Below, Bill Nye handily explaining WHY it’s important not to simply “let them be” regarding creationists, flat-earthers, etc.
There are two kinds of people in the world: Thinkers and Believers. The distinction has nothing to do with religion or “atheism” or even intelligence – it’s about how you approach life on a day-to-day basis. Do you think for yourself, or do you let someone (or someTHING) else decide for you? Do you put your trust in “traditions” or do you apply logic? Do you “feel” or do you reason?
MOVIEBOB CENTRAL 
@MovieBob: You have a very interesting definition of “proven.” What we have is a collection of fossils that seem to fit a pattern that fits with a generally well-reasoned theory put together to explain it, and some small-scale stuff we've observed in the present day that seems like a good microcosm of what that theory predicts on a larger scale. That's a far, far cry from conclusive proof of the kind you're claiming.
Nobody sentient (that we know of) was there to observe it happening over the first three billion years and a hefty amount of change (if you want to be extremely generous and class all members of the genus Homo that ever walked the earth in there, that's still only 1/15th of a percent of the estimated span of life on Earth.) Certainly nobody was taking detailed enough notes for us to draw any solid conclusions from until the last couple thousand years – in an evolutionary timescale, that's peanuts. Some things that we have observed in the century or so that we've been actively looking seem like a good fit for the theory, but we can't say for certain that behaviors displayed in the course of a couple centuries would scale so linearly out to what has been predicted over many, many millions of years.
So we don't have any definitive eyewitness accounts of evolution in action. We do have the fossil record, which does seem to fit – but fossils are just fossils; they're snapshots of a moment in time, not full-fledged recordings. Certainly there's nothing that says they aren't open to other interpretations.
Yes, from a certain perspective it does seem a little silly to reject what seems like a reasonable explanation for the development of life. But to act as though “reasonable” equals “proven beyond all doubt” merely because a theory that has been honed over the course of a century to fit the evidence available fits the evidence available and general scientific consensus says it's correct (and worse yet, to suggest that nobody should question it and people who do so are hindering the development of civilization) is to be every bit as fanatically orthodoxical and close-minded a blinded “believer” as you accuse dissenters of being.
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I just hate the fact that when people say “religion doesn't take science into account” they basically just mean “insane christian beliefs don't take science into account”.
What about Islam? we don't believe the world started 2000 years ago, we have no problem with dinosaurs, we still don't know where we stand on evolution as a whole, but that's because we're not affected either way.
God made every single specie that ever existed? Okay, that's cool, did he just make one organism that is capable of evolving into an entire world's worth of creatures? sounds nice! he mixed and matched, and there's actually multiple origins of life on earth? Interesting thing to know.
I hope people can be more accurate in the future.
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@John
There's much more evidence than that. Listen to what Nye said; the entire foundation of modern biology is the theory of evolution, which is like the theory of gravity or kinetic theory in terms of how convinced scientists are that it's the right explanation.
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@ Anon 10:18
I think I need to reiterate what I'm arguing here… I am not arguing against Bob's beliefs, I am not arguing against Bill Nye's beliefs. I am arguing against Bill Nye's assertion that it is somehow harmful to our society to teach anything other than evolution because than we won't have enough kids growing up to be engineers or scientists.
I'm arguing that our culture benefits the most from as wide a range of thought and belief as possible, and that sort of philosophical censorship (which is exactly what Bill Nye is advocating) would do far more harm than any perceived good. I'm arguing that the scientific view point, while a perfectly legitimate view point for you or anyone else to hold, shouldn't be forced on everyone. That our culture benefits when there are some people who reject it.
No, not everyone should. We do need some scientists and engineers. But, we need artists, poets and philosophers as well.
“The kind of epistemic relativism you suggest is a trap, and it's deeply unappealing to the vast majority of people”
Yes, I'm aware that the vast majority of people are uncomfortable with others being allowed to disagree with them and having to tolerate beliefs other than their own.
