Randal Rausner’s claim that most atheists don’t know what atheism is.

In The Incredible HallQ blog over on FreeThoughtBlogs we read that Randal Rausner on his blog argues that most atheists don’t know what atheism is and so should stop calling themselves such.

The argument goes something like this (please don’t bother correcting this if you think otherwise, it is considered rude on-line to demolish someone else’s straw-man): Rausner writes:

“To be sure, they are able to say in a piecemeal fashion “I don’t believe in Yahweh, Thor or Allah…” but they can’t get down to the essence and provide a succinct definition of the type of which each of these is a token”.

He then proceeds to enlighten the self styled atheists with:

“But don’t ever say I only curse the darkness. Let me light a candle by helping the confused atheists out there. Theism is minimally the position that the ultimate cause of everything that contingently exists is an agent cause. Thus, God is minimally the ultimate agent cause of everything that contingently exists.”

and so by his definition the one true atheism is the denial of this.

Unfortunately language (other than in France) is defined by its use not by a dictionary. Dictionary definitions follow usage not the other way around. Rausner’s definition is close to that of Deism and in fact I have no argument with Deists, and I believe that most atheists would have no argument with them. We might argue about what exactly we mean by a first cause, or if the concept even makes any sense and/or whether we need one or not, but this is a friendly argument among friends.

The trouble starts when using just the assumption of a first cause you attempt to deduce the “truths” of an allegedly revealed religion. Especially those revealed religions that have when they could (or still can) resort to such arguments as threats backed up by beatings, torture, beheading, burning-at the-stake, stoning …

I describe myself as an atheist, but in reality I could also be described as a deist; I think there is some ineffable mystery about existence (but I don’t know any more about it: that’s what ineffable means, and nor do I believe you when you claim you do). But the difference between these positions has no practical consequence, so I stick with the more commonly used term (possibly because is pisses-off so many followers of revealed religions). The source of knowledge claimed by the main religions is unacceptable, and as far as I can see cannot be made so.

We may observe that Rausner does not subscribe to the minimal theist position but as a follower of some evangelical version of Christianity hence subscribes to some baroquely embroidered theist position.

Truth claims must be backed up by convincing arguments, revelation and warm feelings are not good enough, nor are arguments from common belief, authority, …

It is often asked why secularists are so angry, well one answer is that our predecessors lived in a world where freedom of though and speech were forbidden, and we are not going back.

Atheist Morals

We continually see reference to the idea that you can be moral without god in atheist blogs etc. I think this is just propaganda for the benefit of a religious audience. It seems to me that a more plausible position is that you aren’t “moral” even with your god!

Resumed Painting

I have recently been clearing our garage. It had been filled from front to back with rubbish and the children’s old toys. Now it is clear and so I have some work space I decided it was time to resume painting.

The current project is to do a series of head and shoulders portraits of historical figures, starting with Admirals (I will later diversify, I suspect initially in the direction of the Philhellenes: Lords Byron and Cochrane , ..). The plan is to keep the pictures small, initially ~150 x 150 mm (6 x 6″) so that they can be displayed anywhere.

The first is now complete, it is of Admiral George Brydges Rodney, victor of the Saintes (1782).

Admiral George Rodney, acrylic on board 150 x 150 mm

This was based initially on the Gainsborough portrait of 1782, but that was rather anodyne and so I modified the face more along the lines of the Reynolds portrait of 1784.

There are four main distinct portraits of Rodney from the period after the Saintes that I am aware of the two mentioned above another from about 10 years later by Mosnier of 1791 which sort of bears a resemblance to the Reynolds portrait and a print from the 1840′s. The latter bears no resemblance to any of the other three or to the portraits of Rodney when he was younger.

The evidence from these portraits on what Rodney actually looked like is poor, I’m inclined to go with the Reynolds, to which I hope mine bears a vague resemblance.

I painted a pair of these, the above is the second, the first gives Rodney a rather fuller face and so I am not so happy with.

Stories from the job wars: Company IT Policy

Reading the company IT fair use policy this morning I discovered (I knew it already but had conveniently forgotten, a bit like the rest of the rules in the policy) that I am not allowed to mention who I work for on any web page of mine (?!)

Strange but I had thought mentioning them would not reflect to my credit. I suppose they really have my interests at heart.

They would not like to see me harassed over allegations against them for corrupt business practices. Which they swear they no longer employ, but never did anyway and have rolled out an ethical behaviour policy for the common staff so they won’t bribe anyone again (not that they ever did).

