What if You Could Travel Back in Time?

It's a common question, exploited by books and movies to great effect. You've probably pondered the possibility at least a dozen times, but now try this version on for size.

What if you could travel back to an age of your choosing? (Who hasn't wished for this before?) When you get there, you don't re-live your life as it has already played out; the person that you are now gets to travel backward bringing your knowledge and experience with you, though it'll be some year in the past. You can't use your knowledge of events to make a bundle of money or become a famous psychic, but you do get to live the rest of your life in a younger body, and in the earlier time in which you enjoyed it.

Here's the catch: however many years you go back are taken off of your total life span. If you would otherwise have lived to be 80, and you travel back from 40 to 20, you will now only live to be 60. The total duration of your life will not change, and remains a mystery.

Here's another catch. If you had children at the age of 30, and you travel back to age 20 while having fewer than 10 years left to live, you'll never see them again.

So are you happy with how you did things in the past? Happy enough that you wouldn't bother with a do-over, or a chance to live in your younger body? Or do you yearn enough for youth that you'd forego seeing an older age?

Your current age will probably have a lot to do with your answer. If you're 90, you may very well want to live out your remaining time in your much younger body. If you're 75, and you've been healthy and active, you may choose to try to avoid the years of declining health that may lay ahead. If you're 15, you'd probably turn down the offer and want to just get on with it.  But if you're 45 (like I am), you may just want to keep on going, or maybe not ...

The scenario gets at which you value more: youth, or the full experience of your natural life. Would you trade some of the former for more of the latter?

I'm willing to bet that while we live in a society where it seems that everybody values youth, and fantasies about travelling back to a younger age seem common, most people wouldn't bother. It seems to me that for most of us, the natural journey of life is, in fact, more valuable than the ever exalted years of youth.

What would you do?

The Rauser/Scheiber Debate: An Early Impression of Randal's Arguments

Last Saturday afternoon, I drove up to Edmonton to watch a debate between Randal Rauser and Justin Scheiber. The topic of the debate was : does the god of classical theism exist? Today, I'm going to share my thoughts on Randal's arguments in favour of the existence of God.*

Randal argued for three claims. You can hear him summarize them here.

1. It is rational to believe in God without any evidence or argumentation because God belief can be directly justified (aka, properly basic) by, for example, revelation or something like it.

2. God can, in principle, be a legitimate explanation for certain phenomena or evidence.

3. God is the best explanation for our perception of objective, moral truths. The faculty we have for perceiving these truths is our moral intuition. I interpretted Randal as taking an 'objective moral truth' to be one that is true regardless of the opinion or thoughts of cognizers. So for example, if Randal is right, our strong intuition that rape is wrong would remain true even if every cognizer in existence disappeared in the same way that the existence of the Golden Gate Bridge would still be true even if every cognizer in existence disappeared.

I was immediately struck by what odd choices (1) and (2) were considering the debate topic.

Firstly, The idea that God-belief can be rational does nothing to help prove that God exists. Maybe it is rational to believe in God based upon personal experiences and in the complete absence of evidence and arguments, but we were at a debate about the truth of God's existence where one is expected to provide evidence and arguments, so I was left seriously confused about why Randal bothered spending perhaps a third of his opening 20 minutes on this seemingly vain effort.

I suppose that (2) was useful in setting up (3), but by itself, it also does nothing to help prove that God exists. I think that Randal would have been better served by saving this argumentation for a rebuttal if Justin (or an audience questioner) had challenged the idea that God can act as a legitimate explanation in principle. Accordingly, Randal really put all of his eggs in one basket, so to speak, with (3), a version of the moral argument for the existence of God. Justin could have tied the debate by not even refuting this argument and having only one of his three arguments survive. (In reality, I think that he did better than that.)

Regarding (1): I have presented a rationality defeater for the direct justification of God belief here. Accordingly, I conclude that Randal's first argument fails: it is emphatically not rational to believe in God in the absence of evidence and argument because of the common knowledge of the defeater I presented. Moreover, as I mentioned above, this line of argumentation in a debate about the existence of God is like bringing a donut to a gun fight: tasty treat, but useless.

