Religion is a Mental Illness

By: Michael Shermer

Published: Jun 21, 2024

In my book Why People Believe Weird Things I offered this definition of how science works:

That is, science is something we do, an action, a verb, to describe what we see in the lab or field or world, or interpret what we think we see, since the facts never just speak for themselves but must be interrupted through some model or theory (facts are “theory laden”). Sometimes we see things directly, but sometimes we must infer their presence indirectly, for example, exo-planets are inferred by their effects on their home star, either by the perturbation of the star’s motion or by the amount of emitted light that dims when the planet passes in front of it that astronomers can detect. Because many sciences are historical in nature—cosmology, geology, paleontology, archaeology, and history—we have to infer information about them from indirect sources. To put this mouthful more briefly:

My favorite rendition of this process comes from a 1964 lecture at Cornell University by the Nobel laureate physicist Richard Feynman:

Is that all there is to it? In this week’s Skeptic column a scholar of Karl Popper, Eric Denton, considers this question, in the context of what happens when people do not understand how science works, as evidenced by Tucker Carlson’s recent appearance on Joe Rogan when he revealed his ignorance about the theory of evolution.

—Michael Shermer

Eric Denton is a writer and podcaster whose primary focus is epistemology; in particular, Popperian epistemology. He separates the wheat from the chaff by subjecting popular science and philosophical writings to severe criticism. His mission is to promulgate critical rationalism to his readers and listeners. Eric is currently working on a book which revolves around the work of Sir Karl Popper.

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By: Eric Denton

Tucker Carlson, Karl Popper, and How Science Really Works

Eric Denton 

“Theories (scientific or otherwise) are trials, inventions; they are not the results of many observations; they are not derived from many data.”

—Karl Popper, All Life Is Problem Solving

On the April 23, 2024 episode of the wildly popular podcast The Joe Rogan Experience, former preppy now turned populist right-wing firebrand Tucker Carlson confidently declared that “the theory of evolution as articulated by Darwin is like, kinda not true.” 

“In what sense?” asked a bemused Joe Rogan.

“Well, in the most basic sense,” Carlson continued. “The idea that—you know—all life emerged from a single organism and overtime—and—there would be a fossil record of that and there’s not.” 

Rogan interjected by mentioning the existence of transitional fossils; fossils exhibiting adaptations to particular environments.

Carlson quickly appropriated this explanation for his own ends: “there’s tons of record of adaptation and you see it, in your own life. I mean, I have a lot of dogs—I see adaptation in dogs….” He rambled on a bit more before concluding, “but no, there’s no evidence at all that—none—zero—that, you know, people, you know, evolved seamlessly from a single cell amoeba; no, there’s not—there’s not—there’s no chain in the fossil record of that at all.”

I’m afraid Carlson’s blathering is demonstrative of how a great many people think about the methods of science and the growth of knowledge. Like him, multitudes think we acquire knowledge through our senses. This is false. But before continuing, let me supplement this claim with a quote from the philosopher of science Karl Popper’s book The Logic of Scientific Discovery, “I readily admit that only observation can give us ‘knowledge concerning facts’, [here Popper is quoting philosopher Hans Hahn] and that we can ‘become aware of facts only by observation’.” But then Popper reflects, “but this awareness, this knowledge of ours, does not justify or establish the truth of any statement.” So, to be sure, we can learn facts using our senses—unjustified tentative facts—but this isn’t where knowledge comes from. 

On November 24, 1859, Charles Darwin introduced what philosopher Daniel Dennett would later call the “best idea anyone has ever had.” This idea was the theory of evolution by natural selection. “In a single stroke,” Dennett asserts in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, “the idea of evolution by natural selection unifies the realm of life, meaning, and purpose with the realm of space and time, cause and effect, mechanism and physical law.” The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins waxes eloquent about the simplicity and elegance of natural selection in his book The Blind Watchmaker, following up with a curious question, “how could such a simple idea go so long undiscovered by thinkers of the caliber of Newton, Galileo, Descartes, Leibnitz, Hume and Aristotle?” I’ve often asked this myself.

A couple of centuries before Darwin, in 1610, Galileo Galilei observed, among other things, the phases of Venus (shadows caused by its relation to the sun) through his newly improved homemade telescope, thereby corroborating the heliocentric theory of our solar system; a theory put forth by Nicolaus Copernicus about a half century earlier. With this discovery—in the minds of many—we had finally found the key to making scientific progress: observation! It seemed as if Galileo had simply pointed his telescope at Venus, observed it circling the sun, and voilà, the truth was revealed. But is this what really happened? I’ll argue below that this is mistaken. But first we need context.

