skeptics

"An illusion will only make you happy if you’re fully under its spell, and blissfully unaware of it."

"Even after the Cold War ended and most of the world’s communist regimes collapsed, biting the nourishing hand of industrial modernity remained a favourite pastime of leftist intellectuals. Postmodernists and critical theorists launched countless attacks on Western civilisation, while ensconced in cushy positions at Western universities, and Western presses published their books."

"Openly expressing your aversion to Marxism from behind the Iron Curtain would have meant social opprobrium at best—but more likely the gulag. Communist sympathisers in the West, however, were free to vilify their own societies, while glorifying the totalitarian alternative they never had to suffer under. Most were savvy enough to remain hypocrites: they returned from brief visits to Stalin’s Russia or Mao’s China raving about the glorious future they supposedly witnessed there, but only the truly deluded actually packed their bags for Moscow or Beijing."

"Moreover, in evolutionary accounts of religion there’s always a flipside to pro-sociality: being friendly to “us” also means being hostile and aggressive to “them”. There is a dark side to human pro-sociality that is often sanitized in popular accounts."

"The many fabrications and distortions in the genocide case against Israel are evidence of something different from rational inquiry and truth-seeking. What explains the frantic search, from almost the first day of the war, for statements by Israeli officials that can be twisted into proof of genocidal intent? What accounts for the wilful blindness to Hamas’s cruelty, to the point of erasing Hamas altogether, as if the war had only one combatant? And why is the definition of genocide gerrymandered by NGOs to implicate and condemn Israel, even though the Palestinian population grew from 1.1 million to 5.1 million between 1960 and 2020? The answer is that the “Gaza genocide” calumny has become the Left’s equivalent of the “stolen election” hoax on the American Right—a baseless accusation that signals ideological allegiance precisely because it defies logic and evidence. That is why nonsense like the Amalek verse keeps being recycled, impervious to correction—the point is not to offer evidence, but to hammer down a pre-established conclusion. (The "Amalek verse" referred to is Deuteronomy 25:17-19)"

"Rousseau’s first Discourse is one of the earliest instances of something that would come to accompany modernity wherever it gained a foothold: biting the hand that feeds you because you know it won’t punch you in the face."

"Most people intuitively grasp the basic rules of logic and probability—we wouldn’t have survived otherwise. Human reason is a bag of tricks and heuristics, mostly accurate in the environments in which we evolved, but easily led astray in modern life. And it is strategic and self-serving, motivated to reach conclusions that serve our own interests."

"Many religious apologists argue that explaining the evolutionary roots of belief does nothing to undermine God’s existence. But it does. As Nietzsche understood, if you can explain the origins of religious faith in biological terms, then “with the insight into that origin the belief falls away.” Sure, if we possessed incontrovertible evidence for God’s existence, then the genealogy of belief would be irrelevant. But in the absence of such evidence, showing how religious faith can arise without any supernatural input genuinely weakens its credibility."

"In fact, non-Westerners like Ayaan Hirsi Ali are often especially appreciative of the blessings of liberal democracy and industrial modernity because they have had first-hand experience of what it means to be deprived of them. It’s only those who have enjoyed freedom and prosperity their whole lives who tend to behave like spoiled brats."

"Is such a life of voluntary delusion really what you should want? Even if you don’t have any objections against untruthfulness per se, how can you foresee all of the consequences and ramifications of your false belief in an afterlife, or in any other comforting fiction?"

"We should cherish the naysayers. The more mud they fling, the better. Anti-capitalists, postmodern relativists, and Putin apologists are canaries in the free speech coal mine—we should start worrying if they suddenly fall silent. Still, although self-criticism is important if we want to learn from our mistakes, ritual self-flagellation is not just unproductive but actively harmful, especially when it involves glorifying alternatives that would make all of us much worse off. A healthy body needs a robust immune system to protect it from infections, but if that immune system is overzealous, it will wreak the body’s destruction. Enemies of liberal democracy like Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, and Ayatollah Khamenei must be rubbing their hands with glee as they watch us disarm ourselves without a fight. They don’t even have to denounce our free societies—we’ve already indicted ourselves."

