We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it. And, again, I wouldn’t put someone who looks like me entirely outside the bull’s-eye (after all, what would Adam Gadahn look like if he cleaned himself up?) But there are people who do not stand a chance of being jihadists, and TSA screeners can know this at a glance.

PZ Myers was, as is his habit, a little too fast on the draw and immediately jumped to the conclusion that Sam Harris supports racial profiling. Hemant Mehta, likewise keeping with his habit, was a little bit more measured and charitable. To be fair to Sam he explicitly isn’t exempting himself from looking like a Muslim. Although to be less fair Adam Gadahn looks perfectly clean to me, which makes it sound as if Sam equates traditional middle eastern Muslim appearance with uncleanliness. (Not cool.) However, even given Sam’s inclusion of his own appearance and his subsequent clarification that he’s “not narrowly focused on people with dark skin,” (as opposed to ‘broadly,’ I wonder?) this just left me wondering whence Sam’s proposed knowledge-at-a-glance is supposed to arise.

He does offer some hand-waving and a very vague suggestion that “ethnicity, gender, age, nationality, dress, traveling [sic] companions, behavior in the terminal, and other outward appearances” might be indicative of “a person’s beliefs and terrorist potential” peppered with an ad hominem for good measure, that if you disagree with this Barnum statement, you’re either crazy or dishonest. Oh, so that’s it? All I have to do so that I too may be able to reliably identify Muslims at a glance is to consider every single one of their observable characteristics? Gee, thanks, Sam. I’m glad we cleared that up. If we implement this method of yours today, I’m sure the American prisons will be filled to the brim with would-be terrorists in no time. We just have to glance at people and take into account everything about them. Genius!

Look, contrary to Sam’s criticism towards his detractors, this – to me – isn’t at all about political correctness. Nothing could be less of a factor to me: I’ve drawn Mohammed two years in a row. It’s just that for a man who otherwise prides himself on rigorous sceptical and critical thinking backed up by facts, this idea of Sam’s seems remarkably sloppy, ill-conceived, and quite frankly it seems ideologically clouded by Sam’s (perhaps justified) animosity toward Islam. Sure, dislike Islam for valid reasons if you want. It’s certainly not less deserving of criticism than, say, Catholicism. However, please base policy upon factual efficacy, not personal dislike, however warranted it might or might not be.

Efficacy, after all, ought to be the crux of the matter here, and I can’t for the life of me understand how Sam imagines this will work. There are around 1 billion Muslims in the world, most of which aren’t terrorists, so even if we could somehow magically recognise them “at a glance,” how would that help? And what about Sam’s claim that “it is simply a fact that, in the year 2012, suicidal terrorism is overwhelmingly a Muslim phenomenon?” Is it now? Because I was under the impression that 94% of all America-based terrorism was perpetrated by non-Muslims. Depending on the base rate, of course, it seems likely that you’d catch more terrorists by systematically ignoring all the Muslims.

In any case it’s all irrelevant if we can’t reliably detect Muslims at a glance. So either Sam Harris must be proposing racial profiling after all or else he must have some Disney-scenario held in his imagination where Muslim terrorists show up at the airport cackling evilly and sporting full orthodox beards while wearing keffiyehs, thawbs, and sandals. As opposed to looking like Everlast here, who’s been a devout Muslim since 1996. (Not that I’m implying, mind, that Everlast is likely to blow up anything but mics.)

You know what, Sam? I’ll just let Sage Francis play you out.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’ll show you which culture to pump your fist at, which foot is right to kiss.
We don’t really know who the culprit is yet, but he looks like this!
We know who the heroes are; not the xenophobes who act hard.
“We taught that dog to squat, how dare he do that shit in our own back yard!”

