An increasingly realistic God's Eye View of the Bible

"Inspired" by this.
(I couldn't help but think "why would God be in Low Earth Orbit?!")




The crossing of the Red Sea





The crucifixion





Noah's Ark after the Deluge





Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden (look closely!)






Update: something vaguely similar that I quite enjoyed is here (source ) - okay the last panel is speculative, but still it's well done.

Science literacy in Australia and the US

A survey (pdf) commissioned by the Federation of Australian Scientific and Technological Societies of Australian science literacy has somewhat mixed results.

(Update: See also an ABC News (Australia) report on it here. )

The report on the survey, which was conducted just over a week ago by Auspoll, seems show some disturbing results, though others are mildly encouraging.

For example, 30% of Australians think humans and dinosaurs coexisted, and 39% don't realize it takes a year for the Earth to orbit the Sun. On the other hand, I found that 13% of people knew that 3% of the world's water was fresh surprisingly high.

The survey replicates a survey conducted in 2009 by Harris Interactive for the California Academy of Sciences. The press release (which contains all the information I can find online) only describes a brief subset of the results, but I have compared everything I have information on.

Steve Novella commented on the US survey last year; his questions and criticisms would apply to both surveys.

Summary of the results of the Australian poll (correct answers underlined):

Q1: How long does it take for the Earth to go around the Sun?
 One Year: 61
  One Day: 28
One Month:  2
 One Week:  1
 Not Sure:  8

Q2: Is the following statement true or false? The earliest humans lived at the same time as dinosaurs.
   False: 70
    True: 30
Not Sure:  0

Q3: What percentage of the Earth’s surface is covered by water?
  0-25% :  0
 26-50% :  2
 51-60% :  4
 61-69% :  9 
    70% : 41
 71-80% : 33
 81-100%:  6
Not Sure:  6

Q4: What percentage of the Earth’s water is fresh water?
      0%  0
      1%  5
      2%  5
      3% 13
  4%-10% 23
 11%-25% 19
 26%-50%  9
 51%-60%  3
 61%-70%  1
 71%-80%  0
81%-100%  0
Not sure 22

Q5: Do you think that evolution is occurring?
Yes, I think evolution is currently occurring:       71
No, I do not think evolution is currently occurring:  8
No, I do not believe in evolution:                   10
Not Sure:                                            11

Q6: Do you think that humans are influencing the evolution of other species?
Yes, I think humans are influencing the evolution of other species:       77
No, I do not think humans are influencing the evolution of other species:  7
No, I do not believe in evolution:                                         9
Not Sure:                                                                  7

Q7: In your opinion, how important is science education to the Australian economy?
Absolutely essential: 42
Very important:       38
Somewhat important:   16
Not at all important:  2
Not Sure:              2

One highly amusing outcome of this survey is that even though only 71% of people think "evolution is currently occurring", 77% think that "humans are influencing the evolution of other species". Presumably at least six percent of people think humans are affecting evolution while isn't happening. The cognitive dissonance must be astounding.

Here's the corresponding information I was able to pull out of the Calacademy press release:

- 53% of adults know how long it takes for the Earth to revolve around the Sun.

- 59% of adults know that the earliest humans and dinosaurs did not live at the same time

- 47% of adults can approximate (within 5%) the percent of the Earth's surface that is covered with water.

- 15% of respondents answered this question with the exactly correct answer of 70%

- Less than 1% of U.S. adults know what percent of the planet's water is fresh (the correct answer is 3%).

- Science eduction: Essential or Very Important to the US economy: 77%


The Calacademy press release didn't mention the evolution questions, but we can do a comparison with another Harris Interactive poll (pdf) which suggests that rates of "do not believe in evolution" and "not sure" in Question 5 above are about half of the equivalent rates in the US, roughly consistent with other figures I have seen.

