“Communication Is a Two-Way Street” is a trite metaphor that, although useful at times, is an incomplete description of the reality of the process of communications.  Yes, there are senders and receivers in communications.  The senders can only control how they present messages.  They can’t control how messages are received. Only receivers can control their reception.

In intro psychology courses, many of us spent weeks trying to get a solid grasp of the subtle differences between sensation and perception.  Just as two people can experience (perceive) a temperature of 55° F as either warm or cool depending on their preconceptions and other environmental factors, two people can also hear or read my message and either decide that I am “right on” or that I am “not helping.”

I sincerely intend to attend someday a conference where all the cool kids congregate. If I had been at TAM8 in Vegas last weekend, I would have caught this speech that Phil Plait gave on being a dick when it comes to skepticism.  Stephanie was there and wrote about it.

That’s the closest thing I have to a conversion story I have. It’s also why I was a touch disappointed in Phil’s speech, although I appreciated most of it. He asked how many of us used to believe in woo, and he asked how many of us had been converted by people being angry and mean to us. He didn’t ask how many of us had been converted by someone being angry and mean on our behalf or on behalf of the ideals of skepticism.

I’d have raised my hand. High.

I have been wondering what has been learned lately in the blogosphere regarding the best methods to communicate skepticism and interest in science to the general public.  It still seems to me that with the You’re Not Helping self-immolation, the lesson learned was that people don’t like sock-puppets (and for good reason).  Or perhaps that Chris Mooney had better do a better job of checking on someone before vouching for him.

In most of the discussions related to accommodation of religion and science, most of the effort at discovery and focus has been placed on the methods of the message senders.  Who is right?  Who is wrong? Is it okay to be a jerk?  Are jerks making it more difficult for the non-jerks?  Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas even has a post that suggests that we can use science to determine the best way to get people to like science.  He even proposes a (lame) experiment:

Someone grounded in that body of research could develop some testable hypotheses about how folks might respond to NAs. Then you could do lab work, bringing in a large and representative sample of folks with views across the c/e spectrum. Do a pretest, then have some of them read a selection from Dawkins’ The God Delusion, others read from Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God, and a control reading something unrelated to creationism and evolution and theism. Then do a post-test. Follow up a month later, and see how their views on science generally, evolution specifically, and on the relationship between science and religion have changed. Follow up a year later. What sticks, and what doesn’t? What do people remember? What do they convey to their friends? Then follow up the study with treatments that vary the extent of contact with New Atheist writings, to see whether people who read all of TGD, or watch a 2 hour talk by Dawkins, react differently than those with more fleeting contact with NA ideas.

The reason that I think that this idea is “lame” is because the concept doesn’t take into account the individual prejudices, the environments and the presuppositions that people bring into a reading of a book that looks at religion to determine that belief in God is the result of a delusion.  It’s a loaded experiment that I think would yield little.  A reading of either Miller’s book or Dawkins’ book is unlikely to find an audience of readers who were initially unbiased towards the concepts of religion and science.  Such an experiment wouldn’t be able to isolate the independent variables enough to create a sufficiently testable hypothesis.

More importantly, though, Josh makes the mistake of assuming that there is a “best” way to do all of this science communicating.  I don’t see how there can be one “best way” to turn an “Unscientific America” into a scientific America when there isn’t any single “America.”  There are 300 million Americans, and each of them have their own looking-glass selves. Communication doesn’t happen in a vacuum.  A message is by necessity interpreted by the receiver.  Communication is colored by the recipient’s background, history and environment.  Perception is a function of perspective.

Suppose the experiment were to be set up using the two books that Josh suggests; Finding Darwin’s God, by Kenneth Miller and The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins.  Suppose a sizable portion of the Miller readers were anti-Catholic and decided that his book is pure papist nonsense.  Would their non-acceptance be skewed by his catholicism?  How would the experimenter control for such an extraneous variable?  That is just one possible objection, and I am sure that social scientists can find more problems with the idea.

Humans are not psychic.  There is no direct communication available from my brain to yours.  We are limited in communications by the usage of symbols whether visual or audio.  We talk, we write, we listen, we read and use other means to indirectly communicate.  The indirect means we have to communicate are filtered through our perspectives.  We can’t control how other people filter.