Dr. at the November 29, 2005 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council, in Washington, D.C. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

A couple of days ago there was a minor kerfuffle between Hemant Mehta, the Friendly Atheist, and Neil daGrasse Tyson, the equally friendly astrophysicist, over the correct usage of the term ‘atheist.’ It wasn’t very interesting to me. Neil can call or refrain from calling himself whatever he wants. To me anyone who lacks a belief in gods is an atheist, but that’s how I choose to use the word. Some people use it differently. That’s fine. If they object to be called an atheist, I will respect their wishes even if I personally happen to think they are one. I share Neil’s disdain for arguing semantics. If both parties have clearly defined their terms from the outset, then it shouldn’t be a problem. Good on you, Neil, for wanting to focus on real issues instead of trivial semantics.

However, that is not what woke me from my slumber. Rather, it was the following paragraph from Neil deGrasse Tyson’s elaboration in the comments after Hemant’s blog-post:

The concept that you can’t prove a negative is often applied to “you can’t prove God does not exist”.  This notion, while strictly true in logic and philosophy, is simply rubbish to the practicing scientists. That’s why logicians and philosophers, in modern times, make bad scientists.  We prove negatives all the time.

I know it might seem petty and needlessly nitpicky of me to criticise a man as awesome as Neil for something he probably wrote in all due haste in a comment to a blog-post – hey, I’ll confess that I’m not always as lucid and deliberated in internet communications as I could be – but Neil managed to touch upon no less than two of my pet peeves with pin-point precision: namely the condescension of many academics towards philosophers and the oft-repeated misapprehension that ‘philosophy’ or ‘logic’ somehow prohibits the proving of a negative. What follows is the response I made to Neil in the comments:

I’m sorry, Neil. I’m a big fan. I really am. But rather than supporting that philosophers make bad scientists, that paragraph supports that scientists such as yourself make bad philosophers. I’m actually astounded that a person like you, who usually has such an immense depth of knowledge would say something so profoundly ignorant of philosophy and logic.

First of all, qualifications out of the way: I’m almost done with my MA in philosophy, but any other philosopher worth their salt will also tell you what I’m about to tell you: no, it’s decisively not true – strictly or otherwise – in either logic or philosophy that you can’t prove a negative. That’s complete nonsense. In fact, if that were the case, how on Earth would you know, since “you can’t prove a negative” is itself a negative statement? Not to mention that any positive statement is a negative statement of a negative statement. ‘(p & not-q)’ is truth-functionally equivalent to not-not-(p & not-q) which again is truth-functionally equivalent to not-not-not-not-(p & not-not-not-q) and so on. There is no profound logical difference between a positive and a negative proposition, which lets you philosophically prove the former but inhibits you from proving the latter.

There are various forms of philosophical argumentation, but let’s go with simple deduction. A deductive argument is valid if and only if the conjunction between its premises and the negation of its conclusion results in a logical contradiction. That is, the concept of validity is itself founded upon the law of non-contradiction, which is the negative statement that “it’s not the case that p and not-p.” Which, wouldn’t you know it, can be proven formally as follows:

1) (A & ~A) [Proposition]

2) A [Conjunction elimination from 1]

3) ~A [Conjunction elimination from 1]

4) ~(A & ~A) [Reductio, 1 - 3]

You’re a great man, Neil. But, please, in the future refrain from saying that philosophers are bad scientists simply because you don’t understand philosophy.

Yours truly,
Heini Reinert

Post-edit: I should have mentioned that I borrowed my law of non-contradiction argument from here, since I didn’t feel like reinventing the wheel.

Alvin Plantinga - Image via Wikipedia

The discussion is interesting and well worth a listen. Although I think both sides could have made a stronger case. The moderation was mostly fair. However, I couldn’t help my bemusement that Plantinga was consistently ‘Plantinga; one of the world’s greatest philosophers of religion etc. ad infinitum‘ while Stephen Law had to make do with being just plain old ‘Stephen Law.’ I mean, sure, what do I know? Perhaps Plantinga just has these Übermensch qualifications to rival even The Stig while poor Law is inexorably left behind in the dust of mediocrity. But it did become increasingly comical in iteration as the show progressed.