About a decade after the corroboration of the heliocentric theory, the philosopher Francis Bacon independently put forth a scientific method that vaguely resembled what Galileo had done. Or at least it seemed so under indiscriminate viewing. His method proposed that, in order to make scientific progress, we must derive general theories from specific observations. For example, if—up to now—you’ve only ever come across white swans in your life, according to Bacon’s method you can logically deduce that all swans are white; you notice a pattern, then derive a theory. “We must not imagine or invent,” Bacon writes in his book Novum Organum, “but discover….”

[ The title page illustration of Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum ]

In other words, we simply allow knowledge to enter our brains through our senses. Sound familiar? This is precisely how Tucker Carlson demonstrated his method of understanding the natural world. “I see adaptation in dogs,” he said. From this he forms the theory that adaptation is “clearly, obviously true,” but then says “there’s no evidence at all that… people… evolved seamlessly from a single cell amoeba.” Notice that he easily accepts adaptation (which, ironically, is a result of natural selection), but refuses to accept the full theory; all this because he didn’t see it happen.

Before returning to Italy with Galileo, let’s first revisit this statement by Bacon. Here it is in full:

This statement is somewhat paradoxical because it does indeed take us two steps forward, but it also takes us one step back. Two steps forward because it abandons traditional authorities (which is a good thing); one step back because it sets up a new authority, namely, our senses. Wait, our senses can be an authority? No, but that’s what they became under many early thinkers. This kind of reasoning is what legitimized the flat earth theory for so long. For example, if you had a time machine and traveled back in time to the 14th century and asked any number of people why they thought the earth was flat, perplexed, they would answer with their own question: “does it look curved?”

Quick but critical digression: the “white swan” proposition mentioned above comes from the 19th century philosopher John Stuart Mill in his book A System of Logic. In it, Mill points out the major flaw in the Baconian method; the fact that it will never be able to give us certainty:

This is an extremely important finding in the study of knowledge. It was first noticed by the Ancient Greek skeptical philosophers but took nearly two thousand more years before being neatly articulated by the Scottish philosopher David Hume in his book A Treatise of Human Nature. “We suppose, but are never able to prove, that there must be a resemblance betwixt those objects, of which we have had experience, and those which lie beyond the reach of our discovery.” No matter how many white swans you may come across in your life, there’s always the possibility that a black swan might be sitting on an undiscovered island in the middle of the ocean. 

[ David Hume by Allan Ramsay, 1766 ]

Now that we have some context surrounding our “senses as an authority” problem, let’s reexamine Galileo and his Venus observations. In his book, Galileo: Watcher of the Skies, historian David Wootton describes a letter Johannes Kepler received from Galileo in 1597 in which “he made a most remarkable claim.” After revealing he had been a Copernican for quite a while, Galileo writes of the heliocentric theory, “with this hypothesis [I] have been able to explain many natural phenomena, which under the current hypothesis remain unexplainable.” This conflict of theories was a problem, but as Karl Popper writes, “the natural as well as the social sciences always start from problems…” He continues, “seeing a new problem may well be the most difficult step in creating a new theory.” I take this as Popper indicating how much of a gift finding a problem truly is. When we find a problem we should cherish it. From the same book, All Life Is Problem Solving, Popper outlines the growth of knowledge as follows: 

[ Sir Karl Popper in the 1980s. ]

In short, all knowledge creation is through trial and error. More specifically, trial and the elimination of error, always with the understanding that we can never be certain that we’ve landed on the truth. We proceed not with certain knowledge, but with good explanations. What are those? Here, the theoretical physicist David Deutsch provides a helpful addendum to Popper’s work with a definition from his book The Beginning of Infinity: a good explanation is “an explanation that is hard to vary while still accounting for what it purports to account for.” Put differently, “God did it” is a bad explanation because it can be used to describe anything.

Given this, what really happened with Galileo and his telescope? As previously noted, he started with a problem; a conflict between two theories. Notice that Galileo already had a theory in mind before he made his observation:; the Copernican theory. This will always be the case. “There is no such thing as ‘raw’ experience,” writes Deutsch; “all our experience of the world comes through layers of conscious and unconscious interpretation.” Or as Popper is supposed to have said, “all observation is theory-laden.”

