

Mary and I both believe in the Invisible Pink Unicorn.

Simon and Peter denied the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Assume both of these sentences are true, the referents in the predicates are understood and agreed upon by the subjects, but those referents do not exist in a material sense. If the author accepted that Camille exists, does he accept that the Invisible Pink Unicorn and Flying Spaghetti Monster must exist in the same fashion? Notice I am not trying to get the author to admit that IPU or FSM are real, only clarify the definition of existence being used.

Truth
Similarly, we are never told what truths the author is including under “absolute truth.” This section does not lead to an essay, so it’s impossible to even guess. The majority of truths that are required to do science are of a material nature or have material implications. The truth value of statements like the following, though studied by logicians, is almost wholly irrelevant to science and everyday language.

If there are elephants on Mars, then it will rain in Seattle.

I think that the majority of scientists will hold that absolute truth exists for material things without recourse to a divine being.

The average person will believe or state many things that are either not true or too poorly defined to know the truth value. The relation between truth and psychological statements or other uses of everyday language are other matters entirely, and still not fully understood nor acceptably modeled by semanticists.

Logic and Mathematics
I don’t know why the proof separates these, as they are largely intertwined.

In the essay to challenge a disbelief in mathematics’ existence, the author asks naturalists to find the number three in nature. Not three things, he insists. That insistence seems largely ignorant of Set Theory as the possible foundation of mathematics. Notice, we also return to the question of what existence means.

The author also seems not to recognize that what we call logic and mathematics are models. If we formulated a consistent model of mathematics with no real world application, would that also necessarily prove god existed in the author’s estimation? What about an inconsistent and irrational model?

Morality
If you insist you believe in relative morality, you are taken to a short, patronizing essay asking if you really believe all morality is relative. This is intended to put the reader on the defensive and uses extreme examples of situations that our culture finds particularly immoral without pointing out that the average person of European descent does many things on a regular basis that other moral worldviews find equally immoral: eating meat, for example.

I think it’s fair that the author should be put on the defensive as well. Like many atheists, I left the church for moral reasons. So I ask the author how the source of objective morality could possibly be responsible for the atrocities of the Old Testament (for example, in Joshua when the Hebrews take the land promised to them). If god is the source of objective morality, this cannot be a case of “different time, different culture,” otherwise god’s objective standard has been changing.

Which God?
The author produces quotes from the Bible to attempt to demonstrate that only the Christian god could be the source of absolute truth, logic, mathematics, and objective morality. The author seems ignorant that many of the quotes produced would be accepted by both Jews and Moslems. Furthermore, if we assumed everything else written is true, then all these quotes can do is assert that the Christian understanding of god is one possibility. The author also needs to systematically demonstrate that all other gods cannot be the source.

Question Faith, Part I

2007-02-14T17:25:00.000-05:00

As promised, this post will describe my current position in regards to the debates, and most importantly, what I believe atheists should be doing.

The Problem of Beliefs

The most valuable insight to come from Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and his recent interviews and appearances is not a statement but a question. Why shouldn’t beliefs be subject to discussion and inquiry? I find this a very fair demand. Theologists will quite fairly say that they have been doing this for centuries, but what Dawkins is asking for most specifically – and where I agree with him – is that such discourse should be a part of daily religious practice.

One of the largest objections to atheism and Dawkins’s book is the presumed lack of foundation for objective morality. Dawkins and I both assume a relative morality tempered by the evolution of primates and primate society, but rather than describe that position yet again, I want to look at the argument that objective morality indicates the existence of a god.

Here is the modern formation of the argument
1 Objective moral values exist
2 Objective moral values require the existence of a god
3 Therefore, a God exists
(Taken from Luke Pollard’s essay, “Does Morality Point to God?” but also referenced in Peter Williams’s “Calling Dawkins’ Bluff” )

If an atheist assumes the statements are true for the sake of common reference, there are three simple questions one can ask. The first is one of Dawkins’s favorite tactics: can we substitute the name of a specific god for the word “god” in the argument? If not, why not? Does objective morality require a god who matches a specific description?

Second, if objective morality exists, then beings with a moral capacity should all make reference to the same objective morality and understand arguments that an act is more or less moral. If this is so, then it should be born out empirically among all homo sapiens not otherwise impaired by mental illness (though the latter shouldn’t matter with objective morality, in my opinion, but I will allow objectivists that escape).

Third, the assumption of the argument suggests that the necessary god is the most moral. This follows from Aquinas’s fourth “way.”

