Is Atheism Consistent With Science?

Is atheism consistent with science?

I've been thinking about this since last week, when the winner of the 2019 Templeton Prize said it wasn't.

The John Templeton Foundation's goal is to show that religion and science can ideologically co-exist, and their $1.5M Prize

...recognizes an individual “who has made an exceptional contribution to affirming life’s spiritual dimension.”

The winner, theoretical physicist Marcelo Gleiser, "a 60-year-old Brazil-born theoretical physicist at Dartmouth College," told SciAm's Lee Billings

I honestly think atheism is inconsistent with the scientific method. What I mean by that is, what is atheism? It’s a statement, a categorical statement that expresses belief in nonbelief. “I don’t believe even though I have no evidence for or against, simply I don’t believe.” Period. It’s a declaration. But in science we don’t really do declarations. We say, “Okay, you can have a hypothesis, you have to have some evidence against or for that.” And so an agnostic would say, look, I have no evidence for God or any kind of god (What god, first of all? The Maori gods, or the Jewish or Christian or Muslim God? Which god is that?) But on the other hand, an agnostic would acknowledge no right to make a final statement about something he or she doesn’t know about. “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” and all that. This positions me very much against all of the “New Atheist” guys—even though I want my message to be respectful of people’s beliefs and reasoning, which might be community-based, or dignity-based, and so on. And I think obviously the Templeton Foundation likes all of this, because this is part of an emerging conversation. It’s not just me; it’s also my colleague the astrophysicist Adam Frank, and a bunch of others, talking more and more about the relation between science and spirituality.

I just don't get this. I wonder if Gleiser is agnostic about the existence of thousand-legged purple elephants? Billion-legged? Purple elephants with 10⁵⁸⁴⁶ legs?

Is there a scientific reason why elephants can't have 1000 legs? Maybe too much body mass to eat for...or maybe we just haven't discovered the ninth force that makes 1000 legs possible but rules out any more or less as impossible.... What about 120 legs, then? Polka-dotted pachyderms? Does Gleiser think somewhere on Earth there may be a (natural) polka-dotted elephant with a head the size of a dump truck? With antlers? That can play Beatles songs on the guitar? Does he keep an open mind or does he say, no, those don't exist.

I think (s)he -- or anyone -- would say such a creature doesn't exist. (S)he wouldn't equivocate about it -- 'jee, we just don't know, ya know?' -- they'd make a definitive statement. Because leaving your mind open to all such possibilities is impossible -- otherwise we'd never have evolved to this stage, we'd never get anything done. If a writer thought he had to worry about the possibility of all the air in his room suddenly gathering in the top northward corner -- a possibility calculated by (I think it was) George Gamow in One, Two, Three Infinity -- he'd never get anything on the page screen. Our minds have to be atheistic on many possibilities in order to get just from one day to the next.

Sure, you could say you're agnostic about that possibility -- jee, we just don't know -- but what's the point of that? To me it seems just a (too) cute rhetorical device to say we ought to be open to a god's existence (a god which no one ever describes in enough detail to seriously envision), the god John Templeton wants you to accept, so read your Bible and say your prayers and tithe to his church. Which is just a way to defend one's belief in a supernatural something even when there is no evidence whatsoever, to have your wafer [and wine] and eat it too. To me that seems to preclude serious thought, not encourage it.

I have no problem, of course, if someone is religious. But I think it's going too far to tell me I ought to be religious because jee, we just don't know. There are too many amazing things in this world that I want to see and learn about for me to spend time on something I've concluded I shouldn't spend any more time on because there's no evidence for it. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, not a mind so open it can make no sense of the world. Personally I think this world would make more sense and be kinder and more peaceful if religion and its intense belief in things without evidence -- beliefs that lead some of its adherents to violence and wars and horrific, premeditated violations of others -- didn't exist.

People who are kind will be kind whether God exists or not. But people who are not kind too often use religion to hide their unkindness. I think that's what Gleiser's philosophy leads to -- excuses. In other words I don't think his argument is morally neutral. He wants us to ignore arguments -- ignore our way of successfully navigating the world and discovering its workings -- about thousand-legged purple elephants when, and only when, it comes to God.

Anyway, I got that off my chest. What do you think?

Nifty Little Math Equation

Here's a nifty little math problem: evaluate

This video shows one way to do it.

