If a claim isn’t disprovable, then anything can be made up and asserted as truth. Those who are interested in an honest search for truth need to keep this testable quality in mind as they engage in their search.

This brings us to the 9/11 Truth movement, those individuals who make the claim that the United States government was directly responsible for 9/11. For this claim I have no pre-existing bias against this idea whatsoever. In fact I consider the Bush administration to be one of the most corrupt and dangerous governments this country has ever had. This might lead some to think I would be supportive of the idea that the government was behind 9/11, but I’m neither supportive nor dismissive. This is because I’m more concerned with discovering what’s true and I’m aware that my dislike of the Bush administration has no bearing on what the truth really is.

At the moment, I’m not interested in going through why this claim doesn’t hold water for me, that might be a subject to tackle later, for now I want to address one of the many specific claims about 9/11 that the movement asserts: the controlled demolition of WTC building 7. Here’s a video example:

9/11 Truth claims about WTC 7

Many in the 9/11 Truth movement claim that there was nothing structurally wrong with WTC 7 except for a few fires inside, they claim that explosives were planted in the building and that after everyone was evacuated, the building was intentionally destroyed by explosives. Now what are some testable claims that can be made to disprove the hypothesis. Remember, if we can disprove it, then the claim has little merit.

1. No steel building has ever collapsed due to fire, therefore WTC 7 must have been brought down intentionally. If there was no evidence that WTC 7 experienced damage other than fires, this claim has merit.
2. The building’s collapse looked like a controlled demolition, therefore it must have been brought down intentionally. If it can be demonstrated that the collapse could not be due to causes other than a controlled demolition then the claim has merit.
3. Loud explosions were heard before the collapse, this must mean that explosives were planted in the building and it was brought down intentionally. If it can be shown that the explosions are only consistent with a controlled demolition and/or that there couldn’t have been another source of the explosions besides planted explosives, then this claim has merit.

Response

1. There is evidence contradicting the claim that the only damage to WTC 7 was fire. In fact WTC 7 appeared to have sustained exstensive damage due to falling debris from the destruction of the first two towers. Unfortunately, clear photographs of the damage are difficult to find because of the massive amount of smoke coming from the intense fires inside the building.
2. Many people with training in building demolition as well as engineers who were actually on the site believe the collapse was due structural failure caused by damage from the destruction of Twin Towers as well as (unintentional) internal explosions. In addition, it takes, at least, weeks to prep a building this size for demolition. Buildings are generally stripped, especially of fire-proofing so explosives can be directly attached to the structural supports. If this hypothesis is true there should be some evidence that this occurred before 9/11. Another problem with this claim is that we don’t have a good comparison to make between a large steel structure like this being demolished intentionally, and one that was unintentionally destroyed through other means. In this instance their claim that ‘no other steel building has collapsed due to fire’ works against them. The very fact that we don’t have pre-existing examples of what a building collapse due to an airliner crash or damage from another huge building looks like, makes this claim largely irrelevant.
3. The explosions heard by witness have another explanation more consistent with an accidental destruction. The building was outfitted to be a command post for NYC emergency response in case of a situation like 9/11 and fuel-filled tanks were meant to supply emergency generators in the building so the command post could maintain power. The explosions were mostly-likely caused by these tanks.

There are also other problems with the hypothesis that WTC 7 was intentionally attacked:

Further Problems

1. If the 9/11 attacks were planned and the government intentionally killed 3,000 people in the other attacks, why wait for WTC 7 to be evacuated before destroying it? Wouldn’t their cause been further supported if there was an even higher body-count?
2. If it was the conspirators’ intent to destroy WTC 7 all along why not fly a plane into it or make it part of the attack instead of (luckily) having it first be damaged by the other towers?

We have demonstrated that the 9/11 Truth claims about WTC 7 are greatly exaggerated as to their concreteness. Since good, alternative explanations exist for the claims of the 9/11 Truth movement, the WTC 7 building collapse should at least be treated as a very poor piece of evidence, if not discarded altogether.

When these arguments against their movement are dismissed, I can’t help but think that the 9/11 Truth movement lacks appreciation of the truth. Instead, they’re presenting a cause or idea that they’ve already latched onto and have no intention of letting go of no matter what evidence is provided. It has become an ideology and whoever doesn’t agree with them is either blind, stupid, or part of the conspiracy to cover up the ‘truth’.