"According to scholars like Ara Norenzayan and Joe Henrich, belief in moralizing Big Gods has fostered pro-sociality and enabled large-scale human cooperation. That sounds beautiful and uplifting, but if you look a little closer, it turns out that it’s mostly the nasty, vengeful, punishing gods that bring pro-social benefits. The stick works better than the carrot."

"Although over the past decades leftists have been more creative in inventing ever more novel ways of denouncing Western civilisation, the efforts of the Right should not be discounted, either."

"Nowhere else in the world, and at no other previous time in history, have people ever had so much freedom to bite the hand that feeds them without being punched in the face for it. This leads to a paradox that was probably first described by American diplomat Daniel Patrick Moynihan:"

"Personally, I think the Western penchant for vilifying our own civilisation has a more straightforward explanation: only a free and affluent civilisation like ours permits people to vilify it. Where else can you take your own political leaders to task in public, even insult and abuse them, without fear of repercussions? You shouldn’t try it in Russia or China, just as you shouldn’t have tried it in Europe before the rights revolution and the liberal constitutions of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Similarly, where are you free to wage a full-frontal attack on the economic and political institutions under which you live? Where can you make a fuss about problems both real and imaginary? Only in a liberal democracy. But why would you want to bite the hand that feeds you in this way? Such critics have a variety of motives, but perhaps for many, the main appeal is that in doing so they feel they are striking a heroic posture. In a Western democracy, you can pat yourself on the back for courageously “speaking truth to power,” you can even complain about being silenced and censored, while the very fact that you are able to voice these complaints out loud proves them hollow. It’s the intellectual equivalent of a soccer player theatrically flopping down onto the field to feign injury."

"There is also a rich tradition of right-wing thinkers in the West cozying up to foreign dictators, theocrats, and military strongmen, who are sworn enemies of western civilisation and its liberal values."

"The scientific method consists of the use of procedures designed to show not that our predictions and hypotheses are right, but that they might be wrong. Scientific reasoning is useful to anyone in any job because it makes us face the possibility, even the dire reality, that we were mistaken. It forces us to confront our self-justifications and put them on public display for others to puncture. At its core, therefore, science is a form of arrogance control."

"What may begin as an honest error...has a way of evolving through almost imperceptible steps from self-delusion to fraud. The line between foolishness and fraud is thin. Because it is not always easy to tell when that line is crossed, I use the term voodoo science to cover them all: pathological science, junk science, pseudoscience and fraudulent science."

"The integrity of science is anchored in the willingness of scientists to test their ideas and results in direct confrontation with their scientific peers."

"They are betting against the laws of thermodynamics. No one has ever won that wager."

"Few scientists or inventors set out to commit fraud. In the beginning, most believe they have made a great discovery. But what happens when they finally realize that things are not behaving as they believed?"

"Every step taken by science claims territory once occupied by the supernatural."

"[T]he uniquely American myth of the self-educated genius fighting against a pompous, close-minded establishment."

"I came to realize that many people choose scientific beliefs the same way they choose to be Methodists, or Democrats, or Chicago Cubs fans. They judge science by how well it agrees with the way they want the world to be."

"Two hundred years ago, educated people imaged that the greatest contribution of science would be to free the world of superstition and humbug. It has not happened. Ancient beliefs in demons and magic still sweep across the modern landscape, but they are now dressed in the language and symbols of science: a best-selling health guru explains that his brand of healing is grounded in quantum theory; half the population believes Earth is being visited by space aliens who have mastered faster-than-light travel; and educated people wear magnets in their shoes to draw energy from the Earth. This is pseudoscience."

"A scientist looks for a description of the universe in terms of a model that allows him to understand how things work, allows him to predict how things are going to work, and allows him to put together devices that work according to his predictions."

"Those [natural] laws cannot be circumvented by any amount of piety or cleverness, but they can be understood. Uncovering them should be the highest goal of a civilized society. Not...because scientists have any claim to greater intellect or virtue, but because the scientific method transcends the flaws of individual scientists. Science is the only way we have of separating the truth from ideology, or fraud, or mere foolishness."

