Keller Excerpt On Evolution

"GTE* is fast becoming what Peter Berger calls a ‘plausibility structure’. It is a set of beliefs considered so basic, and with so much support from authoritative figures and institutions, that it is becoming impossible for individuals to publicly question them. A plausibility structure is a ‘given’ supported by enormous social pressure. The writings of the new atheists here are important to observe because their attitudes are more powerful than their arguments. The disdain and refusal to show any respect to opponents is not actually an effort to refute them logically, but to ostracize them socially and turn their own views into a plausibility structure." ~ Tim Keller

*GTE stands for Grand Theory of Everything, which is the attempt to use biological evolution to explain every aspect of human nature.

Comments

[matt curtis]

John Stuart Mill, in "On Liberty" had some great observations on the absolute necessity of free and open discussion. Mill observed that not only does such discussion serve to reveal truth and discredit things previously believed to be true and accepted wisdom, it also, by forcing us to defend truth, requires us to examine the reasons for our beliefs and conclusions. If those reasons are valid and sound, our beliefs and conclusions will be that much stronger. An unwillingness to consider and examine opposing viewpoints leads to an atrophy of the mind.

Our educational system unfortunately appears to be failing us. Many instructors seem more intent on teaching their students what to think, rather than how to think. As a consequence, we easily fall for fallacious arguments such as appeals to authority. Typical of the fallacies in abundant use today is that of AGW: you must accept it's true because of the "overwhelming consensus" of scientists. J.S. Mill would have rightfully scoffed at that argument.

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[Bill Kesatie]

"The writings of the new atheists here are important to observe because their attitudes are more powerful than their arguments."

A great deal of Stand to Reason a couple of weeks ago dealt with this very issue. Greg Koukl was making the point that being right isn't always enough. In preparing for debate, you can be right on the facts but still lose the debate if the other party does a better job of presentation. That, I am convinced, is the goal of the New Atheists. Their ideas are poor and not carried through to their logical conclusion. But there attitude still catches the attention of the dispossessed who want an excuse to hate Christianity.

In basketball, size matters. In debate, rhetoric matters. We have to be ready to use rhetoric when appropriate.

[tgirsch]

matt curtis:
Typical of the fallacies in abundant use today is that of AGW: you must accept it's true because of the "overwhelming consensus" of scientists.

There's a big and hugely important difference between saying "X must be true because Expert A says so," and "X is very likely (or almost certainly) true because nearly all of the qualified experts believe so."

Nobody can ever be an expert in everything, so at some point, unless you're willing to personally devote the years of time and effort required to yourself become an expert in something, you've no choice but to trust expert opinion. Is it possible that most experts are wrong? Always. But if you were assigning probabilities, the probability would get considerably smaller as the expert consensus further coalesces.

By the way, AGW accepters don't say "you should believe this because the experts say so," they say you should believe it because the experts say so and continue to provide evidence to support their case. RealClimate.org, for example, has a wealth of evidence presented and open for anyone to examine, critique, question, try to replicate, etc. It's not as if they're hiding anything.

The deniers, meanwhile, continue to operate right out of the smoking-doesn't-cause-cancer / evolution-is-a-myth / the-earth-is-flat playbook. Cast doubt, continually move the goal posts, suggest that the problems are caused by something else without ever specifying what that something else might be.

[tgirsch]

Weird. It stripped out my italics.

[matt curtis]

Tom,

However you phrase it, the argument concerning "consensus" on AGW is a fallacious appeal to authority. It is used as a means of stifling debate and avoiding a review and analysis of data and competing hypotheses.

Your assertion is easily tested. Assume the vast majority of scientists state the Earth is flat rather than spherical. Has that consensus of opinion made it any more likely that the Earth is, in fact, flat?

Opinion cannot change fact.

It seems what you have done here is to choose to trust one group of scientists over another rather than evaluate the data and analysis yourself. To justify doing so, you have often resorted to calling into question the motives of those scientists with whom you disagree. But that merely highlights the problem with appeals to authority - the focus on personality rather than fact.

[matt curtis]

By the way, I like how you finished your defense of one fallacy with the use of another fallacy: an ad hominem attack (there's another fallacy in there too, but I can't recall the name of it).

[Paul]

matt - not to speak for tgirsch, but for myself I have decided to trust one (large) group of scientists over another (much smaller) group. My support isn't unconditional, and I'm happy to listen to any decent argument, but you're absolutely right that I'm not going to examine and analyse the data myself. That's not because I'm lazy (though I am), it's because I know I'm not smart enough to do it. My math is insufficient, as is my stats, my physics, my programming, my climatology, my oceanography, and no doubt several subjects I don't even know the names of. This reflects my experience that just because I want something to be easily comprehensible, that doesn't make it so.

I have tried following a thread of point and counter-point I stumbled across. Both sides made very good points, to the extent that as I read each point I nodded along, pretty well convinced. And at the end of it all I was even more convinced that I didn't know enough, and wasn't going to spend the next four decades learning enough.