This is a paranoid mindset that exemplifies the certaintude of the conspiracy proponents. Many people don’t like hearing that their cherished belief is wrong (or at least that the evidence in favor of it is not as solid as they had assumed) and will attack those who challenge that belief.

This is why, when claims of a factual nature are made (especially claims as extraordinary as the 9/11 Truth claims), provisional acceptance is the most prudent position. This way, if better evidence is discovered we don’t have to worry about feeling foolish. We will be okay with accepting a new, better position because we were always willing to change our mind in the first place.

There’s a form of very bad thinking that I see a lot in some very smart, thoughtful people.

The thinking goes like this:

“Great thinkers throughout history have had unpopular ideas that everyone disagreed with.

“I have an unpopular idea that everyone disagrees with.

“Therefore, I must be a great thinker.”

I do understand the impulse. If you’re a non-conformist and an independent thinker, you’ve probably gotten used to pushing against the current — to the point that doing so feels more comfortable and natural than going along with it. If you’ve spent your life resisting popular but stupid ideas, resisting popular ideas can become a reflex. And it can be very easy to start thinking of yourself as a smart person simply because you resist popular ideas.

The problem, of course, is this: It’s certainly the case that being popular, widely accepted, believed by the scientific/ academic/ medical/ etc. establishment… none of that makes an idea true.

But none of it makes an idea false, either.

You know what makes an idea false? Being false. You know what makes an idea true? Being true.

And it’s not like Galileo Fallacists are out there doing the research themselves…Galileo Fallacists are mostly just laypeople like the rest of us, and they’re relying on authority just as much as anybody else.

They’re simply relying on different authority — authority that supports their “you can’t trust the Man” view of the world. They’re rejecting The Man, only to accept the word of a different Man.

It is also similar to what she calls the Gadfly Corollary.

The Galileo Fallacy is often accompanied by the Gadfly Corollary. It goes something like this

“Great thinkers throughout history have make people upset, angry, irritated, or insulted.

“I make people upset, angry, irritated, or insulted.

“Therefore, I must be a great thinker.”

The fact that you’ve made people mad at you doesn’t automatically make you a misunderstood genius. Sometimes it just makes you an asshole.

Go read the whole thing. If Greta Christina has many more posts like this, I might’ve found a new blog to follow.

No. She doesn’t remember.

And that’s the problem.

There are some AIDS denialists who were around in the ’80s. But an awful lot of them don’t remember. They weren’t around during the early days of the epidemic, when there was absolutely no treatment and your life expectancy when you got diagnosed was a few months, a year or two if you were lucky. They don’t remember the days when a diagnosis was pretty much a death sentence — a sentence to a slow, painful death. (Some people with AIDS lived through those days to tell the tale, but not many.) They don’t remember having half their gay male friends get sick and die. They don’t remember people lying in the streets screaming for the medical establishment to fucking pay attention and work on a treatment, some treatment, any treatment at all.

Same thing with vaccines.

And I think the same thing is happening with the vaccine resisters: the people who insist that vaccines — measles, mumps, rubella, polio, tetanus, what have you — are useless poison, foisted on an unsuspecting public by a Big Pharma cabal of cackling men in expensive suits.

The problem, again, is that they don’t remember.

They don’t remember what the world was like before the vaccines. They don’t remember the polio epidemic that killed thousands of children and disabled tens of thousands — in 1952 alone. They don’t remember the rubella pandemic of the 1960s, when tens of thousands of babies were born dead or with birth defects because their mothers were infected. (FYI, I could easily have been one of those babies — my mother got rubella shortly after I was born, and it could easily have been just a little earlier when she was pregnant with me.) They don’t remember the time when people routinely died of lockjaw… and they don’t live in non-industrial parts of the world where people still do.

But of course, in order to counter the denialist’s claims that the author is some kind of drug company stooge, she has to add a caveat at the end of the article.

Look. I’m no great friend of the drug companies. I get that the way health care is handled in this country is — how shall I put this? — evil. Its purpose is largely to make insurance and drug companies rich, not to help healthy people stay healthy or sick people get better. Ingrid works in health care in this country, and she could tell you stories that would curl your hair. See “Sicko” if you don’t believe me.