“Among beings there are some more and some less good, true, noble and the like. But 'more' and 'less' are predicated of different things, according as they resemble in their different ways something which is the maximum, as a thing is said to be hotter according as it more nearly resembles that which is hottest; so that there is something which is truest, something best, something noblest and, consequently, something which is uttermost being [i.e. maximally ontologically secure]; for those things that are greatest in truth are greatest in being, as it is written in [Aristotle's] Metaph. ii. Now the maximum in any genus is the cause of all in that genus; as fire, which is the maximum heat, is the cause of all hot things. Therefore there must also be something which is to all beings the cause of their being, goodness, and every other perfection; and this we call God.” (quoted in Williams)

There are obvious problems with this argument that Dawkins is quick to point out (the upper limit of heat, for example, is dependent on the amount of matter and energy in a system, not on some universal quantity), but again, I ask that we forget them and accept the statements as valid. If this god is the reference point that no other moral being can surpass, for any being with claims to godhood we should find no human being who finds that being morally objectionable. If a human being can appeal to objective morality to

The religious are often content to demonstrate with words that their subjective experience contains universal implications, but universality suggests empirical evidence can be found to support their claims. That is, the statements being put forward are verifiable, and interlocutors – including potential converts, adherents to other religions, and atheists alike - have every right to expect theists to investigate their claims. We may need to better define the implications of the above arguments to test them, but the principle remains.

I gain confidence in this assertion from the not-entirely independent movements of creation science and Intelligent Design. With varying degrees of success, both have demonstrated that beliefs can be formulated in such a way that the divine’s interaction with the material and the physical consequence of religious claims can be investigated from an objective standpoint.

Other religious beliefs can be investigated from a similar standpoint, and some have been, prayer most famously. If we assume that 1) the Christian god uses prayers to further his agenda, which is the conversion of the maximal number of people to Christianity, 2) a percentage of prayers answered affirmatively greater than chance indicates his response, and 3) he responds to prayers directed to him from believers asking for help, then 4) we should expect that the prayers from ill believers answered affirmatively should predict the number of non-Christians who accept their invitation to attend church when chance is controlled for. This experiment eliminates the “insincere prayer” problem of hospital prayer studies by linking prayers with empirical evidence most Christians would state falls within their god’s plan, however mysterious his full agenda may be.

The underlying thread of this discussion is that religious revelation – however wonderful the subjective experience may be - cannot expect to be on par with scientific knowledge so long as it cannot be verified in any form. Science has already demonstrated that subjective experiences like color-blindness and emotion can be studied with a degree of objectivity, and our means of doing so are ever increasing. I see no reason the same cannot be demanded of religious claims.

It’s often pointed out that scientists hold beliefs as well, and we respond by saying that yes, we do, but our beliefs are generalized from verifiable facts. We may hold some opinions not driven by fact, but those opinions are subject to change and the lack of facts supporting them is exactly our reason for asking further questions. Faith, I will argue, should be expected to operate the same way, and I will say more of this in the concluding section.

A Problem in Evangelical Methods

Despite the great question Dawkins has asked, too often the argument falls to demonstrating religions presumed harmful effect (e.g., in The Root of All Evil?). He is not the only one guilty of this distraction: Sam Harris, most notably, shares the same fault. I hesitate to say “fault”, but I have a feeling that statistics would show that the method fails to change the minds of the religious. These are a people accustomed to thinking that “the lord works in mysterious ways” and that all death – however innocent the dead may be – falls within those mysterious ways. Cases of religious leaders or practices misleading people are common, but also easily explained away by the faithful with an us-them mentality. For example, I doubt Ted Haggard’s fall from grace produced any documented deconverts, even if his congregation may have diminished.

The statement that religion has increased the amount of evil in the world typically meets the objection that secularists have both done the same and present no systematic worldview that aims to prevent the same. Claims that theists are ignorant, unreasoning, etc also invite criticism of atheists with the same qualities (I can personally point toward a number of atheists from the Nietzsche school who don’t even feel rationality is a quality to be admired). There are atheists who are attempting to better the world, and there is great value in pointing them out, but that is entirely different from making wholesale claims about faith that are not backed by history and statistics. Scott Atran is correct in pointing out that some commentators, like Harris and Dawkins, are failing to use scientific reasoning on this point and in their method of presentation.

If atheists wish to make claims about religion, they would do much better to work from the evidence in cognitive science and anthropology and draw their conclusions from empirical evidence, and that evidence is steadily accumulating in favor of religion as a human-creation rather than religion of divine origin. Madeleine Bunting (in her Guardian review) is correct in saying that The Root of All Evil? is not worthy of a great scientist: Dawkins would have better fulfilled his role as a public promoter of science by producing a documentary resembling Atran’s In Gods We Trust: The Evolutionary Landscape of Religion.

Education is the key to my stance. My undergraduate work was in secondary education, and I strongly favored an inquiry method of teaching. The essence of the inquiry method is that because children are naturally little scientists to some degree (see Piaget and Dewey for arguments in favor of this), the best classrooms should make use of their cognitive ability to form hypotheses and test them. Subject matter is presented not as an assembly of facts, but as continuing investigations in which the students may take part. The inquiry method does not work well with all subjects (certain aspects of chemistry, for example, are simply beyond the temporal and material resources of the average class), but as the origin of religion and the existence of god are certainly both in dispute among experts at this time, I see no reason we cannot invite more “students” to participate.

