Don’t talk about politics or religion
It’s a rule of thumb for polite conversation that most of us had drilled into us as children, here in the US. Don’t talk about politics, and don’t talk about religion. You’ll only start an argument.
Maybe that’s true. After all, merely by saying “I am a member of such-and-such political party,” you are implying that you think its platform and philosophy are superior to the platforms and philosophies of all other political parties. If you didn’t think that was the case, you’d be a member of a different party. And by saying, “I am such-and-such religion,” you are saying that there is a certain set of statements about reality that you believe to be true. That means that other people, who don’t think that set of statements is true, are wrong in their beliefs. You don’t even have to say it outright. You just have to let it be known. Maybe someone spotted a bumper sticker on your car, a pendant on your necklace, a logo on your t-shirt. You can say that you think we should “coexist,” that we should be tolerant and all get along. Those are worthy ideals. But you have to face the fact that if you every commit to any opinion, you’re effectively telling everyone who doesn’t share it that they’re wrong, which doesn’t come across as very “tolerant.”
But that’s okay! I actually think we should be talking about politics and religion more freely. The discord is still happening, when the very existence of Democrats is an implicit affront to Republicans and vice versa, and when religious (or irreligious) groups rally support from within by directing anger at the mere presence of other groups. I think that by stifling conversation, we’re only silencing the argument, not really stopping it. No one gains anything from that.
I really wish I could remember the details of this story, because it made a real impression on me, but sadly I can only offer vagueness. At any rate: I read a news story once about an election happening in another country, quite possibly a country relatively new to the whole “election” thing. The focus of the story was on how the citizens were all eagerly arguing with each other about which candidates to support, all over the place. It was not a taboo topic in the least. And that’s an exciting thing to see, because it means that people are engaged in their democracy, they care about the outcome of the election. Most importantly (to me), they don’t see the election as rooting for their own team, but as a search for the best possible candidates. They’d prefer to get the right people into office, even if it means changing their minds.
Well, I’m sorry that anecdote came across as completely made up; I promise you it’s not. (If anyone remembers reading something like that – or experienced something like that! – and could help me figure out details, leave a comment. I’d bet there are plenty of countries this could apply to, but I only read a news story about one of them.) My point is that when we disagree and argue about it, it may feel a little uncomfortable and unpleasant at the time, but there are major benefits in the long run. After all, what’s more important: that your political party control a majority of seats in the legislature, or that the legislature is as full as possible of thoughtful people who have the best interests of the country in mind? Sure, you’d hope those things are the same, but you have to recognize the possibility that they’re not always. And what if there is one particular deity (or set of deities) who really wants you to live your life in a very specific way or else. Wouldn’t it be good to figure out which deity/deities it was, as soon as possible? (Alternatively, what if there are no deities like that? Wouldn’t you want to figure that out before spending your entire life obsessed with made-up rules and nonexistent judgment?)
“Sure, Z,” I can hear you saying. “I guess it would be great if we could all have these calm, reasoned debates. But how? I’m sure of my beliefs, and you’re sure of yours – we’ll never work it out!” It does seem daunting. What I do is, I try to keep a bit of agnosticism in my attitude. Perhaps it doesn’t come across that way… maybe it’d be better to call it best guess-ism. I feel strongly about my beliefs, having reflected on them and examined them before actively calling them my own, but I try to remember that they only reflect my current best guess. At any time, I could come into new information that might lead me to change my mind – to make a new, better guess. I welcome arguments because they’re the primary way I might get that new information.
I’d like to live in a society where more people had an attitude like that. But I’m open to debate about even that belief!
