Patrick Fagan of Family Research Council explaining why single people shouldn't have sex.

Here is another in a long list of articles published by conservative religious groups who think the sky is falling down because people have sex. Patrick Fagan of Family Research Council complains that some people have sex without his permission.

The Supreme Court's First Assault on Marriage

Patrick Fagan is angry about Eisenstadt v. Baird, a supreme court case from 1972 in which they ruled that the government does not have the right to make laws barring single people from purchasing contraception.

He makes a lot of outlandish and bizarre claims in this article so lets look at a few.

The Court played God by redefining the purpose of sexuality. In the process it unleashed sex’s destructive power detached from marriage. 

First off this is built upon an argument that allowing single people to have contraception will cause them to have all sorts of sex they would not have had otherwise. This is quite frankly false, people have been having sex outside of wedlock since always and the invention of marriage did nothing to curb it. The court did not redefine the purposes of sexuality. Human sexuality is about more than procreation and has been since there have been humans.

Since then, the community has been paying to raise children born outside wedlock. The cost comes in the form of welfare, food stamps, Medicaid, supplementary education, costlier child and adult health bills, more prisons, addiction centers, and mental health services. The list goes on and on, now cumulatively and possibly to the tune of trillions of dollars.

He suggests here that all this contraception somehow led to more children born out of wedlock and is somehow also causing us to spend more money on other government programs. First off the notion that making contraception more available leads to more pregnancies is not only wrong, it is absurdly wrong since the goal of contraception is to stop unplanned pregnancies.  First, there is no evidence that people start having more sex when they have access to contraception than when they do not, secondly when properly used most contraception is very good at preventing pregnancy and third teen pregnancy rates are lower now than they have ever been in U.S. history. The highest year for teen pregnancy in the U.S. was in 1957, long before this court case.  Check my article here for some more stats on this.

As far as the claims about higher government costs, what is the evidence that any of these higher costs (assuming they are in fact higher) were caused by contraception access?  He acts as if it were obvious, but it strikes me as an overly-simplistic explanation.

He also goes on to blame planned parent hood on single parent families, but eliminating unplanned pregnancies is one of their goals, one they would be able to meet much better if certain conservative religious groups like Family Research Council stopped trying to shut down their funding at every turn.

Prior to that time, those who intended to raise children together were expected by tradition, common sense, and culture to marry first. The law protected these expectations.

A statement that is not entirely true. I would agree that due to the path our evolution took pair bonding is the most common form of relationship in most societies, but there have been and still are many successful human societies that do not work this way, so claims that we are doomed if we do things any other way are simply scare tactics not based upon real facts.

This interdependence plays out in the raising of children. They grow quickly to become the actors in each of these realms, and if they come from broken families, they generally bring lessened capacities to these tasks in their own lives and to the institutions involved in the functioning of society.

This statement just seems bigoted against people who come from single parent families, suggesting they are less able than "normal" people. It should be deeply insulting to people from single parent households.

In America, the chaos from Eisenstadt must eventually be checked. If not by the Supreme Court and Congress, then by whatever government will follow after the collapse of our present order. Sexual license and republican liberty cannot live together. One of them will supplant the other. Either we become a sexually restrained people—a form of self-control needed for institutions that depend on liberty—or, as we become more and more sexually unrestrained, we will need the all-helping state to do what we won’t be able to do for ourselves and our children.

There is something odd  about this argument, since he is arguing that in order to be free of control from the "all-helping state" we must submit to state regulations telling us who we can sleep with and when. This is clearly theonomy, but I suppose he thinks that is a good idea.

Of course he ends his article mentioning how he hopes that the decisions on the current supreme court cases of Hollingsworth v. Perry and United States v. Windsor will protect marriage ( I.E. make sure all those people he doesn't agree with don't get their civil rights).