Here's a graphic showing a comparison of the corresponding the percentage of correct answers from the two surveys on Questions 1-4 and the percentage rating science education as "essential" or "very important" for the national economy:



(Graphic generated in the free statistical package R)

Australia is outperforming the US (pretty handily on some questions), but that may not be saying a whole lot.

The fruits of accomodationism?

PZ and Jerry Coyne have both discussed the PLOS paper on a survey of high school biology teachers in the US.

The graphic I want to discuss is here:


If we remove those who failed to express an opinion (the same in both surveys - 9%) we can do a "triangle plot" or Ternary plot, showing the three other percentages:



On this plot, moving up is "more creationism", moving (roughly) southwest is "more acceptance of evolution" and moving southeast is "more acceptance of ID".

We see that the general public (in blue) and the high school biology teachers (red) are not in the same place. We can't from this tell for sure whether it's the training of biology teachers and the materials and curricula that they have to work with that makes a difference or whether those who might become biology teachers are a priori different from the rest of the population, but numerous anecdotes (which attest to the fact that education does change people's opinions) suggest that training and the teacher's available teaching materials (like textbooks and so on) and curricula will have a substantial impact on what positions they will endorse. Cognitive dissonance is a powerful motivator.

Since training at a university level will generally tend to be based directly on evolution rather than be ID-oriented, while school-level teaching materials and curricula will tend to be more influenced by (for example) NCSE policy, one has to wonder at the overall effect of the two.

If we attribute the shift between the red and the blue points largely to effects other than pre-disposition, we must say that these have produced a shift away from Creationism... but not even slightly shifted toward the position of actual biological science relative to ID.

The suggestion that I take away from this is that this may be in part to the effectively accomodationist stances of influential organizations like the NCSE - by openly tolerating, sometimes even advocating unscientific positions like ID (that God "guides evolution", rather than the scientific position of evolution operating by natural selection, sexual selection, genetic drift and so on is basically ID), they merely succeed in replacing one load of unscientific nonsense with another.

This is not science education.

Enough with accomodationism. Let's advocate actual science, and get everyone's favourite god(s) out of biology class.

Even though I am in Australia, this sort of thing has particular relevance for me because the Australian school curriculum in under review right now... and while the science curriculum is safe, look what's in the senior History curriculum:

UNIT 2A, pg 8

Controversies

Students develop their historical skills in an investigation of TWO of the following controversial issues:

 a) human origins (e.g. Darwin’s theory of evolution and its critics).

 b) dating the past (e.g. radio-carbon dating, tracing human migrations using DNA)
...

Yep. Maybe if we looked at the controversy itself as historical, this would count as 19th century history. But this is the Ancient History curriculum... as if human origins and radio-carbon dating are actually substantially in doubt now as being useful for informing us about the past - as if we don't really know these things quite well, and as if actual human origins (and carbon dating, for crying out loud) were at issue.

If these are controversies, why not look at the flat earth/round earth controvery, and while we're at it, germ theory too?

I think accomodationism is poisoning our education, by trying to make us accept as equally reasonable points of view that have nothing to do with the actual science.

I think it's insidious. I think it ruins everything it touches.

If it doesn't work, try something else.

Here's an idea - why don't we try NOT being accomodationist for a decade or so. Try actually insisting on science as science - no holds barred. Actually advocate for science. Insist that we teach the accepted scientific positions (and even the parts where there's some actual scientific disagreement if you like) as is. Without trying to fit in everyone's pet unscientific ideas as well, just because it makes them feel all warm-and-fuzzy.

Let's see what happens.

		Too old for Santa? Telling someone that there's no god is not like telling a small child there's no Santa. It's like telling an adult there's no Santa.

Banging my head on yet another brick in the wall, part III - debating theists

I've had some ongoing health issues and some additional illnesses - I'm still somewhat invalid, and as a result my brain really hasn't been up to much intellectual work.

So instead I've had a number of discussions with theists.

Many of those discussions have had a somewhat similar character, and one in particular sums the whole experience up. This is a brief summary of the course of that typical case.