@ Anon 10:18… again I guess
From what I've noticed, the vast majority of today's American art is very derivative of either European, Japanese, or early 1900s American art. Yes, there's amazing new stuff happening all the time, but none of it's happening here (or at least none of it's starting here). Perhaps that's a subjective observation, but it's one I keep coming to.
@ Anon 6:50
That's ad consequentiam, though. All biological science being based on the assumption of evolution being true doesn't make it so any more than all biological science been based on the assumption of creation being true 300 years ago made it true.
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@Anonymous (6:50): Again, I'm not saying it doesn't look right or that there isn't a pretty good case for it. I'm saying that taking the fact that there's a pretty good case for it and going “there, it's totally proven, now shut up and agree with general scientific consensus like I do, because scientists said so” is A. drastically stretching the definition of “proven,” and B. every bit the close-minded unthinking orthodoxy that Bob thinks he's railing against.
As for Nye, half of what he's saying is rather nonsensical – you can't explain biology without this one component that was first suggested in the 1750s and didn't gain widespread acceptance until the 1900s? What the hell were biologists doing in the centuries before that, then? The study of it goes back at least to Aristotle. How does radiation fit into it?
And among the other half, the idea that parents should not pass on their beliefs and culture to their children, for the purpose of social utilitarianism, is just disgusting. Just plain fucking disgusting. Bill, I used to think you were cool, man. When did you turn into a gigantic douche?
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It is as simple as: In science classes, they should be teaching scientific facts and the scientific theories that are most widely accepted at the time. They should not be teaching things that are not based on facts or evidence and the should not be teaching wild speculations. Go look up the scientific method.
Maybe that's too hurtful for some people to manage emotionally. And I think that the posts on this blog is a choice piece of evidence for Bob's Thinkers V Believers theory.
But you know, there's no reason that evolution and creationism can't BOTH be true. After all, the Ancient Astronaut Theory has not yet been disproven.
Yes… aliens made humans. I said it.
LOL.
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@Anonymous: Except what's being discussed here is not the question of what gets taught in class, but the idea that parents should not pass on scientifically unorthodox views to their children. Because that might impair their usefulness to the social machine. Yes, culture and religion should totally be subject to the arbitrary “needs” of society. (Particularly funny coming from a guy who keeps declaring himself “libertine” and fawning over Atlas Shrugged.) What next, the idea that Jewish parents shouldn't teach their kids to eat kosher because it puts pork farmers out of work?
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@ Narf
I think we have to talk about three ideas/questions.
The first is the possibility of beliefs which, if you have them or encourage others to have them, make you a bad person.
The second is the question of what should be taught in public schools.
The third is the idea that ALL beliefs are equally valid at some level.
Going backwards, all beliefs are only equally valid if the only criteria you use to judge them is whether or not they constitute a belief. I think there's a particular kind of belief that is more valuable than that, and I call that kind of belief Knowledge, which I would define as a belief that is a) Justified and b) True.
We can debate the criteria for justification forever, but a few good possibilities are: Authority, Religious Doctrine, Empirical Evidence, Logical Deduction. Many possible beliefs are not justified because NONE of those apply…which is why if I said I believed in a Flying Spaghetti Monster or an Invisible Purple Hippo, most people would think I was talking crazy. And those people would be right, because those beliefs aren't knowledge.
The second characteristic of knowledge – truth – is harder to define, obviously, but the simplest method is the correspondence theory, which says that for a statement to be true it has to correspond to some real phenomena in the world. Once again, the FSM and IPH don't meet that standard, or if they do, there is *simply no way to show (justify) that they do*, so out the window both of those ideas go.
So yes, believe what you want, but don't call it Knowledge. And please, for the love of God don't respond to this by explaining Hume to me, his standard for what constitutes knowledge is to high.
