The Epistle of Thomas to the Creationists

Note: I've noticed that my old web page has finally been taken down by my old ISP, so I'm going to be reposting some of the stuff I had there. I wrote this thing probably around 20 years ago, and I still stand by most of what I said, with only very minor amendments, most of which I've made in editing this here. In particular, I now might have said a little more directly that I am an atheist, though I still don't consciously consider myself a non-Christian. Reconciling this apparent contradiction is a topic for another day, however.

     In view of the theological perspective of this article, it would be disingenuous for me not to state up front that I do not consciously consider myself a Christian. Over the centuries, that term has been used in so many ways that it has almost been stripped of any particular meaning, and some of the meanings it has acquired I should very much like to distance myself from. On the other hand, I do not consciously consider myself a non-Christian, either. In any case, it is not my intention to discredit or disparage religious faith. Nor do I intend to argue that evolutionists are in any way morally better off than creationists. Rather, I wish to discuss a particular moral failing which is held in abundance by most people (myself included, no doubt) and to which creationists are at a special kind of risk.

     Specifically, I refer to the sin variously referred to as pride, hubris, or vanity, and of which idolatry is a special case. Now, the arguments of the creationists against the secular humanists in this regard are well-known. They argue, rightly in many cases, that to deny God is to run the risk of assuming too much moral authority for oneself. Specifically, if there is no God, if the sole arbiter of morally upright conduct is the individual, then what stands between us and complete moral anarchy? To a certain extent, however, the few atheists who are rightly accused of taking this stance are actually closet theists; they are buying into the belief that there is no morality without God. It is almost as if they believe that there once was a God who used to boss us around, but now He's dead so anything goes. I do not believe that serious and thoughtful atheists need come to this conclusion, however. Morality, most broadly conceived, is nothing if not the business of making choices and acting on them, and for that reason is (whether we recognize it or not) of the most profound concern to all of us, regardless of whether or not we believe in God, and the source of that morality need not be metaphysically rooted in theist notions of divinity. A great many ethical theories of great importance have been devised that make no mention of any deity, and there is no shortage of morally conscientious and upright atheists to demonstrate that atheism need not lead to moral disaster. Indeed, history is overflowing with atrocities committed in the name of religion, so it is also clear that a claim to religious faith is in itself no guarantee of righteousness, either.
     Less extreme than the amoral zealotry of the born-again atheist (whose beliefs we need not take too seriously), the secular humanist who believes that morality is ultimately dependent not on God but on humanity can also fall prey to a creeping moral relativism which ends up almost as a denial of any real morality at all. If morality is a product of human invention, what is to stop us from defining our own morality in any way we wish, up to and including ruthless egoism? But if this is a danger, I argue that it is an inherent danger of any human morality whatsoever, and if anything, the advantage of relativism is that it makes starkly clear just who is ultimately answerable for the choices we make: we are.
     Another common criticism of atheism is that by denying God one can lose the sense of humility that finite mortal creatures ought to have, and which is inescapable when one compares oneself to an infinite and supreme being, and thus one becomes guilty of idolatry in placing humans at the pinnacle not just of Creation but of Being. Curiously, this argument seems to contradict another objection, that by denying a divine genesis mankind is cheapened. In fairness, though, they are compatible positions if one takes the view that the big fish in a small pond can still be too proud, and that just being the most advanced naturalistically evolved piece of sludge in a drab godless universe is no cause for rejoicing. While it is true, of course, that many atheists are guilty of either or both of these sins (idolizing and/or devaluing humans), it is also true that neither is an inevitable result of atheism; it is possible to apprehend human consciousness and experience as miraculous and wonderful in itself, while maintaining a greater awe at the magnificence of a spectacular universe which is vast and mysterious beyond any mortal comprehension, without invoking any special concept of God to achieve this perception.

