What does it tell you when someone says "I don't believe in evolution"?

boing
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I haven’t seen GMO concerns backed up by anything showing a real threat.

If we had more industry cooperation from the likes of Monsanto and therefore could have more independent and transparent scientific research (instead of mostly opaque, industry sponsored data), that would finally help to settle perceived threats (or otherwise) once and for all.

If Monsanto has nothing to hide, it’s time for them to stop acting like it. Is it really too much to ask to have more research done outside of industry when it comes to our globe’s food supply? I don’t think so.

As far as your extremist position that all GMOs are definitely harmless, I suggest you try a more nuanced approach like the Nature Journal does here:

http://www.nature.com/news/case-studies-a-hard-look-at-gm-crops-1.12907

The Nature Journal is very pro-GMO overall, but they also acknowledge the uncertainties that still need to be resolved and the dire need that “research on transgenic crops must be done outside industry” to move it forward.

I’ve seen unsubstantiated worry backed with the general mistrust of large corporations.

Do all these corporations on the right in this chart distrust themselves for being large corporations?

I-522.poster.1023.jpg2001×3092 1.19 MB

Mistrust for Monsanto is based upon a well-documented history of transgressions from Monsanto itself. Do you trust Monsanto? And, if so, why do you trust them despite their poor track record?

Monsanto - Wikipedia?

http://digitaljournal.com/article/326009

http://www.truth-out.org/archive/item/93488:wikileaks-us-ambassador-planned-retaliation-against-france-over-ban-on-monsanto-corn

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/05/14/us-usa-gmo-report-idUSBRE94D0IL20130514

Is this enough to raise an eyebrow, perhaps?

both issues have people for and against them that have an opinion one way or another without a full understanding.
Agreed, it would appear that you don't have a full understanding of those that would prefer more transparent and independent research on GMOs. Instead, you have the misunderstanding that they are simply driven by a blind mistrust "of large corporations".

While you’re busy trying to put yourself above others, maybe you need to look into your own foibles and realize perhaps you lack a full understanding of issues?

I don’t think all GMO’s are “evil” or necessarily bad in all cases, but I sure would like to be able to better determine the potential negatives from more transparent, independent scientific research like we see with global climate change.

What I want to know through more independent and transparent studies is all the (potential) downsides so I can properly wiegh that against all the purported upsides we get from opaque, industry sponsored studies from the likes of Monsanto, etc.

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You just destroyed Kahan with your post. Thanks for a great post.

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I'm sick of Sovietism and Naziism being labeled as atheistic

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Whats with the sensationalistic labeling? I can’t say I know anything with 100% certainty. But I think my lack of fear or worry is hardly extremist. I think in general people get worked up over nothing in many facets of life. YMMV.

Maybe I am naive, but in general I tend to be skeptical of broad, sweeping conspiracies. Maybe it’s just wishful thinking that a company who makes food would never knowingly make something dangerous to people.

I never suggested that it shouldn’t be continued to be researched. But when I read “10 reasons you should avoid GMO foods”, many of them come from a distrust of corporation, and many of the “what if” dangers seem unlikely. There are a lot of crack pot anti-GMO voices out there, and they tend to drown out those with more reasonable, rational concerns. Certainly I can’t paint everyone who is wary of GMO that anti-corporation is their reason for being so.

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Or just a really terrible statistician…

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There are a lot of crack pot anti-GMO voices out there
And, a lot of crack pot pro-GMO voices out there that drown out those with reasonable, rational concerns as well.
Maybe it's just wishful thinking that a company who makes food would never knowingly make something dangerous to people
That certainly is wishful thinking. ;)

http://archive.tobacco.org/Resources/00pmbrands.html

Coca-Cola - Wikipedia?

R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company - Wikipedia?

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I agree with others on this one; the way this article frames the issue is just strange.

“You only believe in evolution so it’s just cultural and no different from me not believing in it!”. Umm… okay. There are people who don’t believe in evolution mainly because they don’t really understand it, and that can be solved by education. Then there are the people who simpyl reject in religious grounds. That, to me, is anti-science.