On the ad hominem point, this is the next link I opened after reading your comment - http://blogs.dailymail.com/donsurber/archives/6948. No more than an anecdote, of course, but it illustrates one of the central issues I see repeatedly; if there's one study that supports the skeptical position it *must* be true, and the five that don't *must* be wrong. It only takes one study to prove a theory wrong, but the first requirement is that the study must be true, not that it must be desirable.

[matt curtis]

Paul,

I don't disagree that there are many aspects of the science that are beyond my education, training, or knowledge. What is within reach, however, is logic, reason, and a healthy degree of skepticism. For example, if as reported by the Russian press that data sets from particular Russian temperature collection sites (that reflected cooling temperatures) were excluded from AGW models and reports, then without any particular knowledge necessary we could rightfully conclude the models would have been affected by the excluded data: the average temperature would have been lower.

Moreover, if we discover that one group of AGW scientists have lost or destroyed the original temperature data and refuse to release the computer code for their models, then we can be rightfully skeptical of their conclusions.

Finally, if we have historic evidence of significantly warmer periods during the Earth's history that precede the Industrial Age, then we can reasonably conclude that there are at least other factors that must be considered in determining what has caused any current warming.

In short, we are not all expected to be climate scientists, statisticians, or geologists, but neither should we be expected to disregard reason or surrender proper skepticism - particularly when we are being asked to make significant sacrifices and indebt our children and grandchildren.

[Paul]

mat - The issues you raise each serve, I think, to illustrate just the point I'm making. Off the top of my head:

1. The Russian press (and some proportion of the scientists) are largely controlled by the government and key industrialists who don't want climate controls because of their reliance on oil for their prosperity.

2. CRU didn't throw away the original data, they threw away their copy of it. The reason they couldn't release the data is that they don't own it, so it's not theirs to throw away or release.

3. We do have historical evidence as you suggest, which is why climate scientists repeatedly make exactly the point you do; the reason to believe in a man-made contribution to the warming is that we can't explain *all* of the warming through other means, not that there is any warming at all.

Now I'm positive that there are counter-arguments to what I've just said. In fact I'll happily dismiss point 1 as being real but negligible (though still more likely than the global Soros socialist conspiracy exhibited in the thread I mentioned earlier). And while I can completely understand the reasoning in 2, and could even imagine myself doing the same thing if I were in their situation, it's still no excuse and I'm inclined to assume that everything coming out of CRU is wrong until independently (and verifiably) confirmed.

The point is that counter-arguments exist, and arguments to counter them, until we get either to assertions without basis (on both sides) or technicalities that are beyond me.

[tgirsch]

matt:

Nice try, but no. An argument from authority is when someone argues that something is true /because/ an authority figure says so. That's not the argument that I'm making. It's not true because the experts believe it is; the converse is the case: most experts believe it's true because it's true.

If the majority of experts believe something to be true, and their ranks are growing rather than shrinking, but what they believe turns out to be false, then we're left with two possibilities: they're either simply wrong (which, as I said, becomes statistically less and less likely as the consensus grows), or they're simply lying for some reason. When it comes to conflicts of interest that would cause qualified experts to lie or obfuscate, it's quite clear which side suffers more from that.

But I find it interesting that you didn't actually address that point concerning probabilities and the need to trust experts at some point. (If you prefer, coopt Reagan's "Trust, but verify.")

As it happens, I /have/ examined the data from both sides to the best of my ability, as a non-scientist, and have found that the AGW side does a much better job of backing up their assertions than do the deniers. Which I also mentioned above: the experts I'm talking about make their methods, data, and conclusions public so that others (both experts and laypeople) can examine them for themselves. In many cases, the cases presented by the AGW-denying side are downright laughable and obviously bad-faith arguments (see, for example, January-to-January comparisons of polar ice coverage, or pretty much anything George Will ever writes on the matter).

I'm sorry if it hurt your widdle feewings to be lumped in with flat-earthers, but if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck .... Besides, it's not an ad hominem fallacy if it's true. The infamous Luntz memo is the smoking gun showing precisely how the AGW-denying side, at least among the political class, knowingly obfuscated, using /precisely/ the same tactics used by tobacco companies a couple of decades earlier. (cf., again, George Will)

In your response to Paul, you do something I find quite common among those who deny AGW -- you cherry-pick (and frankly, your list of objections may as well be a bullet-pointed list of talking points from Glenn Beck's website ).

Never mind whether or not one trusts the Russian press, there are all sorts of legitimate reasons why certain data sets may be excluded from analysis. Thus, we can't "rightly conclude" anything from the tidbit of information you've given, because it is, after all, just a tidbit, and you don't know what else is there. It also shows a common misunderstanding about global warming in general: nobody has ever argued, as you seem to imply, that warming will be steady and even across the entire globe. It's the AVERAGE surface temperature that matters, and localized cooling trends do not disprove anything. You have to look at the whole picture.

Otherwise, Paul does a pretty good job of addressing your response. He said more or less what I would have. If you think the entire case for global warming rests on CRU data and models, or even the majority of it, you're wrong. You could throw out everything CRU has touched, and the case doesn't become significantly weaker.

If you're genuinely interested and open-minded, head over to RealClimate.org and check for yourself. All of your objections are addressed there, with links to other studies and plenty of detail. As I said, they're not hiding anything.