The first part of the show was naturally dedicated to Plantinga explaining his argument. I shan’t explain it better than I already have. It’s a simple enough idea, and anyone with an urge for detail can listen to the show or read more about it online. The next part of the show was dedicated to Law’s questions, worries, and objections. Law – who by the way is currently relevant by having taken William Lane Craig up on his debating challange – started things off by questioning whether the probability of naturalistically evolved reliable cognition is truly as low as Plantinga thinks it is. It is entirely the right question to ask. Unfortunately, however, it led to an impasse very fast. Neither man was able to give any particularly persuasive arguments for their preferred probability assessments.

Stephen Law

On agreeing to move on, Law raised an issue, which could easily have been of particular relevance. I say ‘could have been’ because I feel Law dropped the ball somewhat. His worry was that even if we grant Plantinga his argument, it might just as equally lead to a defeater for theism as for naturalism. Plantinga’s theism entails an omnipotent divine creator with a desire to bestow upon us cognitive reliability. However, says Law, if our cognition then leads us to the conclusion that there is no such omnipotent divine creator, then we land ourselves yet again in murky waters. Unfortunately his chosen cognitive method of arriving at a no-God conclusion is the classic problem of evil, which Plantinga doesn’t find very persuasive anyway. I don’t necessarily find it as unpersuasive as Plantinga must, but I think it brings us somewhat far afield from the topic at hand. At the very least I think Law missed an excellent opportunity to bring Plantinga to task with a problem Plantinga seems to have created for himself.

The classic problem of evil is (roughly) that there seems to be an inconsistency between our actual world (it has evil/suffering) and the kind of world we should expect given an omnipotent, omniscient, and omni-benevolent creator. We can easily modify this argument to bring it closer to Plantinga’s home. There seems to be an inconsistency between our actual world, in that our cognition is massively and systematically unreliable, and the world we should expect given an omnipotent creator with a preference for cognitive reliability. We might call this ‘the problem of bias.’ I.e. whereas the problem of evil asked “If God has the ability, knowledge, and desire to prevent evil, whence then evil?” our modified version much more modestly asks “If God has the ability and desire to make humans cognitively reliable, why aren’t we?” This problem is far less easily brushed off by Plantinga than the classic problem of evil. (I should note that according to Wikipedia both Fitelson and Sober, and Ramsey have mentioned a similar problem for Plantinga. I haven’t read their papers, though, so I’m not in any way trying to do them justice.)

As a matter of interest I mentioned Plantinga’s argument to my biologist girlfriend. She scoffed at the argument and suggested the – to her obvious, but to me intriguing – solution that since Plantinga’s examples of adaptively beneficial yet ultimately false beliefs are highly circumstantial, it would probably be much more cost-efficient for our brains to have true beliefs. Sort of like our brain’s ability to learn chess by the simple rules of how each piece moves contrasted with our brain’s inability to learn chess by memorising each and every possible legal chess position by rote memory. (My example, not hers.)

Click here to view the embedded video.

I have no idea who these people are and I’m too lazy to research this in-depth. So pardon me if I judge them solely by the merits of this short conversation. The man doing most of the talking (hereafter ‘The Gambler’) seems intelligent enough as apologists go. Unfortunately he is not doing a particularly good job explaining himself. If you find this video hard to follow, no worries. I did too. Just blame The Gambler. John Ankerberg, the host, isn’t doing much to improve matters either. He clearly has completely the wrong idea about the topic being discussed and The Gambler is doing nothing to correct him. Quite the comical farce.

Let’s start with some of the misconceptions. As I understand The Gambler he’s talking about the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God. The argument deals with the well-known aspect of the universal constants (certain fixed quantities partly governing our universe’s behaviour) that had some of them been altered ever so slightly, then life as we know it could not have existed. To use a popular analogy, our universe is like a machine with a bunch of dials, many of which seem carefully tuned to “life.”