Science works through inference and testing. The reason “theories” like evolution are thought to count as knowledge is that, over and over again, people have made inferences; “well, if this theory were true, we should be able to observe that x”, and then found x; DNA, chromosomes, genetic engineering, bacterial resistance, on and on and on…all these observations, and more, correspond to the Theory of Evolution, which makes it much more Justified than, for example, the theory of Creationism, for which there *are no possible observations that could make it more or less likely that it's true*. Beliefs like that, to me, and Bob, and Bill Nye, are not as valuable as beliefs that don't have those useful characteristics.
Another useful characteristic of a scientific belief is Predictive Power. I can use the theory of evolution to predict what bacteria will do, how a species will respond to a change in its ecosystem, or where I'm likely to find certain kinds of fossils…and my predictions are MUCH MORE LIKELY TO BE RIGHT! That's a feature you ONLY get with beliefs justified by empirical observation and logic. Authority and Religion simply don't help you at all with this, which is why the “knowledge” they offer is not as good.
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So, ok, what beliefs should be taught in public schools?
Well, public schools are a Federal program and therefore are supposed to be free of religious belief. That means no teaching beliefs that arise from specific religions except insofar as you're teaching about those religions as a subject. Hooray! None of those non-falsifiable ideas with no predictive power for our kiddies! That fills me with joy as a person who is *paying money for this program and expects to get some social benefit from doing so*.
Now, I imagine that doesn't comfort you much, because you think there should be a diversity of ideas. I think so, too, but I don't think that diversity should be so great as to include beliefs that are unjustified and/or false, at least not in Public School; parents who absolutely must educate their children in Flying Spaghetti Monsterism are always free to homeschool or create a private FSM school.
And it would be false to suggest that science lends any credence to “creation science” or “intelligent design”…because it doesn't. Those ideas are based on religious beliefs that are not representative of the way mainstream science works.
It is fair…and, in fact, necessary, to say to children that science is all about being open to changes in belief due to changes in evidence. In fact, it's important that people investigate theories that are “long shots” from a scientific perspective – a good example would be Acupuncture, which was long thought to be nonsense, but in fact turned out to have a testable theoretical structure behind it once people got down to the science, and in fact it changed our view of how the endocrine system works.
But science without falsifiablity simply doesn't work, and science based on religion cannot be falsified. I have no problem with all manner of philosophy being taught in *philosophy* classes, and no problem with creationism being taught as part of a course on *religion*…but it isn't part of science, and it's important that people who grow up to be scientists not misunderstand what they're doing. That's why Bill Nye is right to object to biology classes that include these theories, which is what I understand him to be saying.
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Finally, is it possible to have a belief that makes you a bad person?
This is not entirely the point, but I think it kind of relates to this debate because if you understand that the answer is “yes”, you can see that there are some real stakes here in terms of what society ought to teach its young people.
I think there clearly are examples of beliefs that make you a bad person. Intolerance (racism, sexism, homophobia) is one example. Megalomania (believing that you are better than everyone else) is another. Zealotry (believing that everyone must believe the One Truth without question) also makes the list. For this reason, by the way, I tend to think that Randians are kind of crap – they tend to combine all three (not so much racism/sexism/homophobia as intolerance for anyone who isn't a self-aggrandizing entrepreneur).
Another kind of belief that makes you a bad person, or at least a dangerous person in a democracy, is a false belief. That's because if you believe things that aren't true and vote those beliefs, the results will not be reliably good. For example, a person who votes to cut all funding for infrastructure to save money because they believe that roads don't need maintenance (“they're made of rock, stupid!”) is not doing anyone any favors; that person presumably agrees with the values of society – roads are good for everyone – but has false beliefs about how those roads come to and continue to exist, and that makes his or her vote worse than useless.
In a dictatorship or an oligarchy, that wouldn't matter so much, which is why non-democratic countries (like China) are much more deliberate in their efforts to misinform the public than democratic countries – but since, in those countries, the social contract is more Hobbes than Locke, this works out – only the dictators/oligarchs have to benefit, and the people simply have to not be annoyed enough to rebel.
