Failure to reason on the Day of Reason

   So, I hope everyone had a good National Day of Reason yesterday. No surprise, though, that some conservatives, like Penny Nance, lost their shit.

You know, the Age of Enlightenment and Reason gave way to moral relativism. And moral relativism is what led us all the way down the dark path to the Holocaust… Dark periods of history is what we arrive at when we leave God out of the equation.

   Actually, morality has been essentially relative throughout human history. Her morality is relative — relative to her religion. She just doesn't realize this because she believes her morality comes from a deity, and therefore she thinks it's absolute. But her deity doesn't actually exist, so her morality actually has come from other humans. And likely there are even parts of her morality she has derived herself and are therefore unique (and thus relative) to her. Another reality is the Enlightenment actually helped get away from relative morality by beginning to demand reason for morality. No longer was it acceptable to have rules merely because someone thought their deity said so. (OK, I would expect there to certainly have been people who demanded reason for rules/laws before the Enlightenment, but this period certainly represented a bigger push in this direction. We got the formation of this country out of this, as one example!) And then there's this:



   Which is not to say that Nazi Germany didn't have a relative morality, but it's the same relative morality that Penny Nance has — again, this is the type of relative morality where the people who hold this morality to be, not relative like it actually is, but absolute.

   There was also this "gem":

You know, G. K. Chesterton said that the Doctrine of Original Sin is the only one which we have 3,000 years of empirical evidence to back up. Clearly, we need faith as a component and it’s just silly for us to say otherwise.

   I suspect I know what she's getting at; I've seen other Christians make a claim that essentially breaks down into a logical argument as follows:
If P, then Q. (If original sin is true, then humans will do horrible things.)
Q. (Humans do horrible things.)
Therefore, P. (Therefore, original sin is true.)

   I suspect, then, that Ms. Nance is claiming that what we actually have "3,000 years of empirical evidence to back up" is this fact that humans do horrible things. But this does not back up original sin. The logic is flawed as there could be other reasons beside P for why Q is true. Take this example:
If P, then Q. (If my dog eats my homework, I won't have homework to turn in.)
Q. (I have no homework to turn in.)
Therefore, P. (Therefore, my dog ate my homework.)

   It should be obvious that there could very well be other reasons why I don't have homework to turn in. Perhaps I didn't do it. Perhaps I did do it, but forgot it at home. It is possible that my dog did actually eat it, but not having homework is not proof of this. Likewise, the fact that humans do horrible things is not proof of original sin.

   Otherwise, I see that The Young Turks have also covered this with the focus on the comments about the Enlightenment. They cover some of the other flaws with the argument that are certainly worth mentioning, like the fact that life wasn't exactly peaches and cream prior to the Enlightenment. (Though, I will say I believe Cenk is off on his life expectancy ages. People, if they lived past infancy, tended to live to be older than 32. The reason life expectancy ages were so low was in part due to infant mortality bringing the average down. This is not to take infant mortality lightly, but rather to be clear on what I understand the facts to be, which do not match how Cenk presents them.)

Fighting lack of motivation/Laughing at WND

   So...wow! Only one post from April. That is a bit sad. I've had quite a few ideas going through my head, but I've been lacking the motivation to write. (Also, I have been focusing more on contributing to comment boards...places where people will actually read what I have to say.) I'm going to try to pick things up a bit this May, but...Spring Fever! I suspect I'll also be out training for marathons, duathlons, triathlons, and running events more. This just means I'll have to stay focused when I do write!

   Anyway, I've got some feminist and Right-Wing Nut Jobs related topics on my mind, starting today with a piece I noticed some other bloggers picked up from the World Net Nut Daily about how "Real women don't need feminism." So this one covers both! (I'll be adding my comments in red. Also, post includes sarcasm.)

“The Monstrous Regiment of Women” explains that feminists tell women not to submit to a husband [What's wrong with that?], avoid having children[Well, in my experience, it's been more like, "You don't have to have children if you don't want to," but go on...], listen to their “inner voice” [I've heard women tell other women this. Some of those women may consider* themselves to be feminists, but this doesn't mean that feminism itself is suggesting this.] and chase a career[Again, this is more saying that women can chase a career if they wish, not that they must!].