Nice Example of Attempted Pro-Monarcist Spin

This is a nice example of attempted spin in this item from the Telegraph with the headline:

“Monarchy attracts £500 million a year from overseas tourists“

Reading the article it turns out not that the Monarchy is attracting these tourist pounds but the UKs historical heritage (which happens to include Kings, Queens, Country Houses, Castles, …). These things would still be here if the UK were a Republic, appointed a Lord Protector/Regent, or continued as a Monarchy.

Despite such attempts at spin the Telegraph remains one of the better UK papers, but needs to be read in conjunction with the Guardian and/or Independent for a balanced view.

Diplomat disciplined over Pope memo

Some background to the story about the amusing  suggestions for “events” for the forth coming visit of the  ”Pope” visit  can be found at [1]

One reason why Foreign Office staff may not have been taking the visit terribly seriously is that they recognise that this is not a diplomatic visit by a foreign potentate, which would be within their remit, but a visit by a religious leader hostile to the policy of the British Government (and as this appears to be some kind of democracy presumably a significant proportion of the British population) disguised as a state visit so that the British Government will feel obliged to contribute substantially to the costs.

One must question the motives of whoever released this to the press. Clearly it is not Civil Service policy to release the results of brain storming sessions to the public. While not a civil servant (any more) I would not want the notes of any brainstorm that I took part in released since they are invariably laced with things that would look peculiar when read by the humorless out of context. It may well have been a mistake of the brainstorm leader to pass the full set of suggestions up the line but what the hell. There seem to be two possibilities for the motives of whoever passed the offending documents to the press: (1) They wanted it to result in the cancellation of the popes visit (2) They were personally offended (because they were some sort of Catholic). In either case it is the person who released the document that needs to be disciplined not the facilitator of the brainstorm. If in fact it turns out that possibility (2) is the case it demonstrates the problem/s that let to the English reformation (compromising the authority of the state by loyalty of church members to a  foreign power posing as a religion) still exists.

Of course the real tragedy here is that the offence caused is insufficient for the “Pope’s” visit to be cancelled (from this you may assume that my sympathies are to some extent in accord with possibility (1) above, but I would never breach my contract in such a matter and don’t approve of anyone else doing so).

References

[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/vaticancityandholysee/7636736/Diplomat-disciplined-over-Pope-memo-is-named.html

Telegraph “Science” Correspondent Talks Bollocks-shock horror!

Research at Aberdeen University reported in the Telegraph seems to show a correlation between women’s preferences in men and availability of and standard of health care. No surprise there.

However the Telegraphs “science” correspondent Richard Alleyne, seems to think the preference for the Johnny Depp type by those with access to affordable health care compared to a preference for the Sean Connery type by those with poor access to affordable health care  is because they (the women) no longer need to worry about survival of the fittest. With the subtext that a tough guy appearance/image correlates with “fitness” and the other type is unfit but it does not matter if you have health care to look after the kids, and not that in relatively good times a man who will help look after the kids is fitter in the Darwinian sense than the guy who can hunt, wrestle etc but will spend most of their time in a bar drinking and playing backgammon.

The basic idea of natural selection is not selection of the biggest strongest most arse kickingest, but selection of the best adapted to the present environment.

Now let’s assume that women’s preferences in men are not for the equivalent of the peacocks tail (and I would not bet on that myself). What this would mean (assuming that improved health causes the observed difference in preferences and it is natural selection at work here) is that in the present circumstances the cluster of characteristics that correlate with Deppiness increased probability of survival for offspring (or greater numbers) than those correlated with Conneryness.

The problems with the Telegraph article are:

1. The failure to understand that “survival of the fittest” means “preferential survival of those best adapted to survive” and it is contingent on the environment. If “science” correspondents can’t understand this is it surprising that the public do not (I won’t mention creationists – Oops… I just did).

2. Failure to understand that correlation does not imply causation.

3. In the presense of sexual selection all bets are off (think pacock’s tail).

4. I’ve forgotten what I was going to put here but it was a humdinger, and will add it when I do recall.

Global Warming

The controversy over global warming (is it happening and what is causing it if it is) is rather strange. Nobody disagrees that simple models of the atmosphere, solar heating, … all show that other-things being equal if there are more greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere the mean surface temperature will be higher than otherwise. There are several problems with this; that of other-things being equal and the validity of the modelling and no doubt others that I can’t think of at present. But it is clear that we should start with the hypothesis that increasing green house gasses increases mean surface temperatures. Our task is now to fill in the gaps, improve modelling account for the “other-things”, which is what climate science seeks to do.