     I need not elaborate on these and other moral dangers of atheism, except to say that while they are real they are in no way inevitable. In any case, my intention here is to point out the somewhat more subtle dangers of pride and idolatry to which theists, and creationists in particular, are especially vulnerable. This is not, of course, to say that persons of such faith are any more inevitably guilty of these sins than anyone else, but rather that there are unique moral hazards against which they are peculiarly obliged to guard. Christianity is, after all, no more a shelter from moral responsibility than is atheism; indeed, Christians must take it upon themselves to be doubly vigilant to avoid doing evil.
     Herein lies the most obvious moral danger of religious faith. In taking themselves to be guided by divinely ordained commandments, theists may be tempted to relax the rigor with which they scrutinize their actions, and are thus capable of the most unspeakable atrocities. That is, secure in the faith that God wills a certain course of action, they may be prepared to disregard any suggestion (even from their own consciences) that this may not in fact be the morally correct thing to do. This is not to say that God may on occasion will us to do immoral things, but rather that we, as fallible humans, may sometimes be misled about exactly what it is that God expects of us. Unfortunately, it is also often a tenet of faith that to question God is itself an immoral act, and so it can become especially difficult to correct a moral error once it has been made on these grounds. This is because the difference between questioning a command of God and questioning one's own understanding of that command is a subtle one, not at all easily recognized, and harder yet when any doubt is seen as weakness of faith and therefore sinful in itself.
     So, on the one hand, we see how a blind acceptance of putatively divine commands can lead one to commit acts of unthinkable evil, for the assurance of divine sanction may even provide the strength of will to suppress one's natural sense of revulsion and horror. There is a more subtle sin of pride, however, which is independent of the moral character of the acts performed. The duty of morality is the duty to make one's own choices and accept responsibility for them, not to pass off that responsibility to another decision maker (real or imagined). Christians, perhaps more than anyone, must not take comfort in the belief that their faith will preserve them from moral duty (and its attendant and inescapable possibilities of failure), but rather are to be confronted with the difficulties of moral responsibility, most difficult of which is trying to figure out what really is the right thing to do.
     Some may say that knowing what to do is a simple matter of reading Scripture, and that finding the strength to carry it out is where we are put to the moral test. I would argue, however, that they have an overly naive view of moral life. Even if we accept that Scripture is the basis of all morality (a highly contentious claim), there is still the extraordinarily difficult matter of interpretation, which ultimately must fall to the individual confronted with moral choice. "Thou shalt not murder," is fairly straightforward, but the same commandment is very often translated as "Thou shalt not kill," which can raise problems even for the strictest vegetarian. And how exactly does "Thou shalt not steal" apply today in a world of software piracy and satellite dishes? Even if there is universal agreement that stealing is wrong (and in general, there is), there remains real confusion as to what really constitutes stealing.
     Further, consider the virtues that we strive to develop through moral exercise, and their dependence upon adversity. Courage, for example, is utterly meaningless without fear. It is the person who knowingly faces danger and acts in spite of fear whose courage we praise; without fear, the same act is indistinguishable from stupidity. Likewise, where is the generosity in a gift that represents no sacrifice on the part of the giver? What is patience to someone who is in no hurry anyway? And why praise the temperance of one who can't abide drink? Similarly, the virtue of moral courage is dependent upon the fear of sin or error for its meaning. It is one thing to act, knowing that one is right, but it is quite another to act with imperfect knowledge, hoping that one does good but recognizing one's fallibility and accepting responsibility for one's action right or wrong. The former is suitable for angels; the latter is the best we mortals can hope for. This is what is meant by acknowledging that we are sinners.
     This is important for two reasons. First, as we have seen throughout history, there are few people more dangerous than the fanatic who is convinced he acts with divine approval. The abdication of moral responsibility is nearly always a recipe for disaster, from the functionaries of Nazi Germany who were "just following orders" to the terrorist zealots who slaughter indiscriminately in the name of a warped sense of righteousness. But regardless of the harm such persons may or may not inflict upon others, the spiritual sin of pride may lie under even the most righteous and benevolent of acts.
This pride is uniquely difficult to identify, for it is well cloaked in the garb of pious humility. What makes it so elusive is that it appears as a faith in God, when in reality it is a misplaced faith in one's own judgement. It may well be that God is just and perfect and incapable of error, but we most certainly are none of these things, and to act with the firm belief that one is in perfect harmony with God's perfectly just wishes is to lose sight of that truth. Indeed, the person who acts in this way is guilty of the greatest pride, for she puts her moral judgement on a level with God's. She claims to know with absolute certainty that which can be known only to God. The faith here, then, is not in God at all, but in the individual's own reliability in knowing God, and if we understand idolatry as the sin of ascribing divine significance to a human artifact, the pride involved is idolatrous when the individual believes her own knowledge to be perfect in this regard.
     In this way, then, creationists are vulnerable to a sort of pride which is every bit as sinful as the pride of the atheist. It is important to stress at this point, however, that this is in no way an argument against being a Christian. Any particular belief one may adopt, Christianity included, carries its own unique variation of this moral trap, for responsibility is something we simply cannot avoid. Once one has eaten from the tree of knowledge, there is no going back; we are stuck with having to face up to these difficult choices. To seek refuge from responsibility in Christianity, or indeed in any other faith, is only to fool oneself and miss the central message. Christianity, like any truly moral lifestyle, is a challenge and not a shelter.