Let’s try looking at it this way.  Is there an experiment that can show the “best” temperature to take a shower?  Would Josh be able to come up with a statistically valid sample to prove that 140°F is the “best” temperature and then expect that everyone take their showers at that temperature in order to get a consensus on clean?

Communication is not a two-way street.  It is an intersection.  Sometimes there are four corners and sometimes there are seven corners, and I think it unreasonable to expect that a left turn is always the correct course of action.  People who receive your directions and your communications have varying needs.  Stephanie needed someone to be angry at flim-flammers on her behalf, and Randi was there for her. Some people don’t need to hear that; some people just want discussion.  Some people just want the facts.  The trouble is the communicators don’t know what the receivers need. Most of the time we just know what we want to give. That’s just fine as long as we recognize that the message may vary and still have a desired effect.

So, be a dick or don’t be a dick.  Just don’t pretend to tell me that you know which size fits all.

Once you eliminate the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth (or a close approximation thereof). Almost A.C. Doyle

I have a friend who has often told me that as an atheist I rest too much on my preconceptions that God doesn’t exist for me to be open to evidence that his God does, in fact, exist.  He has told me that because of the problem of induction,  there is no way that I can “know” that God doesn’t exist, and that nothing in the scientific method can be used to support atheism.  Since no one can be justified, apparently, in drawing absolute answers from repeated observations, then it is silly to say that there is no God just because I have never experienced “Him.”

It’s the problem of induction, again.  I hesitate to discuss such a philosophical quandary among those who read this blog regularly; those who will likely school me on where my lack of formal philosophical training has failed me, but I have been thinking about the differences between science and religion as “ways of knowing.”

In order to maintain confidence that a causal relationship between natural phenomena has been established, one scientific method that I learned was to disprove a null hypothesis using statistical tools to analyze my data.  If the null hypothesis is not disproved, that means that the proposed hypothesis probably establishes a causal relationship and my investigation has yielded a good answer within a specified confidence interval. In other words, by following a scientific process, an investigator has come up with a good explanation for why something is so, or how something works.

This is only one of the methods that scientists use to discover how things work, one of the ways that people discover “how the world goes.”

Religion promises knowledge based on non-verifiable acceptance of authority, resignation to “mystery,” and the record of inscripturation.  Apologists for religion promise to provide “other ways of knowing” that aren’t limited to verifiable, positivistic methods. Religion, in general, tells people that we can know for certain that the supernatural exists and interacts in measurable ways with the natural.  Religion explains, in its “way,” the creation, miracles, interventions in personal lives and through catastrophic natural events.  The explanations are authoritative but not testable nor replicable through any reliable means.

There is a difference between the process of science and the nature of religion.  Science provides the “probable” answers, while religion promise certainty as long as the seeker will accept Mystery. ¹ Cosmologists have teased out most of the probable answers as to what happened following the Big Bang to within Planck Time and are still trying to determine how this universe came into being.  They don’t know absolutely if the current understanding of the process of expansion has been accurately described, but they have reason to acknowledge that it has been described very accurately using the process of inductive reasoning.

Inductive reasoning, as I understand it, is the process of analyzing subsets of the whole to make rational judgments of the nature of the whole.  For a common example of how inductive reasoning works, I will use political polling.  A sample of the population of likely voters is queried as to how they plan to vote in an upcoming election.  The larger the sample polled, the more likely the pollster is to obtain an accurate prediction of the eventual outcome.  Once the sample size exceeds a certain level, the returns of accuracy and confidence change little and it would be foolish and expensive and time-consuming to sample more than necessary.  A poll of all the people who will vote would be the most accurate way to predict an election, it would yield an “absolutely true” result, provided that none of those polled were deceptive or changed their minds.

The ideal sample size can be determine through some quick calculations, for example:

Determining Sample Size

((The trick to stats is designing the proper formula.  Once that has been done it is a simple matter of algebra.))