But the DVD’s voices say otherwise. They include Edinburgh University historian [1.] Sharon Adams, Jennie Chancey of Ladies Against Feminism [2.], cadet [3.] Jane Doe, former abortion provider Carol Everett [4.], homemaker Dana Feliciano, Buried Treasure Books writer [5.] Carmon Freidrich, “Domestic Tranquility” author [6.] F. Carolyn Graglia, John Knox biographer [7.] Rosalind Marshall, “Raising Maidens of Virtue” author [8.] Stacey McDonald, Schlafly [9.] and homemakers Denise Sproul and Kathleen Smith.

   Hmmm...I count up to potentially 9 women in this list of 12 women that may be women who have chased a career (everyone other than those marked as "homemakers." What's up with that?

The women show how feminism’s twisted and irrational teaching has led to disaster for American women, pushing many into a frustrating, isolated existence.

   Ah! They must be speaking from personal experience, I take it? Except...there are about 4 women (Adams, Chancey, Freidrich, and Schlafly) on this list who apparently still have careers. (Others I'd have to research. So they wrote a book** once upon a time. Are they still authors today?) By gosh, if feminism is so horrible in suggesting that women chase a career, why don't they quit*** their lines of work?

* This is not to say that they are not feminists. I say this more to mean that I'll just take them for their word at this time since I am not going to, nor can I, evaluate the truth of such a claim.

** On another hand, if having a career is so horrible, why list these women's accomplishments as authors at all?

*** Of course, this has been a criticism of Schlafly for years...well before I was even born. Then again, according to Wikipedia, "Schlafly told Time magazine in 1978, 'I have cancelled speeches whenever my husband thought that I had been away from home too much.'" Well, I guess that means her husband allowed her to chase a career and as long as she came home at his bidding, then that was A-OK! It would seem that they should have qualified that earlier statement to say "chase a career without their husband's consent."

The "You aborted Beethoven" argument, and other discussions

   I got into a bit of a conversation with a Catholic on abortion and she presented an argument about how Frederick Douglass could have been aborted and implied that it would have been horrible had that happened. I have heard a similar argument before back in 2006 when an abortion ban was on the ballot in South Dakota. Then, it was about Beethoven, and went similar to this:

Doctor 1: "I want your opinion about terminating a pregnancy. The father was syphilitic, the mother had tuberculosis. Of the four children born, the first was blind, the second died, the third was deaf and dumb, the fourth also had tuberculosis. What would you have done?"
Doctor 2: "I would have terminated the pregnancy."
Doctor 1: "Then you would have murdered Beethoven."

   This argument is deeply flawed, and I have four points to discuss on this argument. Before that, however, there is one minor flaw to address. The Beethoven story is untrue. As for Douglass, due to how slaves were often bred as though they were cattle, I find it hard to believe that there would have been much of a chance that he would have been aborted. What cattle farmer is going to help a cow abort a pregnancy? If the cow can't survive the pregnancy, sad day for the cow. Likewise, I suspect it would be a sad day for the female slave if she could not survive pregnancy. Now, I say this is a minor flaw because the truth of the set-up story does not take away from the argument. However, whenever someone lies* (or repeats a lie they heard from someone else) in order to make their point, I tend to find that to be a sign that their point is flawed and the lie is needed to help conceal the flaws.

1. It's post hoc — While this is not to be confused with the logical fallacy with a similar name, it is using end results to either criticize or praise a decision where these end results cannot be known at the time the decision has to be made. In other words, the argument is using the advantage of hindsight. (This is also known as "Monday morning quarterbacking" and is the idea behind the idiom "Hindsight is (always) 20/20.") The argument need to be adjusted to remove this hindsight. It seems that the argument can be generically viewed like "Something very positive could come out of this, therefore this should be done." This adjustment will become important for the third point.
   