     There is another way in which I see creationism, or at least literal biblical creationism, as idolatrous. In the sense that all things are created by God, it is entirely true that everything, including human artifacts, has divine significance, but in the case of idolatry a particular object or set of objects becomes uniquely elevated and worshipped disproportionately, with the assumption that the rest of Creation is somehow less directly connected to God than the worshipped idol.
     Now, it is difficult to deny that the Bible, divinely inspired or not, is at least in large part a human artifact. Setting aside for now the question of original authorship, it must at least be acknowledged that modern human beings take responsibility for retranslating, typesetting, printing, binding, reading and interpreting this text. To the extent that various translations have differed significantly (compare the meanings of "Thou shalt not kill," and "Thou shalt not commit murder," for example), we must recognize that the message of scripture bears some human influence.
     One might argue that the Holy Spirit intervenes in order to preserve the integrity of the Word. This, however, is the very essence of idolatry, for it differs little if at all from maintaining that a golden calf made by human hands is somehow imbued with divinity and a suitable object for worship. The printed word is no less a human artifact, and no more holy. Those who claim it is are guilty of Having Other Gods Before [Me], and perhaps of making Graven Images (if words can be pictures). If the translators themselves claim to be divinely guided, they are guilty of the pride I discussed above, as well as Taking the Lord's Name in Vain by claiming to speak for God. (My reading of that commandment is not that the occasional utterance of "God damn it!" is a mortal sin, but rather that claiming to speak in God's name is. The spoken desire that God damn something or someone is no doubt unChristian, but it is scarcely more than a breach of etiquette in comparison to the pretense to divine authority.) The worship of Scripture, for that is what an unquestioning literal faith in the Bible is, is therefore a most impious form of idolatry.
     This is not to deny the spiritual importance of the Bible, but to affirm the spiritual importance of everything else. If God is the author of all Creation (and even if He is not), then there is and must be Truth in all things. Knowing this to be so is almost trivially easy. The challenge for us is to understand that Truth. Significant though scripture may be, the testimony of fossils, sediments, and DNA is no less the Word of God (and no less subject to careful interpretation). It has even been suggested by some creationists that the evidence of the natural world is deliberately misleading in order to test the faith of the believer, a position indistinguishable from calling God a liar. By what right do we take the humanly printed word to tell a truer story than Nature?

A New Democratic Government

     Well, the unthinkable has happened, and my home province of Alberta has actually elected a majority NDP government. I'm really not sure what to think just yet; it's still kind of a shock. For all my talk about engaging in the democratic process, I hadn't realized just how much I had internalized the despair and resignation to the (apparent) inevitability of Progressive Conservative majorities forever and ever. I know that in the big picture this is not quite as significant as the fall of the Berlin Wall or the end of Apartheid, but it hits me almost as powerfully, because I live here.
     Our governing party for the last 44 years has not really been progressive or conservative for most of that time. When they came into power under Peter Lougheed (whose son I attended grade school with), they were very progressive in the way they went about conserving our abundant petroleum resources. They established the Heritage Trust Fund, in which to invest the money from oil and gas royalties, in preparation for when the oil ran out. (They replaced the Social Credit party, whose dynasty lasted a mere 36 years.) But over time, they became more and more dominated by business (primarily oil) interests, and they came to take their power for granted.
     By the time I was in high school (and that was thirty years ago!), they were well enough entrenched that a classmate of mine, after hearing from the candidates at a first-time-voters' forum, remarked to me: "Well, I thought the NDP candidate made a lot of sense, but my family always votes Conservative, so..."
     Twenty years later, and another election, I answered my door to the PC candidate for my riding, one of the very few that was at that time held by a Liberal MLA ("Member of Legislative Assembly", the provincial equivalent of a federal Member of Parliament). I mentioned to this candidate my dissatisfaction with the way her party was running things, and she argued that was because Edmonton was underrepresented in caucus. That is, since we had elected non-PC candidates, the government wouldn't listen to us. Consider the logic of that for a moment: If I don't like the way the PCs are running my province, I should vote for them. What, then, should I do if I did like the way they were running things?