Nate Silver didn’t need to sample all of the voters in the 2008 election to predict that Obama would carry the electoral vote.  He merely needed to analyze the polls that sampled populations within the whole of the electorate.  The results he predicted were accurate to a specified confidence level, the famous “margin of error” of ±3 per cent.  There was a 5% chance that he could have predicted incorrectly.  In experimental design, a scientist will determine what margin of error will allow for the most probable and acceptable description of the causality of a natural phenomenon. Shorter:  Is this what caused that?  The  possible answers are not “yes” or “no.”  They are “probably” or “probably not,” or “that’s funny.”

The “problem of induction” is related to absolute knowledge.  If all knowledge is tentative, then any solution is as good as any other.  There is no certainty and there can be none, so my answer is as good as yours even if I haven’t done any serious investigation.  If you can’t state with a 0% margin of error that something is so, then you really have no useful knowledge. I can’t predict that the sun will rise tomorrow with absolute certainty, because I can’t see into the future.  I can confidently state that it will because I have an understanding that the sun doesn’t really rise, instead the earth rotates and creates an effective illusion that the sun is rising. For the Earth to stop rotating sometime in the middle of the night, events would be a bit more jarring due to the forces of momentum than I would care to deal with.  I wouldn’t then be too concerned that my prediction was wrong.

The “problem of induction” has been misused to claim that since there is no way to “know” that there is no God then God is likely to exist even if there is no direct nor indirect evidence of such an entity.  Not by any professional philosophers has this been done, mind you, but by friends of mine who think that they have stumbled onto something that “no atheist can answer.”

When it comes to the differences between religion as a “way of knowing” versus science as a way of understanding, religion offers something that science doesn’t.  Religion offers the comfort of absolute knowledge.  It offers the absolute answers, the answers that people want:  there is a creator that is watching after us and providing a way for us to experience a blissful afterlife.

The conflict between science and religion is in the means of acquiring knowledge.  Religious authority is often derived from personal revelations of prophets who have experienced something that to them is “real” and “true,” as true as the feeling of a burned hand in a fire. I have “felt” the presence of the Holy Spirit, but I have also “felt” the presence of the pagan Goddess in a drawing down of the moon. Both experiences were very emotional, uplifting, exciting and convincing. God’s presence was revealed to me, as was the Goddess’s. I should also note that both experiences were accompanied by prophecies from the respective supernatural agents.

Through these experiences, I found out how religious people “know” what they know. There could be no doubt, because the words came directly to me while I was experiencing the ecstasy. There was no induction needed, because through those experiences I had the Truth.  As Thomas Paine wrote in The Age of Reason:

It is a contradiction in terms and ideas, to call anything a revelation that comes to us at second-hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily limited to the first communication — after this, it is only an account of something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to believe it in the same manner; for it was not a revelation made to me, and I have only his word for it that it was made to him.

I could tell you the Truth of those prophecies, but you would have to take my word for it.

Religion and science are not compatible because of the illusory nature of “truth.”  We all have truths.  Religion claims to provide Truth.  Science is just a process that uses methods to get close to truth.  Religion provides other ways of knowing.  My question is in knowing what?  What does religion help us know, exactly?  And if induction can’t be used to prove an absolute, is that really a problem that religion can solve?

I don’t know.

1. Have you ever noticed that Catholic theologians pronounced the word “mystery” with the “M” capitalized? How do they do that?

I’ve never done that (well, actually, I have, but that’s another story), but I have spent a lot of time flying around in tiny airplanes that get filled to capacity with weight in the form of humans and their luggage. When you do that, the pilots tend to weigh everything and add it up to make sure they know exactly how much there is and to not go over some limit, and they tend to put things where they want them. I’ve seen pilots ask a particularly large or small person to sit in a particular seat, for instance. The point of doing that is not only to control weight, but also to achieve balance (mainly between the front and back ends of the aircraft).

This is what it was like in the old days with the stagecoaches. In order to have wheels that would last a long time and allow a reasonably smooth ride, the wheels had to be really big. If the wheels are really big, the center of gravity is high. If the center of gravity is high, the weight has to be properly distributed.

Or the coach falls over on the first tight turn.

So sometimes, in order to maintain balance, when the stagecoach was barreling down the road with four fast horses out front, approaching the turn, the stagecoach driver or his assistant would pound on the roof to get the attention of the ladies and gentlemen inside and ask a favor of the men.