The predominant theory of Galileo’s time was geocentrism, put forth by the 2nd century astronomer Claudius Ptolemy, asserting that the Sun, the Moon, and the stars all circle the earth. Ptolemy’s was a complex model involving different epicycles. He came to this mistaken hypothesis by the false authority of his senses—by looking at the movement of the heavens and attempting to describe what he saw. Galileo on the other hand observed Venus (a wondering dot in the sky conjectured to be a planet) with having both the Ptolemaic and the Copernican theories in mind. Long story short, the Copernican theory simply made more sense than the common-sense theory put forth by Ptolemy. But as Deutsch notes in The Fabric of Reality, “our best theories are not only truer than common sense, they make more sense than common sense.” Common sense is just another way of describing the Baconian method.

[ Pages from 1550 Annotazione on Sacrobosco's De sphaera mundi, showing the Ptolemaic system. ]

This brings us back to Darwin. How did he come up with the theory of evolution by natural selection? He did exactly what Bacon said not to do, he imagined and invented! As with the creation of all knowledge, he didn’t start with an observation, but with a problem. What was his problem? It was the “mystery of mysteries,” as he describes it in the Origin, alluding to a phrase first uttered by the naturalist John Herschel, who was referring to precisely the same problem: what is the origin of species? The prevailing theory in Darwin’s day was standard biblical creationism, bracketed by Plato’s essentialism. Darwin himself held this view before encountering a conflict between his theory and his observation. The evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr describes this conflict in his introduction to Origin’s facsimile:

When one is faced with a situation like this—a problem situation—one has to start making guesses as to how to fix it. That’s precisely what Darwin did. He had never seen anything like natural selection before, he simply made a guess. The theory of natural selection didn’t enter his brain through his senses. Rather, it left his brain through his senses. More specifically, it was created between his ears and left through his hands and mouth. Nature doesn’t create laws and impose them on us. Instead, we create laws and apply them to nature. Are these laws true? We can never know for certain. Again, laws fall under knowledge, and all explanatory knowledge is conjectural, a “best” guess as it were. 

And that brings us back to Tucker Carlson, who finished his rant against Darwinism by claiming: “Darwin’s theory is [totally untrue]. That’s why it’s still a theory.” Despite such ignorance, Carlson actually gets something right with this last statement. Natural selection is indeed still a theory and will remain so unless it gets overthrown by a new theory, a better theory. If this were to happen, the new theory would also remain just a theory—perennially tentative and subject to revision based on new information or analyses.

In his book The Greatest Show On Earth, Richard Dawkins takes great pains to combat the “just a theory” claim. In order to do so, he fights tooth and nail the very philosophy I’ve been speaking of this whole time: “As for the claim that evolution has never been ‘proved’, proof is a notion that scientists have been intimidated into mistrusting. Influential philosophers tell us we can’t prove anything in science.” Nevertheless, Dawkins lands the philosophical plane: “The more energetically and thoroughly you try to disprove a theory, if it survives the assault, the more closely it approaches what common sense happily calls a fact.” That said, to reiterate, knowledge can never be certain. Popper explains it like this:

My guess is that thinkers such as Newton, Galileo, Descartes, Leibnitz, Hume, and Aristotle—the thinkers mentioned by Dawkins above—didn’t land on natural selection because of its abstract nature. The common sense of their day was far too strong to overthrow. They were afraid to step into the land of best guesses where the only thing that matters is the falsifiability of a theory (that is, it can be put to some test and shown to be wrong), not its verifiability (simply finding more cases where it appears to hold true). It’s not surprising that Darwin sat on his “dangerous” idea for so long before publishing. Its sheer boldness is breathtaking. And it is only through such boldness that makes science progress—by testing bold and seemingly improbable ideas. 

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Tucker Carlson is an abject fucking moron.

Knowledge which is inaccessible to anyone else is not knowledge, and is no use to determining truth.

Rejecting divine revelation but not standpoint epistemology (or vice versa), makes you inconsistent.

By: Helen Pluckrose

Published: Nov 16, 2022

Today I saw a Twitter user say:

The word ‘hyperfocus’ is doing a lot of work here. It is undeniably true that if people only focus on objective truth and facts, they will often miss the point. This is because we are human beings and, as such, we often care more about how people are experiencing a thing than the facts of the matter.

For example, if a friend had suffered a stillbirth, few of us would visit her and inform her that about 1 in 200 births are stillbirths and that this is most often to do with problems with the placenta. This simply would not be the reality that we care about or she cares about. What we would most want to establish is how she and her partner are coping and what we can do to help her/them deal with the sense of grief and loss. In such a situation where somebody we care about has experienced something awful, the reality that matters is their feelings, and those feelings are very much real.