Regarding (2): I agree that God can, in principle, represent a legitimate explanation for certain phenomena or evidence. However, as I have written here and here, I think that God is, in practice, a horrible explanation for probably anything.

Regarding (3): I'm not convinced that the kind of objective moral truths Randal claims to be perceived by moral intuition actually exist, and I'd like to hear him make the case that they do. My recollection is that he did not do that, but I'm keen to explore how one might. It seems to me that if one can't plausibly establish that such objective moral truths exist, the argument that we must have a God-given faculty to perceive them falls apart.

Moreover, I have previously argued that God is a horrible explanation for our moral intuitions and that naturalism is a much better one. On naturalism, one would predict that because the gene is the unit of selection, our moral intuitions would lead us to care most about the well being of those most genetically similar to us, and this is precisely what we observe. We care most about our children, our closest relatives, our community members, and least for those who are distant, unrelated, and outside our in-group. We even tend to choose friends who are genetically close to us - as close as fourth cousins, in fact. This is a very surprising fact on the hypothesis that we were created in the image of a morally perfect and perfectly loving God. So I don't deny that we have moral intuitions, but I think that they're better explained by naturalism than theism, and on a naturalistic explanation, they don't point to the kind of objective moral truths that Randal is talking about. (If you're interested, I have also argued that God simply cannot ground objective moral truths in the way that believers think he can, here.)

So you see, I wasn't swayed one bit by Randal's arguments. I doubt that anybody there was swayed by the other side much, if at all. Debates aren't really places where people change their minds. For me, this debate was part of a long-term process of seeking out the best arguments that a smart and well-versed individual like Randal would come up with because it's important to me to understand the best arguments and evidence that counter my beliefs and to wrestle directly with any cognitive dissonance that they might create. That's a logical consequence of being open to changing my mind. It was also about seeing how an equally smart and well-versed opponent like Justin would publicly make the case for atheism, defend it against Randal's best arguments, and whether those ideas would align with my own or be novel. That's a logical consequence of being open to the best evidence and argumentation out there.

Soon, the video of the debate will be available and it will serve as an excellent example of how debaters should interact. Both presenters were polite, respectful, and a pleasure to listen to. I hope that their enthusiasm will cause theists and atheists alike to delve more deeply into Philosophy of Religion.

If you're an atheist, I would urge you to follow Randal's blog. Although the arguments he chose in this debate didn't sway me (yet, at least - I still have to watch the video), I have both learned a great deal and enjoyed being challenged by his thoughtful work over there.

If you're a theist, I'd encourage you to follow Justin online here, at his YouTube Channel, "Real Atheology" here, and to familiarize yourself with Reasonable Doubts, the podcast he co-hosted. Justin has done more than 20 similar debates and has gotten to know the evidence and arguments on both sides very well. He's a great communicator of all that he has learned on this subject. He didn't convert from Christianity for nothing, and if you're having doubts about your faith, you owe it to yourself to look into how Justin evolved.





*Warning: my recollection of this event is poor. Not only that, my own personal bias as an atheist, coupled with my background familiarity with some of the arguments, means that I would have surely formed memories based on certain parts of the debate while other parts that I might have been paying less attention to are not available to me for this commentary. It'll be interesting to see how inaccurate my recollection is when the video of the debate becomes available.

Should We Accept Revelation?

My friend and most excellent high school teacher, Johnston Smith, will not stop insisting that "there is more in heaven and Earth than is dreamt of in my philosophy," despite my protests (here and here). Johnston taught me debating and more recently has been a keen defender of his Catholic beliefs in a very enjoyable and charitable exchange of ideas with me. Today, I'm going to present a different argument in the hope of halting his use of this popular canard. But first, let me clarify what my "philosophy" actually is.

I’m an evidentialist: I believe that that which is rational to believe is that which is justified by reason and evidence*. Justifications can't be infinite; they are ultimately founded upon that which we can perceive and remember. I don’t think that all of our perceptions and memories are reliable, but considering all of the exceptions is neither in scope nor required. For today, all that one must understand about my epistemology is that perception and memory can be directly justified (aka properly basic).