     So perhaps you can understand why I had this deeply internalized sense of despair. I talk a lot here about the importance of democratic engagement and getting out there and voting even if you don't really believe your vote will make a difference. I suppose that came from my years of voting without making a difference.

     Now, one of the things that helped keep the PCs in power so long was our ridiculously crude first-past-the-post electoral system, which gives the seat to the candidate who gets the most votes. That doesn't sound like a bad idea by itself, because obviously, you wouldn't want to give it to the candidate who got the fewest votes, and if there are only two parties or candidates, then "the most votes" usually is equivalent to a majority. But in Alberta (as in most places with parliamentary systems) there have usually been more than two candidates on the ballot. Here, we have had the Alberta PCs, the Alberta Liberals, and the New Democratic Party as the three major parties for many years ("major" being a bit generous, given how few seats the Liberals and NDP usually held), joined occasionally by the Greens, making for three parties on the leftish side, against a more or less united PC on the rightish side. What this meant was that the PC could win the seat with 30% of the popular vote, if the other three parties got 23% each, even though 70% of the electorate voted against the PC candidate.
     In recent years, a new party to the right of the PCs appeared, the Wildrose Alliance, so the right's vote was split somewhat. However, in the last election that the PCs won, this actually worked to their advantage, because many centrists were so horrified at the prospect of a Wildrose government that they held their noses and voted PC. And to complicate matters further, another new party, the Alberta Party, has joined the fray, so that the left-of-PC vote was now divided four ways. It was only because Rachel Notley's NDP manage to capture enough momentum to consolidate the anti-PC resentment this time around that we managed to finally oust the PC government. In so doing, we elected an NDP majority, which irrationally scares the hell out of some people who think of the NDP as a bunch of dirty commies.

     So now, at last, we have PC supporters finally complaining about the terrible injustice of the first-past-the-post that allowed the NDP to take a majority of the seats with less than a full majority of the votes. Part of me is sorely tempted to laugh and point and gloat. But the more rational part rings alarm bells at that part of me, because if I, who am not at all a committed pro-NDP partisan, can so easily be tempted to revel in an inherently distorting electoral system, what does that mean for those who ran and were elected as NDP candidates?
     I do not doubt the good faith and idealism of the members of the new NDP government, most of whom have never held elected office before, and I'm delighted to see a change here, particularly one that moves in a direction I've thought we needed to move for a long time. But power is so very seductive, and it has so many sneaky little ways to corrupt even (especially) the most idealistic. I'm not even especially worried about the personal greed and entitlement that did in the last government; that will take some time to take root. I'm more worried about the Very Important Policies that we have so urgently wanted to implement for so many years. As urgently needed as they are, it'd be so very easy to say that electoral form can wait until these more pressing issues are addressed.

     It's always like that, though.  It's never in the interest of the incumbent party to reform the rules that favored them in the last election. There's always something more important, or at least, something easily framed as being more important, because so often there are more immediately urgent matters. But that's exactly why electoral reform needs to be the first priority of the incoming government. Other matters may be more immediately urgent, but if you don't fix the voting system now, you probably won't do it later. And eventually, in time, as the excuses pile up and your fresh new democratic legislature grows into an entitled dynasty complacent in its claim to power for power's sake (as did the PCs and the Socreds before them), it will be impossible to even contemplate changing it.

     Please, then, Ms. Notley: make fixing our electoral system your absolute first priority. Get rid of first-past-the-post. Personally, I'd favour a single transferrable vote, but there are other viable solutions out there. Put our best and brightest to work on the problem. Consult (and listen to) a variety of experts. But fix it. Make every Albertan's vote count.

On Anti-Discrimination Laws

     I want to talk about why I am in favour of anti-discrimination laws (some of them, anyway), and how they can be justified given my position that the sole purpose of law should be to make us more free. But first, I'm going to do so by revisiting speed limits, which I've written about before.

     On the face of it, a speed limit is an imposition on individual freedom that does not seem to directly protect a greater freedom. True, high speeds might impose a serious liberty-threatening risk on others, but we have tort law for resolving personal wrongs and mandatory vehicle insurance to protect the right of those harmed to compensation. (Not an ideal solution, but a solution that can be refined and improved.) But ignoring for the sake of principle the case of accidents, how does my safely driving at 200 km/h on a public street infringe upon anyone else’s rights, or diminish their freedom?