“Gentlemen, lean to the left!”

Or the right, as needed. Thusly, the center of gravity would be shifted and the stagecoach could make the turn at a reasonable speed and not fall over. (It would appear that ladies of the Victorian Era were massless.)

This, of course, is a metaphor for the political process, but not the scientific process.

In the scientific process, what is correct is correct, to the extent that we feel that certain conclusions are highly likely or even seemingly inescapable. Just because a range of opinions can exist or has existed does not mean that it should exist. If the opinions on the very wrong extreme of an issue (like, for instance, that Bigfoot DOES exist) are chopped off, the scientific process does not tumble off the road like a hapless, out-of-balance stage coach. Rather, science just heads more in the appropriate direction…down the road where there is no Bigfoot.

In politics, this is possible as well, but the pragmatic and messy truth is that there is, in fact, a range of opinions out there that includes a lot that you or I won’t like. Sometimes we don’t like them because they are philosophically different than what we think. Other times we won’t like them because they are just plain wacko-bozo wrong. Either way, the process for hacking those opinions off and letting them float free is undefined and elusive. So they tend to stick around.

Indeed, politically, it is often the case that the actual opinions don’t matter at all. What matters in a democracy or a consensus group is where the center lies (more or less). And the locus of the center is defined in large part by where the edges are. The center determines our collective direction, and the edges determine the center.

People who want to live near the center need to learn to thank those at the extremes. People who want to live to one side of the center need to form firm alliances with those on their side, moderate, semi-extreme, or very extreme.

This is why we needed a Kucinich to get an Obama. We needed a McCarthy to get a Johnson. This is why we needed an SDS, the Black Panthers and the Velvet Underground (yes, the band) to keep Nixon in line, to get important human rights reform and, eventually, Bono.

In the area of the science vs. anti-science culture wars, this is why we need a PZ Myers to get a Genie Scott. PZ Myers is the biology professor and blogger of Morris, Minnesota who is famous for having a firm anti-religion stance on science education and politics (and life in general). Genie Scott is the executive director of the National Center for Science Education, and is well known for being unapologetic about the validity of modern science, including evolutionary biology as we know it in the modern world, yet she is also known for communing with people who are are religious but still not particularly anti-science.

I’m pretty familiar with both of them as individuals, friends, colleagues, and fellow activists in science education. On a day to day basis, I see little difference between them when it comes to that area we all work together on: Science education in the K-12 classroom, and concomitant training of teachers and administrators. Also, I am aware of the fact that PZ Myers is capable of working with more “centrist” people where appropriate, and that Genie Scott is just as annoyed as anyone else when the religious right wing comes up with all the crap they come up with.

For the last several years, the conservative religious right wing has been effective in winning over the hearts and “minds” of a large percentage of the American people. They’ve even managed this in areas that make no sense. Tort reform. Health care reform. Unions. Across the United States, working class people are embracing policies in these areas that will ultimately, over the medium and long term, do them great harm.

I think the right wing has used two very powerful tools to make this happen: Simplification and spectrum packing.

Simplification is simply to eschew complexity. Listen to liberals talk. For a number of reasons, some good and some bad or annoying, liberals can’t talk about any topic without pretty quickly disagreeing with each other. This tendency comes partly from the fact that “liberal” = “smart” to no small degree, and critical thinking is generally applied in these conversations. But while dogma that is evaluated critically is better dogma (and less dogmatic!), dogma that is argued over is weak, socio-politically. Every argument within the ranks is a tool to be used from outside. You can come up with whatever argument you want, do the best job possible to fill the gaps and address the holes. If the critical evaluation of the argument is not curtailed at some point, that dogma won’t hunt. And when it comes to winning the hearts and “minds” of the American people, you won’t. You’ll have to force the change required by this higher-quality dogma down their throats, and that can only be done now and then, as in the 1930s and now, with economic depression so severe that people are more than usually willing to try things.