At the beginning, in response to a comment I made about modern apologetics, a very pleasant theist (let's call him Michael) tells me that William Lane Craig is a "really clever guy" with "persuasive arguments", and I "really should read his book" (they generally mean Reasonable Faith, but sometimes it's another book).

I respond that while I haven't read his book, I have seen video of him debating, and I have seen detailed reviews of his book that discuss some of Craig's arguments and I have had some of his arguments presented to me before, and that I am inclined to doubt the assertion that Craig's arguments are actually very persuasive.

I ask Michael to present to me what he thinks of as one of Craig's best arguments. His response is "the Kalam Cosmological argument".

Well, let's leave aside the fact that he only named the argument, he didn't actually present it - but instead left me to find the argument (I've seen it before, so it wasn't all that hard to find again, but I find it interesting how I always seem to get left with all the heavy lifting in these things - I have to locate the argument, check that this is really what my opponent means and then explain why it's wrong).

(Let's also leave aside the fact that the Kalam scholars were busy establishing the existence of the god of Mohammad, not the Christian god of the New Testament that Michael worshipped. If his argument went through I wasn't going to make him change religions.)

So anyway, I present Michael's argument to him and he says, yes, that's completely convincing, the conclusion definitely follows form the premises and the premises are "obviously true".

So I take him carefully through an analysis of the premises. Fortunately my correspondent is an extremely honest debater, so this only takes us several days.

Long story short - he ultimately agrees that in fact the premises consist of multiple sub-premises, not all explicitly stated, and that none of the sub-premises are actually established. Not one.

Indeed, he comes to agree that at best one of them is "probably true", and is reduced to arguing that the other premise is "not definitely established to be false".

After some prompting he agrees that yes, he does actually need to have them both be "definitely true" before he can try to apply the argument, and that's not the case.

So Michael's choice of "best argument" from Craig turns out to be a house of cards.

We end the discussion amicably. Michael departs with the suggestion that I still go read Craig's book "because some of his other arguments are really good".

I can't clearly apprehend quite how the cognitive dissonance doesn't make his brain explode into pink mist, but I am satsified that at least (given hours of effort and an honest counterpart), I can actually show one person that one of their "best" arguments for god isn't an argument at all.

(I have come to find that this is about as good an outcome as any such discussion is going to get.)

So, at least slightly satisfied, I return to the discussion from where our little debate originated.

What do I find? Another earnest Christian telling me that I "should read the book by William Lane Craig" and that it has "really good arguments".

I resist the temptation to spend several more days - if I am lucky - removing just one item from this new guy's list of "really good arguments".

Time is short, so ... Mohammad... in a sandstorm

Time is short (well already gone here, to be honest), and I can't draw all that well. But on the other hand I'm not planning to let everyone else take the flak for this protest alone.












Mohammad - in a sandstorm

I think he's looking very prophetic.


Edit: I think Greta Christina covers the reasons why this matters pretty well.


(\|:{>

Human Brain Evolution - a clear kink

Jerry Coyne has discussed human brain size evolution a couple of times recently, the latest one here.

Anyway, I grabbed the data from Lee and Wolpoff (2003) ("The pattern of evolution in Pleistocene human brain size", Paleobiology, 29(2), 2003, pp. 186–196), read it into R and looked at log brain size (since linear trend on the log scale corresponds to constant percentage growth). If there was a sudden jump in growth rate, it should show as a kink.

I then used the lowess function (which is a form of locally-linear regression) in R to smooth the data, to hopefully identify any such kinks and see where they fell. I used the default value of the smoothing parameter (f = 2/3). I then tried a range of other f-values, and all values between roughly 0.5 and 0.8 (a fairly wide range, so the conclusion is robust to the smoothing parameter) give very similar-looking fits, and a clear kink at the same x-value:





The smooth shown in green here is for f = 0.8

(Click the image for a larger version)

With this analysis, the kink plainly appears at 300 thousand years ago (but the ages of the observations are approximate and subsequently rounded).