But that doesn’t mean that AIDS drugs don’t work. And it doesn’t mean that vaccines don’t work. The evidence is overwhelming that they do.

Yes, our country’s health care system sucks. But our educational system sucks as well. And one of the ways it sucks the most is in its failure to teach reasoning, cause-and-effect… and history. The history of AIDS drugs, and the history of vaccines, are a history of the prevention of pointless suffering and death — millions of times over.

It’s ridiculous that this needs to be done, but often people who spout irrational conspiracy theories live in a pretty black and white world, where if you don’t agree with them, you must be part of the conspiracy.

However, the reason is that I find it quite rare that I can read through a purely Christian book without experiencing a great amount of incredulity, and being rather disappointed in the level of intellectual stimulation these books provide, as well as their level of writing skill. Either, they just can’t keep my attention, or they make claims about things that are backed by insufficient evidence or poor reasoning.

But, I have to add, because this is quite important, it’s not only Christian non-fiction books that I have problems reading. I also find many secular books poorly reasoned or poorly written. A good example is The Christ Conspiracy The Greatest Story Ever Sold by Acharya S. It’s a book that attempts to show the falsity of Christianity by reference to historical scholarship and the study of mythology. It’s a book that I might find interesting, it certainly reinforces my own worldview, however many of the argument claims presented in the book were rather weak or extrapolated from poor evidence. The feeling I got while reading it was that the author would use any means to attack Christianity without regard to the validity of her arguments.

So basically, I don’t like bad arguing, whether it’s for or against a position I already profess. I am a lover of truth, no matter where it leads. I’m sure some people might not consider those examples convincing, and that’s fine, but I wanted to try to dispell any accusation that the rest of the post is overly biased.

This brings me to my main point. Recently, I fell into reading another of these Christian books, The Case for a Creator by Lee Strobel. Normally, a cursory glance through the pages would’ve let me know what a disappointing read it might’ve been and I wouldn’t have started it, but I decided to this time. I’d really be open-minded and give this one a chance and I’ll read it all the way through. Maybe it wouldn’t be as bad as I thought. Certainly thousands of Christians find this book compelling, it can’t be that awful. Unfortunately, I was wrong.

Lee Strobel’s The Case for a Creator is a poor case indeed. I haven’t quite yet finished it, I’m on the second to last chapter, but I couldn’t hold back any longer from talking about it.

First, a description of the book. The Case for a Creator is one of many “The Case For…” books which include The Case for Christ, and The Case for Faith. In these books, Lee Strobel, a former journalist attempts to reinforce Christian beliefs by way of historical studies, philosophy and science. And after making my way through this one, I can see why they might seem compelling to many Christians. Strobel uses his journalistic style of writing as an attempt to make these topics more inviting to the lay reader. Some might find it inviting, but I find it dreadful. Instead of doing research, analyzing it, and then using his own voice to convey what he’s learned, he makes a pretense at objectivity by interviewing people who already agree with his position and basically letting them speak for themselves. He interjects into what they’re saying by lobbing softball questions at them so that they can easily dismiss criticisms of their position.

I believe this journalistic style is supposed to seem objective, but it doesn’t come off that way, nor do his chosen interviewees. They include Stephen Meyer, Jonathan Wells, William Lane Craig, Guillermo Gonzales, and Michael Behe. All of which are either members of the Discovery Institute or Christians. Actual objectivity might entail him interviewing some non-Christians, or even Christians who disagree with his views, but he doesn’t. This is not journalism.

Now, this isn’t my biggest complaint. I could get past the style of writing and interviewing; my hope was that perhaps the interviewees themselves could save the day and provide some insight. I was wrong.

One thing I enjoy about secular science writing is the sense of wonder I get from it. It always seems that the more questions we answer about the universe, the more questions are raised. There are always more mysteries left to solve, and each time, the universe gets larger and more wonderful upon reflection. This has always been compelling to me. This constant thirst for knowledge as well as respect for the mysteries of the universe is something you find in the best of science writers and I believe is inimitable.

