Science, Reason and Critical Thinking: The Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense & Sceptic Trumps

Crispian Jago is organiser of Hampshire Sceptics in the Pub, blogger at Science, Reason & Critical Thinking and designer of The Periodic Table of Irrational Nonsense and the Skeptic Trumps cards featuring the BHAs Andrew Copson, Philip Pullman and many more!

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Can science study everything?

Science can be seen as a body of facts, a set of theories or a set of methods. In our view it is primarily a set of methods. These methods are both technical, eg controlled experiments, and social, eg peer review, and there is no definitive list.

Science is not, therefore, an area of study or even several such areas. You can do science in any area to which scientific methods can be applied including human behaviour and social dynamics. It’s true that studies of people present various distinctive difficulties – but so do astronomy and particle physics.

When thinking about methods in the natural sciences it’s easy to suppose that science requires controlled experiments but this is incorrect. Controlled experiments are impractical in studies of stellar, geological and biological evolution. In medicine some controlled experiments are unethical – that’s why we have ethics committees.

In his wonderful book Guns, Germs and Steel Jared Diamond showed how comparisons between societies and ecologies could be used to illuminate human history and prehistory. In this he applied scientific methods to history – he took a similar approach even more explicitly in Collapse.

Now Diamond has tackled the methodology question head-on. His new book, Natural experiments of history, was written with political scientist James Robinson, and looks at eight ‘natural experiments’, that is sets of historical episodes from which general conclusions can be drawn. In four, similar societies experienced different impacts, eg conquest, whilst in the others different societies experienced similar impacts. The book then compares the consequences in the various cases.

The specific results are interesting, of course, but the real importance of Diamond’s work is to show how scientific method can be applied to the unpromising material of human history.

Truly, science is method, not subject matter.

Down with naked numbers!

On the front page of today's Guardian Larry Elliott reported (Watchdog under new pressure for cutting job loss forecast) that the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) had forecast job losses of 499,000. That number is ridiculous, not in itself but in its claim to precision.

“499,000” means that the number of jobs lost will be neither 498,000 nor 500,000 but 499,000. That’s a claim worthy of a racing tipster or a psychic. It has no place in a sensible economic discussion.

In its pre-budget report the OBR discusses the uncertainty in its forecasts with care. It says “the probability of growth being within one percentage point of our central forecast [2.5%] in [2014] is around 30 per cent". In science we generally quote a range or the standard deviation. In the OBR’s case the growth forecast is 2.5% +/- 2.1%; the range 0.4% to 4.6%. That's a dismal level of precision but at least it's honest - and that is not something you always get in official statements.

It’s obvious that this uncertainty affects every other OBR forecast. I can't find the job loss forecast in the OBR's Pre-Budget Report but if it's proportional the +/- 1 SD range would be 100,000 to 900,000. (And let's remember that there's a one third chance that reality will fall outside this range!)

You can't understand forecasts without knowing the uncertainties. Let's push to have them spelt out.

What is philosophy for?

Once upon a time, or so I've heard, three Greek philosophers sat in a taverna arguing about the number of teeth a horse had. Their arguments were rigorous and elegant. One applied principles of symmetry. The second considered the nature of grass whilst the third drew on Plato's doctrine of ideal forms. Finally, unable to agree and somewhat drunk, they approached an Arab merchant at the next table to judge between them.
The merchant listened carefully and then asked to be briefly excused. On his return he gave judgment. The losers were upset and demanded that he explain what was wrong with their arguments.
"Arguments be dammed" said the Arab "I went to the stables and counted them!"

I was reminded of this several times on Saturday at the BHA's conference on Humanism, Philosophy and the Arts. Interspersed with singing, poetry and two non-philosophical speeches three humanist philosophers offered persuasive arguments about the role of the Arts and their relevance to humanism. The philosophers made many claims about facts. For instance, Richard Norman and Nigel Warburton argued that humanists could appreciate religious art just as much as the religious could whilst Richard Norman claimed that WW1 war poetry had changed our attitudes to war. Now these are factual claims that should be settled by empirical investigation. The first needs the methods of psychology and the second of history. Neither can be resolved by the methods of philosophy.

I was still wrestling with this after lunch when Julian Baggini spoke on Hollywood vs. Philosophy. One of his points connected with mine for he said that philosophy is not usually an argument; it's more often an attempt to draw the reader's attention to a fact or connection that he may have overlooked. That, it seems to me, is a very useful approach when approaching an issue but it's not very useful for settling it. Philosophers may help us to understand what teeth are and what is to qualify as a horse - even perhaps what counting means - but if you really want an answer you can believe in you just have to go to the stables with the Arab and start counting.

I think Francis Crick got it right in conversation with Sue Blackmore: “philosophers often ask good questions but they have no techniques for getting the answers. … A lot of problems that were once regarded as philosophical are … now … part of physics” Or, I might add, history, sociology or psychology.

In the last 200 years scientists and other empirical scholars have got much better at finding data and at connecting those data with longstanding intellectual problems (as well as with major practical problems and, regrettably, trifling pseudo-intellectual ones). The process is incomplete but it expends inexorably to address issues of religion, aesthetics and morality.