I also hate how the article frames the issue as Democrats vs. Republicans. “Ha!”, the article points out. “Some Democats also believe in things not backed by science, like homeopathy, or are anti-vaccination!”. I DON’T CARE. Could we just focus on the fact that a lot of Americans don’t understand science and not on who believes what? You silly bipartisans.

Here in Finland I’ve met exactly one person who doesn’t believe in evolution. She came from a religious family. It was so strange talking to her. I was only 14 and hadn’t realized there are people who think dinosaurs aren’t real. The science education in Finland is real good. And this is despite the fact that we have no seperation of church and goverment. Something like 70% are members of the church, but a huge chuck of that (probably at least half) don’t really believe, they just haven’t bothered to leave the church. A lot of people just want to be able to get married in a church. And a huge majority of the ones that really do believe in God still believe in evolution.

I think he meant the people who are anti-GMO because they think genetic modification is just in and of itself scary and evil, which is a pretty anti-science position, and not people like you who have reasonable concerns about the harms and Monsanto.

I do agree that he should’ve specified what he meant, a lot of people don’t bother making a distinction and end up misunderstanding people’s positions. I think the issue is stupidly framed as “Anti-GMO vs. Pro-GMO”, anyway. There are several different points of views and concerns and they should all be looked at seperately.

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As a third party, I can assure you that there is nothing contained in the actual responses to make me think that Nonentity is more emotional about this subject than you.

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Being against GMOs isn’t an anti-science stance. It isn’t a denial of the science of genetics or genetic engineering at all, but of the particular way we’ve engineered the use of that scientific understanding.

Besides that, criticisms of GMOs can be unscientific (health claims are usually full of woo, since health is where people get very magical in their thinking, regardless of party affiliation), but not all criticisms are like that. Recent scientific studies on the use of herbicides have shown that for a growing number of areas glyphosate-resistant weeds have reached the point of negating current benefits of GMOs as herbicide use actually becomes greater on GMO crops than non-GMO crops. Other studies have shown that GMOs making minimal change in pesticide use due to resistant pests. People who oppose GMOs have various reasons (rarely Democratic party affiliation, since the party doesn’t have a stance), but they aren’t necessarily anti-science, as some critiques are tied to criticisms of business models of the vendors of GMO crops, scientific studies of the failed promises of GMOs, issues with pollen drift, issues with impact to non-pest insect life, including pollinators, etc.

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Had the disagreement been about the content of my argument rather than the semantics of my argument I would agree that my interlocutors’ intransigence is about equivalent to my own. However, their objections were purely on the grounds of semantics (as is yours). Since I provided a simple remedy for semantic disagreements from the very start (agreeing to use a word of my interlocutors’ choice instead of the word “faith”) I reject the assertion of equivalence. Quite simply the only reason to keep harping on my use of the word “faith” in that context was to find some reason to argue – otherwise they would simply have proposed a new word and we could all have moved on.

I understand what you’re saying. See if you can understand what I’m saying.

Scientific theories can be wrong. Scientific assessments of evidence can be wrong. Even ones made by expert scientists. I’m not just making this up – there are hundreds and probably thousands of cases of scientific error and fraud in history. Can we agree on that much?

So for any given scientific finding or principle I learn about I can either accept it at face value or I can question it. If I question it I will either find that the case made for the scientific principle is good or that it is not so good. It may be that the scientific finding or principle in question is simply an error or perhaps a case of fraud.

But what if I don’t question it? Then the same situation applies: the evidence and reasoning provided as the basis for the finding may be completely valid or it may be invalid in some way. However, without verifying the evidence and reasoning behind the finding myself I can’t be sure whether the finding rests on valid inferences or not. In this case, I have essentially accepted an argument from authority – I believe because the learned scientist says so (and not because I myself understand and agree with the chain of reasoning).

I may reasonably infer that there is more basis for believing scientific arguments from authority than there is for beliving religious arguments from authority – and I’ve never argued otherwise. But the fact remains that I’m accepting an argument from authority if I don’t verify the validity of the scientific evidence in question for myself.