The people interviewed in this book crush that sense of wonder. They proclaim in sweeping gestures that this or that question can never be answered, or is unassailable by science. That somehow, the grand history of human inquisitiveness is at an end, there is nothing left but for us all to acknowledge that ‘God did it’ so scientists can just pack their bags and go home. They speak with such arrogance, it’s almost painful to read.

One of the most frustrating claims made in the book in this regard, and the one that made me want to sit down and write this was from J.P. Moreland, a Christian apologist and fellow of the Discovery Institute. His interview was about human consciousness and he claimed, “There will never, ever be a scientific explanation for mind and consciousness.”

Modern neuroscience is still a relatively young field, and taking into account the advances that have been made in understanding the brain in just the last few years, why would anyone make the claim that this or that will never be discovered by science? It makes the person making the claims look foolish.

I am reminded of this wonderful quote by Darwin:

It has often and confidently been asserted, that man’s origin can never be known. But ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge. It is those who know little, and not those who know much, who so positively assert that this or that problem will never be solved by science.

…which is just what he asserts only a few pages later: “There will never, ever be a scientific explanation for mind and consciousness.”

If you’re going to attempt to back up your religious beliefs with science, be prepared for the consequences. History seems to indicate that scientific claims made in the advancement of a particular dogma fall short.

I can’t, in good conscience, recommend this book to anyone. Even many Christians would disagree with its claims, and its arguments against evolution are particularly poor. There’s much more to the book, and though the arguments against these claims have been made many times over, I might return to The Case for a Creator for a future post or two.

In Boulder, two days ago, a rosy-cheeked thirtysomething mother of two small children, in soft yoga velours, started to tear up when she said to me: “I want to take action but I am so scared. I look at my kids and I am scared. How do you deal with fear? Is it safer for them if I act or stay quiet? I don’t want to get on a list.” In D.C., before that, a beefy, handsome civil servant, a government department head — probably a Republican — confides in a lowered voice that he is scared to sign the new ID requirement for all government employees, that exposes all his most personal information to the State — but he is scared not to sign it: “If I don’t, I lose my job, my house. It’s like the German National ID card,” he said quietly. This morning in Denver I talked for almost an hour to a brave, much-decorated high-level military man who is not only on the watch list for his criticism of the administration — his family is now on the list. His elderly mother is on the list. His teenage son is on the list. He has flown many dangerous combat missions over the course of his military career, but his voice cracks when he talks about the possibility that he is exposing his children to harassment.

It’s been on my mind more and more lately. What is it that we, as regular Americans, can do about it? I know I want to do something, but I’m not sure what.

Whoa. Bryan Appleyard has reservations about the book. That tells you how bad it has got to be. If you show your new baby to your sister, and she doesn’t scrunch up her face and say “OOOH, she’s cute widdle one!” but instead starts talking about the miracles plastic surgery can do, you know you’ve got a really ugly baby. This book is one ugly baby. It’s the baby that would inspire your sister to get her tubes tied to prevent the possibility of repeating your mistake.

Don’t buy this book. Stick your brain in a blender first. If you want a short, safe feel for what the whole thing is like, Beauregard has an article online (it opens with a quote, but only one, thank Waring), but I’ll say nothing more — I’ve read half his book, a sufficiently painful experience. Fortunately, Shelley skewers him with a sneer. Read that instead.

Shelley also uses the word “crackpottish,” not me.

I disagree. That pot ain’t cracked, it’s pulverized and powdered. It’s a smear of dust. It’s gone to the Great Kiln in the Sky. It’s a non-pot. It has ceased to hold soil. It is soil. You could point a gentleman to the spot with the pot, and he’d have to use his imagination—and even at that, the best he’d be able conjure up in his head would be a loose pile of gravel. You know the phrase, “He hasn’t got a pot to piss in”? That’s this pot. This pot is fractured, splintered, split, shattered, blown to flinders, smashed, demolished, obliterated.

So no, I’m not going to make the mistake of calling this a work of crackpottery.

Hilarious.

Pariser has a very broad definition of “stealing.” When questioned by Richard Gabriel, lead counsel for the record labels, Pariser suggested that what millions of music fans do is actually theft. The dirty deed? Ripping your own CDs or downloading songs you already own.