This concept is hopefully understandable even without getting into too much detail. We can leave aside what those constants are and why fiddling around with them would turn off “life mode.” In any case, it has nothing whatsoever to do with whether the age of the universe is sufficient time for “evolution to occur.” I’m not even sure what Ankerberg means by this. Given large enough reproduction rates any amount of time is sufficient for evolution to occur. Not to mention that evolution is entirely irrelevant. The driving force of fine-tuning arguments is usually the supposed improbability of life; not its diversity. Why would the laws of physics allow the existence of life at all, when they could have failed to do so even more easily?

The other main misconception is that the idea of multiple universes arises solely from the atheist’s discomfort with the improbability of life. Many philosophers, theoretical physicists, and quite a few authors have postulated multiple universes for all sorts of reasons. By all means let’s concede – as I did before – that:

Accepting the actual existence of many worlds in order to escape the existence of God seems arbitrarily discriminatory

This doesn’t in any way detract from the fact, that if you have independent reasons for believing in multiple universes (e.g. because they allow you to make sense of modality or because they allow you to retain determinism in quantum physics) then it dissolves the mystery of “fine-tuning” quite neatly into a weak anthropic principle at no added cost. That is to say, if you already believe we live in a multiverse for reasons nothing to do with theism/atheism, then you get to shrug your shoulders at fine-tuning and say “Well, I suppose there had to be life as we know it in one of them.”

Which leads us neatly into The Gambler’s critique of atheists, that we commit the Gambler’s fallacy. He likens it to tossing a coin repeatedly. The coin lands with ‘heads’ up improbably often. Atheists allegedly then conclude that the coin therefore must have been tossed prior to the ‘head’ run. The Gambler considers this conclusion fallacious because the coin might be double-headed. He is right in his assessment that what he describes is an example of Gambler’s fallacy. He is wrong about the dialectic.

This is closer to how the real dialectic goes:
Theist: “The universe is remarkably structured. If you fiddled around with some of its constants, life couldn’t exist.”
Atheist: “Surely you mean ‘life as we know it’ couldn’t exist? Maybe other possible “tunings” could support other kinds of life?”
T: “Alright, but that’s just speculation.”
A: “Sure. So the universe is unlikely. What’s your point?”
T: “So it must have been purposely designed! God obviously wanted life and therefore created a life-supporting universe!”
A: “She might have done a better job…”
T: “Excuse me?”
A: “Never mind. But hold on. Surely your premise, that the universe is improbably life-supporting, doesn’t support your conclusion that therefore a life-desiring creator exists.”
T: “How so?”
A: “Well, perhaps it’s just a massive coincidence or…”
T: “Yeah right.”
A: “Oh, I agree it probably isn’t. However, it’s still not ruled out by your premise and so invalidates your argument. Or maybe there are multiple universes.”
T: “Aha! That’s the Gambler’s fallacy!”
A: “It would be if I had tried to argue that there are, in fact, such universes based on nothing but the premise that it’s improbable that our universe should support life. However, I’m not the one arguing for a multiverse, you’re the one arguing for God.
T: “But surely God is more parsimonious!”
A: “Perhaps. But if you think I would have committed a fallacy in arguing for a multiverse, because the conclusion doesn’t deductively follow from our agreed premise, then surely you must admit that your God-conclusion is equally fallacious.”
T: “But concluding that a coin, which always lands heads up is double-headed isn’t a Gambler’s fallacy.”
A: “No, it isn’t. It is, however, an argument from ignorance. At least until you’ve ruled out other possible explanations for your improbable tosses. You evidently believe in God. Suppose God intervened in the coin tosses?”
T: “But the double-headed coin is analogous to God. What is ‘God’ then analogous to?”
A: “I honestly don’t know. Some other supernatural explanation for the universe being the way it is? Maybe humans will discover magical means to time-travel, go back in time, and design the universe.”
T: “That sounds perfectly ridiculous.”
A: “Not more so than your God does to me…”
T: “…”

I had a chat with the always impeccably dressed Robin LePoidevin about atheism, agnosticism, and some of his books on behalf of the Faroese Atheist Society, ‘Gudloysi.’ Despite the anger of the thunder-gods outside, it was both interesting and quite illuminating to take a peak into the mind of such a distinguished professor of philosophy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Where’s your God now, William Lane Craig?