There does seem to have been a substantial acceleration in growth in brain volume approximately 300 thousand years ago.




Edit: Here's a link to a somewhat related article at Panda's Thumb from some years ago, based on a different paper. Much of the data is the same, but contains additional information.

The message of Easter must have been 'sink the boot into atheists'

This Easter a bunch of god-botherers in Australia have decided they needed to get out all that angst and tizzy they built up while the Global Atheist Convention was in Melbourne. Besides, there was all that child-raping-coverup stuff they needed to distract people from, and blood-libelling the poor old Jews every time you have a bit of trouble is out of fashion now.

So the atheists have copped some of the vile crap we're used to seeing from the crazy christian rump. And tha Australian media have done their usual sterling job of reporting these things in a balanced, reasonable way (i.e. very badly indeed - that last was supposedly the "balancing" article describing the atheist response, but largely consists of far more theist quotes).

Yesterday I pointed out to my partner that as galling as it was, it was actually kind of good for us, because the more reasonable believers who have come to know a few atheists and discovered we just aren't the baby-eating nihilists we have been painted as will only be driven away even faster by this sort of rhetoric - it will hasten the demise of religion among the broader community, and become ever harder to claim any kind of moral authority when all that comes out of their mouths is hatred and lies.

If the Nielsen poll I pointed to late last year is accurate, and we combine with some information from the last census, the two largest religious denominations in Australia have recently become outnumbered by those that can't say they believe in god (20% and 26% for Anglicans and Catholics, compared with 30% who don't state a belief in god - and most of those - 24% are explicitly atheistic, choosing the option "don't believe in god".)

If anything, I expect these sort of attacks to become even more common for a while. And of course, the smaller the religions denominations become, the more radical the remainder must be, so I also expect it to get nastier.

Bruce at Thinker's Podium has a pretty good discussion and an interesting take from a somewhat similar perspective.

Barry Duke's article in the Freethinker is also worth looking at.

Happy Easter! Don't forget Jesus died so you could hate atheists!

Australian Tyrannosaur

Well, the headline is overblown, but it's still interesting; I wouldn't have expected a tyrannosaur would be found in Australia

Finally, a report that isn't a hatchet-job

The coverage of the 2010 Global Atheists Convention in the Australian media has been generally appalling, full of the usual theist combination of stereotype, bile, and bafflement - "militant" this, "unhappy" that.

However, I was impressed to see one reasonably straightforward, in places even positive, report - which is unusual enough that I thought I'd point to it.

Hey I can read my blog again

First time is more than six months, I can actually read my blog when logged on as efrique.

Huzzah!

I didn't change anything before it stopped working, and I didn't change anything before it started working.

At least it's working again.

Crocoduck 0 - Crocadillo 1

This is just the cutest thing.

Interesting how "upright" the stance is, with the legs under the body rather than splayed. Some other land-dwelling crocodilian fossils seem to have that more mammal-like stance.

---

In other news, Scripps Institute scientists have advanced the study of abiogenesis, by putting together self-replicating ribozymes.

First, try thinking *inside* the box.

One of those phrases that drive me nuts is "think outside the box". A lot of the problem is that people don't bother to *think* "inside the box" (in the usual framework), particularly when it's repeated as a mantra (yesterday I heard someone say it to me three times in ten minutes .... gnnnhaaahhh, makes me stabby).

The problem isn't so much the box, its the lack of thinking.

We have frameworks - ways of thinking about things - for a reason, and we should take advantage of them first. Then, maybe we should consider if the framework is the problem.

You want an illustration of the emptiness of the concept "think outside the box"?

An obvious one is that rarely to people give you strategies for doing so*. Without it, "think outside the box" is pretty useless.