I too hope these decisions will be a new beginning to our country. I hope that the supreme court will send a message to the Patrick Fagan's of this country that their hateful attitudes and opinions are no longer welcome here. I'm sure there are a lot of racists out there who don't like the Loving v. Virgina decision either, yet I don't lose a bit of sleep at the thought of racists feeling disenfranchised with the U.S. government. I have no patience at all with people who believe they have the right to use the government to tell me where I can legally stick my penis.

Science reporting on evolution still bad

Ran across this article last night.

Have scientists discovered reversible evolution?

The article is about evidence that dust mites who are currently parasites may be evolving into a free living organisms. The reason it is talked about as reverse evolution is because dust mites used to be free living organisms before they became parasitic. The article is written as if the author is presenting a startling new find that is over turning scientists previous belief that evolution does not work in reverse. The idea that evolution is working towards some sort of goal is inaccurate

The main problem here is that the author seems to confuse the evolutionary process which is basically genetic variances, with the taxonomical or behavioral changes that are sometimes produced. That is, in order for evolution to reverse the species would have to follow the exact same genetic changes one step back at at time, considering all of the possible variances it is easy to imagine that, while this is technically possible, it is not very likely. This is actually a concept called Dollo's law of irreversibility.

However, it is entirely possible for a species to follow an evolutionary pathway that leads something very similar behavior or taxonomy to an earlier or separate species. It's called Convergent evolution and we have know about it for a long time because there are already examples of it everywhere. For instance, most birds, many insects, and bats all use wings to achieve flight but the genetics that created those wings are each completely different, and we can see this in taxonomical differences in these wings. Another good example is whales who, despite their earlier ancestors moving out of the water, moved back into it. They did not stop being mammals but they did evolve many traits to deal with aquatic living that are very similar to fish. Again whales did not go backwards, they did not use the same genes as fish, they evolved a new set of genes that created similar taxonomy.

There is nothing to suggest that dust mites have followed some path backwards to an earlier form, but why should the facts get in the way of science reporters making up attention grabbing headlines on their articles to increase their readers? People will know what they really mean right? It's not like there are systematic misunderstandings of evolution in this country or anything.

Why non-overlapping magisteria doesn't work.

Non-overlapping magisteria is an idea presented by Steven Jay Gould which basically argues that religion and science can coexist because they focus on different claims.  In non-overlapping magisteria or NOMA for short it is said that science rules over the examination of the physical or empirical realm, and religion rules over issues relating to "ultimate meaning" and morality.  

I take a number of issues with this position not the least of which is that I don't think religion should or does hold total control of some of these ideas. Morality for instance, may not be completely understood using pure empiricism but philosophers, even some of them religious themselves, have been discussing moral claims without explicitly claiming a religious basis for them for thousands of years.

However, the philosophical problems I have with the NOMA isn't actually what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about why the argument and other similar arguments don't work on a practical level. The point of the argument is to attempt a diplomatic resolution with theists who have a problem with certain scientific discoveries.  The idea is that rather than trying to convince them to abandon their religion (which isn't likely to happen) we can convince them that their religion and the science are compatible with each other.  In a sense it's a noble goal but I would argue it is also almost certainly doomed to fail.

First we need to understand that an argument like NOMA is typically only used when addressing the fundamentalist type of religious believers.  Of course it can be hard to define what a fundamentalist believes exactly at times because people don't always fit neatly into a box.  There is a continuum between liberal and fundamentalist believers and even strong theological differences between some fundamentalist groups but there is one generalization we can make about fundamentalists. They believe that their holy book (the bible for Christians) is inerrant and contains true history, science, and theology. There is some debate on how to interpret context among Christian fundamentalists but they all generally agree that the bible is inerrant. This is important because more liberal believers are usually willing to interpret much of their holy books metaphorically so they usually have no problem with science to begin with, but fundamentalists have a problem with most metaphorical interpretations.