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Or you could have proposed a new word for a concept you were describing. The argument stemmed from that fact that you said people have faith in science and others disagree. Then it became apparent that when you said people had faith in science, you didn’t mean the same thing by “faith” as you do when you say they have faith in religion. In fact, you recognize that they can be regarded as wholly distinct concepts except insofar as the same word might be used to refer to both.

However, you argued with:

If your only point is that you can imagine many people equivocating between two concepts by using a single word to refer to both, then shouldn’t you be arguing that we should not be using that word to refer to both?

Your explicit definition of faith is extremely problematic anyway. “Belief without proof” assumes that we know what proof means. If faith is belief without proof and we set a high enough standard for proof then everything is “faith” and the word is wholly meaningless. You might as well simply say that people who believe in science and people who believe in religion are both part of the universe.

But if we look at the standard people actually use to decide what they have faith in we see they are quite different. Presumably people who strongly believe reputable scientific sources and people who strongly believe religious texts and preachers both have personal experiences that lead them to think that their source of information is right. They are not acting “without proof” they are acting on what seems like good evidence to them. But that is two very different concepts: One is belief because the people you have been taught to respect say so, the other is belief because people who are following a method of inquiry you respect say so.

So lets call belief based on appeal to the authority of a person or text Faith A and belief based on the authority of a method of gathering information about the world that actually builds bridges and spaceships Faith B. What was your original point in trying to compare these two things when you said:

?

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Several good points you have there. I just wanted to point out that nutcases are everywhere, so dishonest folk can easily use them to shape a debate. People right here on BB do it; I suspect you’ve seen it already. You just ignore or contemptuously dismiss the real issues and answer the lunacy at great length, which doubles (at least!) the perceived contribution of nutcases, paints people with a single mistaken idea as being mistaken in all ways, and simultaneously gives you an appearance of rationality.

Obviously I’ve only addressed one part of what you said, but note I’m being honest about that, and not pretending that only viciously anti-human scientists-for-hire are in favor of GMOs, or trying to be dismissive of any other viewpoint.

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That looks like an interesting book. I am horrible about reading actual books, but I’ll put this on my list.

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I strongly recommend Devra Davis’s “Secret History of the War on Cancer” and Naomi Oreskes’ “Merchants of Doubt” - I don’t think anyone who isn’t familiar with them can possibly be optimally informed on issues surrounding science, health and government policy - but I have to warn you, these are dense scholarly works, exhaustively footnoted. Very few people read them for enjoyment, although it’s a truly enlightening experience to carefully read them and fact-check the sources, and you won’t regret doing it.

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That wasn’t my point. In fact, I disagree that the word “faith” is only applicable in religious contexts. If that’s correct then we have religious faith and other kinds of faith that are subsumed under a larger category of “faith”, unqualified. This is no different than if I were to refer to electric guitars and acoustic guitars, collectively, as guitars. I personally have no problem with using the word “faith” in this sense. Anyone who does is, as I’ve already mentioned a few times, free to offer a preferred term which I will use instead.

Also, no one objecting to my use of the word “faith” has acknowledged that I used scare quotes around it in the comment that caused the furor.

The same problem applies to any definition. No matter what sequence of words I offer as a definition someone can always point out that I haven’t provided a definition for the words in the sequence. When I define those terms the same objection can be made about my new definitions. There is no point at which this method of interrogation of definitions needs to stop – it will result either in infinite regress or circular definitions.

  1. Are you so sure that religious believers only believe because they “have been taught to respect” their religious authorities? I think this is probably true for most religious believers but I seriously doubt it’s true for all. It’s hard to account for religious converts under this assumption.
  2. How do you know scientists always follow scientific methodology? There are cases of outright scientific fraud, some of which took decades to overturn. When you accept the say-so of any particular scientist you are placing a great deal of trust (some might even call it “faith”) in the honesty of that particular scientist.
  3. How do people come to respect scientific methodology in the first place? You assert that religious folks respect religious authorities because they “are taught to” but you make no mentioned whatsoever of how people come to respect scientific methodology. I think it’s probable that there are a great many people who trust scientific methodology only (or at least mainly) because they were taught to respect scientific methodology – that they haven’t bothered to see for themselves what scientific methodology is or how it works but accept it as authoritative because of the prominence of science in our culture. My argument from the beginning has been that anyone who respects scientific methodology only because they were taught to do so has no better basis for his belief than a religious believer who respects religious authority because they were taught to do so. The basis for the belief is the same in both cases: cultural authority. None of this is to say that respect for scientific methodology isn’t more justifiable than respect for religious authority; I personally believe that the former is much more justifiable. It is only an argument about the justification of individual belief.