Heuristics for reality
This is part 2 in my response to Chris Guin. Here, I’m going to begin by setting aside some of the direct ties to religious beliefs, and talk about Chris’s general statements about how we gain knowledge about reality. Here’s the bulk of it, an explanation of why we shouldn’t be so preoccupied with Biblical contradictions in the first place:
Modern Western culture has things backwards, I believe, when it comes to the big picture of how the world works. We feel that “the ground truth” is logical, governed by strict laws, mathematical – even binary – in character, and that our emotions, perceptions, will, desire, consciousness, and languages are “heuristics” – that is, ways of simplifying a complex underlying reality to better get by in and understand the world. The idea is that, if we simply had a computer quick enough and powerful enough, we could crunch all the numbers in the universe and have perfect knowledge.
But what if that has it mostly backwards? What if the base of reality is perception, consciousness, will, desire, and language (”the word”), and our logic and reason are simply “heuristics” to help us simplify a complex, probabilistic, subjective, and personal universe to get by in it? I think there’s good evidence that this is the case. For example, the deeper one gets into physics, the less “sense” everything starts to make. As a computer science student, I spent plenty of time in classes proving that there are things that computers can’t do – problems that can’t be solved in a reasonable amount of time. True logic knows its own limits.
The first thing I want to do in response to this is clear up some of the confusion about what the science actually says. Chris, I don’t understand how the fact that computers take a long time to solve certain problems is relevant here. Sure, EXP ≠ P, and while that may be inconvenient it doesn’t have any great significance for the value of logic. You may be going for something more along the lines of undecidability and/or incompleteness. In that case, yes, there are some things that no algorithm can compute; there will always be some mathematical truths which are unprovable with a given set of axioms. While this is true, and while it’s also true (in the more poetic, humanities-ified version) that there are some questions in life that logic can’t answer, I don’t think this is a reason to reject the answers that logic can provide. That would be like rejecting the concept of evolution because it doesn’t answer cosmological questions about the origin of the universe, or like rejecting the principles of electricity because electricity can’t bake you a pie from scratch. Like throwing out your crescent wrench because it isn’t a soldering iron.
When you say that “the deeper one gets into physics, the less ’sense’ everything starts to make,” I assume you’re referring to quantum mechanics, and maybe also chaos theory. As a physicist myself, I have to tell you that this just isn’t true. I suspect that you’re seeing physical laws and theories that are counterintuitive to you, and erroneously classifying these as nonsensical and illogical. However, they are completely logical (and, much to my undergraduate surprise – at least in the case of quantum mechanics – can eventually become intuitive).
So, I can say with confidence that nobody well-informed on the science believes that “if we simply had a computer quick enough and powerful enough, we could crunch all the numbers in the universe and have perfect knowledge.” Quantum physics and chaos theory cast a whole lot of doubt on the determinism aspect, and the computing aspect is unrealistic whether you’re talking about complexity or computability. But (and this is my real point) so what? It’s still all based in logic. Logic with limits, sure. But logic nonetheless. And the fact that limits exist way out on the horizon is no reason to reject the repeatedly verified, reliable information we can glean from working inside those limits.
Second: what is this illogical universe that you’re talking about, Chris? You suggest that perhaps “the base of reality is perception, consciousness, will, desire, and language” and perhaps the universe is “complex, probabilistic, subjective, and personal.” The universe might be complex? Of this I have no doubt. Logic is not inconsistent with complicated systems. Reality might be based on language? I have no idea what this means, but feel compelled to point out that while subjective connotations exist within language, we couldn’t communicate at all unless we agreed on rules of syntax and a set of definitions – in other words, some basic axioms. A completely idiosyncratic string of sounds is not a language by any normal understanding. A probabilistic universe? This is my favorite one. See above… the “regular” universe is already understood in a probabilistic way.
So let’s distill what you are really proposing. I see two main ideas in the remainders of your lists. One (for perception, consciousness, subjective, personal) is a Matrix-esque “What if the universe I experience is completely dependent on my own senses and awareness?” The other (for will, desire, maybe personal again) is basically, “If I want reality to be like this, reality is like this.” I think I’ve shown why your supposed “good evidence” for this isn’t actually. I don’t think we have any evidence that these pictures of reality might be true. But I also think that this hypothetical universe you suggest is not an illogical one. It’s simply a different set of premises, new axioms from which we might build up the rules that would govern reality. “When I close my eyes, whatever I was looking at ceases to exist,” for example, might be a new rule. Or perhaps, “If I wish for something to be true, it happens.” You haven’t done away with logic in your hypothetical world.
