Author Archives: Bob Seidensticker

About Bob Seidensticker

I'm an atheist, and I like to discuss Christian apologetics.

Dr Johnson: Dunning-Kruger Effect

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Has it ever seemed to you that less competent people rate their competence higher than it actually is, while more competent people humbly rate theirs lower?
It’s not just your imagination. This is a genuine cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
The Dunning-Kruger experiments behind the research focused on cognitive tasks (logic, grammar, and evaluating humor), but similar disparities exist in other areas. In self-assessment of IQ, below average people overestimated their score and those above average underestimated (the Downing effect). Studies of healthy and unhealthy behaviors are handicapped when they rely on self-reporting because test subjects tend to improve their evaluation. In self-evaluations of driving ability, job performance, and even immunity to bias, we tend to polish our image.
This is the Lake Wobegone effect—the town where “all the children are above average.”
Notice that there are two different categories of error:
(1) the error where there is a preferred answer and everyone (apparently) is biased toward giving that answer (“How much snack food do you eat?” or “How popular would you say you are?” or “How good a driver are you?”) and
(2) the error where bias changes depending on actual competence, with the less and more competent groups rating themselves too high and too low, respectively.
Let’s look at the second category, where the two extremes make opposite errors. The results of the Dunning-Kruger research hypothesizes that the competent overestimate others’ skill levels. But the error is more complicated for the incompetent—they overestimate their own skill level and they lack the metacognition to realize their error. In other words, they were too incompetent to recognize their own incompetence. Improving their metacognitive skills drove down their self-assessment scores as they became better evaluators of their own limitations.
The original paper was titled, “Unskilled and Unaware of It,” for which the authors won an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000.

Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge:
it is those who know little, not those who know much,
who so positively assert that this or that problem
will never be solved by science.
— Charles Darwin (The Descent of Man, 1871)

Photo credit: Martin Beek

Christianity’s Bogus Claims to Answer Life’s Big Questions

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Christianity claims to be able to answer the Big Questions of Life®. I can buy that, but anyone (or any religion) can answer them. It’s whether the answers are credible that matters.
For discovering reality, religion comes up short. Surprisingly, we rarely turn to science, the discipline that has faithfully answered so many other questions. But science can help with the Big Questions, too.
For example: Why are we here? Science can answer that: we’re here for no more cosmically-significant reason than why deer, jellyfish, and oak trees are here.
For example: Where did we come from? Science has some remarkable answers (Big Bang, evolution) and still has a lot of work to do in other areas (string theory, abiogenesis). Science never answers anything with certainty, but the scientific consensus, where there is one, is the best explanation that we have at the moment. The retort “Well, if Science can’t answer it, my religion can!” is not a meaningful answer. Sure, your religion may have an answer, but why trust its answer over the incompatible answers of the other religions?
For example: What is my purpose? There is no evidence of a transcendental or supernatural purpose to your life. One great thing about rejecting dogma is that you get to select your own purpose! And who better than you to decide what that is?
For example: What will happen to me after I die? There’s no evidence that anything more remarkable will happen to you than happens to a deer, jellyfish, or oak tree when they die.
And so on. Science has answers; it’s just that religion doesn’t like them.
Science has only one reality to align itself with. By contrast, each religion makes up its own, which is why they can’t agree. Science provides answers and doesn’t demand faith to accept them.
Think about a church steeple with a lightning rod on top. The steeple proclaims that God exists, and the lightning rod says that it can reduce lightning damage. Which claim provides the evidence to argue that it’s true? Religion makes truth claims and so does science, but science takes it one step further: it actually delivers on its claims.
Religion … well, not so much.
(This is a modified version of a post originally published 9/2/11.)
Photo credit: Wikipedia

Who Cares About Darwin?

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It’s more or less Darwin Opposite Day—the day half a year from Darwin’s birthday—so it’s a good time to ask the blasphemous question: Who cares about Darwin? More precisely: Who cares about what Darwin wrote?
Of course, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species revolutionized biology. In the history of science, he’s a god.
Darwin may be a god, but in biology today, Darwin’s writings don’t count for anything. No one checks their results against Darwin’s thinking. No biologist says, “That’s an interesting hypothesis, Chuzzlewaite, but let’s compare it against the Great Darwin to see if it holds up.”
By contrast, consider how Aristotle was elevated during the medieval period. What Aristotle said, not what experiment showed, determined science.

