1993 Skeptics Conference

Science, Pseudoscience and Junk Science

Christchurch, September 3rd-5th

The programme for the 1993 Skeptics Conference is still under development, but it’s shaping up to be really interesting. It’ll be a rather omnivorous event, complete with meat and teeth. Come along for the usual humour and frivolity that make our conferences fun, but also be prepared to be challenged.

We know we’re a diverse group, but one of the common characteristics of Homo skepticus/skeptica is the tendency to talk and debate…at length…at the drop of a hat…on almost any subject.

Consequently, this year’s conference is looking at having a number of panel sessions to encourage participation from a range of speakers semi-simultaneously, with plenty of discussion time following to enable extended participation from the floor.

To date, three main panels are under development:

The Nature of Scientific Method — what are the characteristics of good science, what should we be looking for in science, how should science be conducted, and how can it be useful in everyday life?

Junk Science — having got some form of grounding in real science, we then turn our attention to junk science to see the way in which science is used and abused in everything from environmental issues to health research.

Teaching Critical Thinking — what is being done in schools to encourage critical thinking and/or an appreciation of the scientific method, what should be done and how can it be encouraged, is there room for this in the new curriculum, what is the place of science and technology?

There’ll also be a pile of speakers and unspeakable demonstrations throughout the conference, such as:

  • Ghosts
  • Police Use of Psychics
  • Acupuncture
  • Electric Medicine
  • Witches
  • Manufacturing Memory

Last, but by no means least, we are delighted to be able to tell you that we have a magical after-dinner speaker in the form of Margaret Mahy, internationally acclaimed children’s author and Skeptic. She’s living proof that you can be creative and rational at the same time! (Don’t forget to send in you filking and photography entries, even if you can’t make it to the conference itself!)

Dawkins on Theology

The British Independent recently ran an editorial not worth reproducing in the Skeptic. The editorial did, however, generate a vigorous response from Richard Dawkins which is worth thinking about.

Sir: In your dismally unctuous leading article asking for a reconciliation between science and “theology,” you remark that “people want to know as much as possible about their origins.” I certainly hope they do, but what on earth makes you think that “theology” has anything useful to say on the subject? Science is responsible for the following knowledge about our origins.

We know approximately when the universe began and why it is largely hydrogen. We know why stars form, and what happens in their interiors to convert hydrogen to other elements and hence give birth to chemistry in a world of physics. We know the fundamental principles of how a world of chemistry can become biology through the arising of self-replicating molecules. We know how the principle of self- replication gives rise, through Darwinian selection, to all life including humans.

It is science alone, that has given us this knowledge and given it, moreover, in fascinating, overwhelming, mutually confirming detail. On every one of these questions, theology has held a view that has been conclusively proved wrong. Science has eradicated smallpox, can immunise against most previously deadly viruses, can kill most previously deadly bacteria.

Theology has done nothing but talk of pestilence as the wages of sin. Science can predict when a particular comet will reappear and, to the second, when the next eclipse will occur. Science has put men on the moon and hurled reconnaissance rockets around Saturn and Jupiter. Science can tell you the age of a particular fossil and that the Turin Shroud is a medieval fake. Science knows the precise DNA instructions of several viruses and will, in the lifetime of many present readers of the Independent, do the same for the human genome.

What has “theology” ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has “theology” ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? I have listened to theologians, read them, debated against them. I have never heard any of them ever say anything of the smallest use, anything that is not either platitudinously obvious or downright false.

If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow there would be no doctors but witch-doctors, no transport faster than a horse, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference?

Even the bad achievements of scientists, the bombs and sonar-guided whaling vessels, work! The achievements of theologians don’t do anything, don’t achieve anything, don’t even mean anything. What makes you think that “theology” is a subject at all?

Richard Dawkins, Oxford

Skeptics Crush Baby Rabbits

The abuse of the Skeptics as “arrogant, narrow-minded bigots” by defenders of Consumer is annoying, but it doesn’t yet surpass an art teacher who wrote an article for a Wellington paper in 1986. Overseas — or rather underseas — skeptics, he warned, had once tried to disprove ESP by going down in two submarines. In one, skeptics rushed baby rabbits to death, while in the other submarine skeptics measured the reactions of their mother to see if she was getting the terrible psychic vibes. Despite her pathetic shudders, delivered on cue, those awful skeptics still wouldn’t believe in ESP!

This malicious little fabrication might inure skeptics to other accusations. But it still comes as a shock — even for arrogant, bigoted, narrow-minded baby rabbit crushers — to be capped politically correct. Carl Wyant suggests it (see p. 15), claiming that our failure to attack religion betrays a politically correct solicitude for the sensitivities of other cultures. Okay, we give in. If Carl can supply the Teheran postal address of the Hashemi Rafsanjani, I’ll send the good cleric the next Skeptic, along with Carl’s address if the fellow has any further questions or lines of enquity. And thanks for the suggestion, Carl.

A second blast comes from Frank Haden (see p. 13), who left the Wellington conference feeling that “the group is in grave danger of being subverted by believers.” Maori-bashers and gay-bashers were subject to ridicule, he writes, along with the Round Table and Treasury incompetents. That there are no Skeptic defenders of Maori or gay-bashing is hardly disturbing, but Haden’s charge of political bias does have some basis, given what both Jack Shallcrass and Brian Easton had to say in Wellington. Their talks were political, though this was unusual for a Skeptics conference.

A more important point of clarification for Frank Haden. The Skeptics are not interested in “universal disbelief,” as he call it. Radical Pyrrhonian skepticism is pointless, except to bait believers. Skeptics accept the intellectual credibility of modern science, not because they’re by temperament obedient, but because of all the human enterprises of the last millenium, science is among the most successful. Skeptics tend to be what philosophic parlance calls pragmatists and “scientific realists”: they view the world as existing independently of our beliefs and desires, having its own intractable nature. We’re right about it, or wrong, but the world itself must determine that. We don’t construct reality, we discover it. The Skeptics’ call is not for disbelief, but for evidence.

To the contrary, it’s one of the delusions of extremist political correctness that it can freely alter reality by relabeling it. It’s not nice to be crippled, so we make it better by calling it “disabled,” and when that seems tired we go on to “physically challenged.” The names change but, alas, the condition does not, and you’d have to be optically challenged not to see it. An interesting foyer argument developed at the conference with Frank on the one side and Hugh Young and Vicki Hyde on the other, but I cannot see that politically correct language has much bearing on the mission of the Skeptics.

Still, if there are Skeptics worried about political correctness, they will be happy to know that our new leader, Vicki Hyde is (1) a woman of (2) Maori descent (Ngati Maniapoto). She’s never crushed a rabbit, but watch out bunnies — she (3) owns a ferret, and he’s said to be a dedicated skeptic.