Here's a simple and familiar example of what I mean. I look at the kitchen table and see two boxes on it. The belief that there are two boxes on the table is directly justified by my seeing them. When I say that that belief is directly justified, I mean that I don't ordinarily need any additional evidence to know that there are a couple of boxes on the table; my perception is enough. I bet that you, like pretty much all humans, form rational beliefs like this all the time.

Now, I have to be open to information that could change my mind about that belief. Perhaps there is one box on the table and a mirror that makes it look like there is a second one, too. Upon learning that that that was the case, I’d have a defeater for my belief that would force me to change my mind. Quite simply, reason dictates that it's not possible to rationally hold both beliefs: (1) that there are two boxes on the table and (2) that there is one box plus a mirror that merely makes it look like there are two. But barring any such tricks or problems with my vision, I can know that there are two boxes on the table without needing any additional evidence or information. That belief can then serve as evidence for subsequent beliefs. If my son tells me that he was alone playing with some toy boxes in the kitchen a few seconds ago**, I can conclude with the rational belief that he probably left them there, and so on. Our perceptions can be directly justified and serve as foundations for rationally held beliefs.

But Johnston thinks that there is more to be perceived than that of which we normally think when we consider the familiar human senses of vision, hearing, vibration, temperature, etc. Johnston thinks that we can also include alongside those perceptions a way to perceive God and/or the Holy Spirit commonly known as revelation. In his words:

"All epistemology is based upon faith: the skeptic has faith in reason and perception; the theist has faith in revelation and reason . . . While the skeptic believes that perception is the only reliable source of data for his reason to consider, the theist does not say that it is only the senses which supply reliable data. Paul of Tarsus writes, "Eye has not seen nor has ear heard the wonders God has in store for those who love him." As I have suggested before, it is just as "rational" to accept sources of data other than the senses as it is not to accept them . . . There are many realms of knowledge, each with its own standard of proof. Science uses observation & the empirical guided by reason; law uses evidence (including witnesses) guided by reason; history uses the record guided by reason; theology uses revelation guided by reason."

I think that Johnston has work to do to make the case that revelation can be directly justified the way that other sense perception can, but I haven’t made the case that sensory perception can be directly justified today, and I’m not going to get into it at this moment (though this paper by Christian philosopher, James Sennett, is the bomb), so it would be unfair of me to demand that Johnston do so now. Rather, for the sake of argument, I’m going to accept that he may be right about that. It’s equally fine if Johnston thinks that accepting revelation is merely a matter of faith, as he has suggested. What’s important is that we both accept reason, as he admitted above. Remember that reason provides us with an epistemic duty to reject a belief when a defeater for that belief is identified. I intend to present a defeater based on reason for Johnston’s claim that revelation can lead to directly justified beliefs.

Let’s return to those boxes on the kitchen table, a belief that was, for me, directly justified by visual perception. Now imagine that you look at the table and see three boxes, instead. What if three others say that they see four, five, and six boxes on the table, and two others see none at all? There are no smoke and mirrors operative, and all seven of us are healthy, neurologically normal human beings.

Breathe this thought experiment deeply in and really imagine that you look and see three boxes. What are you going to conclude? Do you believe what your eyes are telling you, knowing what I and the others are or aren’t seeing? Or do you have enough doubt about your initial belief as to lead you to reject it and concede that something fishy is going on, something fishy enough to require you to refrain from making any rational claims about what’s actually on the table?

It seems rather obvious to me that it would be the height of arrogance to insist, against the knowledge of what one’s epistemic peers are perceiving differently, that what one, personally, is perceiving, forms a rational belief.

What if the person seeing six boxes says that she prefers a world where there are six boxes on the table because she needs them in which to wrap six presents. Do preferences or conveniences make beliefs rational?

The humble thing to do in this situation is the rational thing to do, and that is to recognize that something about this situation is undermining the ability to perceive what’s on the table. None of us seven people can, without additional evidence or reason, rationally form any beliefs about how many boxes are on the table let alone whether any boxes are on the table at all.

Notice that I’m not saying that your perception of three boxes is false. (I'm not making a de facto objection). You may be the right one among us. The two who see none may be right. Or maybe none of us is right. I’m saying that forming a rational belief about what's on the table based upon our vision isn't even possible. (I'm making a de jure objection).