Aristotle’s views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics. (Source)

Creationists seem to put Darwin into the Infallible Sage bin along with Aristotle, and they love to quote him as if biology today were constrained by what he said. But, of course, what Darwin wrote about evolution is important today only for the history of science, not biology. Even if they could make him look bad (and I say they don’t), so what? That would have nothing to do with the validity of the theory of evolution.
A popular Creationist tactic is to twist Darwin’s The Descent of Man to argue that he supported eugenics. Ben Stein’s “crockumentary” Expelled correctly quotes Darwin from this book:

Thus the weak members of civilized societies propagate their kind. No one who has attended to the breeding of domestic animals will doubt that this must be highly injurious to the race of man. It is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race; but excepting in the case of man himself, hardly anyone is so ignorant as to allow his worst animals to breed.

Ah, so Darwin was rabidly in support of eugenics, right? Nope. The very next paragraph clarifies. He talks about our instincts for compassion and says,

Nor could we check our sympathy, even at the urging of hard reason, without deterioration in the noblest part of our nature.

Unsurprisingly, Expelled just quote-mines the first passage out of context to completely misrepresent Darwin’s views.
Here’s another excerpt popular among Creationists, this time from Origin of Species.

To suppose that the eye, with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree.

A frank admission by Darwin of the inadequacy of his theory? Not really. The very next sentence explains how evolution could account for it.

If numerous gradations from a perfect and complex eye to one very imperfect and simple, each grade being useful to its possessor, can be shown to exist … then the difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection … can hardly be considered real.

Creationists out there: do your research into what Darwin actually said and don’t quote him out of context. It makes you look like a liar.
In the hope that humor can make the point where reason can’t, let me modify a popular Christian joke. Here’s the Christian version: A flood drives a devout man onto the roof of his house. A boat comes to take him away, but he says, “No—God will provide.” The water level keeps rising. Then another boat comes, and then a helicopter, but the man sends them all away. The flood water continues to rise, and he’s swept away and drowns.
He goes to heaven and he’s furious at God. “Why didn’t you save me?” he says.
“What did you want?” God says. “I sent two boats and a helicopter!”
Now: imagine a fundamentalist in heaven. With his new heavenly wisdom, he realizes that science was right all along, and his literalist take of the Bible was laughably wrong.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” he demands of God.
“What did you want?” God says. “I sent Charles Darwin and 100,000 evolutionary biologists!”

It appears to me (whether rightly or wrongly)
that direct arguments against Christianity and theism
produce hardly any effect on the public;
and freedom of thought is best promoted
by the gradual illumination of men’s minds
which follows from the advance of science.
— Charles Darwin

Photo credit: Wikipedia

Dr Johnson: Extraordinary Claims and Extraordinary Evidence

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In the 8/12/12 Stand to Reason podcast (start at 1:06:00), Greg Koukl discusses the popular aphorism, “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” He doesn’t care for it, probably because he wants to lower the bar of evidence for his own remarkable claims about Jesus.
He proposes instead, “Extraordinary claims require adequate evidence.” As an example, he cites the Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969. “A man has walked on the moon” is an extraordinary claim (or certainly was in the 1960s), but he notes that we were satisfied with the evidence of “a simple newsreel” (by which I presume he means the live video feed from the moon).
That video alone, as powerful as it was, might not have been enough to support the enormous claim of the moon landing, but of course we had far more than just that. We had public statements from NASA, the press, and the president; we had public launches of ever more enormous rockets from Cape Kennedy through the 1960s; we had thousands of workers within the aerospace industry who were in a position to blow the whistle on a hoax; we had satellites visible from the back yard of the ordinary citizens; and we even had the validation from the USSR—if we hadn’t landed on the moon, they would have delighted to point out the lie.
Was Koukl’s “simple newsreel” extraordinary evidence? In pre-Photoshop days, I think so. Add all the peripheral evidence backing up the claim, and you have evidence that, by any measure, was extraordinary. Koukl’s attempt to downplay the necessary evidence for an extraordinary claim fails. It’s a weak and disappointing attempt to shirk his burden of proof for the supernatural elements of Christianity, presumably because he knows that that burden, rightly evaluated, is gigantic.
One aspect of an extraordinary claim is its importance. “Extraordinary” means both “surprising and unexpected” as well as “important.” The Guinness Book of World Records has many entries for extraordinary in the first sense but very few in the second. The gospel claims are both unexpected and important, so they’re extraordinary by any measure.
Back to Koukl:

Use of this slogan functions to stack the deck against the … religious person making the claim because when you buy that equation it turns out that there’s almost no evidence that is going to be extraordinary enough to substantiate the extraordinary claim (1:09:40).

Yes, there’s almost no evidence documenting events 2000 years ago that can substantiate the extraordinary claim, “Jesus rose from the dead.” No, that’s not stacking the deck. That’s the same skepticism you apply to other nutty claims, whether it’s that Mohammed rode to heaven on a winged horse or that someone can sell you the Brooklyn Bridge, cheap. There simply isn’t enough evidence to support the gospel’s enormous claims, so there is no reason to accept them.
That’s the easy resolution to this difficulty—if there’s not enough evidence, don’t accept the claims.
Koukl admits that “people don’t rise from the dead very often” but then goes on to say that the gospel story isn’t a resurrection claim all by itself but that this is woven into a narrative that says that a man was dead and then people saw him alive again, and before his death the man predicted all this. Given that this is the evidence, “Well, that would change things, wouldn’t it?”
Not in the least. The facts we have at hand are that there is a story that talks about this. It’s not a fact that people saw Jesus risen from the dead, it’s just a story (perhaps more precisely: a legend). It’s in the same bin as the stories of Merlin or Prester John or Caesar Augustus, each of which has supernatural elements. I’ve written more about how the gospels weren’t written by eyewitnesses (“Is Mark an Eyewitness Account?“).
Koukl says that what is an “extraordinary claim” is subjective and depends on the person. Okay—but is Koukl saying that the claims of Scientology aren’t extraordinary to the Scientologists, so they are entitled to believe in their religion because they have a different worldview? And would this also be true for Mormons or anti-vaxers or flat earthers or those who believe in fairies? This seems to be evidential relativism of a sort that I can’t imagine Koukl supports.
Koukl is playing Whac-A-Mole, and by shoring up one problematic issue in his apologetics he forces another to emerge.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinions,
but they are not entitled to their own facts
— Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan

Photo credit: Wikimedia

Why Map of World Religions but not World Science?

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Map of world religions
Everyone’s seen maps of world religions like this one, but why do you never see a Map of World Science?
Imagine such a map. Over here is where scientists believe in a geocentric solar system, and over there, a heliocentric one. This area is where they think that astrology can predict the future, and that area is where they reject the idea. The Intelligent Design guys reign in the crosshatched area, and evolution in the dark gray area.
Naturally, each of these different groups think of their opponents as heretics, and they have fought wars over their opposing beliefs. (To keep it manageable, I’ve shown on the map only the conflicts with more than 1000 deaths.)
Of course, the idea is nonsense. A new scientific theory isn’t culturally specific, and, if it passes muster, it peacefully sweeps the world. Astronomy replaced astrology, chemistry replaced alchemy, and the germ theory replaced evil spirits as a cause of disease. One scientist should get the same results from an experiment as another, regardless of their respective religions. Evolution or germ theory or relativity or the Big Bang are part of the consensus view among scientists, whether they are Christian, Muslim, atheist, or Other.
Sure, there can be some not-invented-here thinking—scientists have egos, too—but this only slows the inevitable. Contrast this with the idea that Shintoism will sweep across America over the next couple of decades and replace Christianity, simply because it’s a theory that explains the facts of reality better. It works that way in science, not religion.
Let’s go back to our map of world religions. Religions claim to give answers to the big questions—answers that science can’t give. Questions like: What is our purpose? Or, Where did we come from? Or, Is there anything else out there? Or, What is science grounded on?
But the map shows that the religious answer to that question depends on where you are! If you live in Tibet or Thailand, Buddhism teaches that we are here to learn to cease suffering and reach nirvana. If you live in Yemen or Saudi Arabia, Islam teaches that we are here to submit to Allah.
We ask the most profound questions of all, and the answers are location specific? What kind of truth depends on location?
For discovering reality, religion comes up short. Next time someone nods their head sagely and says, “Ah, but Christianity can answer the Big Questions,” remember how shallow that claim is.