And it is not just religious and political ideologues who will be upset by what the facts tell us.

Why atheism will replace religion

Article from Psychology Today. Nigel Barber asks why do modern conditions produce atheism whilst underdeveloped countries have virtually no atheists?

Atheists are heavily concentrated in economically developed countries, particularly the social democracies of Europe. In underdeveloped countries, there are virtually no atheists. Atheism is thus a peculiarly modern phenomenon. Why do modern conditions produce atheism?

More developed countries, especially Europe, have higher levels of Atheism:

First, as to the distribution of atheism in the world, a clear pattern can be discerned. In sub-Saharan Africa there is almost no atheism (Zuckerman, 2007). Belief in God declines in more developed countries and is concentrated in Europe in countries such as Sweden (64% nonbelievers), Denmark (48%), France (44%) and Germany (42%). In contrast, the incidence of atheism in most sub-Saharan countries is below 1%.

Where people have more control over their lives Atheism is higher:

The question of why economically developed countries turn to atheism has been batted around by anthropologists for about eighty years. Anthropologist James Fraser proposed that scientific prediction and control of nature supplants religion as a means of controlling uncertainty in our lives. This hunch is supported by data showing that the more educated countries have higher levels of non belief.

Where social uncertainty (eg more affluent or better health care) is less more people are atheist: Why?

Atheists are more likely to be college-educated people who live in cities and they are highly concentrated in the social democracies of Europe. Atheism thus blossoms amid affluence where most people feel economically secure. But why? It seems that people turn to religion as a salve for the difficulties and uncertainties of their lives. In social democracies, there is less fear and uncertainty about the future because social welfare programs provide a safety net and better health care means that fewer people can expect to die young. People who are less vulnerable to the hostile forces of nature feel more in control of their lives and less in need of religion.

Where people have smaller families atheism increases:

In addition to being the opium of the people (as Karl Marx contemptuously phrased it), religion may also promote fertility, particularly by promoting marriage, according to copious data reviewed by Sanderson (2008). Large families are preferred in agricultural countries as a source of free labor. In developed "atheist" countries, women have exceptionally small families and do not need religion helping them to raise large families.

Professional psychological health cares means that people are more likely to atheists:

Even the psychological functions of religion face stiff competition today. In modern societies, when people experience psychological difficulties they turn to their doctor, psychologist, or psychiatrist. They want a scientific fix and prefer the real psychotropic medicines dished out by physicians to the metaphorical opiates offered by religion.

High sport spectatorship increases atheism and religion declines.

Sport psychologists find that sports spectatorship provides much the same kind of social, and spiritual, benefits as people obtain from church membership. In a previous post, I made the case that sports is replacing religion. Precisely the same argument can be made for other forms of entertainment with which spectators become deeply involved. Indeed, religion is striking back by trying to compete in popular media, such as televangelism and Christian rock and by hosting live secular entertainment in church.

In summary

The reasons that churches lose ground in developed countries can be summarized in market terms. First, with better science, and with government safety nets, and smaller families, there is less fear and uncertainty in people's daily lives and hence less of a market for religion. At the same time many alternative products are being offered, such as psychotropic medicines and electronic entertainment that have fewer strings attached and that do not require slavish conformity to unscientific beliefs.

Leave your comments below or contribute here.

References
Sanderson, S. K. (2008). Adaptation, evolution, and religion. Religion, 38, 141-156.
Zuckerman, P. (2007). Atheism: Contemporary numbers and patterns. In M. Martin (ed.), The Cambridge companion to atheism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Humanists4Science Chairman responds to Madeleine Bunting in CiF, Guardian

In the Comment is Free Guardian on 15th April, David Flint, Humanists4Science Chairman has responded to Madeleine Buntings' article in the CiF Guardian section: 'God is attracting more debate than ever'. The New Atheists did not manage to dent the growth of religion across the world. Instead, they only fed our interest in it.

Bunting asks what progress have the 'New Atheists' achieved since the publication of Richard Dawkins 2006 book 'The God Delusion'. She says:

'the great mistake the atheists made is to claim that religion started out as a clumsy stab at science – trying to explain how the world worked – and is now clearly redundant. That misses the point entirely: religion is not about explaining how an earthquake or flood happens; rather it offers meanings for such events. When someone is killed in a car accident, western rationality is good at analysing how the brakes failed and the road curved, but has nothing to say about why, on that particular day, the brakes failed when it was you in the car: the sequence of random events that kill. This search for meaning is part of what drives the religious spirit.'.

David's response is in The Guardian 'Not all religious explanations of tragic events are harmless' - Instead of searching for such meanings, we humanists accept that the universe is unjust.

Leave your comments below.

Can Scientists Be Morally Neutral? BBC4, Saturday 9.10pm

Over dinner, Michael Portillo and seven guests discuss whether scientists can be morally neutral in their pursuit of scientific knowledge. Should scientists take an ethical stand on how science is used? Should there be limits on what scientists are allowed to discover? What ethical dilemmas will be thrown up by the science of the future? Guests include Baroness Susan Greenfield, Mark Henderson, and Bryan Appleyard.