Crimes Against Logic Read online

  Faith

  Mystery can help the image. You must be careful what you deem mysterious. The outer reaches of science, the relationship p. 36 between God and His human creatures—that’s the sort of thing. You don’t want to embarrass yourself by confessing to finding it a mystery how hot-air balloons stay aloft or why the tides ebb and flow with the lunar day. But keep to the right topics, and a little mystery-mongering can give off a scent of profundity heady enough to make the mind swim.

  Still, you can do better. Rather than trying to obscure your prejudice, boldly declare it a virtue. You have no reason to believe what you do, no evidence, no argument. Of course not. This is a matter of faith!

  Now you have captured the really high ground. Speak with a hushed and beseeching tone. Let the pain of your sincerity appear in small grimaces as you hold forth. Who but a philistine with no sense of the sacred, no respect for your deepest convictions, would expect you to provide evidence?

  How scrumptious to be faithful! But utterly irrelevant to whether or not the opinion in question is true. Whatever the finer feelings associated with faith, no matter how elevated those who indulge in it, from the point of view of truth and evidence, faith is exactly the same as prejudice. Declaring an opinion to be a matter of faith provides it with no new evidential support, gives no new reason to think it true. It merely acknowledges that you have none.

  When pressed, the faithful often claim that faith is required because man is incapable of knowledge in this area. This is wonderfully self-abasing: Oh God, you are so big, and I am so small, and all of that. But this self-abasement is also self-defeating. To say that knowledge is impossible is to say that, on this matter, p. 37 all opinions must be mere prejudice. It doesn’t improve things to call your prejudice faith.

  Indeed, declarations of faith are generally self-defeating. Someone will claim this status only for those opinions he cannot defend. No one ever declares his shoe size a matter of faith, nor his mother’s sex, nor the atomic weight of gold. The moment someone declares some opinion to be a matter of faith you know what to think of it.

  Odds On

  The most famous argument for believing something for which you have no evidence is Pascal’s Wager. Pascal claimed that it is rational to be a Christian even though the evidence available makes the position quite improbable. Because if by chance Christianity turns out to be true, then you win everlasting salvation. While if it is false—if there is no God and no heaven or hell—then you are no worse off than the correct atheist. On the other hand, if you refuse to believe, you will go to hell if you are wrong and be no better off if you are right than a Christian who is wrong. An atheist can never win, and he might lose badly. But a Christian just might win, and he can never lose badly. In other words, no matter how improbable the truth of Christianity, it’s always the best bet.

  There is nothing sanctimonious about this. On the contrary, it is rather tawdry. I wonder if someone who had somehow managed to make himself love Jesus on the basis of this calculation would find that love reciprocated. He certainly wouldn’t if I were p. 38 Jesus. But it is a matter of little concern, since Pascal’s argument is not all it is cracked up to be anyway.

  Note first that what is rational to believe has here been separated from what you have any reason to think true. That is the whole point of the argument. Pascal’s Wager is thus irrelevant when the question is whether or not God exists. Pascal’s Wager attempts to show that Christianity is the best bet however unlikely its truth.

  Nor, however, does the argument work on its own terms. It does not show Christianity to be the best bet. By the method of Pascal’s Wager, any other doctrine that attaches everlasting bliss to agreement and everlasting agony to disagreement does equally well. The choice is not, as Pascal tacitly assumes, between Christianity and atheism alone. The choice must be made between all the different religions according to which adherents go to heaven while everyone else goes to hell, Islam, for example. Pascal provides no grounds for being a Christian rather than a Muslim. The choice between them is a 50:50 bet.

  Worse, Islam is not the only heaven and hell rival to Christianity. There is also Blytonism: the view that only those who worship Enid Blyton as the creator of the cosmos will go to heaven, the rest to hell. Admittedly, I just made up this religion. But it is a possible religion. Why should only those religions that have so far been made up receive the benefit of Pascal’s Wager? Had Pascal lived in 2000 B.C. he might have come up with his wager, and it wouldn’t then have been Christianity that it defended. Nor should anyone object to the lack of evidence for Blytonism. It is the starting assumption of Pascal’s Wager that p. 39 the doctrine in question—Christianity, Islam, or Blytonism—lacks evidence sufficient alone to warrant belief in it.

  Once you see that Pascal’s Wager supports equally not only Christianity, nor even all established religions, but all possible heaven and hell religions, the game is up. For infinitely many such religions are possible. Which will you choose? Choose any one of them and the chance that you have made the best bet is not 50:50 (i.e., 1 in 2), it’s one in infinity: this religion versus all the infinitely many other possible heaven and hell religions.

  Each possible religion, including Christianity, is but one ticket in a lottery with infinitely many tickets. Each bet has an equal chance of being best: i.e., an infinitesimal chance. And an infinitesimal chance is no chance at all. Without some evidence, every religion is an equally hopeless bet.