If this is the kind of thing the individual who made the above statement is referring to, then he is undoubtedly correct. However, it is unlikely that even the people most dedicated to discovering objective truth and facts - e.g., scientists - would respond to a friend or family member in need of emotional support following a traumatic experience by coldly providing them in this situation. This is because they are human too and have empathy and compassion as well as a dedication to objective truth, and, ideally, they know which of these needs to be prioritised in which setting.

When people complain about others not valuing objective truth and facts enough, it is almost never because they have offered sympathy rather than information in such a situation. It is almost always because they are focusing on experience, subjective perception and feelings in a situation where objective truth and facts are needed. To continue the example, the organisation, Sands, which exists to support research into:

would not be very effective in its aims if it focused only on how people feel following a stillbirth.

This example should also make it clear that there is no contradiction between caring about how people experience things and gathering objective truth and facts about the thing. In fact, they are complementary. Somebody who has experienced a stillbirth is likely to be amongst those most motivated to support scientific research which hyperfocuses on discovering more facts about it in order to aid the effort for fewer people to experience the grief that they did.

The problem, then, is not that some people focus too much on objective truth and facts and some too little but that some people focus too much on the wrong one in any situation. While there must be some examples of people focusing too much on objective truth and facts when listening to experiences and feelings is what is needed, most of us who argue for the need for greater respect for objective truth and facts are concerned that the opposite is becoming too much of a norm. That is, we are concerned that too much of a focus on how (certain) people experience or perceive something can take precedence over establishing the objective truth of the situation. That matters because we cannot possibly hope to remedy any social ill without having an empirically substantiated understanding of the reality of the situation.

The context in which this perceived conflict between objective truth and subjective perception is most often raised in the circles within which the tweeter (who is a sociologist) and I move is in relation to society and culture and the “Culture Wars.” The conflict arises between Critical Social Justice scholars and activists and liberal empiricists with the former wanting us to focus more on the lived experience of marginalised groups and the latter wanting to focus more on empirical data that might explain why imbalances continue to exist, whether this indicates a social problem to exist and, if so, how to remedy it. It is important to note that both groups seek the same end: a just society in which nobody is marginalised and discriminated against because of their identity.

The problem as I, a liberal empiricist, see it, is that the tendency of CSJ scholars and activists to attribute all societal imbalances to things like ‘white supremacy,’ ‘patriarchy,’ ‘cis/heteronormativity’ and to attribute these entirely to socialised attitudes and dominant discourses that must be dismantled using things like unconscious bias training is simplistic, implausible, unfalsifiable and thus unlikely to work. If something doesn’t work, there is good cause to be sceptical of the hypothesis underlying it and strong grounds for instead gathering data about the genuine cause of imbalances and what will work to address those that need addressing.

Subjective perception is simply not a good tool for discovering the reality of complex social phenomena, especially when they vary so much by individual and Critical Social Justice activists only regard as authentic the perceptions of those members of groups seen as marginalised who agree with them. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Candace Owens cannot both be right about the experience of black Americans and the prevalence of white supremacy in the US at the same time (although they could both be wrong). It is simply not good enough to go with the perception of the one you already agree with. A truth exists and must be examined rigorously to understand reality and remedy any racial injustice. Just as the fact that polling among Britons revealed that they believed, on average, that 22% of Brits would be Muslim by 2020 did not make their perception correct. We cannot go by their subjective perception (or lived experience) and act as if this were true. The actual figure is estimated anywhere between 5% and 7%. Knowing the objective facts of the religious demographics of the UK is useful for many reasons but this does not mean that the subjective perception does not matter, particularly when it is so spectacularly wrong. We need to understand the cause of that too.

I doubt the hypothesis that “People who hyperfocus on "objective truth" and "facts" are the ones most easily duped by the framing of the issue.” I suspect that a larger cause of error and misframing of reality is too strong a reliance on subjective perception. However, the biggest error is the belief that we need to choose between facts and feelings or prioritise one exclusively when the reality is that, as humans, we naturally care about both. The important thing is to try to get the optimal balance for the context.

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Imagine getting mad at an indifferent, objective reality.

This is why the ideologically compromised attempt to denigrate science. Like Toto in The Wizard of Oz, it looks behind the curtain of god-existence bluster, and social theory moralizing.

If they’re hostile to evidence, they’re hostile to truth.

By: Lawrence M. Krauss

Published: June 2, 2021

The progress of modern science has been a truly global phenomenon, a fact worth celebrating, just as the technological fruits of science have, to varying degrees, impacted the lives of everyone on the globe.