And so it is with revelation. People born in India or Iran are Johnston’s epistemic peers, yet they almost exclusively have and/or believe in revelations about multiple gods in the former country and a different but no less mutually exclusive god in the latter. If you were an ancient Greek, you might well have had a theophany of Zeus or Apollo. And what about me and countless others like me? I was once a Christian who tried, genuinely tried, yet my "relationship with god was always a one-way street. I’ve never had any inkling of any revelation of any god, whatsoever^.



What must Johnston conclude about this state of affairs? Is it epistemically acceptable for him to claim that belief founded upon revelation is rational? Can Johnston successfully argue that he and certain other Christians are somehow epistemically superior to the rest of humanity without resorting to special pleading?

One thing that Johnston can't do is ignore this defeater by claiming that it's based upon a disanalogy in that the truth regarding how many (if any) boxes are on a table is normally amenable to an examination of empirical evidence while the truth regarding revelation and God are not. Why not? First, there is no disanalogy: the reason that the 7 observers are in trouble is that there is no way to answer their question with empirical evidence because none is available to them. They're stuck that way, just as are those who claim vastly different and mutually exclusive revelations. Second, that objection is about evidence, but the defeater posed by the analogy is entirely about reason.

Isn't it time for Johnston to admit that his belief in revelation, and Christian revelation in particular, is irrational? Claiming that these beliefs are based on faith doesn't somehow solve that problem; it's synonymous with it. Alternatively, he must defeat the rationality defeater I have presented, or provide other evidence or argumentation indicating why revelation is rational and true.

But I don't see how he can.


*Please notice that I'm not just talking about scientific evidence, here. The kind of evidence a historian might accept, or a judge in a court of law, are both included in evidentialism, where the strength of the belief is apportioned to the strength of the relevant evidence. Accordingly, my epistemology does not amount to scientism.

**I'm actually quite sympathetic to the idea that testimony can also be directly justified in certain situations, just as sense perception can.

^A reminder is required here: I don't conclude on that basis that revelation isn't rational or that god probably doesn't exist.

The Chapel Hill Murders Were Not Inspired by Atheism

Today, I'm sharing a blog by a friend of mine from Edmonton, Alexander Delorme. While I was thinking about responding to the hysteria that these heinous murders were committed "in name of atheism", especially in light of my recent posts explaining the incoherence of the popular notion that the Nazi experiments on Jews were committed "in the name of science" (here & here), Alexander came along and said what I wanted to say better than I ever could have. Here's a link to his blog.

It was going to happen sooner or later. It must now be dealt with.

Craig Hicks, an otherwise unremarkable man, has been charged with the murder of three people. He shot them on the University of North Carolina’s Chapel Hill campus and handed himself over to police shortly thereafter. He has been cooperative, according to police, and the investigation has so far suggested that the fatal altercation developed out of a banal dispute over vehicle parking.

A sad and upsetting tale, surely, but one that in most cases would be treated as just another tragedy for the local authorities to clean up and settle. Yet this story has gone viral. Why? Interestingly, the three victims of this horrific event, Deah, Yusor, and Razan, were Muslims, and the incident is regarded by some as a hate crime against the people of Islam. Although such a fact should raise some concerns regarding whether or not their murders were inspired by hatred and bigotry, their faith is not an exceptional factor considering Deah and Yusor were married and Razan was Yusor’s sister. Simply because of their relationships with one another, it was overwhelmingly likely that they shared religious beliefs, which means Hicks’ attack on them was probably no more hateful than if he had attacked any other family sharing any other faith.

But that is not exactly why everyone is hearing about these murders. We are hearing about them because Craig Hicks is an atheist.

In case you’re only just hearing this from me, the media is having a heyday bringing Hicks’ atheism to the forefront of the conversation. Hicks is an atheist who frequently criticizes religion on social media. The Washington Post quotes Hicks as saying: “People say nothing can solve the Middle East problem, not mediation, not arms, not financial aid. I say there is something. Atheism”. Another statement in question is one that CNN could admittedly not confirm: “When it comes to insults, your religion started this, not me. If your religion kept its big mouth shut, so would I”. This has led people to suggest the motive for Hicks’ crimes is rooted in his atheism and ‘anti-theism’.