Here's a second one: the people exhorting you to "think outside the box" can't be bothered to think outside their framework for long enough to come up with a less hackneyed and overused phrase, thus illustrating that they are utterly unable to follow their own advice for the few minutes it would take to come up with a more interesting expression.

"Think outside the box" is about as useful and as cliche as that poster of a kitten saying "Hang in there".



*(de Bono does have some exercises/approaches that are sometimes useful, sometimes not -- but he also doesn't say "think outside the box", thankfully)

Out of body experiences... interesting, but not mystical

The weekly TV science program on our national broadcaster, called Catalyst, started its 2010 season on Thursday, and had an item on the various things that combine to produce out of body experiences (I don't know if that video works outside Australia, but the transcript is there too).

The text there is only a fraction of the item on out of body experiences, they talked about what produces the feeling of floating up out of your body (showing how you can induce sensations of rotation and floating), and how you can identify your body as being somewhere other than it is, before talking about trying to actually produce an out of body experience.

[As usual I didn't watch the whole thing live (early evening is a hectic time in our house, so we record anything we actually don't want to miss). I'll give it a more careful look when I get to it, but what I saw of it was fascinating.]

So anyway, the point was that out of body experiences are simple consequences of the way our body and brain work, and that it's not hard to reproduce many aspects of them. Nothing particularly mystical, and certainly not evidence for a soul.

The God Delusion - English Language sales pass 2 million

In a thread related to the The God Delusion being back in the bestseller lists, Richard Dawkins mentioned English language sales figures for TGD (here):

    How many have been sold in the USA?

As it happens, I have just been sent some recent figures for sales of The God Delusion in English:-
North America 907,161
Rest of World 1,179,241
Total English language 2,086,402

(Another commenter mentions in excess of 260,000 sales for the German edition)

Not bad.

Polls

I just recently posted on polls.

This comic kind of says it all.

Darwin vs the crocoduck

A bit of fun. I do love schadenfreude.

Kirk Cameron on O'Reilly:

"Darwin said in order to prove evolution [...] you gotta be able to prove [...] one animal transitioning into another. And all through the fossil record and life, we don't find one of these - a crocoduck."

(original here)

So did Darwin say that? Well, no. In fact, he specifically debunks the notion.

Darwin, Origin of Species, Chapter IX:

"... it should always be borne in mind what sort of intermediate forms must, on my theory, have formerly existed. I have found it difficult, when looking at any two species, to avoid picturing to myself forms directly intermediate between them. But this is a wholly false view; we should always look for forms intermediate between each species and a common but unknown progenitor; and the progenitor will generally have differed in some respects from all its modified descendants."
(emphasis in the original)

Nothing more needs to be said. Darwin completely debunked Cameron and Comfort 150 years before they even thought of it. When you're pwnt by a guy that's been dead for about a century, you're too stupid to argue with. Just quote what Darwin actually said, and you're done.

[But just in case a creationist wanders by and is too dumb to just read Darwin, it's kind of like this. If I find you and your cousin and I'm looking for an intermediate form to see if you're related, I won't find a direct intermediate (a 50-50 mix of you and your cousin, or even worse, a Frankenstein's monster of components of both of you, like Cameron's crocoduck). The intermediate form is your nearest common ancestor -- your grandparents. Your grandparents will have characteristics different from both of you, and will not be directly intermediate. Not exactly like that, of course, the analogy is imperfect. But it's really not that complicated.]


The only possible conclusions are that they never read Darwin, or they did and they're deliberately lying. Either way, we end up with creationist lies. As usual.

To paraphrase Haldane, God must have an inordinate fondness for lying creationists, since he made so many of them.

A New Years "What shits me"...

What shits me is when people make a youtube video out of a piece of text.

If it's just a piece of text, make a fricking blogpost. I can read it ten times as fast as your video goes, and twenty times as fast as it will download.

I can jump back and forth instantly to the parts I want to reread. I can rescan a sentence I read that I didn't quite understand without reaching for the mouse.