Scientific breakthroughs have paid no heed to geographic boundaries. Modern algebra owes its origins to 10th century Arabic mathematicians. Around the same time Chinese astronomers recorded an early supernova that formed the Crab Nebula, even when no record of this remarkable object was made in Europe. In spite of the attempts by British astrophysicist Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington to quash the impact of an otherwise unheralded young Indian physicist, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, the latter’s groundbreaking work on stellar evolution altered our picture of stars so significantly that he was later awarded the Nobel Prize for his work.

Nevertheless, the postmodern notion that empirical scientific knowledge is somehow culturally derived, with little or no objective underpinning, has continued to persist in various social science and literary corners of academia far removed from the rush of scientific progress.  

Until recently, it seemed inconceivable to imagine that any physical or biological scientists could become so misguided as to argue against the empirical basis of their own fields. But we are living in strange times. This week, the Divisional Dean of Social Sciences at the University of Oregon sent an email to faculty “to encourage you all to attend this exciting presentation!”, by a visiting physicist, which was described as follows:

On its own, this racist nonsense would not deserve remarking on here, even if it does lead one to wonder how its author, who apparently doesn’t understand the empirical basis of her own discipline, could gain an appointment at a physics department. But the response it produced by the administrator at Oregon is more worrisome.

The Dean at U. of O. should know better, being a professor of Anthropology, although his specialization in Folklore and Public Culture suggests he might be particularly sympathetic to arguments that knowledge is culturally or racially derived.

The Dean’s email apparently received wide circulation beyond U. of O. in the academic community. A tweet from Bruce Gilley, who is a professor of Political Science and Public Policy and on the board of the National Association of Scholars saw what the U. of O. Dean had missed, namely that the underlying pretext of the talk was itself racist. As he remarked “Neo-racism is now spreading like wildfire in the academy with the normalization of racist and anti-scientific ‘research’ that freely denigrates people based on their race. This talk below will use ‘black feminist and anti-colonial analysis’ to debunk ‘white empiricisim [sic].'”

Galileo would have discovered four moons of Jupiter with his telescope regardless of his sex or pigment, and DNA is a double helix regardless of whether it was Rosalind Franklin’s crystallography that demonstrated it, or Watson and Crick’s analysis of that empirical data. Empirical evidence is not white, or black, and the term “black theory” makes no intellectual sense.

As it turns out, the U. of O. talk was abruptly cancelled, with no reason given in the announcement. I agree with Professor Gilley’s assessment that, having been announced, a better course would have been to have proceeded with the talk, and allowing those present to then ridicule its premise via intelligent rebuttal.

I wonder however, whether that would have happened, or whether there would have been polite applause, for fear of appearing racist by asking pointed questions. I happened to attend another online talk by this individual, in this case a physics seminar. Each slide shown also included a reference to a different racist incident that had happened in the US. Speaking to other colleagues after the seminar, I wasn’t the only one who questioned the appropriateness of this political commentary from beginning to end in a seminar on dark matter, as would I would have equally squirmed had each slide quoted a different lie uttered by Donald Trump when he was President. Yet none of us spoke up at the time to raise any concerns.

We need to be willing to be more vocal up front in our critical assessment of nonsense emerging in academic science settings. In more reasonable times, this nonsense would never have passed the selection criteria applied by seminar organizers in any serious academic department in the first place. In current times, such gibberish instead helps promote a dangerously distorted view of science that can fall upon receptive ears among even senior academic administrators.

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Neil deGrasse-Tyson is a scientist. But that doesn’t make everything he does “science.” If he puts on an interpretive dance show, his arabesques and Dougies, while likely moving, wouldn’t suddenly become “science.”

That the presenter is a physicist doesn’t make big pseudointellectual words hiding empty, shallow assertions “science.” It doesn’t even qualify as social science, because social scientists also use empirical data.

The claim of “anti-intellectualism” appears to be the academic equivalent of the “you should be more open-minded!1!” that we often hear about “god” or vague, ill-defined “spiritual” (whatever that means) claims; the truly close-minded expecting belief uncritically. Formulating a concept out of thin air to justify the assertions is pretty good evidence of this.

Science (i.e. natural sciences) and social sciences (e.g. politics) attempt to describe the world and society, respectively, as accurately as possible. Expressing subjective feelings is the realm of the humanities. Thus, her presentation would probably best be described as live action, multimedia performance art.

And that’s not science; natural or otherwise. No matter who does it.