We are thus immediately thrust back into the debate we always have whenever a militia of Muslims slaughters a village or whenever orthodox Jews bar women from an airplane: Was the atrocity motivated by religion? Was the perpetrator misusing or misrepresenting the ‘true’ version of what they believe? What does it mean to be a ‘true’ believer? Fortunately, because he is an atheist, Hicks makes these questions easy to answer.

Hicks appears to hold as much conviction as any atheist, but there is nothing about this, nor independent of it, that suggests he felt justified in murdering people specifically because of their religious affiliation. You wouldn’t think so if you took Adam Withnall’s word for it. His hot air balloon of an article, run by the Independent, is almost too simplistic to mention, let alone take seriously. But because people will mention its contents and will take its implications seriously it must be popped not with a pin but with a rapier’s edge.

Hicks may be the most irrational and Muslim-hating idiot there ever was – something we don’t even know yet – but that would be a condition independent of his non-belief. Whereas it is easy to find and point out theological justifications for Muslims, Christians, Jews, and even Buddhists to commit atrocities (often towards each other) there is no such thing as ‘atheistic dogma’. To be an atheist means to lack belief in god(s), full stop. Unlike all variations of the aforementioned religions, atheism does not come with ethical baggage. Implying that Hicks was motivated by atheism to commit murder is to assign ethical persuasion to atheism, persuasion that just isn’t there. Atheists are not necessarily good people, nor necessarily bad people. Contrast this with religious people, who throughout history have acted unethically precisely because of religious instruction, and it is astounding that Hicks’ atheism is being demonized by the same publications that treat the Islamic State’s name as a subject of controversy.

Consider this comment by Nihad Awad, National Executive Director of the Council on American Islamic Relations: “Based on the brutal nature of this crime, the past anti-religion statements of the alleged perpetrator, the religious attire of two of the victims, and the rising anti-Muslim rhetoric in American society, we urge state and federal law enforcement authorities to quickly address speculation of a possible bias motive in this case.”

In an extraordinary feat of stupidity, Awad, and presumably many others like him, have equated the condemnation of religion with the condemnation of people. This doesn’t stand up to the laziest scrutiny. Let us compose a thought experiment: Suppose Neah, Yusor, and Razan had identified as Republicans. Would Hicks’ criticism of the Republican Party been grounds for alarm and contempt, and would Awad have smeared Jon Stewart for inspiring anti-Republican rhetoric in American society? Or would it have been enough, with the so far limited information available to us, to simply treat Hicks as the murderer he is? The fact of the matter is that religions are accustomed to feeling cozily immune from criticism, and as a result any dislike and distrust, however mildly or belligerently put, is perceived as savagery towards not only religious beliefs but also those who hold them. This is why we are hearing so much about Hicks and his ‘anti-theism’, because our society buys Awad’s argument.

There was going to come a time when someone committed a crime in the name of atheism. That time may or may not be now, but so far we are being forced to treat this case as if it were so. It is every thinking person’s duty to participate in the counter-narrative, to assert that atheism is not some senseless ideology, resurrected from the time of Stalin and Pol Pot and prone to violence for its own sake. As I write, #MuslimLivesMatter is trending. And of course they do. What is forgotten is that their lives matter to atheists and secularists, too. It is the atheists and the secularists who most passionately stand up for our Muslim brothers and sisters against the threats of theocracy, of extremism, of oppressive iron-age doctrines. Hicks’ actions do not represent atheism. Should he claim his disbelief as the motive for the murders of Neah, Yusor, and Razan, the world will hear us pass our judgement on him twofold.

What Would Jesus Do About Measles?

What happens when faith reaches its zenith? Children get hurt and die. In the case of under-vaccination, it's not just the children of the most faithful who suffer; the rest of us do, too.

Today, I present to you Dr. Paul Offit's timely NYT Op-Ed on religious exemptions to vaccination. Join the call to remove religious exemptions for vaccination. If god exists, surely they disappoint him, too.

PHILADELPHIA — MEASLES is back. Last year, about 650 cases were reported in the United States — the largest outbreak in almost 20 years. This year, more than a hundred have already been reported.