I hope you can see why I, having read your inaccurate generalizations of science and your unclear assertions on the nature of reality, was somewhat baffled as I reached the point in your post where you claimed that God is outside the bounds of logic:
[Logic] is seldom the appropriate tool for understanding the eternal and the divine. After all, as God is perfectly supreme and in no way bound by our universe, on what basis can anyone “logic around” with God? God is outside of time, cause and effect, and even the proposition that something can not be both X and not X. Trying to reason about God as though any of these assumptions were true often results in goofy conclusions – consider the kerfuffle about predestination, or interminable arguments about the divinity/humanity of Christ, or the nature of the afterlife, or the nature of the trinity.
However, even though I don’t buy your build-up about how we should accept the possibility of a logic-free reality, I think I can be satisfied with this characterization of your God. After all, those “goofy conclusions” and “kerfuffles” resulted from contradictory passages of scripture. But you say you would reject those debates entirely in favor of a God outside of cause and effect, and while I’m not sure what exactly “outside” means, the most obvious interpretation would seem to indicate that he doesn’t cause anything. I have no idea how this could be consistent with God creating the universe, God giving Moses commandments, God sending Jesus to the people, or even God inspiring people to live good lives on a day-to-day basis in the present. God is outside of cause and effect, so nothing can be the effect of his cause.
Moreover, if we read the Bible and find that God supposedly commanded that we do X, who cares? Wherever God is, X and not-X might be the same! If the Bible says that God made a covenant with his people to protect them in exchange for their abiding by his rules, who cares? This presumes that God is okay with an initial act (rule-following) implying a resulting act (God’s protection), which may very well not be true if he exists outside of cause and effect! Any supposed sequence of events can’t be treated as truth, because God is outside of time! It is impossible to know anything about God at any time by any means, least of all by reading the Bible. In fact, it would seem that there can be no evidence, no reason to believe in this God at all.
At the very least, with this picture of God there is no reason to value what the Bible says for its own sake, no reason to suppose that the Bible says anything true. If God is not bound even by the rule that X = X and X ≠ not-X, how can you rely on the Bible or any sentence you read about God as a source of any knowledge about God whatsoever?
Questionable Ethics #1
I’m generally a fan of advice columns. They’re sort of my replacement for gossip. I don’t want to scrape around for the dirty secrets of my friends and acquaintances, but it is reassuring to read about other people’s complicated lives and sordid problems, and realize that whatever difficult times I think I’m facing actually aren’t so bad. It’s also interesting to compare my reactions to the advice of the columnists and see how my instincts measure up to the supposed Zeitgeist.
It’s only supposed, though; most advice columnists at least appear to operate under the assumption that they offer just another opinion—perhaps a very worldly opinion, having read hundreds if not thousands of letters about people in similar situations—but an opinion nonetheless. Not Randy Cohen! A columnist for the New York Times Magazine, he purports to explain what is ethical. Period. That’s why he’s called The Ethicist. (Sounds like the most boring possible superhero.)
It’s possible that Cohen doesn’t personally believe that he has the definitive answers on all questions of morality. A Times Magazine focus group may have decided that the column could appeal to its readers’ desire for some pseudo-intellectual snobbery by reminding them of the good ol’ days of Philosophy 101. Or it might be a complete accident. I still enjoy the column anyway. However, I do think it’s worth pointing out that morality is not as clear-cut as it usually sounds in Cohen’s answers. My coblogger A and I are going to start a series which we’re calling Questionable Ethics. Each week, we’re going to examine the complexities of the situations described in “The Ethicist,” with the hopes of elucidating some of the nuances that Cohen ignores.