[matt curtis]

Tom,

In your first paragraph above, you argue you're not making an appeal to authority; that you are simply arguing that most scientists believe AGW is real because it is real (if that is the case, then the whole "consensus" argument is moot because as you describe it it's not really an argument at all). But that's not really what you are saying because in the very next paragraph you go back to the traditional consensus argument which, no two ways about it, is a fallacious appeal to authority.

We simply cannot say a thing is statistically more likely to be true the more people accept its truth. More people believe in a supreme being. Does that make the existence of a supreme being statistically more likely? And it does no good to respond and say, "But they're not relying on data" or "They're not trained theologians." In the end, it matters not what they believed, but whether the reasons for their belief were true. Was the underlying data accurate, was the analysis sound, and were other possible explanations properly considered and excluded?

Let's apply your reasoning to the courtroom. Do you suggest the jury decide a case based on whether the defendant has more attorneys on his side who believe in his innocence than the victim has on her side who believe in her case. Applying your reasoning, it's statistically more likely the defendant is innocent because more people believe he is regardless of what the actual evidence may be. Or, continuing the analogy, do you mean to suggest that the 12th juror (say Henry Fonda's character from "12 Angry Men") should simply accept the consensus of the remaining 11 jurors?

Let's be clear here with respect to the arguments of both sides of this issue. There are excesses and fallacious reasoning by many on both sides. There's also frequent reliance on anecdotal evidence by both sides (an unusual heat wave, or unseasonably cold weather). There's also a great deal of hyperbole and overstatement of certainty. And that goes for both sides.

Next, my feelings weren't hurt; I was just pointing out a fallacious argument. I don't happen to believe the Earth is flat, that Nicotine is not addictive, or that there are no ill effects from inhaling tobacco smoke. More importantly, however, an ad hominem attack is fallacious reasoning even if it is true. The point of an ad hominem attack is to address something other than the substance of a debate. For example, you may call a liar a liar in response to his claim that your house is on fire, but that doesn't mean your house isn't on fire. (I haven't read Luntz's memo so I can't comment fully; however, the summary provided by this environmental group here, http://www.ewg.org/node/8684, does not demonstrate any obfuscation. It's certainly suggestions on effective "messaging" but the summary did not provide any examples of obfuscation.)

You got me on the cherry picking. That was intentional, but I meant merely to provide a short list. There are many more I could have included, and I readily admit I didn't include counterexamples. My point, which I thought I clearly indicated, was to provide a couple of examples where we could apply simple reasoning without any special background in science and come to some conclusions. I made a point of indicating the assessment on the Russian report was contingent upon the truth and accuracy of the report. I don't know that the report is true, and I'm skeptical of much press reporting - particularly the Russian press.

Now, let's assume the report is true. There may still have been legitimate reasons for not including the lower temperatures from particular sites. The article suggests the data was cherry-picked to include only those sites showing warming. Right now we simply don't know whether the data was rightfully excluded (or even that it was). Let's next assume your assertion about AGW theory is correct: that global warming is not uniform across the globe. If accurate data (temps below the global average) were excluded from the analysis, then a reasonable and proper conclusion would be that the actual average global temperature was less than reported. If I took 10 temperature readings with 2 slightly above an averaged normal, 3 more significantly above that normal, 2 slightly below the normal, and then threw out the 3 significantly below the normal, I would end up with a higher average temperature. I don't know that the Russian press report is true, but, if it is, the conclusion that the actual average temperature is lower than reported is true.

I agree that if there are other similarly large (as claimed) data sets that reflect accurate data, well-designed models, and true assumptions, then the CRU scandal may ultimately be moot. Again, either the data and analysis are correct, or they're not. NASA or the Univ. of Alabama may have gotten the data and analysis right where the CRU did not. CRU may have been the only climate change group to fudge the numbers. Then again, it's my understanding that NASA has not yet released its data or computer code in response to FOIA requests. We'll have to wait and see, but the overall point here is that we should be demanding free and open inquiry. The current AGW argument more closely resembles the Inquisition (hyperbole intended).

[tgirsch]

I'd swear I responded here, but either I failed to complete the response correctly, or Jeff's spam filter has correctly identified me as a nuisance and thrown me into the internet dustbin. My previous response in short form:

- As indicated at Lean Left, you seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of what the "argument from authority" fallacy actually is. (You complained about a cherry-picked source, so I provided several more references that confirm my position.)
- The existence of God is a non-scientific question, so the analogy to theologians fails. If, on the other hand, we're talking about the meaning, context, or authenticity of a particular religious text, then an appeal to theologians would be entirely appropriate.
- In your courtroom analogy, you've got it all wrong. The experts aren't the lawyers, they're the jury.
- Your omitted data example ignores the possibility that there was other, HIGHER-than-average data which was ALSO omitted for similar reasons.
- The CRU "scandal" doesn't have as much "there" there as you seem to think, and the reason they don't release their data is because they're legally and contractually prohibited from doing so (it's not their intellectual property). I agree that this is a travesty and needs to be fixed, but it is not an example of them intentionally hiding things.