Parents have chosen not to vaccinate their children because they can; 19 states have philosophical exemptions to vaccination, and 47 have religious exemptions. The other reason is that parents are not scared of the disease. But I’m scared. I lived through the 1991 Philadelphia measles epidemic.

Between October 1990 and June 1991, more than 1,400 people living in Philadelphia were infected with measles, and nine children died. The epidemic started when, after returning from a trip to Spain, a teenager with a blotchy rash attended a rock concert at the Spectrum. By Nov. 29, 96 schoolchildren had been stricken with the illness; a week later, it was 124; by the end of December, the number had risen to 258, and the first child had died. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention sent a team to determine whether the strain of measles was particularly virulent. It wasn’t. Investigators found that the deaths had nothing to do with the strain that was circulating and everything to do with the parents.

Two fundamentalist Christian churches — Faith Tabernacle Congregation and First Century Gospel Church — were at the heart of the outbreak. Children had not been vaccinated, and when they became ill, their parents prayed instead of taking them to the hospital to receive the intravenous fluids or oxygen that could have saved their lives of those with the worst cases. “If I go to God and ask him to heal my body,” said a church member, Gordon Korn, “I can’t go to a doctor for medicine. You either trust God or you trust man.”

Public health officials turned to the courts to intervene. First, they got a court order to examine the churches’ children in their homes, then to admit children to the hospital for medical care. Finally, they did something that had never been done before or since: They got a court order to vaccinate children against their parents’ will. Children were briefly made wards of the state, vaccinated and returned to their parents. At the time, a religious exemption to vaccination had been on the books in Pennsylvania for about a decade.

To prevent doctors from violating his church’s beliefs against vaccination, the pastor of the Faith Tabernacle Church asked the American Civil Liberties Union to represent him. It refused. “There is certainly a free exercise of religion claim by the parents,” said Deborah Levy, of the Philadelphia chapter of the A.C.L.U., “but there is also a competing claim that parents don’t have the right to martyr their children.”

When spring came and the epidemic faded, C.D.C. officials published the results of their investigation. Over a third of those infected — 486 of 1,424 — belonged to one of those two churches, as did six of the nine dead children.

At the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, we saw more than 200 children in our emergency department and admitted about 40. Children would come in, covered in rashes, squinting in the bright light (a side effect caused by eye irritation), struggling to breathe and often extremely dehydrated. It was like being in a war zone. When I asked their parents why they had done what they had done, they all had the same answer: “Jesus was my doctor.”

It seems to me that if religion teaches us anything, it’s to care about our children, to keep them safe. Independent of whether one believes in Jesus, or that the four Gospels are an accurate account of what he said and did, you have to be impressed by the figure described. At the time of Jesus, around 4 B.C. to 30 A.D., child abuse was the “crying vice” of the Roman Empire. Infanticide and abandonment were common. Children were property, no different from slaves. But Jesus stood up for children. In Matthew 25:40, he said, “Verily, I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of my brethren ye have done it unto me” — a quote that could be emblazoned onto the entranceway of every children’s hospital in the world.

Constantine, the first Christian emperor of Rome, passed laws protecting children from abuse and poverty. Christian monasteries became prototypes for modern-day hospitals. And missionaries brought medicine to the four corners of the earth in Jesus’ name.

So why didn’t representatives from other churches or other religions stand up for the children suffering from measles in Philadelphia? The reason is obvious. No one likes to tell someone else how to practice their faith. It’s an understandable instinct — to a point. And that point was reached in Philadelphia in 1991.

In the wake of the current epidemic, several states have proposed legislation modifying or eliminating philosophical exemptions to vaccination. No lawmaker, however, dares to touch religious exemptions. It’s political dynamite. But with an estimated 30,000 children in the United States unvaccinated for religious reasons, that is a dangerous mistake.

Parents shouldn’t be allowed to martyr their children — or in this case, those with whom their children have come in contact. Religious exemptions to vaccination are a contradiction in terms. In the good name of all religions, they should be eliminated.

The question anti-vaxxers should have to answer

With measles eliminated from America a few years ago (consider what an awe-inspiring achievement that is), anti-vaccination madness is once again an issue as outbreaks are now occurring all over the continent, sadly, including the happiest place on Earth. The outbreaks are traceable to pockets of under vaccination leading many to ask the same question: what can be done to change the anti-vaxxers' minds?