Gabriel asked if it was wrong for consumers to make copies of music which they have purchased, even just one copy. Pariser replied, “When an individual makes a copy of a song for himself, I suppose we can say he stole a song.” Making “a copy” of a purchased song is just “a nice way of saying ’steals just one copy’,” she said.

With the recent decision by NBC to pull their TV shows from the iTunes music store, I was hoping this type of thinking wasn’t growing in the entertainment industry, but this statement seems to indicate otherwise.

One of the motivations claimed by NBC for removing their shows was that iPods could be used to play illegal media and they wanted Apple to take stronger measures to prevent that. This seems to indicated that they might’ve wanted only protected music to be playable on iPods, a ridiculous request. Most of my music comes from CDs I rip to my computer. I’m on my computer all the time, so it just makes sense. I should also mention that I buy CDs in lieu of buying straight from iTunes so that I can get a hard copy of the music as well as the packaging. This at a premium over iTunes albums.

Apparently, to rip these CDs to my computer is equivalent to ’stealing’. I suppose their solution would be to buy another copy of the same album from iTunes, which is bullshit.

In addition to the movie industry putting insulting “don’t steal our movies” ads in front of DVDs that you’ve already purchased, this is indicative of a larger attitude within the entertainment industry of treating their own customers as thieves and criminals, and it’s not a good way to do business. This type of attitude makes me much more reluctant to buy TV shows, movies and music from NBC/Universal and Sony.

Of course, NBC is the maker of Heroes, Lost, The Office, 30 Rock, and other shows I enjoy, so I don’t know how effective my self-imposed boycott might be. Also, their Amazon based TV service doesn’t work on Macs anyway, so it’s not like I have much of a choice there…

(via Daring Fireball)

It’s good to be hated by the right people.”

I’m not quite sure what to make of the following quote, though if it turns out to be some sort of parody, I’ll be pleasantly surprised (though I’m not holding my breath).

This film – it is going to surprise you, one and all. It’s not what you think it is. No one has seen it yet.

His next quote from Marcus Aurelius makes me think that there is really going to be no substance to this movie at all.

The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.

Since people who believe in the special creation of humans less than 10,000 years ago are the majority in the country, you might be able to take that statement as an indictment of Intelligent Design. However, from the look of the trailer and the rest of the site, it appears more likely that the entire basis for the movie will be that evolution is the majority viewpoint (at least among scientists), there are people with a minority viewpoint who don’t have the respect of the majority, therefore the majority is wrong because they’re picking on the minority. If this is the case, don’t expect too much of an examination of the actual scientific evidence for Intelligent Design (because there isn’t any). It’ll just be whining about how science is being oppressive or ‘discriminating’ against good God-fearing Christians.

However, I was pleasantly surprised reading this post by the quality of the comments below. Not a single one is respecting the Intelligent Design position, and all are critical of Ben Stein (they all also happen to be fairly well written). Some examples:

Hmmm, er, um well… that’s not much of a response. Anyone can claim to be a rebel, to be oppressed by tyranny. Playing the victim is nothing new, even with a slick paint of coat on it.
No, we haven’t seen the film. But we can most certainly judge the rhetoric and claims already being made, and those of us quite familiar with this debate and the particular buzzwords you’ve chosen have a pretty good idea of what your portrayal will involve (and what it will conspicuously leave out).
Ben’s also words seem pretty clear: you guys want to portray methodological concerns about supernatural explanations as if they were actual bans on free inquiry, rather than boundaries of disciplines with limited scopes. You want to present this as an issue of free speech, but to do so, you are simply going to ignore and misrepresent cases like Sternberg’s, in which a lot more was going on than simply his ability to speak his mind.

Framing this as a “freedom” issue is clever, but false. No one is being oppressed or prevented from thinking anything, as Mr. Stein claims. As noted above, claiming victimhood for oneself is a standard move by these people, not to mention a time-honored Republican tradition. But when scientists criticize Intelligent Design as non-scientific, that isn’t oppression or censorship; it’s the scientific method in action. But I won’t hold my breath waiting for Mr. Stein to address the scientific facts. He’ll wrap himself in the flag and cry about being oppressed and some small subset of the public will believe him.