To answer your final question, I believe there is clearly a difference between:

  1. Verifying a scientific result for myself using my own measurements and calculations and following the line of reasoning by which the result was derived.
  2. Simply trusting that the researchers initially responsible for the scientific result honestly and correctly made the measurements and calculations and the the line of reasoning used to derive the result is sound.

You might not want to call the second one “faith” because in principle I might be able to verify the result for myself as in (1). However, unless I do actually verify the result for myself I am stuck in the position of trusting that the researchers responsible for the result are neither frauds nor in error. That’s fine, we don’t have to use the word “faith” since it apparently drives people nuts. But it’s pretty obvious to me anyway that my epistemic justification in believing the scientific principle is much stronger under scenario (1) than under scenario (2). This is the only point argued in the comment you quoted.

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I no longer follow either of those, personally, and do not greatly respect either of those systems of belief. I wonder how many different ways there are that a person can arrive at a deeply held conviction?

Me, I believe the things I can independently derive to be true using my own methods, experience and meat-based sensory apparatus, and everything else I think I know is at best only conditionally believed, until experience convinces me otherwise. I’m big on the scientific method, since it encourages skepticism, experimentation and observation.

I’ll spare you lengthy digressions on how I proved to myself the realities of evolution, pantheism, climate change due to human pollution, and other contentious issues, and note merely that there are vast areas of knowledge where I am extremely ignorant and thus can have no strong beliefs.

I do have some pretty strong conditional beliefs; for example, I believe that the sun will not burn out before I have to go to work tomorrow, so I am not going to sit up all night posting on bOINGbOING. There’s no good evidence for this belief, but I have not yet encountered any evidence against it yet either, so I will practice good risk management and sign off now.

Live long and prosper, and may your viewpoint ever evolve. Stagnation is boring!

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I don’t think it is quite that simple. Anyone can just keep saying, “Well, what about that, what about that?” and derail a discussion, for sure. But I think “proof” is actually a problematic word here. Back to my platypus example, would you say I am taking their venomous quills on faith?

I refer you to:

Not only am I not “so sure” that all religious people believe only because they were told to do so, I am don’t think that at all. As I say, people have their own personal experiences that shape their beliefs and what they think are reliable sources of beliefs. The Dalai Lama says that if the tenants of Buddhism could be scientifically disproven then they would have to be abandoned, so it doesn’t simply break down on religious and scientific lines. But at the same time, I would call that a clearly pro-science position while someone who says, “A person I revere says so” is taking an anti-science position. People of religious faith and people who rely on science for answers will vary a lot as individuals, I was trying to differentiate between two concepts (which I called Faith A and Faith B) to try to see if that’s what we were getting at. It was my attempt to give a different label to religious and scientific faith, two things you are willing to admit are quite different and something you said I was welcome to do.

I actually don’t think there is a huge difference between those things. If I had verified Newton’s laws myself they wouldn’t somehow have been more immune to relativity, nor was relativity immune to quantum theory because I understood it. If I replicate someone else’s experiment, I am replicating all the flaws in their experiment, and I may make mistakes of my own. Given my own level of expertise in the lab I’m probably better off reading journals than trying to do the tests myself if I want to know what’s true. But that doesn’t mean that anyone who says, “I found this crazy thing out,” gets automatically believed.

I suppose that this might, as you suggested, all come down to disagreeing with your definition of faith and thinking it is weak and includes too many things that are not faith. I certainly believe that two masses are attracted by m1 * m2 * G / r^2 and that G is a constant but I wouldn’t say I have faith in those things at all. If I found out in the near future that G wasn’t constant over space and time or that weird things started to happen when r was very large or very small then I wouldn’t have my faith rocked, I would say, “Oh, okay.” I believe the bus will come by the stop outside my house tomorrow but I can think of a number of scenarios in which it wouldn’t. I can’t take seriously the use of the word “faith” to describe either of those things.