(We’re not the first people to attempt to supplement this column with an alternative point of view. I used to read and enjoy Gawker’s “The Unethicist,” but that doesn’t appear to be running anymore. And anyway, our approach will be a bit… different.)
I want to say first of all that there’s a lot of dispute about the meaning of “ethics” versus the meaning of “morality.” Are they synonyms, or are they completely different concepts? We’re not going to mess with that one. There is certainly a usage in which they are synonymous. We’ll mean the same thing when we talk about a “moral system” or an “ethical system,” a set of rules by which one determines right from wrong. Being “moral” or being “ethical” will mean taking actions that are considered good. The real point here is that there isn’t one single road map to ethical/moral behavior; there are numerous systems (many written down by philosophers, and theoretically infinite unwritten possibilities) that prescribe the path to follow.
This week, Cohen looks at three questions. The last two are fairly straightforward, so I’ll focus on this first letter. Read more
Inside an abortion clinic
You have to read this breathtaking piece from Esquire. It’s eight pages long, but please, bookmark it and read it when you have the time. It’s about Dr. Warren Hern, who is apparently the last American doctor specializing in late abortions. The reporter spent some time shadowing him, not long after the murder of Dr. George Tiller, another late abortion provider as well as Dr. Hern’s friend. It’s very vivid, and lends a perspective I think we should all have when we’re talking about abortion law. Take this excerpt, for example:
The patients can be upsetting too. They’re under terrible stress, of course, but sometimes they come in very angry. One had conjoined twins and would have died giving birth, but she exploded when he told her she couldn’t smoke in the office. And some treat him with contempt and disgust [Z's note: italics here indicates quotation of Dr. Hern], usually the ones who have been directly involved in antiabortion activities. They hate all abortion except for their special case. One even said they should all be killed. Only fourteen, she came with her mother. What brings you here? he asked. I have to have an abortion. Why? I’m not old enough to have a baby. But you told the counselor we should all be killed? Yes, you should all be killed. Why? Because you do abortions. Me too? Yes, you should be killed too. Do you want me killed before or after I do your abortion? Before.
He told her to leave. Her mother was very upset. But he isn’t an abortion-dispensing machine. He’s a physician. He’s a person.
Or this:
The abortionist comes in, remembers that the U. S. marshals don’t like him to use this room because the window is too exposed, and walks right back out. You follow, asking about the patients who were supposed to see Dr. Tiller.
The patient I just finished was very unhappy to see me. I think they are very antiabortion. She had a fetal abnormality, and she and her husband are just devastated. Stuff like that.
What kind of fetal abnormalities are we talking about?
One was Down syndrome, another was a lethal brain abnormality along with a lethal heart abnormality. Another one had a catastrophic — we’re not talking about cleft lip, we are talking about cleft face. There was no face.
The takeaway message, I think, is that this is an immensely complicated issue with no easy, pleasant solutions. No normal person enjoys the prospect of an abortion on its own, but many different people still find Dr. Hern’s services invaluable. If you consider yourself pro-choice, you should read this to get a feel of the reality of the situation. An abortion isn’t a magic spell that makes a fetus disappear; it can be devastating and tragic for everyone involved. If you consider yourself pro-life, you should read this to understand the difficult places that women, that couples, find themselves in when they go to see abortion doctors and how they are helped by these doctors. You should understand how the hateful anti-abortion rhetoric fuels the fire of violence, and forces doctors and their families and employees to live in constant fear.
I’m sorry to leave you with mostly these big blockquotes, but I just can’t add much to this article. It speaks for itself. Go read it, whoever you are.
Do you have to believe?
The topic for the second installment in Atheist Week also comes via Friendly Atheist. Hemant Mehta posts a reader’s query about answering the question, “If you don’t believe in God, what do you believe in?” and explains the issue like this:
There are also a lot of similar [answers] most of us tend to give: I believe in the goodness of people, I believe in nature, I believe we all find different ways to answer that question, I believe in the Golden Rule, etc.