2. It contains selection bias — Perhaps the most obvious flaw is that these arguments contain an extreme positive, using people who are famous as the examples. Sometimes ordinary people are used (when I have seen this, the example is the person presenting the argument hirself). But never are infamous people used, except as a counter argument. The first time I heard the counter, it may have even used the same set-up as the Beethoven claim, but instead of Beethoven, it ended up being Hitler. On this note, I tend to find it to be another sign that an argument is flawed when it invokes famous people for no apparent reason It's a good sign that the argument won't be nearly as convincing if you flip the script. A good argument really should be able to handle both extremes. (This is not to say that pro-lifers themselves won't stay consistent on the argument — I suspect many would and do — but rather that it won't be as persuasive to anyone who is undecided.)
   
3. It is a quiverfull argument (inconsistent application) — If the goal is to produce people who could possibly make an important difference in the world, then why stop with existing pregnancies?** (I'd like to hear a really good explanation for why not.) It's general probability that the more often you play a game, the more likely it is that you will eventually win (unless the game is such that it is impossible to win, of course). My brother and I are both engineers as well as the only two offspring my parents produced. What if they would not have stopped at two? Maybe if they would have produced twenty children, perhaps they could have contributed a combination of engineers and scientists amounting to twenty. What if one of those twenty would have found a cure for cancer? Now that discovery has been delayed because they didn't have those twenty children! (To be somewhat fair, Catholics do tend to encourage people to have multiple children, but they do not encourage people to have as many children as possible.)
   
• Objection to #3: If a family has more children than they can afford, this will hurt the chances their children have at becoming successful — That general rule about probability is just that: general; it does not apply in all cases. Raising children is one of those cases as raising children costs money. Having lots of children, then, costs lots of money. Have too many children, and you won't be able to provide them with the resources they need to blossom. In regards to quiverfull families, I have heard that quite often the older children essentially raise the younger children themselves. If they're busy raising children, how are they going to have time to dedicate to their studies? Not to mention, it may very well be more difficult to afford college. But arguing that it is OK to not have children for financial reasons is a pro-choice argument!
  
• Human Factories — I talked to my brother about this and he went so far as to suggest we need to harvest sperm and eggs from people and then mix and match them and (I guess) we'd grow them in a lab. (Not sure if we quite have the technology for this quite yet, but then we should get working on it!) One of the problems with the natural, quiverfull approach is that there isn't going to be a lot of genetic diversity between the children. This solves that problem.
     Of course this wouldn't be very practical — How are all these children going to be fed?! — but I doubt many "pro-life" people are going to be rejecting this idea due to practicality. (Also, this idea could always be implemented up to the point of where it is "practical;" and I'm putting that in quotes because what is practical is going to be somewhat subjective. The point, though, is that practicality can only be used as an argument for not implementing an idea but never as an argument against the idea.)
  
  • We can take this even further yet! Being that practicality is an issue with this, the population impacts can be reduced by only using select people as breeding stock. Or/and genetic modification could be used (but then you end up with the wrath of Khan)!
    
4. It overlooks the impact of abortion on potential future offspring — I have heard, and this should come as little surprise to anyone, that people usually plan to have a certain number of children. My parents, for example, decided to only have two. So let's create a hypothetical. What if a woman who was planning to have two children would have had an abortion before having that second child? Would she have changed her mind on how many children she was going to have? Not likely. She would likely still go on to get pregnant again and have the second child. But notice what else could happen here. If she does not have the abortion, that pregnancy would result in the second child (and she won't have any more children!). What if it is this later child (the one conceived after the abortion) that ends up doing something great in the world? In this case, the abortion was necessary for this to happen! The bigger point, though, is that abortion has little impact on the number of children that are born. People aren't going to suddenly have more children if you outlaw abortion. (The main exception would be if they had as many children as they wanted, but then got pregnant again.) So this argument that something good could result by not aborting a pregnancy ends up being nearly cancelled out by essentially the same argument that something good could have resulted from the pregnancies that now won't happen because an abortion didn't.
   