This is a very important question in light of a recent study undertaken by Brendan Nyhan and colleagues. They randomly contacted Americans by phone to participate in an on-line examination of the effects of 4 different kinds of messages on subjects' (1) self reported attitudes towards MMR vaccine and (2) their propensity to use the vaccine in the future.  Although a message correcting misinformation about the MMR vaccine causing autism changed respondents' minds about that particular concern, none of the interventions increased the respondents propensity to use the vaccine in the future; they actually decreased it.

How depressing.

What will change the minds of anti-vaxxers?

I suggest that we ask them that question.

Anti-vaxxers should be asked to consider the following scenario: imagine that we live in a world where the MMR vaccine is 99% effective at preventing MMR infection with only a 1 in a million risk of a serious adverse event, like a life-threatening allergic reaction. That's it - no risk of the vaccine causing any other adverse effects. Period. And we know this for a fact. Close your eyes, take a deep breath, and as you exhale, let the imaginary scenario where that is perfectly true sink deeply in.

Anti-vaxxers should have to tell the rest of us what it would take to convince them that that is indeed true. Remember, for the sake of argument, it is true. The question is what would be required for them to recognize and acknowledge that it is.

Here's the catch: children would still be developing features and diagnoses of autism, MS, hepatitis, arthritis, learning and behavioral disabilities, and a host of other mysterious disorders some time after getting vaccinated, even though none of those conditions would, in our imaginary scenario, be causally related to the MMR vaccine. What would it take to convince them that that was the case despite those coincident occurrences happening to kids and families everywhere?

That is the crux, isn't it? The truth is that we simply cannot trust our personal experiences (and those of our friends and family as well) to draw any conclusions about events like these. They are completely unreliable. Only population based studies and large randomized trials can reliably inform us about potential causal correlations like these. Asking anti-vaxxers this question forces them to struggle with that fact. In the end, I think that there are only 2 possible kinds of responses.

First, some would realize that nothing could convince them of the truth of such a scenario. These people may never change their minds - they aren't open to having their minds changed. Unfortunately, this stance indicates a complete unwillingness to even try to recognize a real world scenario that might actually be true and that would actually be wonderful. All too common, stances such as these - the definition of irrationality - are dangerous conversation stoppers. Perhaps peer-pressure, mockery, satire, and ridicule would work, but no amount of evidence would seem likely to satisfy.

The second response would have to be some kind of evidence. What else?

And so it would seem that if there are anti-vaxxers that are open to having their minds changed (and there are), despite Nyhan's study results, the thing that will do the trick must be evidence. That's a very good thing, because as long as the conversation is one about evidence, there is a conversation to be had. The key will be determining what kind of evidence may be required and how to best present it so as to have have the greatest impact. Nyhan's important work remind us that we should study the effects of our efforts to change minds very carefully. I suggest that anti-vaxxers themselves should be the ones telling us where to start.

You know that imaginary scenario I described above? It's actually pretty close to the truth.

Of Mice and (Scientific) Men

A friend of mine shared some thoughtful comments in response to my last blog, where I tried to advance the case that when scientists behave immorally while doing science, their immoral behaviour can't be "in the name of science". This charge is incoherent and therefore misleading. The commenter was unconvinced. I’m grateful for those comments because they show that I didn’t do a good enough job of clarifying my argument. I’ll try to do that today.

Contrary to those comments, I don’t think that a problem for my case arose out of a focus on Mengele specifically and not on more ambiguous cases of immorality in science. The problem, I think, lies in the ambiguity of the phrase “in the name of”, so I’m going to try to make my case again without using it at all.

In my introductory paragraph, I framed the question at hand, and that question was not whether scientists can behave immorally while doing science. I fully conceded that. The question was whether science can cause scientists to behave immorally while doing science. Remember that this question arose in response to a tu quoque that not infrequently pops up whenever faith-based religion is criticized for causing immoral behaviour. That tu quoque entails the claim that science causes immoral behaviour, too. Moreover, the question of causality is the important one if we are interested in curbing that immoral behavior by criticizing or condemning the underlying cause. Accordingly, I’m going to try to make the case that it is incoherent to claim that science causes scientists to behave immorally while doing science. (On the other hand, the coherence and truth of the claim that faith-based religions can - and regularly do - cause people to behave immorally during their practice is not even contested.)

