Archives June 2013

The Indian and the Ice: When to Believe Something

Imagine a woman living in India in the 18th or 19th century[1]. Her cousin, the sailor, has just returned from a trading voyage and, after being suitably plied with food and attention, tells his audience about distant lands where it is so cold that water becomes as hard as wood; you can break off a piece of water and hold it in two fingers.

The woman doesn’t believe him. His story seems utterly fantastical. In her experience, water is never hard. It’s always liquid or gas. As much as she wants to trust her beloved cousin, he’s also a sailor, just like the ones who have passed through town in the past, talking about mermaids and six-headed serpents.

[1] I got this analogy from The Pig that Wants to Be Eaten, by Julian Baggini. He, in turn credits it to David Hume’s On Miracles, though I gather that the analogy of the Indian and the ice didn’t actually appear in On Miracles, but rather arose out of criticism of that work.

Clearly, the Indian woman is wrong: there is such a thing as ice. But I’d argue that she’s wrong for the right reason: being too skeptical, rather than too gullible. And this is one of those cases where reality turns out to be weirder than she could imagine.

Forming an accurate understanding of the world is a balancing act: I don’t want to admit too many untrue ideas, but I don’t want to just disbelieve everything, because I also want to admit true ideas. And I also don’t want to spend my life on the fence about everything. So I use rules of thumb, which don’t always work. And so sometimes, I’m wrong.

Like other atheists and skeptics, I’ve been accused of being closed-minded. The analogy of the Indian woman and the ice is just the sort of thing a critic could point to. More things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy and all that.

But for every such nugget of implausible truth, there are several metric tons of bullshit. The Indian sailor’s story of hard water sounds, to the woman, just like other stories about six-headed monsters, centaurs, mermaids, and floating mountains. And so she’s right to reject it, at least until such time as good evidence comes along.

The cost of believing too much is measured in money and in human lives. Tim Farley keeps a running tally at What’s the Harm?. The cost of believing too little seems, to me, much lower. So it’s a chance I’m willing to take.

Paul Taylor’s Fickle Exactness

Paul Taylor, who helps Eric Hovind run the family misinformation mill in the absence of his father Kent, accuses people who think Noah’s Ark was just a story of not having done our homework:

Question 1: How did they all fit on the boat and who put them in there? Don’t forget that there were two of each specie(sic) (male & female) 

[…] The questioner makes a more serious error, however, by not actually reading the Bible. If he had read the account in Genesis, then he would have realized that the biblical account does not even refer to “species.” Instead, it refers to kind. The Hebrew word for kind is mîn. For this reason, creation biologists have started to use their own technical term for this grouping of creatures—baramin. The Hebrew bara means “created,” so baramin is a created kind.

Got that, scoffers? Specific words have specific meanings, and unless you’re careful to use just the right word, you’re arguing against a straw man!

For example:

Question 4: Didn’t Noah have to wait for many years to get the snail on-board?

Noah did not take invertebrates onto the Ark, only animals with lungs (Genesis 7:15). Invertebrates can survive such conditions.

Spineless, lungless, eh, what’s the dif’?

Anatomical snail diagram
Source: Wikimedia Commons.
Aside from the absence of a spine, note the presence of a rather large lung, which Taylor says doesn’t exist.

Of course, that’s just a diagram. That snail lung could be as fictitious as dragons and unicorns. How about a photo?

Snail lung. Photo by salyangoz, from here.

Yeah, but that’s ‘shopped. I can tell by the pixels. Pixels are scoffers. Well-known fact, that.

CNSNews Doesn’t Like Girls Learning About Their Naughty Parts

This tweet from @Defund_PP

led me to this article at CNSnews.com about girlshealth.gov, an HHS site offering information about sex, aimed at girls ages 10-16. They disapprove of it.

But the site also includes a glossary that explains anal sex and “mutual masturbation” and includes information about birth control and how to access everything from condoms to “emergency contraceptives.”

Let’s see what it says:

anal sex (say: AYN-uhl seks) = sex that involves putting the penis in the anus, or butt.

and

mutual masturbation (say: MYOO-chuh-wuhl mas-tur-BAY-shuhn) = when two people touch each other’s sex organs or genitals for sexual pleasure.

Maybe I’m being obtuse here, but I don’t see the part where HHS is telling girls to go on a spree lesbian anal orgy-ness and how their parents can write off the KY as an educational expense. Likewise, on the page on contraception, I don’t see a 10%-off coupon on birth control pills, I see an explanation of the facts that tries to be clear and not tiptoe around the subject with twee euphemisms.

But apparently the author of this piece — and many times more so some of the commenters — doesn’t seem to understand the difference between sex ed and porn. Apparently it all goes into a big mental bucket marked “Sex. Don’t touch.”

I suspect that something like this also contributes to the popularity of the “abstinence-only” movement: many religions treat sex as a taboo subject, so if you just tell kids not to do it, then maybe you won’t have to talk about it.

No, I don’t think ten-year-olds should be having sex, and neither should sixteen-year-olds be getting pregnant. (And neither, probably, should they be reading that site without parental guidance.) But “don’t do it” sex ed is about as effective as “don’t do it” driver’s ed. And the prudish attitude exhibited above isn’t helping.