To understand why this creates such a problem for NOMA type arguments let's look at the concrete example of creationism. I choose this for several reasons, one it is one of the most common areas where religion and science conflict in the U.S. and two as a former fundamentalist I was once a young earth creationist years ago so I am familiar with both sides of the discussion.

To understand why evolution presents such a problem for fundamentalists we will actually start with Jesus and work backwards to the Genesis creation story. Most of my readers probably know that Christianity teaches that Jesus is our savior but if you haven't been steeped in Christian theology you may not know exactly how that salvation is provided, or for what reason. Jesus is suppose to save us from sin, but in Christianity the idea of sin is far more complex than just bad actions that you as an individual take. The concept is called original sin and the notion is that people don't just commit sins their very nature is corrupted by sin. Jesus' death is offered as a way to actually alter basic human nature and remove said sin nature.

Understanding that we can now look at Genesis. See the question becomes what gave us this nature, if it was built into us by god then his creation would not be perfect and also God would be blaming us for his failure. This will not do in fundamentalist theology so they have an explanation for this. Adam and Eve were created perfect but through an act of free will introduced this sin nature into human nature by eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in the Genesis story.

Now, it is unavoidable that in order to believe in evolution one must take the Genesis story as a metaphor or allegory. It cannot be a literal historical event because it would directly contradict the evolutionary picture of early history. Fundamentalists will argue that if the story was not a historical event then there was no event to introduce original sin into human nature and if there was no original sin then Jesus' death makes no sense.

My goal right now is not to analyze the rationality or evidence for such claims, but to elucidate as to why NOMA type arguments don't work on the one group of people that they exist to convince. The argument NOMA tries to make is that people can both believe in their religion and the science at the same time, but to a fundamentalist belief in evolution requires a denial of things they feel are intrinsic to their religious beliefs. It doesn't help that most fundamentalists view themselves as embroiled in a fight between the godly believers and the worldly unbelievers and they take a gateway drug approach to any ideas that they view as worldly. If a person drops even one of their core beliefs they take a step towards worldliness and who knows where that will stop. I am not guessing that this is what many fundamentalists think either, when I was a believer I read many books by theologians and preachers who made these exact arguments about NOMA.

The thing is in a sense one could say they are right, and they would use me as an example. To take the creation story as metaphorical one must deny the typical interpretation of biblical inerrancy and interestingly enough that was one of the first beliefs that I jettisoned on the way to becoming an atheist. It was over historical inaccuracies not evolution but as soon as I let go of the idea that the bible was perfect I began to accept other ideas because the evidence supported them and the more I read about these other ideas the less the bible made sense. My story is not unique either, few people just drop firmly held beliefs all at once but one piece at a time. This is why even though a non-overlapping magisteria approach may be more diplomatic than marching up to a fundamentalist and telling them science proves their religion wrong I'm not convinced it will be any more effective.

Marco Rubio responds to the president or does he?

I've listened to Rubio's response several times now and I noticed something worth commenting on.

Early in Rubio's speech he brings up his concern that liberals always make an unfair assessment of the motives for the current Republican party. Claiming that their focus on smaller government and Laissez-faire economics is due to being only concerned with corporations and rich people.

I might surprise some of my readers by saying that I actually agree with Rubio on this point. Though  I have reason to disagree with many of the economic conclusions his party has taken I do agree that it is wrong to attack their motives in this way.  As a skeptic I am inclined to think that, while there are sometimes good reasons to infer an individuals motives, such inferences are not based upon the most certain of evidence since we cannot read people's minds. How much less reliable must it be then to infer the motives of an entire group of people? Secondly, even if we infer correctly it does nothing to prove your opponents arguments wrong, which means at the worst it's just an ad hominem used to distract ones listeners from a poorly defended argument.