This, on a side note, is why Fox News is so annoying to thinking people; its perverse insistence on making up issues like the “Ground Zero Mosque” and the Duke Rape case and whether or not Obama is a citizen etc etc. is the result of a business model that sees beliefs as commodities to be sold to the public in exchange for advertising revenue; the truth of the belief becomes less important than the cash value of propagating it. In a democracy, that's very destabilizing.
So what I'm saying is, a) some beliefs are more valuable than others, b) we should teach the valuable ones at school, and c) to do otherwise would make us morally suspect.
Ok?
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…oh, some odds and ends.
Calling art “derivative” is code for “not understanding how art works”. Joseph Campbell made a whole career out of explaining how all heroes in all cultures have roughly the same story. Harold Bloom, not one of my ideological buddies, explains the Canon of literature literally as being the history of literature that writers have liked, imitated, and made reference to. So all “great” literature is inherently derivative.
Art works the same way. For like 1,000 years, all the art made by Europeans was about Jesus, Mary, God, and sometimes the Devil. A lot of that art is still great and important. When artists moved away from that, they did it in part by taking advantage of new technology and in part by taking inspiration from Rome. But Rome's great art was about taking inspiration from Greece…and Greece took its cues from the Phoenicians…and so on.
What I'm saying is, we're doing ok.
And John, I'm aiming this at you, too…I hope you read it.
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@Anonymous: I read it, but I'm not sure why you were aiming it at me. I do agree that derivation is not inherently bad – it's one of many items in the artist's toolbox – but on the other hand I generally share Narf's opinion that the arts in the US are in a state of serious decline. I think I'd more attribute it to pervasive commercialization pushing derivation to the forefront of a huge majority of projects and often forbidding the people involved from engaging in any other part of the creative process, but I do think that what he's saying about the idolization of dogmatic rationalism stifling creativity has merit.
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@ Anon 6:58 – 7:28
You spent so much time and effort writing about irrelevant red hearings that I'm actually fairly surprised this wasn't just an article copied from some where. But, lets talk about your questions anyway…
“The third is the idea that ALL beliefs are equally valid at some level.”
I'm not arguing that all beliefs are equally valid. The relative validity of individual beliefs in this case is moot. Just that they should be free to exist regardless.
But, I would ask you this of science… can you actually prove that it works? Can you compare science against a control? Can you defend it with out resorting to selection bias? I mean, if I were to shake a magic 8-ball enough times, I would eventually get the right answer. Can you actually empirically show that science is better at making predictions than a magic 8-ball?
“The second is the question of what should be taught in public schools”
Completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. We're talking about what parents teach their children at home, not what's taught in school.
“The first is the possibility of beliefs which, if you have them or encourage others to have them, make you a bad person.”
Well, first off, the criteria of what constitutes a “bad person” is subjective to the point of ambiguity. Generally when one calls something “bad” it's because they don't like it in a way they can't logically explain. But, with out getting to deep into moral relativism, I'm going to assume given the context of the rest of your post that you mean “harmful”. And, in that case… no.
I've made this argument several times before, but… Beliefs in and of them selves don't beget actions, and harmful people will do harmful things regardless of belief. The two simply do not correlate to each other at all.
As for the case of you're misinformed voter, the real problem isn't his initial belief but that the people who know about road maintenance did a poor job convincing him otherwise. And, I think that is the case far more often than not.
“Calling art “derivative” is code for “not understanding how art works””
A work being inspired by another and a work being derivative of another are 2 entirely different things. Yes, all art is inspired by other art, the distinction is whether it tries to be something new in it's own right or not. A good example would be how Aliens in inspired by Starship Troopers, but Halo would be derivative of Starship Troopers.
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@ Narf
Since you said you would admit that you're wrong if I could demonstrate conclusively that science will get the right answer more often than a Magic Eight Ball, here's the proof:
The magic 8-Ball has the following answers.