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I myself am incredibly skeptical of anything I believe to be true because of my own personal experience since cognitive bias leads people to believe a lot of silly things. Also, the notion of “conditionally believing” something seems a non-distinction to me because I don’t believe anything non-conditionally. But to each their own.

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I didn’t see a platypus example. Let me compare your belief in the quills to a medieval peasant’s belief in dragons, though. Presumably you believe you’re more justified in believing in platypus quills because accounts of those are more credible than medieval accounts of the existence of dragons. But would a medieval peasant be unjustified in believing in dragons? Would you describe such belief as “faith”? The difference between your belief in platypus quills and a medieval peasant’s belief in dragons seems to me to be a question of degree rather than kind. The accounts you trust are more credible than the accounts they trust but ultimately you’re both just accepting cultural authority as a determinant of what is or isn’t true.

I personally have no problem calling belief of this kind “faith”. To me it seems like a sort of faith in the cultural authorities in question. But I don’t think faith is the only correct term one could apply so I’m not married to using the term if someone else has an objection to it.

Then you presented me earlier with a false dilemma:

You concede these two conditions aren’t the only possibilities and since my rebuttal was only pointing out that these aren’t the only two possibilities that’s pretty much that.

Then we’ll have to simply agree to disagree. I think there’s obviously a difference between finding out something for yourself and taking someone else’s word on it.

First of all, your example here is confusing because Newton’s three laws of motion (inertia, F=ma, action/reaction) are all held to be true under relativity as well. It’s Newton’s theory of gravity that was superseded by general relativity. And it was superseded in part because of specific experimental and observational results – for example, the precession of the perihelion of Mercury. I still maintain there is an obvious difference between checking for myself that the perihelion of Mercury’s orbit precesses than if I simply believe an astronomer who tells me so.

Second of all, your specific competence isn’t really a factor in the distinction. You may trust a professional scientist more than you trust yourself to carry out an experiment but the fact remains that this is trust rather than first-hand knowledge. I think there is a difference between trust and first-hand knowledge. The distinction I’m making is roughly the same as the difference between testimony and hearsay. It seems clear to me that there is a difference between testimony and hearsay. Again, if you don’t see that difference then we’ll probably have to agree to disagree.

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Maybe, maybe not. But a better question would be whether phlogiston theorists were justified in believing that heat was a fluid. I would say that they were, and I would say faith was not part of it. I would also say they were wrong. You can see how I have a problem with your use of the word “proof,” I think it underlines a completely different way of looking at how we know things.

I think the element of the word “faith” you are missing is how readily we would accept that we were wrong. I find it unlikely I have been hoodwinked on the platypus issue, but I’d readily accept that I was if given good reason. This is why I don’t think “faith” captures it. As I said, this seems to be a definitional issue.

If our senses directly reported the raw facts of the world to us then I would agree with you. I think competence has everything to do with the difference. A three-year-old will have better access to facts about monsters in the corner of their room by listening to their parents than by believing their own senses. And they won’t outgrow their tendency to make mistakes of fact about things they have personally experienced upon becoming adults. I am quite open to the possibility that I am gravely mistaken about what I have seen, heard, calculated, and verified and I don’t think I have any special reason to think I am less likely to be wrong than others (depending on the people and the area of knowledge). Nor do I have good reason to think that if I verify something I’ve been told experimentally that I wouldn’t repeat any mistake that the original experimenters made - especially if it is an idea that appeals to me.

While I understand the difference between testimony and hearsay, and I understand why we make such a distinction in a court, that doesn’t change the fact that some people’s hearsay is a lot more reliable than other people’s testimony if you want to take a best guess at what is true. I would trust a second-hand account from chain of people I believed was reliable above a first hand account from a person I knew to be prone to hallucinations if I had to go with one or the other - other things being equal.

So yes, I think we are agreeing to disagree.

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