  Weird Science

  Jack rehearses his latest medical conjecture, claiming that diseases can be cured by the liberal application of Thames Valley mud to the chest and shoulders. Jill points out that Jack lacks the data required to support this conjecture. Neither he nor anyone else has conducted repeatable experiments with proper control groups that confirm his idea. Jack replies that the so-called scientific method has no special claim to deliver knowledge and, for good measure, throws in a few examples of questions that remain unanswered by science and a catalog of the harm it has done to humanity and the environment.

  p. 40 Let us grant Jack his dim view of science. In so doing, we are at least fashionable. Let’s agree that scientists are sloppy, their methods unreliable, and their intentions grubby. This may please Jack, but it doesn’t really help his medical conjecture. It could be that science is dreadful and that rubbing mud on yourself won’t, in fact, cure your cancer.

  If scientific methods are unreliable then many of the views we now think justified—the view that the earth orbits the sun, that light travels faster than sound, and so on—are not really justified after all. But the justification lost by these popular misconceptions is not thereby transferred to the unsupported conjectures of those who don’t like science. Jack may be quite right about the bankruptcy of science; his hypothesis about mud curing cancer remains mere conjecture.

  Again, this is obvious from the fact that the antiscience ploy can be used in defense of any opinion at all, including contrary opinions. Jack claims that human civilization was kick-started by space aliens who taught our ancestors about fire, the wheel, and so on. Jill claims we were taught these things by a breed of talking donkey that has since become extinct. Jack and Jill can both rail against the tyranny of science, but they can’t both be right about the history of human civilization.

  Not everyone who enjoys dabbling in conjecture wants to appear antiscience. For them there is always quantum physics. No one can doubt that quantum physics is scientific; people have even received Nobel prizes for it. But look! It’s completely crazy. So, you see, crazy ideas like mine are perfectly scientific.

  It is a rare foray into gobbledygook that does not begin with a tribute to quantum physics. For example, Lyall Watson begins his Supernature by claiming that:

  p. 41 Science no longer holds any absolute truths. Even the discipline of physics, whose laws once went unchallenged, has had to submit to the indignity of the Uncertainty Principle. In this climate of disbelief, we have begun to doubt even fundamental proposition
s, and the old distinction between natural and supernatural has become meaningless.[4.2]

  What the old distinction between the natural and the supernatural was we are not informed, but, because it has become meaningless in the new climate of disbelief, my guess is that it was the distinction between what we have reason to believe and what we have no reason to believe. And once that distinction has become meaningless, well . . . fasten your seatbelts kids.

  Before considering the real implications of quantum physics for scientific reasoning, it is worth giving Supernature’s opening paragraph a little attention, because it is a beautiful example of a style popular with those who like their ideas fast and loose.

  Begin as you mean to continue. Start with an outrageous and obvious falsehood: “Science no longer holds any absolute truths.” How about this one? Light travels faster than sound. This is a scientific discovery, and it is true. It is pointless to add that it is absolutely true, because truth is always absolute. Unlike bald men, of whom some can be balder than others, true statements cannot differ in their degree of truth. A statement is either absolutely true or not true at all. Consider our example truth. How could this be partially true? Light travels either faster, slower, or p. 42 at the same speed as sound. In none of these circumstances is it partially true to claim that light travels faster. It is either absolutely true or it is false.

  “Absolutely” adds a nice touch of confusion to the falsehood, but the confusion doesn’t stop there. By saying that science “no longer” contains absolute truths Dr. Watson implies that it once did. How can this be? What is absolutely true surely can’t become false. The mind boggles. Have the laws of nature changed since the days when science contained absolute truths?

  What Dr. Watson presumably means is that some of what scientists once thought true they now think false. It is a shame he doesn’t simply say this, but I suppose the banality that scientists revise their opinions isn’t the kind of observation with which one starts a book on the supernatural.

  One obvious falsehood and two serious confusions, and we are only on the first sentence. Now for sentence two: “Even the discipline of physics, whose laws once went unchallenged, has had to submit to the indignity of the Uncertainty Principle.” The claim that the laws of physics enjoyed a period of unchallenged acceptance will entertain most historians of science, but that is a matter of little concern compared to Dr. Watson’s misuse of the Uncertainty Principle. This is not a principle, as strongly suggested by Dr. Watson’s paragraph, that states that the laws of physics are uncertain. It is, rather, the principle that you cannot simultaneously measure certain properties of a subatomic particle, its position and its velocity, for example. At any time, one of these facts about a subatomic particle must be unknown.

  How this principle can possibly show that science contains no truths or make the distinction between the natural and the superp. 43natural meaningless is an utter mystery to me. If those who introduced the principle had given it a different name—the Measure Exclusion Principle, say—then perhaps Dr. Watson would not have tried on this preposterous nonsequitur. It’s a pretty cheap play on the word uncertain. But for those who swallow this pill, the rest of Supernature will no doubt be passed quite comfortably.

  Dr. Watson’s flirtation with the Uncertainty Principle attempts to draw on a vague but widespread idea that, by being strange but true, quantum physics has shown that normal standards of coherence and observational evidence are obsolete in science. We have already noted that the obsolescence of a standard confers no support for opinions that do not meet it. But it is still worth noting that quantum physics has not really had any impact at all on the standards of scientific inquiry.

