Beware of dragon
“George Bush says he speaks to god every day, and Christians love him for it. If George Bush said he spoke to god through his hair dryer, they would think he was mad. I fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes it any more absurd.”
- Sam Harris
If you replaced the phrase “Christians love him for it” with “skeptics must shut up” in the above quote, Sam Harris could be describing the current state of the skeptical movement.
Recently, one of my least favorite issues has resurfaced, what role, if any, atheism has within the skeptical movement. The controversy seems to have begun with Jeff Wagg writing a blog singling out a flyer and four scheduled talks at Skepticon3 focused on atheism or more accurately religious criticism, one of which with a heavy emphasis on physics. Though Wagg hadn’t seen the talks yet, he expressed more than mild disapproval of them based on their titles and his opinions of the speakers themselves. In fact, he suggested these topics have no right being discussed at a skeptical conference at all. According to Wagg, this doesn’t look like a skeptics conference at all, but rather something entirely different, “an atheist conference”…or worse “an anti-Christian conference.”
BUT DON’T PANIC!!!
Wagg also found another flyer for the event that better met his personal approval, even though it also promises to dissect “the pretensions of religion” and features pictures of the same exact speakers, all of whom are well-known atheists. Wagg also included the correspondence between himself and the organizer where the organizer assured him that numerous other skeptical topics would be presented and that it wasn’t just “an atheist conference.” The organizer even explained that since Skepticon3 was being held in the Midwest where religion is a particularly big issue, that may account for the larger than usual emphasis on religion.
But Wagg wasn’t happy with this answer because, like many other skeptics (who incidentally don’t believe in any deity for presumably good reasons), Wagg feels skepticism and atheism have no relationship at all:
As for Christianity, skepticism has nothing to say except about testable claims associated therein. Bleeding statues? Yes, skepticism comes into play. Jesus rose and is in heaven? Seems unlikely, but there’s not a lot more to say.
This has become a common sentiment among a growing number skeptics, which brings me back to the hair dryer. George Bush says he speaks to god every day, and skeptics must shut up. If George Bush said he spoke to god through his hair dryer, they would think he was mad. I also fail to see how the addition of a hair dryer makes it any more absurd.
Almost two years ago, the NYC Skeptics and the New England Skeptics Society collaborated to organize our first annual Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism (NECSS) and I don’t think I was alone in noticing that the issue that dominated the vast majority of that conference was criticism of the anti-vaccine movement. And much emphasis was placed on how much evidence contradicted anti-vaccine claims while nobody hesitated for a moment to even entertain the possibility that all the studies proving them wrong have been deliberately manipulated by powerful conspirators with an invested interest in deceiving the public about the true harms caused by vaccines, as most anti-vaccinationists argue.
An invisible grand conspiracy with seemingly infinite resources to cover up the truth is every bit as unfalsifiable as any appeal to an invisible, omnipotent deity, and yet no skeptic I know of considers it speaking out of school to reject this excuse flat-out unless compelling evidence can be presented. Further, when self-proclaimed “psychics” say that their powers fail when in the presence of a skeptic, I know of no skeptics who view this as a valid excuse that demands skeptics keep their psychic criticisms to themselves.
The reason for this is obvious. In fact, it’s almost become the skeptic movement’s unofficial motto: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” A key word here is “require.” When someone makes an extraordinary claim, the burden of proof is on them to provide sufficient evidence for that claim. If they fail to do so FOR ANY REASON, whether it be that their dog ate their homework or that their god ate their homework, an excuse is an excuse. If you fail to meet the required burden of proof, you don’t just get a pass for having come up with the most inventive excuse. Rather, you simply fail and no one is under any obligation to take your claims even the slightest bit seriously. Carl Sagan beautifully explains this principle with his invisible dragon in the garage analogy.
So why do seemingly all skeptics recognize this when it comes to every other kind of claim except those wrapped up in packaging with gods on it? As far as I can tell, it appears to be special pleading because skeptics want to grow our numbers and are worried about further alienating the religious, who make up a majority of the world’s population.
And to justify this inconsistency, some skeptics have invented their own myths like that those damned atheists in the skeptic movement want to kick out all the deists and theists from the skeptical movement or that Richard Dawkins calls all religious people stupid even though, as far as I can tell, he has done no such thing. In fact the only two instances I could ever find that even come close was when Dawkins made an off the cuff remark on Bill Maher’s show (3:40 mark), calling Francis Collins “not a bright guy” after initially defending him as intelligent until Maher said that Collins believed in the literal Garden of Eden and when Dawkins responded to Ray Comfort’s version of Darwin’s Origin of Species on CNN by calling Comfort specifically an idiot on the topic of evolution (which he in fact is). And both those incidents happened after the “Dawkins calls all religious people stupid” myth began.
For the record, I don’t think deists or theists of any kind should be banned from the skeptical movement. Nor do I think people who believe in psychics, homeopathy, Scientology, or any other form of nonsense should be banned from the skeptical movement. What I do think however is that a key element of the skeptical movement is critically analyzing your own beliefs and expressing criticism of beliefs that are not supported by empirical evidence. So I think that if you’re the kind of person who views fair, objective criticisms of your beliefs as unwelcome personal attacks, then this may simply not be the right group for you. Though what Wagg and the skeptics who share his position seem to be saying is that unapologetic atheists should be banned, or at the very least, their voices should.
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