Although take a look at this video and tell me you wouldn’t rather be in this world than the next.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Also rapture-happy Christians should read this website before issuing their next prediction.

P.S. If anyone is interested in a thorough and passionate explanation of why it’s important to draw Mohammed, I recommend the following video by Thunderf00t:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Edit: I was featured on Friendly Atheist again this year. As last year I am very honoured to be among good company.

Click here to view the embedded video.

A while back I held a little talk loosely based on my Intelligent Design essay for the Leeds Atheist Society. I’ve had the video cluttering up my hard drive for a while but only now figured out how to convert and embed it, so there you go. The sound quality is shoddy and my accent is thick but hopefully I’m understandable.

If, for some unfathomable reason, you want, you can download the slides from the talk here.

Image via Wikipedia

Dear friend in philosophy
Thank you for your recent charming company. As you might recall from our discussion at the restaurant, I remarked glibly that omniscience entails fatalism. You, of course, disagreed with me on the grounds that God’s existence is somehow atemporal. Since informal discussions over lunch, sadly cut short by your disappearance, are less than conducive to heavy philosophy, I thought this clarification in order.

I believe I can prove my assertion. Given a few reasonable assumptions, and a particular understanding of the concepts involved, we should be able to conclude logically from infallible omniscience that:

It’s impossible for Odin to know what you’ll do and for you to do otherwise.

This is what I mean when I say ‘omniscience entails fatalism.’ I take fatalism to mean ‘truth-values of propositions about future events are inalterable.’ Or, more simply, there are truths about the future and the future is therefore fixed by these truths. What is true about the future stays true.

Now, classically ‘omniscience‘ has been understood as ‘maximal and complete knowledge of all true propositions.’ I should note that I’m assuming infallible omniscience. That is, not only does Odin know everything but it’s impossible for Odin to believe a falsehood. I think this a plausible assumption – as does van Inwagen. However, if you’re unconvinced consider only the strangeness of an atemporal omniscient Odin, who could nevertheless possibly be mistaken.

Formal argument

1.	□ ( p → q )	Def. of infallibility + omniscience.
2.	□ ( ⌐p ˅ q )	Material implication from 1.
3.	□ ⌐( ⌐⌐p ˄ ⌐q )	DeMorgan from 2.
4.	□ ⌐( p ˄ ⌐q )	Double negation elimination from 3.
5.	⌐◊ ⌐⌐( p ˄ ⌐q )	Definition of necessity from 4.
6.	.: ⌐◊ ( p ˄ ⌐q )	Double negation elimination from 5.

Mouse-over the individual symbols to see what they mean. Click links to see the rules of inference used.

Informal argument

1. Necessarily, if Odin knows what you’ll do, then it’s true you’ll do it.
2. Necessarily, either Odin doesn’t know what you’ll do, or you’ll do it.
3. Necessarily, it’s not both the case that it’s false that Odin doesn’t know what you’ll do, and that you’ll do otherwise.
4. Necessarily, it’s false that Odin knows what you’ll do, and that you’ll do otherwise.
5. It’s impossible that it’s not false both that Odin knows what you’ll do and for you to do otherwise.

---

6. Therefore, it’s impossible that Odin knows what you’ll do and for you to do otherwise.

If you clicked on any of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy links, you’ll notice that my argument shares some commonalities with their argument. It is, however, entirely my own, and as far as I’m concerned it does more with less. Please note that I derived my conclusion from the single premise of infallible omniscience. Since the conclusion derives from a single premise, the premise and the conclusion are truth-functional equivalents. Saying that Odin infallibly knows what you’ll do, is – logically speaking – just a paraphrase of saying that it’s impossible for Odin to know what you’ll do and for you to do otherwise.