This brings me to the part of my post where Rubio and I part ways, and where I wonder at his lack of introspection. Though he is unhappy when people make sweeping generalizations about the motives of Republicans most of his speech involves sweeping generalizations about the motives of other groups.  Rather than asserting the evidence for his own economics he asserts that anyone who disagrees must hate capitalism.  Rather than believing the evidence for anthropogenic climate change he asserts that anyone who believes it wants to destroy the energy industry.  He promotes school vouchers as a matter of personal choice which I suppose suggests that those that oppose vouchers are somehow against choice.

Of course he his statements are not quite as overt as say Paul Ryan's Randian diatribes about takers and makers, but the message is essentially the same. The problem is that very little of this really engages with the actual arguments people from the other side are making. Most liberals don't hate capitalism, but they do want some limits on corporations to protect individuals and the environment from being abused for the sake of profit.  Climate scientists are not a bunch of luddites who want to destroy the energy industry and force us to live in pre-industrial conditions, they propose developing new and better energy technologies that will offer cleaner and more plentiful energy to meet our increasing demands. Those who oppose school vouchers do so because we believe it is not a good solution to our education problems and it is often used to get children sent to schools where they are taught pseudo-science and revisionist history as it is currently being used in Louisiana.

Rubio presents the battle lines drawn between the liberals and conservatives to be about big vs. small government, and then suggests smaller government is apparently the solution to every problem.  Even though his own party is actually quite inconsistent in its obedience to this principle. I would suggest that instead of worrying about the governments size we try to promote intelligent government. I know that may sound like an oxymoron to some but we've tried everything else, maybe we could give it a try?

SkeptiCamp Talk: Religion and Science

Sorry,  I meant to put a link up to this right after the talk but I kinda forgot about it. You can follow this link to my video directly.

Religion and Science: An examination of the protestant reformations effect on science development

  You can also watch here to get the whole video, my part starts at about 25 minutes in.

Skepticamp Phoenix, Session 3.

 

Anyway, enjoy and feel free to tell me what you think. Tough it is my first time speaking in front of a group in quite a while so be gentle.

She's a witch, burn her.

 This is a humorously intoned line from Monty Python's search for the Holy Grail.  One of my all time favorite movies.

For those who are unfamiliar the scene is involves people using horrible logic to justify burning a woman for witchcraft. It's meant to poke fun at the ignorance of days gone by, or at least that is what I would like to believe.  Unfortunately there are still places in the world where people are killed for witchcraft.

New Guinea woman tortured, burned alive in ‘sorcery’ case

In Papua New Guinea a 20 year old woman was stripped naked, beating covered in gas and set on fire because they believed she had killed a local six year old with a curse.  Police and firemen who attempted to help her were thwarted by the mob who set her on fire in the first place.  From what  I can tell this sort of practice is actually quite common in Papua New Guinea. 

It is hard to imagine that religion did not play a part in this considering passages like Exodus 20:18: "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." Especially since the majority of Papua New Guinea is protestant Christian (65.48%), with most of the rest a mix of Catholics (17.67%), and Muslims (15.89%). Though to be fair there are also ministers there speaking out against this kind of behavior.

It is sad to see that in some places in the world people still blame disease on supernatural causes and then kill people out of their imaginary fears.  You know, I've been occasionally told I'm too judgmental by people.  "You like the freedom to choose your own way, but refuse to allow others that same freedom," I've been told.  My response is always the same. Some choices are better than others, some ways of examining the world will necessarily produce better answers. Our knowledge of the universe is still quite limited, but we do know why people get sick and I can't help but feel that if these people had been given science text books on germ theory instead of bibles this woman would still be alive. If that makes me judgmental, so be it.

"Academic freedom" bill proposed by Arizona state senate.

These so called academic freedom bills have been making their way around various states the last ten years or so. In fact, one just died in committee in Colorado. Now we have one on the docket in Arizona.

amending Title15, chapter 7, article 1, Arizona Revised Statutes, by adding section15-706.01; relating to school curriculum.

To read the wording of the bill the purpose doesn't seem so bad.

1.  Create an environment in schools that encourages pupils to explore scientific questions, learn about scientific evidence, develop critical thinking skills and respond appropriately and respectfully to differences of opinion about controversial issues.