The trouble with ignorance is that it picks up confidence as it goes along
— Arnold Glasow

(This is a modified version of a post originally published 8/31/11.)
Photo credit: Wikipedia

The Powerful “Like What?” Test

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In a recent “Christian Meets World” podcast, Christian host Jason Rennie interviewed author and blogger John Loftus. At one point (20:40), Rennie proposed a deliberately ridiculous natural explanation for the gospel story: time-traveling insurance salesmen led by a clone of Elvis go back in time to manufacture the idea of Jesus to get the concept of “Act of God” into insurance law. He asks whether this is more improbable than the gospels being true.
“Act of God” probably has a lot more to do with God than with Jesus, but let’s ignore that. What about this explanation for the gospel story? It’s natural—does that mean that it beats the supernatural explanation?
The host touches on an important point—the distinction between the rule of thumb “a plausible natural explanation beats a supernatural explanation” and “any natural explanation beats a supernatural explanation.”
The first statement is enough for me. We don’t always have natural explanations—science has many unanswered questions, for example—but where we do, the natural explanations that dismiss the supernatural explanations are all plausible. There’s no need to support a crazy natural explanation simply because it’s natural. We have quite plausible natural alternatives to the gospel story and needn’t imagine time-traveling clones of Elvis.
But ignore that for now. Let’s actually compare these two alternatives using the “Like what?” test.
Consider the pieces of this proposal one at a time—first, the clone of Elvis. With the “Like what?” test, we ask, “So you propose a clone of Elvis? Like what? What precedents do we have that would make such a thing possible?”
In this case, we have quite a lot of precedent. We’ve already cloned two dozen species of animals.
Next: insurance salesmen eager to improve their business. There’s no problem finding precedents to this.
Time travel? This one is quite far-fetched, but it’s simply technology, and we understand technology. We’ve seen almost unbelievable progress in technology in the last 200 years. No one today can even sketch out how time travel might work—indeed, it may be impossible—but 10,000 more years of technology might well deliver this.
Note that this isn’t about time traveling wizards. We have no precedent for that. Everything here is natural.
In summary, the explanation has:

  • A clone of Elvis, like clones of sheep and dogs that we’ve already made.
  • Cost-cutting insurance salesmen, like insurance executives today.
  • Time travel, like the technology today that would seem miraculous to people just 50 years ago.

That hardly means that this ridiculous explanation is the best one—while it’s possible, it fails because it brings no evidence to support it over likelier explanations. It simply means that we have precedents for all major components of the story.
Now apply the “Like what?” test to the supernatural explanation, that the Jesus miracles happened pretty much as claimed in the Bible. Like what?
Here, we have no universally-accepted supernatural explanations. Christians don’t accept the supernatural stories of Hinduism, Muslims don’t accept those of Christianity, not everyone accepts ghosts or other paranormal phenomena, and so on.
The only prior examples on which there is universal agreement is that there are false supernatural claims. Consider supernatural claims about the sun, for example: the Greeks explained it as Apollo in his chariot, the Mesoamericans said that Quetzalcoatl created the current sun (the previous four having been destroyed by disasters), and the Salish said that the raven brought the sun to mankind. All nonsense, we agree.
Present a universally-accepted prior example of the supernatural—like clones, salesmen, and technology in the example above—and the gospel story has some standing. As it is, it doesn’t even leave the gate. It’s trounced even by this deliberately ridiculous example.

Any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic
— Arthur C. Clarke

Photo credit: Wikimedia
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