The answer is surprising; scroll down for it:

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Added next day: Using a spreadsheet, I calculated this up to n=143 (after which nⁿ gets to large for Excel 365), when the left-hand term is 0.376 734, which differs from 1/e by 2.4%. A pinned comment below the video has a clever way to do the limit:

though the proof of Stirling's approximation is very similar to the method used in the video.

20th Anniversary of the Hockey Stick

Today is the 20th anniversary of the hockey stick paper by Michael Mann, Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes that reached back to 1,000 BP.

Jerry Mahlman, a climatologist at GFDL of NOAA, came up with the term "hockey stick graph." Their first graph was for the last 600 years of the northern hemisphere; today's anniversary is for the paper on the last millennium, then Mann and Phil Jones later reconstructed temperatures back to 2000 years BP.

Their work has been attacked like few others in science, but it has held up just fine. No one expected Mann to be the pugilist he turned out to be, who tirelessly fought off everyone at every turn -- auditors, congressman, lawyers and trolls. Sure, it wasn't the last word in temperature reconstruction, but first papers rarely -- for example, the Bohr Model, pre-Einstein papers on Lorentz transformations, the parton model of hadrons, and many many others in science. (I just happen to know the history of physics better than that of any other field.)

Many papers did their part in backing up the HS result by bringing in new data and improving the methodology. Here's a comparison of MBH98 to the PAGES 2k results of a couple years ago, from Stefan Rahmstorf's Facebook page:

One of the particular advancements of MBH was the inclusion of an uncertainty band around the temperatures.

I don't feel like relitigating any of the particulars of a case against the hockey stick, unless someone wants to bring something up in the comments. As I've written before, the hockey stick is required by basic physics, in particular radiative forcing's logarithmic dependence on CO2, which goes back to Arrhenius in 1896. Given that, it's a short argument to the hockey stick, one that can be condensed into a single tweet:

The hockey stick is required by basic physics:
1. temperature change is proportional to forcing change.
2. CO2 forcing change is proportional to log(CO2).
3. CO2 has been increasing exponentially.
=> hockey stick.

(209 characters.) Before the industrial era, the atmospheric CO2 concentration changed little during the Holocene, which implies the flat shaft of the HS. CO2 is increasing exponentially in the industrial era, which implies a linear increase in temperature, which is the blade of the hockey stick.

It'd be far more surprising if there wasn't a hockey stick in the data.

It's been interesting to follow all the twists and turns over the years of the effort to defeat this graph. It would have been interesting to have had social media during some of the big debates in science, such as the debates over the wave or corpuscular view of light, or the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics, or the establishment of evolution by natural selection. (Here's a good book on some notable feuds in science.) I'd glad all that mischief is over. Science always wins. 

Thoreau With a Machine Gun

The New Zealand shooting suspect, Brenton Tarrant, apparently said he is introverted, a racist, and an "eco-fascist by nature."

What is an "eco-fascist?" It's not what you might guess at first, which for me was some kind of right-wing climate denier who's sure green policies will be the death of the modern world. (No, that'd be a US Republican congressman.)

Apparently, eco-fascism advocates using the power of the state to enforce green policies, even if that power isn't based in popular elections and democratic processes. Naturally there's nationalism, racism and genocide involved.

Eco-fascists are "the nature-obsessed, anti-Semitic, white supremacists who argue that racial purity is the only way to save the planet."

Which would almost be funny if one of its adherents didn't just kill 49 people in a mosque.

Eco-fascism hardly seems a consistent ideology, but then consistency is about the last thing you can expect with the banality of evil. A few quotes the Reddit forum r/DebateFascism given by journalist Sarah Manavis last year:

"I believe that both the state and the state’s citizens have the right to use all means necessary to save the environment, including murder and sabotage,” one user wrote. “Murder is okay in this case, as combating climate change is sure to save more lives than it could ever hypothetically destroy.”

“To be fair, the Third Reich was one of the earliest governments to make conservationism a major focus,” wrote another.

“What really pisses me off is how everyone associates deep ecology with Communism and far left ideologies, which are deeply rooted in industrialization. It was Nazi Germany that was environmentally aware not Soviet Russia, with the rabid industrialisation,” one said.

“[Eco-fascists] have put the wellbeing of our earth, nature and animal on the forefront of their ideology.... It’s someone who has also turned away from industrial and urbanite society, seeking a more close to earth way of life.”

So, eco-fascists desire to turn away from industrial society, but only after its war engines have punched out the machine gun you need for your terrorism.