● It is certain
● It is decidedly so
● Without a doubt
● Yes – definitely
● You may rely on it
● As I see it, yes
● Most likely
● Outlook good
● Yes
● Signs point to yes
● Reply hazy, try again
● Ask again later
● Better not tell you now
● Cannot predict now
● Concentrate and ask again
● Don't count on it
● My reply is no
● My sources say no
● Outlook not so good
● Very doubtful
So any question you ask it has a 50% chance of a “yes” response, a 25% chance of a “I don't know” and a 25% chance of a “no”. Assuming you roll the “I don't know”s again, that means that the breakdown will have something like an average of 71% yes, 29% no.
So if you ask the magic 8 ball a question like “Will it Rain Tomorrow?”, you will only be accurate if reality happens to correspond to exactly that percentage of answers – I imagine there are places where that would be a pretty good fit. For everywhere else, though, it's pretty wildly off, and, of course, the situation gets worse if I ask a question like “Will there be a hurricane tomorrow?” or “Will everyone spontaneously combust tomorrow?”
Predicting the weather, or spontaneous human combustion, can be done using observation of empirical evidence and tools developed using the scientific method. Those methods work better than a magic 8-ball, QED.
I'm sorry that my red “hearings” so confused you, but my point was that using elementary logic and intro-philosophy epistemology, your case can be torn asunder, and I spent the time doing it because it was like doing a fun (yet easy) Sudoku puzzle while watching Breaking Bad, and also because your thesis is so dangerous and so wrong and I am that guy from the XKCD cartoon.
And yes, by “bad” I mean “harmful”, and no, I am not persuaded that actions and beliefs bear no relationship to one another. There's evidence in cognitive psychology (Dan Airely's new book is a good example) that getting people to do bad things relates mainly to their ability to rationalize their behavior, so in fact there's quite a strong relationship between people's willingness to steal or harm others or fail to help and people's professed moral framework. We know this because of experiments done with controls and repeated trials and “science-y stuff”, but you don't care, I suspect, because evidence holds no meaning for a free-spirited, poetic individual like yourself.
In the meantime, I'm wondering how you justify your extremely self-assured assertions about which art is derivative and which art is inspired while telling me that ALL moral judgments are so subjective that it's too ambiguous to even talk about it.
What I begin to suspect is that you either a) just like to keep the argument going, which I respect (obviously) or b) just cannot admit to being so spectacularly incorrect as you are on this issue due to unwarranted pride or c) have a chip on your shoulder about logic because you're not much good at it but clearly want to be. I feel like c) is too mean, and I've seen you say smarter things than this, so I'm going with a).
But that's what I choose to believe.
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…oh, sorry, to respond to that one argument about the subject of the discussion: it's possible that we agree.
All positions and beliefs have a right to exist, if they absolutely must. But some of them are stupid, and most of them are wrong, and parents who teach their kids that science doesn't really explain anything better than a magic 8-Ball are harming their kids with their nonsense.
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@ Anon 12:04
I have a number of issues with your proposed experiment:
1 – Despite your “QED”, nothing was actually demonstrated. You gave a break down of the probability of the 8-ball being right and just asserted that science would perform better. You presented nothing showing the probability of science being right, much less actual empirical evidence.
2 – “Will there be a hurricane tomorrow?” and “Will everyone spontaneously combust tomorrow?” fall quite clearly into the area of selection bias.
3 – I would concede that a magic 8-ball is perhaps a bit too weighted to work properly as a control, but that doesn't negate the need for controlled experiments. We'll just need to find more controls to compare against.
And, are you referring to “The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty”? The entire thesis of the book was that rationalization was an unconscious process that happens that completely independently and often in-spite of “professed moral framework”. All his experiments showed that he could get people to perform dishonest behavior regardless of what they believed. I'm baffled as to why you would even mention that book.
For all your talk about empirical evidence, your argument is disappointingly lacking in it.
(As an aside, I suggest you look up “Danth's Law”. I never call people out on it because for me it's like a shark smelling blood in the water, but it's something that perhaps you should be aware of.)
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