Question Faith

If, as Dawkins and I are both arguing, faith should be questioned, the goal of atheists seeking to deconvert the religious should be to raise questions and challenge answers. We should model our presentations and our arguments on the form “If X is true, then Y should be true. Where is the evidence for Y?” Too many atheists spend their time arguing against X when the data for Y is unavailable. This is not good science. However self-evident the falsehood of X may be to us, if it is not verifiable in itself, we can never hope to dissuade anyone from believing it and should be ashamed when we vilify anyone for maintaining their position.

Rather than only promoting the sources of facts in favor of the atheistic perspective (which will always contains gaps big enough for a god to hide inside), we should be constructing web portals and writing calls for action from theists. In fact, we need more atheist-created web pages that are directed at theists, rather than pages that are collections of disputable assertions about the origin of Christianity and current theories of evolution. These are both valuable resources in their own right, but they are not resources we should be directing theists toward.

A great amount of thought and work has already been undertaken. All that remains is to pull these resources into one place, and yes, by writing this, I am volunteering to take part. I am currently working on models which I will share here and elsewhere as they come together.

In a day or two, I will critique one popular anti-religious organization, The Rational Response Squad, from the viewpoint I’ve sketched above.

In the Beginning

2007-02-13T21:21:00.000-05:00

Hiya, friends and strangers! Welcome to my new little corner of the interweb.

Recently my attention has been drawn to the debates surrounding Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the other "fundamental atheists" that have been stirring up trouble in the media, on Youtube, and in blogs like this. I find that oft-quoted insult troubling due to the difference between the methods and outlook of the atheists versus religious fundamentalists, but I also have reservations about the means being used by some of the "bad cop" atheists, as The Rational Response Squad have dubbed themselves. I'll write more on the matter in the days to come, but I wanted to begin with some...

Personal Background
I came to regard myself as an atheist only recently. At the age of fifteen or sixteen, I began to have doubts about Christianity. Until that point (and for some years after) I had been highly active in my church: singing in choirs, acting in pangents, witnessing to my friends. My doubts began when I started questioning the basic ethical and logical basis of Christianity. Did pre-Columbian people get to go to heaven? Why did God have to sacrifice anyone to save the rest of us? Why plant the tree of knowledge in the first place? My doubts were amplified when writing from the Jesus Seminar landed in my hands (from the book collection of my fairly conservative father, no less). The discovery was shattering. Not simply in the Seminar's findings, but the facts that had long been known to theologists but undiscussed in Sunday School about the origin and circumstances surrounding the New Testament. As I fell deeper into the world of Mithras and the mystery cults, it became clear to me that whether or not Jesus existed, I couldn't accept the Gospel story as fact. When I took a world religion course, it became clear to me that the origin of Christianity was on as shakey ground as all the religions I had dismissed out of hand.

Throughout the period, I prayed. I never made my doubts as open as I describe them here, but I asked questions and continued to stay involved. The summer before I turned 18, I left Sunday school feeling angry one day, and knew I could never go back. I can count the number of times I've stepped into a church since then on one hand.

The nail in the coffin came afterwards and turned me into an angry agnostic for a few years. After the shock of telling my parents that first Sunday, I felt nothing. I felt no doubt about my decision. Something in me must have expected a showdown, that the holy spirit would intervene and bring me back, but nothing happened. Not even my parents cared enough to save me. Not my Christian friends, not my church. I didn't suddenly become immoral, and I didn't even lose some of my doubts about evolution, abortion, etc until college. I felt as if I had been taken in with a scam and left with a dozen boxes of worthless knives and no way of getting my money returned.

Years Later
Last year I attended a lecture by Eugenie Scott on the slight of hand involved in the "Teach the Controversy" tactic. A long time fan of culture jamming, I had been following the Flying Spaghetti Monster with glee. Scott's lecture spoke to the educator in me (still present despite a failed student teaching endevour), and I started to follow the serious issues that prompted the FSM response.

Last fall, I stumbled onto The Root of All Evil on YouTube and several lectures by Dawkins. I had called myself an agnostic until then, but the teapot scenario won me over. I am open to evidence on any deity's existance, but from the evidence that I've seen, I don't feel the theistic question warrants even ambivalence. This is incredibly dismissive, I admit, but like many vocal atheists, I am used to speaking within the realm of science. I have noticed that theists and agnostics are reacting strongly to the recent invasion of loud atheists, and this will inform my position on what atheists shouldbe doing.

In my next post I'll explain that position on the trouble with atheism, which the savvy will liken to Neil DeGrasse Tyson and Scott Atran's recent remarks.