Oh, and the comments will sound less like they were made by a 12 year old with Tourette's Syndrome.

If you have an animation, or a sequence of images that's more than a second or two (too long for an animated gif), then by all means, youtube it. But if it's just a way of fancying up some text, and putting it to bad music, forget it, it's a blogpost.

A youtube of a blogpost is a waste of time and bandwidth.

It's the present day version of what 5 years ago would have been a 14-point-purple-comic-sans-in-blinking-text blogpost.

A bit of biblical fun

I don't usually do the biblical bits here, but this one tickled me:

1. Jesus calls himself the Son of man (e.g. Matthew 16:24-28):

Then said Jesus unto his disciples, If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow me.
For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.
For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?
For the Son of man shall come in the glory of his Father with his angels; and then he shall reward every man according to his works.
Verily I say unto you, There be some standing here, which shall not taste of death, till they see the Son of man coming in his kingdom.



2. Numbers (23:19) points out that he's therefore NOT God:

God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent

My life is not a marketing exercise

I read so often from liberal theists, faitheists and people who want to frame science, that "aggressive" atheism is "hurting the cause" of atheism or reason or cute puppies, that it will convince nobody and turn off those we wish to convince.

These arguments are long on emotion and very short on evidence. They're also factually inaccurate (in that most so-called "aggressive" atheism is anything but aggressive).

My usual argument has been that not every atheist activity is about convincing others; in fact, hardly any of it, as far as I can see.

My life is not a marketing exercise.

But sometimes it actually does impact those we criticize, and sometimes they come to understand what we're getting at, whether that was the aim or not.

I have read a lot of deconversion stories and related discussion (hundreds by now).
I have seen many times former theists say things along the lines of "Well, actually, I had my faith criticized and it wasn't until that moment that I began to really think about my beliefs."

I've seen comments like that on blogs, in forums, on youtube, yahoo answers and reddit. I saw another only this morning.

Not every deconversion of course - a lot of the time people start thinking about these things themselves, or the trigger to start down that road is something different. But quite a lot of the time, an aggressive challenge to someone's beliefs is actually effective in getting them to think about it. Yes, it will also annoy plenty of people - people don't like having cherished beliefs criticized. You have to pick your moments. But that doesn't mean it is automatically counterproductive.

Being likeable is not often a catalyst for change.

I think being generally thought of as likeable is impossible. Atheists - unless we hide ourselves in a closet forever - will often be regarded as confrontational, simply for existing.

There's absolutely a place for people like Hemant Mehta, with those who seek to actively engage with the religious. More power to him. I think Hemant and people like him do a great deal of good, not only for atheism and reason, but for wider humanity. There's also a place for the louder, less compromising voices.

I have never once seen someone say "my former beliefs were respected and treated with deference - and that was what convinced me they were wrong".

Why would it? How could it?

Yes, if you want to work with theist allies in some other cause, be it gay marriage or proper health care or whatever, it might not be the occasion to critically discuss the truth of their beliefs, but to focus on the current priority. (On the other hand, it's probably never the time to agree to propositions you acually disagree with, or even to hold silent on them, simply for the sake of getting on.)

I think most atheists can manage the distinction between present priorities and longer term goals well enough.

But if we're talking about reason and evidence and skepticism, attempting to promote them and spread them, it makes no sense at all to ignore the most egregious transgressions against them.

If we are trying to get people to critically examine their beliefs, it makes no sense to pat them on the head and tell them we think their crazy beliefs are just dandy. Freedom of belief is only that - to believe as you like. It doesn't mean freedom never to be called on those beliefs. It is not freedom from criticism. It is not freedom from questions.

Our commitment to freedom of belief does not mean we must accept other people's fanstasies as perfectly valid, or that we must meekly hold our tongue when they're brought up. Indeed, we should not. The person you risk offending may also be the person you eventually goad into the line of thought that leads them to convincing themselves.

What could be better than people thinking for themselves?