* This should go without saying, but it's one thing to make up a hypothetical situation. It's another to make up a story and attempt to pass it off as though it really happened.

** It is known in psychology that humans form beliefs first and then find arguments to support these beliefs (Michael Shermer wrote about this in his book, The Believing Brain). This is backwards from how things should be — beliefs should be formed from supporting arguments. Based on the inconsistent application,*** it appears that this argument was formed incorrectly to support the belief. In other words, it's not an argument against abortion; it's an argument for maintaining the belief that abortion is wrong. I must point out that forming an argument to support an already held belief does not necessarily mean that the argument could not lead to the belief. But when an argument is inconsistently applied, this signals that the person presenting the argument is not convinced by hirs own argument. If ze is not convinced by hirs argument, why should ze think this should convince anyone else? This, more than any other reason, is why I do not buy into the argument.

*** See also: "The Only Moral Abortion is My Abortion" and, for a good political example, Rick Santorum.

---

   There are some other observations from that night's discussions that bothered me a bit, but I'll keep these shorter.

• I think I had heard her suggest that getting an abortion damages the uterus. I was wondering if she was going to next suggest, being that this conversation was started by a conversation about rape, that rape victims have "ways to try to shut that whole thing down." Her remark, much like Todd Akin's is essentially false. Abortion is safer than pregnancy itself. And, as with Akin's remarks, I've heard this bullshit before.
  
• There was also some implied Islamophobia. I caught part of a discussion about how Europeans are not having many children and how this has essentially lead to a void (my words, not hers) that is being filled by immigrants. The tone of voice suggested that this was not desirable. But why? Shouldn't she, being so-called "pro-life", be happy that there is at least some group of people out there that is willing to produce lots of offspring? The only way I see this making sense is if they are the Wrong Type of People. I see this as the most likely reason because I know many of those immigrants are followers of Islam and that Muslims are not very trusted. I grant that much of that mistrust is reasonable — a recent incident at University College London is evidence as to why — but I quite enjoy how "pro-life" people abandon their supposed principals when other conflicts of interest arise. (What also bothers me is how much alike Muslims are to Christians. Yet, Christians don't seem to like Muslims...my guess is simply because they are the Wrong Religion!)
  

IDHEF - Chapter 6: New Life Forms: From the Goo to You via the Zoo? (Part I)

This is part of my breakdown of the book "I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist." Related posts can be found by clicking here.

   I want to take a brief moment on the opening quote (which they attribute to Ron Carlson, but I have not been able to determine the original source). The university probably didn't teach Ron Carlson that a frog turned into a prince. If they did, he should ask for his money back. What Carlson says is actually a common straw person of the theory of evolution. No where does the theory suggest such a thing. Sure, the university would have likely taught him that humans have amphibian ancestors (but certainly not frogs), but those ancestors would be millions of generations, and thus millions of years, in the past. (Actually, I may be off by a factor of 1000. Those amphibian ancestors may be more like billions of generations in the past.) That's nothing like what happens in fairy tales, where the frog turns into a prince in a matter of seconds. Moving on...

Can We Please Search for the Root Cause? - Single Mother Edition

   The title of this post is based on the idea of root cause analysis that shows up in engineering and perhaps other professions as well.

Root cause analysis practice tries to solve problems by attempting to identify and correct the root causes of events, as opposed to simply addressing their symptoms. By focusing correction on root causes, problem recurrence can be prevented.

   It would seem this concept gets it's name from weeds. With weeds, if you only remove what can be seen at the surface and you don't remove the roots, the weed will grow back. The same concept generally holds true with other life situations — if you only try to fix the problems that can be seen at the surface and don't address what is causing the problem, the problem will keep coming back.