The second tool is spectrum packing. This simply means allowing your side of the issue to include the full range of voices. If you leave things alone, those voices will emerge. But what you have to do then is to live with them. You are not going to shut them up anyway, so fighting them won’t work. When it comes to the key issues, those voices and your own rarely disagree, so they are allies, but if you try to shut them up they won’t be.

Ken Miler, a Catholic biologist who seems to want to see his god somewhere in the mix when thinking about evolution, although he opposes the creationists with a vengeance, and radical atheist PZ Myers are on the same side and more often than not work together and agree on tactics. Yet they also argue. The fact is that if the enemy is well enough defined, and the stakes high enough, even smart liberal-minded people can avoid being stupid about their politics. They may never be as good at this as the Republicans, but they can move closer to a strategically more effective place than they are now.

They have to. Or they cease to be relevant.

So, gentlemen and ladies, please lean to the left. Or if someone else is leaning too far to the left for your taste, thank them for it, because they are keeping your ass from flying off the road.

The Shakers got what they wanted, as well. They lived their lives mostly segregated from the rest of the world. Segregated from each other, as well, since purity, to them, meant no sex.

As you can imagine, a sect without sex has something of a recruitment problem. The Shakers never grew beyond a few thousand members, and without being able to indoctrinate from birth, they’ve shrunk to somewhere fewer than a dozen members currently. They’ll die out soon. For all intents and purposes, they already have.

While the Shakers did have a disproportionate affect on U.S. music and design, that’s a topic for a different post, one on art and children perhaps. The more important point here is that they’re gone–and why.

One of the most amusing things about watching the Republican party turn into a purity movement over the last couple of decades, maybe the only amusing thing, was the realization that purity movements are, by definition, self-limiting. Not only do they define themselves by what they are not, but they’re rarely content with yesterday’s definition of pure. The Shakers escaped that, maybe because they valued equality so thoroughly, maybe because of where they started(!), but most groups that value purity above all else start to get competitive about it.

Generally, however, purity movements either abandon their quest for purity in favor of rewarding in-group status (see the treatment of recent Republican infidelity revelations) or they splinter into tinier sects, some still obsessed with purity, others offering various loopholes (see the Mormon polygamist groups).

None of these outcomes are anything I want to see for any group I’m involved with, so I twitch when I see someone trying to draw, for example, simple lines between what is and what is not feminism. And when I say twitch, I mean I tell y’all about it.

Most recently, I’ve been twitching about these big, overlapping groups of rationalists and critical thinkers who are out here fighting the good fight against various forms of irrationality. I was talking to Genie Scott on the radio in the midst of the accommodationism debate. I watched people recommend that anti-creationists withdraw from Bloggingheads because it had given insufficiently critical air time to creationists. And all too often, I see people dismiss naive, ignorant questions with the same contempt they expend on proselytizers and the peddlers of woo.

Are we turning into our own purity movement? It wouldn’t be difficult to do. We do, after all, value accuracy. There are places where, ethically, we need to draw hard, fast lines. And we have better evidence that we’re right than most of these other purity movements. It would be terribly easy to draw harder, faster lines, excluding those who don’t meet our standards for accurately portraying the most current evidence for…well, anything really.

In fact, the accommodationism debate seems to be working very hard to head that direction over a question of words. Yes, that’s right, words. Which ambiguous, context-dependent words are used to most accurately capture the weird, diverse, sometimes irrational and illogical way the mind works has become an issue of utmost importance. Descriptive words are becoming fighting words.

We can do that if we want to. No reason rationalism can’t have its own academic slapfights that mean nothing to the rest of the world. No reason we can’t splinter into tiny sects. No reason at all…except that it means losing sight of one of our major goals–education.

See, here’s the thing about education: it’s progressive. We start with the simple, the general, and build from there. Take reading. While significant numbers of children can easily learn to read using a whole-word method, the evidence has grown that the most sure way to teach almost all children to read is intensive work in phonics.

This means that we teach them that “a” sounds one way in “car” and a different way when an “e” is added to make “care.” This gives them the tools they need to decipher the vast majority of “a” sounds. What we don’t do is bring up words like “career” before they’ve got the basics down. In order to be accurate, the rule would have to be that a vowel sound is short when alone and long when followed by an “e” except when…or in the exceptional cases of…. But this just isn’t helpful for the new reader.