It’s really just a bad question. Just because we don’t believe in a God doesn’t mean we don’t believe in anything. And just because someone says they do believe in God doesn’t mean we know anything else about them.
Yes, those are reasons why it’s a bad question. But my revulsion toward it is a lot deeper. I reject the premise of the question entirely.
Imagine saying to a person on a diet: You don’t eat chocolate cake? Well then, what desserts do you eat? Or, imagine saying to a person born blind: You don’t know Picasso’s work? Well then, who is your favorite painter? It would be absurd to demand these answers. It’s completely possible not to eat desserts or not to have a favorite painter, particularly if you’re a person with any sort of inclination against doing those things. I think belief is similar. When someone says, “What do you believe in?” they are saying, surely everyone must have groundless faith in something. As an atheist, I’m not the sort of person who tends to do that stuff.
In the same way that “bananas” isn’t an answer to “What time is it?”, I don’t see how you can answer this question with things like the Golden Rule, humanity, or scientific inquiry. It’s just playing a semantics game — I don’t “believe” in those things the same way someone else believes in God. I value humanity and I value science. I believe in doing good things and refraining from and/or stopping others from doing bad things, but that follows from a sort of axiomatic definition of goodness as a quality of which there ought to be more. Good things are good. There’s no faith there. If I found out that one of the moral precepts I try to follow actually does more harm than good, I would shed it and figure out a new one.
No, I think that valid answers to “What do you believe in?” (instead of the Christian God) would be things like deities of other religions, unicorns, leprechauns, the Tooth Fairy, supernatural powers. Those are things you have to “believe” in… but I don’t think anyone really has to believe in at least one thing in that set. My answer, assuming I’m brave enough to say it out loud to the person who asked, would be: “I don’t believe in anything. I look for proof, and I make my best educated guess when no perfect proof exists. Why do you think I need to believe in something in order to be complete?”
And honestly, if you asked me what I believed in, and I told you that instead of God I believed in Santa Claus, or Ouija boards, or invisible flying grapefruits… would you find any of those answers satisfying or even acceptable?
Choosing between God and Satan
I was involved in a discussion recently in the comment thread of this post, and I found myself using an analogy that in retrospect was pretty accurate for clarifying my position. We were discussing whether atheists don’t believe in God because they want an excuse to live lives without any morals. (I’m sure there are some people who call themselves atheists for this reason. There are also some people who dress in all black and act really morbid just to spite their parents. Those people aren’t really part of the goth subculture, just as these people aren’t really atheists.)
The people arguing that atheists are just trying to skirt morality are working from the premise that morals can only come from God, and without Him and the threat of eternal damnation we’d all be terrible people. (Weren’t we just talking about that?) Someone pointed out, as evidence that atheists hate doing good, the fact that some atheists had previously stated that if God were to exist they wouldn’t worship Him. Clearly, he argued, they were just rebelling against God and his morals. I answered:
We disagree on what makes someone/something deserving of praise (or worship).
Christians: Assuming the God of the Bible exists, He ought to be obeyed and worshipped.
Atheists: [some, not all] Even if that God existed, based on what the Bible says about him I’m not sure he’s worthy of worship.The Bible says that God wants us to worship Him, and that He is omnipotent and omniscient. Omnipotence is a pretty intimidating concept, and I can see why someone would agree to submit to that unquestioningly. However, some of us find some Biblical teachings to be morally repugnant. I’m not inclined to worship anyone more powerful than I am just because of their power; instead I look at what they do with their power and how good I think it is.
The other person then asked me what I thought constituted worship-worthiness. I thought I had explained it right there, but I guess it wasn’t clear. What follows is the analogy that I used to make the the point to him. It’s written a bit better and more thoroughly than in the comment thread, of course. (Forgive me if this is a really well-known strategy already; I did a bit of searching and couldn’t find anything that was really expressing this idea, so I figured it could be potentially helpful to get out there for other people stuck in the same conversational impasse.)