Consider a cancer researcher who is experimenting on and therefore killing mice. Such a program is indisputably a "legitimate" scientific enterprise even though the researcher knows full well that mice will be harmed by the process*.

What determines whether a researcher thinks that killing mice is acceptable is how that researcher values the lives of mice versus the lives of the people her research efforts hope to ultimately help. Science has nothing to do with that consideration. Science doesn’t inform the researcher that she should value human life, or a cure for cancer, or the lives of mice, or how to weigh the whole shebang. She brings her values into a moral consideration upon which science is silent. It’s a moral consideration because morality is about the well-being of conscious creatures, and it is precisely the well-being of mice and men that is in question. If a researcher is prepared to sacrifice the lives of mice, then the scientific method advises on ways to obtain reliable, true information from the experiments. That is all.

If the lives of mice are not well valued, we should not be surprised that the lives of mice will be lost whether they are the victims of scientific experimentation or of mouse traps behind the furniture. If we find it morally abhorrent that mice are dying, criticizing science won’t save their lives, but addressing why the well-being of mice is undervalued by mouse-killers may.

Perhaps scientific projects like this one are morally abhorrent and the low value we place on the lives of mice is an example of speciesism run amok. All that my argument requires is that you recognize that the scientific method has nothing to say on that matter.

Now imagine a society that values the lives of mice on par with those of humans, and that a mouse researcher is identified, captured, and tried for "crimes against conscious creatures". In her defence, she claims that her work was done "in the name of science". I hope that it's now obvious that this is a lame excuse to try to deflect blame and place it squarely on something greater than herself and something that is otherwise held in high esteem: the scientific method. The problem is that it doesn't make sense. She failed to properly value the lives of mice, and the scientific method played no role in that consideration.

Perhaps she's a psychopath who lacks the empathy required to value mouse life. Perhaps she hates mice because they spread a disease that claimed the lives of her parents when she was an impressionable child. Or perhaps she was raised in a religious tradition that included an ancient scripture saying, "For I am the Lord, your God, and I am holy. You shall regard every mouse after its kind an abomination and do with them as you wish." Whatever her reasons, they can't have anything to do with the scientific method.

I rest my case.

So why is the notion that the Nazi researchers acted "in the name of science" seemingly widespread and appealing despite being incoherent and misleading? Because it's a deepity.

A deepity is a phrase that balances precariously between two interpretations. On one reading, the phrase is true, but trivially so. On the second reading, the phrase would be profound if it were true, but that second interpretation is actually false. Somehow, the truth of the first reading seems to rub off on the second one, making it seem profound and true. Deepities are common and beguiling, but fallacious.

It's trivially true that the Nazi researchers did some things that were motivated by science and could, in that sense, have been done "in the name of science". But those things are standard scientific moves like choosing objective outcome measures, repeating experiments to understand the influence of normal biologic variability on outcomes, etc. But when people hear that the Nazis acted "in the name of science", the second interpretation that takes hold of the imagination is that the heinous evils they committed during their experiments were motivated by science. That would be profound if it were true, but alas, it is false. Somehow, the truth of the first interpretation rubs off on the second one, making it seem profound and true. As I've shown, though, that second reading is incoherent and misleading.

A Hitler Youth Book Burning

Unlike science, people do get their values and morals from religion and religious apologists tell us that they damn well should. It should be no surprise then, that the Nazi devaluation of Jewish life had its roots in centuries strong Christian influences. Nazism was its own crazy religion following its own charismatic prophet ("dear leader") and which spread through the systematic cultivation of fear and the suppression of free speech, skepticism, and reason. If we want to prevent the next Holocaust, one thing we can do is maintain a critical stance on the many faces of dogma and the methods people employ for its dissemination, protection, and exaltation.

Once again, I'd like to thank my thoughtful commenter for the opportunity to clarify my thoughts. I hope that this does indeed clear things up.

*Notice that the legitimacy of mouse based scientific research actually refers to the moral legitimacy of experimenting on mice. The scientific legitimacy is assumed.