Rational thinking is progressive as well. It is most decidedly not something we’re born to. If it were, there’d be no need for all the outreach that we do. We would never have to teach the difference between anecdote and data. We would never have to caution against confirmation bias or uncritically accepting authority. We wouldn’t have to point out when our skeptical spokespeople are trading on their reputation for skepticism instead of in skepticism itself.

Even in those last cases, we counter fact with fact to show that the situation cannot be so simply stated. We don’t declare that those who overstate their own degree of critical thinking to have put themselves outside the realm of critical thinking or to be a danger to critical thinking in general. We simply point out that no one is perfectly rational about everything, label the situation as a prime example and move on with our common goals of increasing general levels of rationality and decreasing the harm that the hucksters can do.

Am I saying that we should never argue with the educators over their means? No, no more than I’m saying that each of us must always take the time to fully answer naivety (although this person could use some reading material if someone has links handy) or that those of us with multiple avenues to reach a broad public should never abandon one as annoyingly cumbersome.

I am saying that it’s a very big, irrational world out there, and that we should be wary of choosing our targets based on the fact that they will listen to the arguments we make. In many ways, our allies are the easiest people to argue with, just because they care about the same things we do. They are not, however, where the biggest gains in rationality are to be made. That comes from reaching out to the people who have several steps to take before they would even register on our rationality meters.

And there is our choice. Rationalists are a finite resource. So is the energy we can dedicate. We can spend it reaching out to the (often oblivious and sometimes annoying) general population, or we can turn it on each other until we are all cleansed of irrationality and imprecision. I know which requires the greatest work, and I know which one I’ll choose every time.

Let’s just say I’m not with the Shakers.

Generally, my take on the whole question is similar to my take on religion in general: Don’t we have something more interesting to talk about, and if not, can we at least refrain from misrepresenting each other’s points of view?

Now, having said that, I’ll admit up front that I haven’t read the book that’s raising so many hackles. However, in PZ Myers’ general review, he pulled a quote that I have to address:

Dawkins and some other scientists fail to grasp that in Hollywood, the story is paramount—that narrative, drama, and character development will trump mere factual accuracy every time, and by a very long shot.

I write science fiction. I read science fiction. I watch it on television and in the theater. I read and write and watch in other genres too. This statement is one of those gross oversimplifications that makes me cringe. Maybe it’s better in context, covered in caveats, but an awful lot of people aren’t seeing it in context right now.

There is some truth to the assertion, of course. You never see a “real-life drama” that hasn’t been trimmed to fit the length of a feature film. Locations stand in for one another. Behavior that would result in lockdowns or restraining orders is played for laughs or romance. Bad guys can’t shoot, but good guys have perfect aim. Explosions require far more fuel than would be available, and people still walk away from them.

Accuracy does get cast aside in moviemaking. However, the fact that decisions like these are made in the writing or the production doesn’t make them good decisions.

Marion Zimmer Bradley was an editor who was famous for having a standard rejection letter that gave the following reason for rejection (I paraphrase), “Willing suspension of disbelief does not mean hanging it by its neck until dead.” In addition to plot, pacing and character development, a story also requires a setting, a “world” in speculative fiction terms. That world–and plot and characters, for that matter–are made up of details.

Accuracy has an important role to play in building world, plot and character. Every time we flub or cheat a detail, we’re making our audience, at least part of which will catch any inaccuracy, do more work. In writerly terms, it’s called throwing our audience out of the story. It means that something has gone wrong enough to remind an audience that the story is only a story. In order to get back to the point where the story is a world that the audience is visiting, the process of suspending disbelief has to start all over again.

Every time another inaccuracy is noticed, the process starts once more, and upholding that disbelief gets harder and harder. Some readers or viewers will give up on us completely. They’ll give up on the story because it asks too much of them–not in thinking but in forgiveness.

Yes, there is a kind of movie that can get away with flubbing all the details. Details aren’t why people go to summer action extravaganzas, those movies in which everything explodes, even the water. They’re not looking for accuracy. On the other hand, they’re not going to these movies looking for story either.