I acknowledge that if there were to be some clear proof that God exists, with all the stipulations of typical Christian theology (e.g. omnipotence, omniscience, omnibenevolence), I’d probably have no choice but to worship Him. If there were incontrovertible proof that He really does decree what’s objectively right and wrong, no matter how nonintuitive his judgments are, that’s just the way reality works… I think I’d follow those rules. Obviously, I have a hard time imagining such a scenario, because of various paradoxes required by such a being’s existence. (Can an omnipotent being make a boulder so heavy he cannot lift it? and so on.) I have less trouble imagining an extremely powerful God, one whose abilities far surpass anything a human is capable of. I can certainly understand a being like that not being worthy of worship.
I realize most theists would probably stop me right here and argue with me about the many properties of God which are infinite. Bear with me, though. All that’s necessary for the purposes of this argument is that we agree that at the very least, to humans, infinite power and extremely vast power are indistinguishable. If someone comes to you and says they’re God, and they can perform tons of apparent miracles, that’s pretty compelling, right? Even if they didn’t perform a literally infinite number of miraculous acts.
Now, consider Satan, the Devil. Satan, we’re told, is not omnipotent but is extremely powerful. In stories, he often tries to trick people into thinking that he’s looking out for their best interests. He appears in Revelations 13 pretending to be God and demanding worship. So let’s imagine that two beings manifest themselves to you, both claiming to be God, and both demonstrating extreme power, far beyond your comprehension. How do you tell them apart?
You have to look at what they do and say. How does each one use such power? Presumably they have some commandments for you. Perhaps one tells you to love your neighbors, to care for the less fortunate, to treat others how you would want to be treated. Maybe the other one tells you that if your child talks back to you, you ought to kill him, and that it’s honorable to offer your daughters up to be raped by an angry mob. So you take those commandments, and you evaluate how good they are, how morally upstanding they would make a person who followed them. You can imagine doing that, right? Even without knowing which set of commandments belonged to God, the supposed arbiter of all morality. My guess is that you’d pick the first one to worship as God, and the second one to shun as Satan. The second one sounds pretty awful.
Here’s the thing, though. All of those things are in the Bible, said by God or people speaking with his endorsement. The first set sounds familiar, I’m sure, but killing unruly children is laid out in Exodus, the story of Lot is right there in Genesis, and the apostle Peter later calls Lot just and righteous (2:7-8)… so you can’t claim that you’re just using the commandments of the God you already know to pick the hypothetical God in this example. There’s more where that came from, too, as I said in the comment thread:
I wouldn’t call a deity “benevolent” if they would think it’s good to kill everyone and start fresh every time a few people started misbehaving. I don’t approve of stoning to death as a punishment for anything. I don’t see any moral problem with homosexuality. I doubt that a benevolent God would set up a society with women inferior to men rather than equals, or that He would proclaim everyone to be tainted with original sin.
Even if you disagree with some of the particular cases, the general point is clear. We are able to look at rules and principles and judge them on criteria that are not derived from God.
The easy but weak analogy to make here is to a brutal dictator. Insert your choice of cliché example. Obviously, people condemn his regime because they look at what he did with extreme power and realize its moral repugnance. Reductio ad Hitlerium is so overused that people will overlook a situation where the analogy really is apt, so I think this sort of God vs. Satan challenge is a better trope to use. I’m not arguing that Satan might really be the good one, and God the bad one. If the Bible is entirely true, the Christian God is the one we ought to worship. However, this example makes clear the fact that moral judgments are something we are capable of, outside the scope of any deity’s commandments.
Thoughts on humanity
Just a quick post today. Check out this video, made by a student for a class project. People walking down the street are asked, “What does it mean to be human?” and these are their responses.
I found it interesting to note the common responses and the uncommon ones, as well as people’s reactions when it was clear they’d never thought of this question before. Happily, most seem pleased rather than upset at the prospect of thinking philosophically about life. It would be an awesome experiment to do this in several cities, around the country or the world, and see how people responded the same or differently.