   Today, I wish to talk about single mothers. This is due to a conversation that I had recently with my mother. She has had it in her head (and so does my father) that women get pregnant so that they can get on welfare. First, before I even get into looking at the root causes, this is such bullshit! Additionally, it frightens and disappoints me a bit when I hear such crap from my parents because this is conservative rhetoric. It's not a far cry from the ideas of 47-49% of the country being "moochers", which is bullshit* I addressed in part back in December. I also addressed a bit of this bullshit about single mothers then as well. I'll quote what I said before, bolding the part about single mothers:

   Take some time to grab a calculator if you need, and let's do some math! Currently, federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour. Let's say you work 40 hours per week at that wage. In a year's time, you will make $7.25/hour * 40 hours/week * 52 weeks/year which amounts to a whopping $15,080/year. Apparently, this is near the 2012 poverty guideline for a household of two, but... Damn. That's not a lot of money. And what if you were a single parent making that wage? You'd be living in poverty and you would qualify for that dole money. Similarly, if we talk about people who are getting by on unemployment, I have heard the average unemployment benefits are just under $300 per week. At a full year, that again is only about $15,000. Who's going to be chilling on a hammock making that?

Likewise, I find it equally as stupid to suggest that women intentionally get pregnant and/or keep their children that result merely so they can live the "high-life" on welfare since that "high-life" does not exist.

   Getting back to the main topic, my mother's "solution" to this single-mother problem seemed to be that single mothers should give their children up for adoption. This was a bit bothersome first in how the point was so casually announced by my mother. It was as though this should be an easy decision. Perhaps it's easy for a woman who herself never had to make such a choise. For some reason, I don't suspect it would have actually been that easy if she had been in such a situatation. Second, it doesn't address the root causes. My mother fails to ask questions like "Why do single women get pregnant?" As suggestd, she seems to think the answer to "Why do single mothers go on welfare?" is that they are lazy mooches who want free gifts. (She also fails to consider the impact on foster homes.) I was able, though, to get the conversation redirected to those root causes, which involves the obstacles that society has set up in women's paths. I'll be going over these obstacles in this list below:

1. Contraception and Sex Education — The very first obstacle is society's resistance to give women the tools they need to prevent pregnancy in the first place. This resistance primarily comes from the religious right. My wife, Amy, picked up a fundamentalist magazine from her place of employment that is somewhat refreshingly (though also frightening) blunt about why this resistance exists:

   With increased access to birth control, and the easy availability of abortion on demand, sexual activity has increased in the last few decades, as men and women alike have come to believe they can avoid the consequences of that activity.**

   If this doesn't make complete sense, I'll help clarify — Many denominations of Christianity disapprove of people having sex particularly outside of marriage and sometimes even within marriage if the couple is not having sex for purely reproductive purposes. When a single woman gets pregnant, that is proof that she was having sex. This allows whatever church to which she may belong to shun her***. But if a woman has access to contraception and proper sex education, then it is less likely she will end up pregnant and the church will not have the proof they need. So they oppose contraception and sex education.
   Having a society that opperates this way makes it more difficult for women to avoid unwanted pregnancy.
   
2. Abortion — Similar to #1, churches oppose abortion because it allows women to not suffer the "consequences" of church-unapproved sex. Also similar to #1, this makes it harder on women to end an unwanted pregnancy.
3. Low Wages — Already discussed above. It is bullshit to say that women get pregnant so that they can be on welfare. The reality is that welfare may seem like a better option because jobs don't pay worth shit. Not to mention who's going to look after the child while the mother is at work? So you have to subtract out child care costs. Let's please not make these stupid accusations until there are better incentives for people to work, shall we? If women had better incentives to work, you may find out that they will then want to work.
   

   So let's, as a society, work on these issues and give women better choices. You'll likely find that things will improve with such changes.

* I cannot help but do a bit of chest-thumping as well. I was addressing the minimum wage problem in this country before Obama brought it up in the State of the Union. Also, I want to take some extra time to say that I am pleased that attention is being payed to the issue. But let's not stop at $9. Also, let's try to start fixing our tip system for restaurants. Preferably, I think we should be like Europe where no such system exists.