Truth Table

Since the two sentences have the same truth-value under every truth-value assignment, they are truth-functionally equivalent.

Your objection

As for your objection from timelessness – i.e. Odin does not have foreknowledge because she is outside of time – I simply fail to see the relevance. Firstly, I’m not convinced that the act of knowing is coherent when applied to a “knower” outside time. Verbs imply change and change implies time. Perhaps you could have time without change, fine, but I can make nothing of  ‘change without time.’ Unless you’ll concede Odin as an entity without agency, or unless you’re ready to posit hyper-time, then Odin cannot be outside time.

Secondly, even if I concede this nonsense, I still don’t see how it applies. No particular temporal location of Odin is doing any work in this matter. What’s doing the work here is that there are true propositions about the future. We could run the same argument without any reference to either Odin or any other hypothetical future-knower. We all know that propositions can change truth-value, but, again, change implies time. There can be no atemporal change in truth-value unless you’re partial to presentism or hyper-time. In either case you shouldn’t also hold that there are propositional truths about future contingents.

Another common objection

A different objection I have encountered repeatedly – in private conversation and on the internet – is the assertion that just because Odin knows what you’ll do, she’s not forcing you to do it. Often objectors tout this by appeal to analogy. Suppose I have a son, the analogy goes, and place before him a plate of cookies before departing the room. I then know that my son will eat the cookies. However, I haven’t in any way forced him to do so and he’s choosing to eat the cookies of his own free will.

This is a silly objection for several reasons. The objector is guilty of equivocating more than once. Firstly, we’re now talking of knowledge in several degrees of certainty. Nobody claims parents have infallible omniscience about their children. The father’s knowledge doesn’t amount to an infallible certainty about the future proposition ‘my son will eat the cookies.’ The father’s knowledge is more of an educated guess. He doesn’t know infallibly that his son won’t drop dead before devouring any cookies, or that this isn’t the day his son finally grows a conscience. Odin, presumably, knows those things, so knows unconditionally what will happen. The father might be surprised, since he can’t account for everything. Odin has infallible knowledge of said everythings.

Secondly, we’re also juggling several ‘free will’ concepts. I dislike the term altogether and avoid using it when I can. My argument can certainly do without ‘free will,’ so there’s that. But to say a little more, it really depends on what you mean by ‘free will‘ and whether you’re consistent in your usage. If by ‘free will’ you mean ‘the ability to do otherwise than what Odin’s future-knowledge dictates,’ then you don’t have free will by my argument. If, however, you mean ‘the ability to act without coercion from anyone else,’ then sure, you do have ‘free will’ in light of my argument. Although I don’t see how it gets you anywhere closer to an objection.

The only solution

Either there'll be a seabattle or there won't

There is a solution to a consistent coexistence between Odin’s infallible omniscience and an open future. As far as I can see it’s the only solution. We can, like Aristotle, deny that propositions about the future have any truth-value. When the above-mentioned father says ‘my son is going to eat the cookies’ what he says is neither true nor false because it hasn’t happened yet. If there simply are no true propositions about the future, then Odin may have infallible knowledge about all true propositions unproblomatically while still allowing you to ‘do otherwise.’ Actually there isn’t an otherwise since there isn’t a wise for it to be other to – but you get my gist. Of course, this would still mean Odin doesn’t know the future. However, it wouldn’t detract from Odin’s omniscience any more than does Odin’s lack of knowledge about the distance in miles from Duckburg to Gotham City.

I trust I have clarified my side of our disagreement. Of course, I think you now ought to agree with me. However, that’s not likely to happen since I know we’re equals in stubbornness. Though you manage to pull it off far more gracefully than I. In any case take my explanation for what you will.

Your friend,
Heini

P.S. I have omitted mentioning my friend’s name for the sake of privacy. I shall leave it up to him/her whether to break anonymity.