What to do with opposing views?
Two months ago Dr. Steven Novella, who writes at NeuroLogicaBlog, was invited to be an expert on an acupuncture debate, and directed readers of his blog there to see more and comment. I followed his link and found Opposing Views, a website that hosts debates between experts in the topics debated, and allows readers to comment on individual arguments as well as the broader questions.
There are quite a few debates there that I think readers of this site would be interested in. If debunking pseudoscience is your thing, check out Are Autism and Vaccines Linked? or Does Intelligent Design Have Merit? The more religiously (or irreligiously) opinionated of you might want to take part in Should Religious Symbols be Displayed on Public Property? or even the more fundamental Is There a God? There are of course the classic debates on same-sex marriage and the electoral college, and many others. What’s really nice about the format is that they have verified experts representing their respective sides. While I can’t exactly say I’d vouch for the credibility of some of them (for example, the Discovery Institute), they certainly are experts in whatever it is they’re defending. No one can pout later about how their side was unfairly represented by someone who was unprepared and ill-informed.
So, I’ve been hanging around there for a while, commenting to point out nerdy things like post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies and trying to engage people in intellectual discussion. I like it, but sometimes I wonder if I’m caught in a bit of a “someone is wrong on the internet” trap. (If these crazy people are on a debate website, I think to myself, surely they want someone to explain to them how they’re being irrational. Four hours later….) Incredibly, the site management does moderate comments. They’re successful at weeding out the YouTube sunshine, but they can’t exactly cull all the stupid ones because that would often introduce a pretty strong bias with respect to a particular debate.
Another reservation I have is that it’s tricky to pick truly debatable topics, and to phrase the questions in ways that facilitate debate with actual clash. Consequently, some of the dialogue gets more frustrating than it really needs to be. Should We Recycle? is actually about whether recycling should be government-mandated or market-driven. Both experts in Should Prayer Be Allowed in Public Schools? ended up agreeing that there’s no problem with students who choose to pray on their own in a non-disruptive way, although many of the commenters (and probably many of the users voting in the poll) didn’t get the memo.
Perhaps more important, however, is an issue about debate philosophy that I’ve struggled with for some time. Is it better to challenge ridiculous opinions out in the open, and let them either flourish or die in the marketplace of ideas, or should we instead refuse to dignify certain viewpoints with a formal recognition such as a debate? Some beliefs are so ludicrous that even agreeing to debate them gives them more credit than they’re due. On the other hand, if any meaningful number of people did hold such beliefs, it would be pretty scary — the kind of thing you might want to take action against. (Would you waste an hour trying to convince an audience not to listen to the Timecube guy? Probably not, unless there actually was an auditorium full of Timecube believers. In that case, I might be tempted to spend a lot more than an hour, if I didn’t run screaming.) A few of the questions on Opposing Views are pretty clear examples of this type of gray area. Are Generic Drugs as Effective as Name Brands? Yes. Yes, they are, because they’re chemically identical. There are also the cases where it’s not so much that one side is definitionally correct, but that anyone who’s devoted some intelligent thought to the matter reaches the same conclusion. Debates like those are harder to pinpoint, but they’re the ones I referred to before, in which eliminating the vapid comments would leave the thread sounding pretty one-sided. Is that debate really worth it, or is it making the struggle to educate and convince people even harder?
I don’t have answers to these questions yet, but I believe they’re worth thinking about and trying to answer. In the meantime, I’ll be around on Opposing Views, and for purely selfish reasons, I hope some of you will be too. There are these structural and philosophical difficulties that may or may not ever be overcome, but I still hate to see someone be both wrong and unchallenged on the internet. (More than 80% of responding users think that acupuncture works, despite the studies that have shown pretend acupuncture to be more effective than the real thing.) If some of you are there with me, we can make a dent in some of those poll results, and fill the comment threads with some higher-level critical analysis. At least for now, I’m naive enough to believe that it makes a difference.