** Tomorrow's World; "Sex: Is It Sin?"; Page 11.

*** There are at least two purposes to shunning. One is to make the woman herself feel bad that she then feels the need to ask the church's fictional Jesus for forgiveness, which has to be done at that church. In other words, the shunning has the goal of keeping her in the church. The second purpose is to keep the other parishioners in church. The pregnant woman serves as an example of what will supposedly happen when one strays from the teachings of the church. Since being shunned is an undesirable outcome, people will keep coming to church to avoid such an outcome.

---

   I feel I must end by pointing out that in previous discussions with my mother, she claimed that more acceptance of single mothers is leading to more of such pregnancies. This, too, is bullshit. Pregnancy rates have been going down for quite some time. Why could that be? (Could it be the result of improved access to contraception and sex education?)

A new response to "Let people believe what they want to believe!"

   I've written a bit in the past about how this idea of letting people believe what they want to believe annoys me. It does so because it is a bad idea as well as the fact that people don't actually apply this outside of a few specific topics, particularly religion. My latest thought on this involves getting arrested for a crime for which you did not commit (the hypothetical works better if it is a fairly serious crime that involves jail time). If you were arrested for a crime, would you (A) find a lawyer and defend your innocence or (B) let the police believe what they want to believe, which is that you are guilty of the crime (which means you get locked up in jail)? If you chose A, would you mind explaining why? If you are a person who has used this "Let people believe what they want to believe!" line before and you chose B, would you mind explaining this inconsistency?

IDHEF - Chapter 5, Addendum #3: Selecting specific processes to "prove" an argument

This is part of my breakdown of the book "I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist." Related posts can be found by clicking here.

   There is something I did not cover in my part II analysis that I was thinking could use more attention. This is in regards to the Rushmore and confetti arguments that the authors used. In my analysis, I noticed that the authors had contradicted themselves only paragraphs later, and I focused on this fact as well as presented counter-examples. What I did not do, though, is point out how their argument was flawed regardless of their contradiction and the existence of those counter-examples. (Also, they make a similarly flawed argument in Chapter 7 and Chapter 10 (maybe others I'm forgetting) so I'd have to address this eventually anyway!) First, let's recall what the arguments were:

Suppose we observe and repeat an experiment where we allow natural laws to work on rock for the next ten years. Will we ever get the faces on Mount Rushmore? Never. (p124)

Let's suppose you throw red, white, and blue confetti out of an airplane 1,000 feet above your house. What's the chance it's going to form the American flag on your front lawn? Very low. Why? Because natural laws will mix up or randomize the confetti. (p124)

   If you don't see the problem with these points, ask the question, "What natural laws?" More specifically, what natural laws are being applied? All of them?!? I think not! With the confetti, there are only about two processes at work — gravity to pull the confetti toward the ground and wind to blow it around. Similarly, with the rock, you'd be primarily looking at water and (again) wind. The flaw is that they are using only a few data points to back up their claim that "[nature] doesn't organize" (p124).

   I could make a similar argument about baseball players. Baseball players take performance enhancing drugs. Barry Bonds did. Mark McGuire did. Alex Rodriguez did. (OK, they allegedly did, but for the sake of argument, let's say they actually did.) Because a few baseball players take performance enhancing drugs, does that mean they all do?

   This would not have been a problem if the authors would have taken their own advice from Chapter 2.

Are you absolutely 100 percent certain that gravity makes all objects drop? No because you haven't observed all objects being dropped. Likewise, are you absolutely certain that all men are mortal? No, because you haven't observed all men die. (p64)

Likewise, are you absolutely certain that all natural processes do not order? I hope you can see the answer to this question.

   Worse, we have observed natural processes that do order/organize. That is why they ended up contradicting themselves shortly after providing those examples by saying, "[living things] grow and get more ordered" (p125). Is this not a natural process? Now, I have a suspicion that they may recognize the contradiction, so they do some handwaving about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. But in spite of this, the main point to take away from all of this is that just because one can present a number of examples to support their case, it only takes one counter example to refute it.