Setting up story and accuracy as a dichotomy also ignores the richness that accuracy can add to a story. In fact, whole stories can be built from closely observed detail. Juno is one of those stories. It doesn’t have a suspenseful plot. The characters don’t change much from beginning to end, although a few of the relationships do. What we get instead is messy, accurate observations of the complexities of life, and that was enough to win Diablo Cody an Oscar to garner an impressive return for the movie.

To bring this back to science, one of the excellent parts of the new Star Trek movie (along with the opening and Simon Pegg) was the fact that the ships weren’t all oriented on a single plane. Nobody would have noticed if they had been. Pretending there’s an absolute up and down in space is the norm in movies. Instead, we were treated to unrestrained cameras and dizzying angles, which created the sensation in the viewer of truly escaping gravity in the way a more conventional film couldn’t.

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

There is wonder in science, and solid, grounding reality. If Hollywood prefers to do another remake that no one was asking for instead of telling wondrous, solid stories…well, three things actually.

1. No one will be remotely surprised, as this is business as usual and not just in relation to science.
2. The blockbuster cinema of lowered expectations will continue to boom.
3. There’s very little Richard Dawkins or any other scientist will have to say about it, no matter accommodating they are.

What is the meaning of life?  Where is our purpose?  Why are we here and what are we supposed to do?  Where did we come from and what will follow us when we are gone?  Why am I such a lowly worm and a sinner?

In my favorite episode of My Three Sons, Chip Douglas wants to join a club that his friends have started.  They cook up a series of tasks for him to complete for his initiation, and when he completes his tasks they will teach him the “dirty little secret.”  He is dying of curiosity, so no matter how absurd the tasks, his dogged determination carries him through so that he can reach the Holy Grail of the “dirty little secret.”

Chip finally completes the last task and goes to his friends and says “Okay, I’m in.  What’s the dirty little secret?”  They laugh and tell him that “The dirty little secret is that there is no dirty little secret.”

Giordano Bruno

And that, my friends, is the mystical meaning of life.  There is no dirty little secret, no hidden answer “42.”  It rains on the just and the unjust alike. I am not a sinner, nor a lowly worm.  The purpose of “purpose” is to puzzle us, to urge us to try to discern the secrets as a great pastime, inspiring wonder at the world around us.  A deep desire to understand the “why” of the cruelties of fate (or the blessings of good fortune) is born of a curiosity that drives us on through our tasks.  If we just keep on searching for answers to our questions, eventually our gods will give us the 411 on life.  Or something will.

I was out having a conversation with a guy who calls himself an “atheist, mostly” because he doesn’t accept the Christian/Jewish/Muslim concept of God.  Nor does he accept the gods of mythology.  He does, however, think that there is more out there that we don’t yet perceive through our physical senses.  He bases his belief on the shared experiences of humanity encountering ghosts and other unexplainable phenomena.  He has decided that if so many people have reported supernatural phenomena for centuries, there must be some basis in fact.   I didn’t laugh at him, but I did explain to him that I had experienced some weird things myself.  I explained to him that when I looked back at them, I could find a plausible and natural explanation for each.

That’s how it is with the appearance of design in nature, and it’s the appearance of design that leads to the illusion of purpose.  The biological cell is incredibly complex, with multitudes of cooperating organelles and structures.  The process of creating copies of DNA and from there, mapping out the structure of proteins (which then fold in the most efficient structure possible to carry out their tasks), well it’s all just too complex to develop without the guidance of a planner.

If the Planner is capable of such wondrous processes as meisosis and mitosis (and sex), then the Planner must be in control of Purpose and our lives thus have meaning beyond that which we can see, touch, taste, smell and hear.  Religion, in this context, makes a great deal of sense.  It provides answers to the question of purpose.  Follow a path and gain enlightenment and/or eternal life in the Planner’s Presence.

Unfortunately, the answers provided by religion aren’t all that satisfactory, because they don’t provide any means to verify or test the answers.  The answers are based on authoritative declarations from the writings and thoughts of learned people who have analyzed the works of other learned people. The answers are based on the pronouncements of a priestly class who lay claim to a source that we can’t access (unless we have a faith strong enough to believe them despite contrary evidence).