Watch, I know a quote, too:
“Alas, to wear the mantle of Galileo it is not enough that you be
persecuted by an unkind establishment; you must also be right.”
-Robert Park

According to this post, the majority is usually wrong. The more your ideas are ridiculed, the better they must be. Everyone should try to be hated by everyone else.
Remember, it’s good to keep an open mind; but it shouldn’t be so open that your brain falls out.
There are systems in place to keep science on the right track. All untrue claims are eventually filtered out. Science has self-correction built in. Science is not closed-minded to new ideas. Intelligent design is a very very old idea that has not withstood the demands of evidence, so it has been thrown out. Yes, creationists are sometimes ridiculed, but only because science has dealt with it long ago and bringing it up again and again is like someone today trying to prove geocentrism. It should be either ignored or laughed at.
There is no such thing as “Big Science” controlling what is being studied. If a new idea works, it will pursued. It’s just that simple. If there is any merit whatsoever to a theory, it will not be simply thrown out.
At some point, the general public has to trust that science in general works, and is moving in the right direction. Suggesting that an idea is correct simply because it is criticized is absolutely ridiculous.

Check ‘em out for yourself.

It also appears that noted Science Blogger PZ Myers will also be featured in the movie. He was interviewed for a movie about the intersection of science and religion awhile back called Crossroads, however he wasn’t informed of it’s creationist point-of-view. The deception of creationists knows no ends. It’s also interesting how it appears that all of the creationists interviewed for the film were met with personally by Ben Stein, but PZ wasn’t. Hmm…

Update:
The original post has been removed, so I’ll post the entirety of it below:

Before I thank all of you movie-going readers and posters: the thoughtful, the mortal, the Supreme Beings With Bees-in-Their-Mouths apparently among us, those with intelligence as well as those with designs… it is only fitting that we invite the late, great Johnny Cash to weigh in on the merits of free speech, science and the genius that is freedom of inquiry, in the face of tyranny.

“It’s good to be hated by the right people.”
— Attributed to Johnny Cash

Indeed. We could, I’ll wager – agree that that is perhaps the only statement that all who have visited these pages today might collectively agree upon. But please – let’s have no hatreds here. Life is too long.

Thank-you all, for sharing with us. We are overwhelmed. We had no idea…

This film – it is going to surprise you, one and all. It’s not what you think it is. No one has seen it yet.
“The object of life is not to be on the side of the majority, but to escape finding oneself in the ranks of the insane.”

– Marcus Aurelius

And if we re-read Ben Stein’s words here again and again (as I have)…we may still not quite comprehend the full implications of his thoughts. But keep trying, if you misunderstood them…it’s worth it.

I do not know Mr. Stein…but I can tell you this: the man is comitted to freedom.

Let the buzz begin. Not that “Expelled’s” intentionally incendiary tone will need much help from the pastors and religious-school teachers in attendance at yesterday’s meeting. From the clips and trailers they showed, the film presents a world of–to use a quote I heard repeatedly yesterday–”the new scientific movement” (Intelligent Design, in case you weren’t sure) vs. the tired, old “theory” of evolution. Relying on news-clip montages, interviews, even cut-away shots of concentration camps, “Expelled” talks of faithful scientists and other believers losing jobs, losing grants, even losing friends in defense of ID. And, relying on footage of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and other atheists du jure, it sets up a worldview of ID vs. atheism, with no gray areas in between.

And, taking it even further, it posits that, without God, there can be no source of morality, no reason not to “stab someone on the subway,” to borrow another phrase I heard a couple of times yesterday (and which explained, according to Lauer and Logan, the concentration camp scenes, since the film will explore the influence of Darwinism on Hitler). So the battle for ID to be taught on par with evolution is no more, no less than a battle for the legitimacy of morality itself.

Just a furthering of anti-science bigotry. I’m getting rather tired of people saying that I can’t be a moral person just because I reject their notion of God. Just because an atheist doesn’t believe in God doesn’t mean that they don’t also experience pain, feel compassion towards others, and wish to get along with their fellow man. So not only are these people not being honest in their depiction of science or religion for that matter (equating belief in God with Intelligent Design creationism), they’re also spouting hate and bigotry. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised.