Steven Pinker, Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne resign from the FFRF over 'imposer of a new religion, complete with dogma, blasphemy, and heretics'

[frazzled1]

https://whyevolutionistrue.com/2024/12/29/steve-pinker-resigns-from-the-freedom-of-religion-foundation/

After biologist Jerry Coyne wrote an article denounced as anti-trans so the Freedom From Religion Foundation took it down.

Pinker wrote to the FFRF

I think it’s important to distinguish two things:

1. The right to bodily autonomy, an ethical issue.

2. The nature of sex in the living world, a scientific issue.

Some trans activists believe that the only way to ensure the first is to rewrite the second, imposing what we regard as fallacious and tendentious claims in defiance of our best scientific understanding. This is unfortunate for two reasons: it’s a conceptual error, confusing the moral and the empirical, and it’s counterproductive to force people to choose between trans rights and scientific reality. Those who favor scientific reality will be alienated from the cause of safeguarding trans rights.

I see FFRF as in the vanguard of separating key moral and political commitments from honest scientific inquiry (after all, a major impetus for enshrining religious doctrine such as creationism is that it is necessary for the preservation of moral values). Many people have noted that the radical factions of the trans movement have taken on some of the worst features of religion, such as the imposition of dogma and the excommunication and vilification of heretics. FFRF can be firmly on the side of trans rights without advancing tendentious (and almost certainly false) biological claims. Of course, it’s fine for views that we regard as tendentious to be expressed in FFRF forums, as long as respectful disagreements are allowed to be expressed as well.

To this day, we only know a tiny bit about how the universe is made up. But human beings tend to take a 'piece' of the truth and dogmatize it. I think Richard Dawkins is guilty of this - for the reason he is very emotionally attached to his theories and his way of approaching things.

Just because we currently can only explain what 5% of the visible universe is made of, doesn't mean we can fill the void with all sorts of imagines and call it knowledge. Supporting the tested and proven method that has provided us with the only information that can be considered knowledge is not dogmatic, it's scientific.

Humans only have 2 sex's, if you claim otherwise you must be able to prove it with as much evidence as science has to show that it's only 2.

Deepak Chopra is a pedlar of woo.

Imo much of the considered criticism of the 'skeptic movement' on this is giving it more weight than it deserves - I rather suspect some of the idiotically under-thought positions derive from too many of these orgs being heavily male dominated and they're just not giving a shit about women's rights

My experience of the skeptic community is that they are not a community of skeptics.

I understand skeptics to be people approach everything with a skeptical mindset and only decide on a position after deep interrogation and demands for evidence. The people I met in the skeptic community were not this, but were people who enjoyed laughing at those who held religious or superstitious beliefs and feeling superior to them. It was basically a social club for people who held the same anti-supernatural beliefs and felt superior to those who did not share those beliefs.

I was very disappointed in them.

One of the first things discussed in undergrad philosophy, was there being no evidence the sun would rise tomorrow. Just because it always had was no guarantee it would continue. I forget the elegance of the argument.

Same experience.

Which is a shame as the single most valuable explanation of gender ideology for me personally was a presentation to a Skeptic Society - Rebecca Reilly Cooper all the way back in 2016.

Glad Dawkins et al finally caught up with RRC and Andy Lewis et al.

Admittedly, its not my area of expertise, but I rather suspect that the scientists (astronomers?) who specialise in this area could give a pretty thorough explanation of why you actually can be sure the sun will rise tomorrow.

I knew someone who was very ill with encephalitis and he said he had reached cosmic consciousness. He said they knew everything in the universe and there was no god.

The neurologists I spoke to said people with certain illnesses or damage often have religious experiences eg think they see god - so he was quite usual in that he still said there was no god.

You can induce religious experiences by stimulating parts of the brain. I expect you could stimulate a belief in anything like men can change into women if you had the right stimuli and environmental inputs. Particularly if there was positive feedback.

I'm not confusing anything..... scientific method can also be applied to the non material and non corporeal, indeed this is the realm of quantum physics.

Angels on the head of a pin

Gender has no scientific basis whatsoever.

Religious belief systems are in some way hard wired into the brain.

Trying to understand the brilliance of Jane Austen using mathematical theories is only for the arrogant

I'm not talking about gender.

Why are you suggesting I think there are more than two sexes?

This is the Sex & Gender Discussions board so you surely can’t be surprised that everyone else is talking about Gender around you and thus may be (charitably) assuming your contributions are relevant to said discussion rather than something… else?

Admittedly, it's not my area of expertise, but I rather suspect that the scientists (astronomers?) who specialise in this area could give a pretty thorough explanation of why you actually can be sure the sun will rise tomorrow.

I think that they'd say they can predict that it will rise tomorrow with a probability very near 100%, rather than it being a definite truth.

(And I rather suspect that anecdote says more about undergrad philosophy than it does about the robustness and applicability of the scientific method.)

I've been posting here for years. I'm well aware it is the sex and gender board. I'm just wondering why the hostility and suspicion that I'm trying to sonehow justify gender identity? I'm not. I'm pointing out that Richard Dawkins can come across as a zealot.

U ok Hun?

Are you o.K? Why the hostility?

A discussion doesn't always have to validate everything you say, or agree with your every point?

Making unnecessary personal comment is not very rational or reasonable is it. Maybe you are just trying to live up to your new username?

Richard Dawkins is not a zealot, he is an expert in one scientific discipline, who lost his shit a bit when people who knew nothing about his specialist subject thought they had the authority to put their creationist ideas on a par with his scientific learning. Over and over and over again.

He doesn't make claims to understand the underlying mechanisms and structures of quantum physics, does not claim the scientific theories of the natural world apply more widely, to abstract thought, for example. He is very much someone who stays in his lane, but expects people joining that lane to have something of value to add and religion or belief do not cut it.

Yes I've watched in amazement as people were deleted for using the word 'cult' even though this ideology and its followers undoubtedly have multiple overlapping traits. Anyone who has studied cults will be clear on this. Andrew Gold has talked about it at length on his Heretics channel.

Sarah Haider has published an excellent article re this:

https://newsletter.sarahhaider.com/p/atheism-without-reason

'I have never seen anything like it. In amazement, I watched scores of people I respected add pronouns in their emails, flags to their bios, and repeat circular mantras like “trans women are women”. The same people who laughed at religious credulity accepted the idea of a “gender” fully and without question, and worse–they suppressed all open discussion. Overnight, the same people who campaigned against blasphemy laws enacted their own version without a hint of irony. I watched long-standing figures in the movement be cast down for this crime of doubt; first by insane radicals on social media, but as the disease progressed, also by the most prominent organizations we had.

In other words, movement atheism had betrayed nearly every value it claimed to stand for.'

I think they'd say with confidence that the Sun doesn't rise at all, that from the Earth's prospective the Sun is a fix point, and it's the Earth that's moving. As the Earth revolves around it's axis, it creates the illusion that the Sun raises and sets, but the truth is it doesn't. Because science is cool like that. 😊

No they couldn't, if they tried all it would mean is that they don't understand the statement.

It's not a scientific statement, it's about epistemology. The possibility of science depends entirely upon a certain type of epistemology, however, the opposite is not true, science cannot tell us what ideas about epistemology are correct or true.

This is a great illustration of why the idea that science is the only way to know real things is completely wrong.

It's pretty similar to the reasons science doesn't tell us much about metaphysics - the existence of material reality has a relation to metaphysical questions, like what is the nature of being, but the answers to those questions, whatever those answers might be, actually underlie and shape the nature of the material world. And they intersect significantly with epistemology as well.

Essentially, what is the nature of being, and can we know it, and how do we know it. The nature of deity or God or the One, or the underlying first cause, or whatever you want to call it, belongs to these types of inquiry, not science, which only looks at the physical world by definition.

One of the biggest hand-waves skeptics try is to take anything that gives true knowledge, including things like mathematics, or logic, or even individual experience, and call it "science". So in the end it argues in a circle. But that is not accurate, while the bounds of what constitutes science are not absolute, it is always about material reality and makes no claims about anything else.

No, it really can't. If those things are real, or say, models of real things, they are physical.

It is true that theoretical physics can stray into areas that arguably are testing the boundaries of science, as in, not even theoretically knowable or testable. Maybe, for example, talking about what cam before the big bang singularity. Things like that aren't really physics of any kind they are philosophy.

Sometimes mathematical insights (not science) do lead to new ideas in physics, but those could, at least notionally, lead to observations or testing, and in the past often have, sometimes much later. Sometimes that never happens in reality, but that could be just because no one has figured out how to do so yet.

A lot of skeptics and atheists who "signed up" in the early 2000s onwards didn't necessarily actually have to do any critical thinking or make difficult public stands about their unpopular opinions. It was already pretty mainstream and you probably wouldn't be socially shunned, a few people from very fundamentalist churches aside. The God Delusion was a bestseller. And you could get a lot of internet points by dunking on "Sky Fairies" or sharing Flying Spaghetti Monster memes.

So you get a movement that selects for people who self-id as contrarian freethinkers - but who don't actually have the freethinking muscle when they're confronted with a new issue.

Stephen Pinker was on Radio 4's PM programme today, on a segment discussing whether we've reached peak woke in 2024.

What you are saying here is irrelevant to what I argued in my post, so you cannot have understood what I was arguing..

Your original post was very confused.

Scientists work on hypotheses and theories, not facts. A hypothesis which gets data to support it becomes a theory. The more data that is gathered that confirms that theory the stronger it becomes. The moree data that undermines it, the weaker it becomes until it is abandoned. This challenge and change in scientific theories is normal in the scientific method.

You state this:
Scientists are sometimes/have been rejected by the scientific community on the grounds that they did not adhere to what is commonly believed to be science
This is a confusing sentence as it is not clear what you mean by 'science' - do you mean scientific theories or the scientific method?
Firstly, scientists have destroyed their careers by falsifying data or results, or by persisting with theories and ideas discredited by large amounts of counter data. I don't know what scientists you are referring to who have conducted well conducted trials and research, and whose research was successfully replicated by others and yet were still rejected, but if this has ever happened then the 'rejectors' were not following the discipline of science.

There will always be alternative theories and scientists who uncover different results or patterns to the established 'truth'
Well yes, science works by competing hypotheses and theories and the ones who gather the most data to support them become the established theories. They too risk being 'dethroned' if a stronger, more evidenced, more explanatory theory comes along. Science does not work on facts or truths, it works on stronger and weaker theories.

If you are trying to argue, (it is not quite clear what you are arguing) that the scientific method, rather than particular theories, is challenged by some scientists, then you would need to state your case.

You are so right. Well said. 😁