It is not possible to prove Anthropic Global Warming simply by displaying a (mean global surface) temperature against time plot because climate is not a fixed thing, it changes due to a number of other causes. To be more precise no “hockey stick” plot on its own proves anything. The plot that we need to see is the plot showing the difference in temperature between what would have been observed without human generated greenhouse gasses and actual observed temperatures against time. This is a difficult job, we need to establish a long-ish time series of global average surface temperature which extends back before satellite data became available, preferably to before industrialisation or longer. Parts of this record must be reconstructed from ground station records which may be contaminated with heat-island effects from growing cities or just relocation of the stations etc. The time series of temperatures in the absence of anthropic green house gasses has to be produced by climate models, and as we all know such models are always incomplete and may in parts have poor validation status.

Now climate scientists tell us that the plots do in fact show global warming over what would otherwise have occurred (of course subject to caveats about the noise, modelling fidelity, etc). Other things being equal we should believe them since it would be the opposite finding that would be extraordinary and require further investigation.

Not Lying Until Pressed?

UK civil servants like most of us prefer not to lie when asked a direct question. This applies even when they cannot tell the truth for various reasons. When faced with such a question one tactic often employed is deflection. Deflection entails either answering a different question which appears to the casual oberver to be that asked, or to reply with a question.

The reason for this post is the recent allegations about Gordon Brown and bullying of Downing Street junior staff. A very senior civil servant has replied to questions which are equivalent to “have you had a word with the PM on the QT about his bullying junior staff”. The first two or three times the person in question replied each time with different deflections. Eventually the person in question had to give a direct answer and they denied that they had done so.

If that straight answer were in fact the truth there was no reason for deflection so we may conclude that it was probably a lie. They could not tell the truth if the answer were yes so eventually must lie, and we all know that. Now the questioners knew what deflection meant from the start. So instead of pursuing this question they could just have observed that the answer given was a deflection and we would draw the appropriate conclusions from that. There was and is no need to drive the subject to lying.

I suppose that just observing that the interviewee was deflecting etc would be considered bad television and so the Jeremy Paxmans would never adopt this approach.

Peer Rejected

It seems that some problems with abuse of peer review have been highlighted by the stem cell community [1].

My own experience with this was a paper that I wrote for SIAM Review [2] essentially criticising something they had published (on the speed of the domino effect). The criticism was that [3] presented a mathematical model of the domino effect the results of which were counter-intuitive and no attempt had been made to compare the model predictions with any experimental data despite there being a number of data sets in the literature. In fact the principle references in [3] did contain experimental data (slightly flawed in my opinion but that is not relevant here) which if used would have invalidated the model.

The problem with my paper might in the eyes of the editors (and possibly the referees, if the same referees were used as for the original paper) be that not only was I critical of the original paper but of the reviewers in not picking up that no attempt at validation had been made. This might also be construed as a criticism of the who refereeing and editorial policy at SIAM Review.

It took SIAM Review a year to decide that they would not publish this paper. IIRC the reason for rejection was that they did not accept papers that were critical of stuff they had already published. I am not able to recover the email to quote the exact wording as my work email system seems to have deleted all emails older than a few months. Why it took them a year to tell me that they were not going to publish  I don’t know. They could have determined that it did not satisfy their policy in about 5 minutes.

Peer review is not some panacea that guarantees that what is published is correct, methodologically sound and/or important. It is influenced by the the foibles of the editorial staff, policy and any number of other things. The need of researchers to publish guarantees that a large proportion of papers published are trivial (assuming they have no other defects).

It is also the case that a paper or report has not been published in a peer reviewed journal is not necessarily worthless. There has been a piece in the news recently about the IPCC using a report from mountaineers in the Alps about the state of glaciers. This is not a controlled experimental result nor has it been published in a peer reviewed journal (IIRC it was published in some mountaineering journal) but it is expert testimony and has some value in the absence of other data.

Of course I might have broken an academic taboo in sending [2] to SIAM Review without first informing the authors of [3], but in this case I consider that an irrelevance, they had published and there is nothing they can say that would retrospectively introduce validation into their paper also the criticism was not just of what they wrote but of the refereeing process itself. I’m afraid that I am not a very courteous person and I an not going to tell you that I think what you write is a heap of crap before doing so, which is why the internet is such a wonderful (virtual) place I can write what I want without asking anyone’s permission.

References

1. “Journal stem cell work ‘blocked’”, BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8490291.stm

2. “Validation of a Model of the Domino Effect?”, Ron Larham arXiv.org paper: arXiv:0803.2898, http://arxiv.org/abs/0803.2898

3. “Domino Waves”, C.J Efthimiou, M.D. Johnson,  SIAM Review 49 (2007) 111