Science steps in and looks at the processes of nature and shows us how to tease apart the secrets of their workings, slowly and carefully and with missteps along the way.  The missteps are readily acknowledged and re-examined.  The successes are retested to make sure they closely approximate (within a high confidence interval) the truth.  Then they are once again examined as new questions arise that cast doubt on the answers.

The problem with science is that it doesn’t provide comforting authority.  It never promises the “truth” of anything, just progressively more useful descriptions.  The result of scientific methodology is often more uncertainty, and that is not comforting to those of us who believe in absolute answers.  This will never do, and from this uncertainty comes for some faith that we can still practice the ritual and pray and get the answer we have been promised.  Science and religion are in a pas de deux, but they are constantly stepping on each other’s toes.

If science can’t produce comforting authority then what is it good for?  It is good for disproving assumptions, is what it is good for.  It has been good at disproving the “certain knowledge” that race is a valid biological construct.  It has been good at disproving the the “certain knowledge” that complex structures such as avian vision can’t develop in stages (half an eye).  It has been good at disproving the “certain knowledge” that there was a global flood 4,500 years ago.  It has been good at disproving the “certain knowledge” that the universe and all of its contents can only have been produced by an intelligent actor.

If, then, religion depends on a creator in order to provide a purpose to life, what happens when that creator is no longer a necessary function in the life equation?  Religion steps back in and says it can still help find purpose because science is limited to a natural methodology, whereas through faith there are “other ways of knowing” and science can’t approach those other ways.

Of course, as an atheist, I can look at the pathetic claims to “other ways of knowing” and scoff.  I acknowledge that I have been using very general terms and examples, and in my examples I allow religion to be relatively harmless.  It is a concept that claims an authority it cannot have.  I could simply sit back and say “Well, if some people want to believe, then that’s their business” and I could leave it at that.  With that, I could be just as accommodating as Josh Rosenau or Chris Mooney or Chad Orzel, and then I could whistle on my way nonchalantly.

My problem is that I am not content to leave it at that.  I didn’t become an atheist because of science; it was a slow realization that I was not born a lowly worm.  I was not born dependent on the sacrifice of a man-god and his resurrection in order to gain “salvation.”  I realized that I had no overriding purpose to uncover; I was not born to any certain fate.

I learned that as religion lost its explanatory power on the workings of nature, it clung to its power of redemption and salvation, and these are problems that it created so that it could provide the solution.  I’ll drop the generality of religion and address my specific objection to Christianity.  I was taught that at birth I carried the sin of Adam and Eve and that I needed to practice certain rituals or pray certain prayers to be cleansed of the sin that I never committed.  I needed baptism, confession and contrition to access the creator. In another version of Christianity I needed to be “born again.”  I could never be good enough for the creator on my own, being human.  And being human, I was condemned to be separate from the creator unless I chose the right way to accept redemption.

I am not a sinner.  I have done bad things, but I am not a sinner.  The sin for which I am supposed to be supplicating forgiveness was a sin committed by someone else.  I just couldn’t buy into the idea that I was born evil and unable to become good on my own.

I dropped Christianity.  That was when I ran into the objection that I couldn’t explain origins without God, and therefore I am foolish to be an atheist.  What I find humorous is that when I explain that scientific methodology has disproven the notion of a necessary supernatural designer, or planner, then I am also told that God is “not an explanation for origins, God is inseparable from Creation.”  The goalposts are continually shifted.

And finally, I arrive at my point.  The organizations fighting (thanks to all of you!) to achieve acceptance of solid education in subjects scientific, are bowing first to the demands of religion to say, “But this shouldn’t harm your faith.”  They are granting privilege to religion that it doesn’t deserve, while the defenders of religion are demanding that science conform to faith.   By giving in to this demand, the defenders of science forget that the process of science is an interloper into the security blanket of cherished, certain knowledge.  Science is a dirty bastard, because it doesn’t confirm the answers we want.

In advancing science education, scientists should not accede to such demands to accommodate religious fear of becoming less and less relevant.  What they should instead do is explain the science and let religion and the religious deal with their own issues regarding the implications of the discovery of how nature works.

They’re grownups. they can handle it.