"America's astronauts have been left stranded in low-Earth orbit, like passengers waiting beside an abandoned stretch of track for a train that will never come, bypassed by the advance of science."

"For a million years, our species was confronted with a world we could not hope to understand. Now, within a span of a single human lifetime, the book of nature has been opened wide. On its pages we are finding, if not a simple world, at least an orderly world in which everything from the birth of stars to falling in love is governed by the same natural laws."

"It is not so much knowledge of science that the public needs as a scientific worldview—an understanding that we live in an orderly universe, governed by physical laws that cannot be circumvented."

"There is no “radical relativism” plaguing modern knowledge fields, and certainly none plaguing atheists or physicalists or scientists—we are to a clear super-plurality all realists, not relativists, regarding knowledge of ourselves and the world. And secular science has provided extensive justifications for belief in the reliability of the human mind—to the extent that it actually is reliable. Remember, without those installed software fixes, of formal logics and mathematics and critical thinking and the scientific method, it’s actually pretty un-reliable. So there is no reason to believe that any of this comes from God—to the contrary, that inborn human reasoning is so terrible proves it cannot come from God. … God would want to send us that software fix! So the fact that no book purported to be God’s communications contains that crucial information means no such book actually contains God’s communications."

"I’m sure you’re familiar with the backfire effect. This is when someone says something that’s just dead wrong, and you very politely correct them and give them the facts, and they double down on their original claim. They’ll tell you you’re an arrogant scientist and that they know in their gut or their heart that it’s true. And that’s because it’s a core belief and it’s tied to identity. When you attack that core belief, you’re attacking them in their minds whether they know it or not, and it’s very difficult to overcome that."

"Do the doctrine’s problem-solving strategies encounter recurrent difficulties in a significant range of cases? Are the problem-solving strategies an opportunistic collection of unmotivated and unrelated methods? Does the doctrine have too cozy a relationship with auxiliary hypotheses, applying its strategies with claims that can be “tested” only in their applications? Does the doctrine refuse to follow up on unresolved problems, airily dismissing them as “exceptional cases”? Does the doctrine restrict the domain of its methods, forswearing excursions into new areas of investigation where embarrassing questions might arise? If all, or many, of these tests are positive, then the doctrine is not a poor scientific theory. It is not a scientific theory at all."

"Consistency is not the hobgoblin of the Creationist mind."

"The Creationists are by no means the first to play on fears about what scientific inquiry will disclose. Anxieties about ourselves endure. If our proper study is indeed the study of humankind, then it has seemed—and still seems—to many that the study is dangerous. Perhaps we shall find out that we were not what we took ourselves to be. But if the historical development of science has indeed sometimes pricked our vanity, it has not plunged us into an abyss of immorality. Arguably, it has liberated us from misconceptions, and thereby aided us in our moral progress."

"In almost any natural population of organisms, more offspring will be produced than are able to survive. The offspring will vary—in particular, they will vary with respect to characteristics that affect their abilities to survive and reproduce. Some organisms will survive longer and reproduce more frequently. If the advantageous characteristics are inheritable, then they will be transferred to descendants. As a result, they will become more prevalent in later generations. Over a large number of generations the common features of the population may be radically changed."

"Evolutionary change is change in the genetic constitution of a population. This type of change can come about as a result of a number of factors. Immigration and emigration of organisms will bring new alleles and new allelic combinations into the population and will cause others to disappear. Mutation will lead to the formation of new alleles. The major claim of a Darwinian theory of evolution is that the principal factor of change is natural selection: The most important evolutionary changes come about because some allelic pairs are fitter than others, and these obtain greater representation for their constituents alleles in subsequent generations."

"The road to Creationism is paved with bad philosophy."

"The book that follows is a chase. The Creationist is allowed to choose one battleground after another. Given each choice of battleground, I insist that the battle be fight on that ground. In every case, “scientific” Creationism is defeated. When all the distortions have been removed, all the attempts to flaunt credentials examined, all the misleading quotations returned to their contexts, all the fallacies laid bare, we shall see Creation “science” for what it is—an abuse of science."

"Creationist strategy is often to run entirely different issues together, to concoct a muddy paste out of distinct allegations about the evils of evolution and the glories of Creationism."