We can probably expect the usual cretins to jump on this eco-fascist angle to ensure us that, see, as we've been saying all along, climate change is just a ploy from those who hate humans, hate civilization, and hate themselves, quote unquote.

And see, one of them has gone there already! So banal.

PS:

BIG CAVEAT with this 👇 a lot of the stuff in that manifesto is deeply Online ironic shit, but worth noting the space (and rhetoric) these people are floating around in https://t.co/pCO9N50gEE

— Sarah Manavis (@sarahmanavis) March 15, 2019

Greta Nominated

Ha! What did I say earlier? Via HuffPost:

Maybe she doesn't have enough accomplishments and experience yet to win. On the other hand, Malala Yousafzai won the Peace Prize when she was 17, just two years after surviving the assassination attempt against her.

From the article:

“I think we have reached a tipping point where enough scientists are telling it like it is and not being so afraid of being alarmist,” Thunberg told New Scientist on Wednesday, adding it’s been frustrating that many people are paying more attention to her age than the issue at hand.

“They talk about our age, our looks and so on,” she continued. “The emissions are still rising and that is all that matters. Nothing has happened, that is crucial to remember.”

She's right about this, too.

All Things Greta

Photo from TheNation.com

Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who speaks truth to power, has been named "Women of the Year" by Expressen ("The Express"), one of two nationwide evening newspapers in Sweden. She has an interesting back story (perhaps required nowadays for this kind of celebrity), such as major depression starting when she was five eleven, Asperger's and OCD. (She can also talk backwards.) From their interview of her (via Google's translation, which isn't perfect):

When I was five [should be 11], I went into depression. I felt very bad, cried every rest of the toiletand [sic] went home and finally there was no point at all going to school because I would still have to go home. I also stopped talking and eating. One big reason I was depressed was that I was worried about the climate and the environment. I felt that there was no point in everything when the system was so wrong and I didn't see that I could do anything about it.

Wow, these are very unfair thoughts for any child to have, let alone a 5-year old. Aren't kids being scared unnecessarily? A while back I saw someone on Twitter write that his 9-year old was looking up his life expectancy, and in the process came across some climate catastrophism and started crying. This (false) "we have 12 years to stop climate change" stuff isn't helping.

She also said:

I really do not like attention and being at the center, but one must take that if that is what is required for the media to start reporting on the climate and people should get their eyes up. Then it's a shame to complain. I myself have put myself in this situation.

I predict his girl is either going to become Secretary-General of the United Nations or a shark of a hedge fund manager.

Bloggable Stuff

More Nuclear: Andrew Sullivan has an article about nuclear power in New York Magazine. (He's for it.) I just noticed it and having read it yet.... But I see that he repeated the claim that the cost of the New Green Deal is estimated to be $93 trillion, which is crap ridiculous. (Most of that estimate is due to the costs of the social changes it advocates -- job guarantees, livable wage, etc. But still.)

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Cold and wet: NOAA says the average USA48 temperature for February was in the lowest third of Februarys in their 125-year period. It had the second highest February precipitation, only 1/10th of an inch below 1998's record.

Here, Salem, Oregon had the coldest February in 30 years and the 7th-coldest February on record (since 1893). Eight days with snow, which is very unusual. 

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Record electricity: US electricity use set a record in 2018, was up 4% compared to the year earlier, largely because, the EIA says, a colder winter and a warmer summer. Cooling degree-days and heating degree-days both show signs of a warming temperature trend:

Here's another interesting graph. I'm guessing (?) the peak in industrial electricity, and the transition around 1980, is mostly due to the transition to a service economy:

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Another hockey stick: In Greenland, from an article by Carbon Brief that also debunks an old Don Easterbrook graph that has wormed it's way through the Web. (I'm sure there will be a retraction any time now.)

Backflipping Bot

A new MIT robot that looks very much like the indefatigable "dog" in that episode of Black Mirror. It weighs 20 pounds, can move along at 5 mph, can do flips (why? Just for fun.) and can right itself when it falls over. Be sure to stay for the shots where it goes haywire.

60 Minutes on Climate Case (Worth Watching)

	David Appell (@davidappell)
2/28/19, 5:34 PM This Sunday's "60 Minutes" will have a segment on "Juliana v US," the lawsuit filed by youth plaintiffs against the United States claiming that climate change violates their rights. CBS, Sunday at 7 pm . Online here at 8 pm ET: bit.ly/2NyCvwf via Our Children's Trust

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