Doesn't seem so bad right? We all believe in critical thinking, and who doesn't want to encourage students to explore science and learn about scientific evidence?  The problem is that these bills are just the latest scheme by creationists to promote non-scientific opinions in the classroom regarding scientific conclusions that some politicians have decided they don't like.

Even their own bill states states the following as one of the intents of the bill:

2.  The teaching of some scientific subjects, including biological evolution, the chemical origins of life, global warming and human cloning, can cause controversy.

The first three are obvious, evolution, abiogenesis, and global climate change are the three main things that get heavily politicized, the first two due to religion and the last one due to the all of the lobbying done by oil and coal companies to prevent any changes to energy policy.  I'm not sure why cloning is on there since no one is trying to clone a human right now, but it seems to be brought up in these bill a lot.

In case you doubt that academic freedom bills are promoting the teaching of creationism and climate change denial lets look at a few facts.  The discovery institute is one of the major promoters, these are the same people who promoted "intelligent design" right up until they lost Kitzmiller v. Dover in 2005, when the judge flat out ruled that ID was just attempt to repackage creation science.  "Creation science" was itself ruled as not science by several courts decisions in the 1980's such as McLean v. Arkansas.  The people who came up with the idea for "academic freedom" are creationists who, just as with ID, changed the name to see if it would allow them to sneak in their pseudo-science.

Luckily, even though these bills have been popping up all over the country, most of them have died in committee before they got to a vote.  Information provided by the NCSE. Hopefully the same thing will happen here.

Here is a list of the legislature members who introduced this bill.  If you live in one of their districts email them and let them know you are not satisfied with leaders who promote bills which are designed to permit the teaching of pseudo-science to our students.  If your legislator is not listed below I have also included a link to the entire AZ legislator list.  Email them and ask that they do not support this bill. 

Arizona State Legislature

Judy Burges, Dist-22 R jburges@azleg.gov 

Chester Crandell, Dist-6 R ccrandell@azleg.gov 

Rick Murphy, Dist-21 R rmurphy@azleg.gov 

Steve Pierce, Dist-1 R spierce@azleg.gov or Justin Pierce, Dist-25 R jpierce@azleg.gov 

(not sure which one because the bill only lists last names)

Don Shooter Dist-13 R dshooter@azleg.gov 

Steve Yarbrough, Dist-17 R syarbrough@azleg.gov 

Update: I emailed the rep in my district.  (Katie Hobbs, Dist-24, D) and she let me know she is opposed to this bill.

2-27-2013 Update: This bill has died at least for this session as of Feb 22 when the deadline for Senate bills to be heard in their Senate committees passed. It is still possible that the bill may resurface again in latter in another state senate session so I'll keep my eye out.

Arizona Republicans Propose Bill That Would Not Allow Atheists To Graduate High School

So I ran across this on the Friendly Atheist today.  Since it is in my home state I felt I should comment.

Bill HB2467 has been put forward in by Republicans in the Arizona legislature  which requires students to repeat the following oath in order to graduate.

I, _________, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge these duties; So help me God.

From what  I can tell there is no exceptions allowed in this bill, ether you say this oath or you don't get a diploma.  This would require atheists, as well as anyone who has any other objections to this oath to ether lie or not be allowed to receive the diploma they have worked to get for basically their entire lives up to that point.

If we fight this in the courts it isn't likely to stand of course.  Religious groups such as the Quakers or Jehovah's witnesses have already successfully challagned similar loyalty pledges.  The problem is we shouldn't even need to be defending against nonsense like this. 

This is not only a violation constitutional rights it's a massive waste of time they could have spent on doing something that might actually improve education in this state.  Getting rid of the abstinence only laws would be a nice start.  My only question is how these jesters got elected in the first place.

In case you want to know the jesters in question this list of legislators that sponsored the bill.