"Creationists are actually criticizing methods that are used throughout science. As I shall argue extensively, there is no basis for separating the procedures and practices of evolutionary biology from those that are fundamental to all sciences. If we let the creationists have their way, we may as well go whole hog. Let us reintroduce the flat-earth theory, the chemistry of the four elements, and mediaeval astrology. For these outworn doctrines have just as much claim to rival current scientific views as Creationism does to challenge evolutionary biology."

"Ironically, philosophers of science owe the Creationists a debt. For the “scientific” Creationists have constructed a glorious fake, which we can use to illustrate the differences between science and pseudoscience. By examining their scientific pretensions, I have tried to convey a sense of the nature and methods of science."

"Even if Creationists continue to lose in the courts, they may still succeed in wreaking havoc upon science education (and, ultimately, upon American science). By lobbying local school administrators, the Creationist minions can affect the books that are chosen and the curriculum that is designed. Because textbooks are published to make a profit, the special-interest pressure will change the character of the books that are produced. While Creationist laws fail, the cause may triumph, as science education relapses into its post-Scopes, pre-Sputnik condition."

"The formulation that I have given accords with those found in textbooks on physics. But it does not coincide with the statements of the second law offered by some Creationists. Creationists like to present the second law either by omitting any mention of its restriction to closed systems or by choosing a statement that does not make this restriction clear."

"If “scientific” Creationism merits no discussion in the community of professionals, then it does not deserve a place in the classrooms where those professionals are being educated. This is not to deny that professional education in the sciences might not benefit if it were more open to heterodoxy, if received opinion were not sometimes subjected to pressure from minority views. But the ideas in question ought to have something in their favor. They should not fail so abjectly as Creation “science” does."

"Knowledge of science can have a great impact on social and political policy. Students need to be told, clearly and directly, what statements are supported by the available evidence. It is not the teachers function to offer instead a contrived and unresolved “debate” in which one of the parties is an ill-defined position that lacks any evidence in its favor. To represent as equal ideas of unequal merit is to mislead and confuse. Because the consequences of so deceiving the students may be their later inability to perform their duties as conscientious and informed citizens, such educational practices ought to be recognized for the irresponsible charades they are."

"Creationism does not merit scientific discussion. As we found in the last chapter, Creation “science” is not a promising rival to evolutionary theory. It is not integrated with the rest of science, but is a hodgepodge of doctrines, lacking independent support. It offers no startling predictions, no advances in knowledge. We cannot commend it for any ability to shed light on questions that orthodox theories are unable to answer. Nor can we praise it for offering a definite alternative that might help scientists in their quest for an improved biological or geological theory. “Scientific” Creationism has no evidence that speaks in its favor, partly because Creationists are so meticulous in leaving their doctrines blurred."

"My conclusion can be summarized in a sentence. It is educationally irresponsible to pretend that an idea that is scientifically worthless deserves scientific discussion."

"I now turn to the last gasp of the Creationists’ “scientific” defense of their theory. We have looked at a “theory” that has no detailed problem solutions to its credit (except those it borrows from its rival), that has no clearly defined problem-solving strategies, that encounters anomalies whenever it becomes at all definite, but that typically relapses into vagueness whenever clear-cut refutations threaten. Why should we take this “theory” to be worthy of any consideration?"

"To provide scientific explanations, a creationist would have to identify the plan implemented in the creation. The trouble is that there are countless examples of properties of organisms that are hard to integrate into a coherent theory of design. There are two main types of difficulty, stemming from the frequent tinkerings of evolution in the equally common nastiness of nature. Let us begin with evolutionary tinkering. Structures already present or modified to answer to the organisms current needs. The result may be clumsy and inefficient, but it gets the job done.… (examples of the panda’s thumb, orchid self-fertilization, and the ruminant digestive system elided) The second class of cases cover those in which, to put it bluntly, nature’s ways are rather repulsive. There is nothing intrinsically beautiful about the scavenging of vultures, the copulatory behavior of the female praying mantis (who tries to bite off the head of the “lucky” male), or the ways in which some insects paralyze their prey.… (example of coprophagy elided)"