  The Uncertainty Principle, which so excites gobbledygookers, is part of the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics. The Uncertainty Principle and other elements in this interpretation of quantum physics run contrary to some of our common ideas, at least about the world of medium-sized objects that we can observe with our unaided sense organs. Superposition—the thesis that quantum objects are simultaneously in states we would normally take to exclude each other—and the role of observation in bringing about a so-called collapse into just one of these states are the hardest to understand. By most people’s lights, the Copenhagen Interpretation of quantum physics does indeed look weird.

  But this should give no comfort to those who willfully embrace weird ideas. The strange elements of the Copenhagen Interpretation are the kind of things that physicists, if they accept them at all, do so only under duress. And the duress is observap. 44tional evidence. The Copenhagen Interpretation is not willfully peculiar. It is an attempt to explain the observational evidence.

  The weirdness of quantum physics is not an example of an intellectual free-for-all but just more of the tyranny of the scientific method. More important, though, it may contain what we find hard to understand; the true interpretation of quantum physics does not involve paradoxes, that is, statements or sets of statements that contradict themselves. It cannot, because paradoxes are impossible, no matter how small the things we consider. The philosophy of quantum physics is concerned in large part with showing that its paradoxes are merely apparent.

  Internal consistency and observational evidence are required no less by quantum physicists than by any other scientists. It is only because we continue to care about consistency and evidence that there is any problem of interpreting quantum physics, or, indeed, any intellectual problems at all.

  Anyone who thinks that her favorite weird ideas—about reincarnation, astral travel, or whatever—are intellectual bedfellows with quantum physics ought to read some of the latter. She will find the experience disillusioning.[4.3]

  But Still

  Many middle-class racists adore members of the race they despise. At least that’s what they say. “I have many black friends. p. 45 Indeed, I like most of the blacks I’ve met. But you must admit that, on the whole, they’re lazy and violent.” So familiar is this line of thought that the last part may now be omitted. Just say you have many black friends and everyone will take the lazy and violent bit as understood.

  This approach to the question of racial characteristics is only reasonable. The reasonable person recognizes the strength of the case for the contrary view. You don’t just blunder in, pointing out that every black you’ve ever met is a fiend. To conclude on the basis of such experience that they are an evil bunch would display the worst kind of bigotry. You can never personally know enough nasty blacks properly to draw the conclusion that they are generally nasty. No. You must first admit that most of your limited experience suggests blacks to be decent and likeable. Only then is it reasonable to conclude that they are, on the whole, irredeemable villains.

  Though the ploy is most famously employed by racists, it is enjoyed by bigots of all sorts. Attend closely to the evidence for the contrary view, nod appreciatively while it is rehearsed, perhaps even throw in some evidence of your own, and then utter the magic words: But still.

  Yes, your boss offered you extra training, asked if you needed time off, gave you several warnings. But still, he was always out to have you fired.

  But still is a tool of logical inversion, the mirror image of therefore. Where the evidence would incline anyone to say “Therefore, grass is green,” you may instead say “But still, grass is red.” With but still in your logical arsenal you need fear no evidence. If it fits your hypothesis, you have therefore. If not, but still.

  p. 46 And, as usual with our prejudice ploys, it’s but still anything. The evidence suggests that grass is green. Fine. But still, grass is red, or blue, or any color you like.

  Colloquial English provides alternatives to but still for those keen on ignoring evidence. You have just heard formidable evidence suggesting your opinion is wrong. Alas, you have but still-ed twice already this morning. Try “yes, yes, of course, but at the end of the day, when all is said and done, you must admit that [insert opinion here].”

  Besides straight rev
ersal, watch out for exclusion. The technique is parodied in Monty Python’s The Life of Brian. Reg, leader of the People’s Front of Judea, asks his comrades “What have the Romans ever done for us?” expecting a great chorus of “Nothing!” Instead, one of the revolutionary brothers mentions the flat Roman roads. “Yeah well, there is the roads,” Reg acknowledges. “But apart from that, what have the Romans ever done for us?” “The sanitation,” pipes up another, and others mention yet more Roman improvements to their lives. But Reg never gives up: “All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, roads, fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

  You see it outside movies most often when businesspeople and politicians want to exclude what would naturally lead to conclusions they don’t care for, such as that they are no good at their jobs. “Setting aside an exceptional $200 million loss on an investment in pork-belly futures, last year’s profit was a healthy $100 million.”

  But that $200 million was lost on pork-belly futures, so that the annual result was a $100 million loss, not a $100 million p. 47 profit. Why should we shareholders not count it? It was indeed exceptional. It was exceptionally bad! That is no reason to exclude it from an assessment of management performance. Would exceptionally good performance be excluded on the same grounds? “If you ignore the $200 million profit on llama farming in California, our result was a disappointing $100 million loss,” is not the sort of thing you hear as often.