     Well, it doesn't, at least not directly. As I argued before, people driving at excessive speeds use more than their fair share of the road, forcing everyone else to wait longer for a safe opportunity to merge into traffic, make a left turn or otherwise use the road to get where they want to be. But being forced to wait doesn't exactly violate any individual right. You have to wait for a break in traffic anyway, and it's not as if you have a right to have that break miraculously appear when you want it. 

     No, it's not about you. It's about all of us. Everyone using the road imposes some delays on everyone else, but people who violate traffic rules such as speed limits tend to impose disproportionate delays; for every minute they save themselves, they easily cost the rest of us collectively several minutes or even hours. Hours spent waiting in traffic are hours of constrained liberty, so imposing speed limits is defensible as a liberty-maximizing measure.

     Notice that in most places, there is no minimum speed limit. There may occasionally be people who feel like driving slow, but there is nothing inherently to be gained by doing so; you do not save time by going significantly slower than traffic. So while there's an intrinsic incentive to speeding (I can save myself a few minutes), people pay a natural price in time for going slow. Fines for speeding are meant to counteract the incentive to speed with a (hopefully greater) disincentive.

     So let's consider discrimination. On the face of it, an employer or merchant who discriminates is making a foolish and self-destructive choice, forgoing an otherwise qualified candidate or customer for an arbitrary and irrelevant reason. It's sort of like someone deliberately choosing to drive very slowly; yes, it imposes inconvenience on others, but there's not a lot we can do about people who willingly impose disadvantages on themselves.

     Of course, there’s much more to it than that. If discrimination were just a matter of people making foolish and arbitrary distinctions that go against their own interests, we'd dismiss it without much thought. If you walked into my shop and I refused to do business with you and asked you to leave because my invisible friend is allergic to your shampoo, I'd lose business and you'd go somewhere else, shaking your head at poor silly delusional me. My loss of business would be incentive enough that we wouldn't need to worry about making rules against such silliness.

     But the sort of real-world discrimination that we try to pass laws against is different, because left unchecked it can turn into an actual incentive. If I post a sign outside my shop, boasting of my ethnically clean premises, I might actually gain a market advantage if ethnic bigots represent a market segment with any buying power. Worse, even if actual bigots don't make up an appreciable portion of the market, the perception that they do can become self-reinforcing. Even if I'm not a bigot, I might feel obliged to cater to the bigots whose business I might lose if I don't.

     Consider, for example, the controversy we had in this city a few years ago when a new anti-smoking ordinance was being proposed for all workplaces. Bar owners, almost unanimously protested loudly that they would lose business if their customers couldn't smoke. Whether this was true or not, it was an almost universally held belief, so much so that smokers expected to be able to smoke in any bar they went into, and bar owners were loath to turn them away. Meanwhile, nonsmokers generally were resigned to the fact that if they went to a bar, they'd have to put up with smoke.

     There's an inherent selection bias here. People who wanted to light up a cigarette just would, and people who did not want to didn't light up, but since they were accustomed to other people doing so, they wouldn't say anything. Bar owners rarely heard from potential customers who objected to the smoke enough to stayed away. So there was a powerful perceived incentive to allow smoking, whether or not it was actually in the bar owners' economic interests.

     These perceptions take on a life of their own, and can become very hard to displace. It may even be that nobody at all actually agrees with them, but everybody goes along with them because they believe everyone else agrees with them. It's unfortunate that the Invisible Hand of the market is so poor at weeding out these things, but that's actually to be expected; when clever entrepreneurs find a common misperception to exploit, you can be sure they'll invest heavily in promoting and maintaining that misperception for as long as they can milk it. 

     Will the Invisible Hand persuade the Indiana state legislature to repeal its new Religious Freedom Restoration Act, or at least amend the worst bits? It might. I hope so. If it does, then that might actually be some evidence that we're outgrowing the need for antidiscrimination laws. But the fact that they passed it in the first place leads me to suspect we still need them.

Respect the Experts: They're Not Idiots.

     Many years ago, on my old web page, I wrote a piece explaining the twin paradox of special relativity. More recently, I created a YouTube video with the same purpose. Now, I'm not a physicist, and don't claim to have a complete understanding of Einstein's theory at all. I just happened to stumble upon and share a way to think about the twin paradox in a way that made sense to me and that seemed to be consistent with what the experts say about it. (If I'm wrong, of course, I shall be more than happy to have a physicist set me straight on it.)
     But a curious thing happens when you post something about relativity theory on the internet. You start getting email or comments from people who are convinced that Einstein was hopelessly wrong, and who try to explain how. Over the years I've had maybe a half-dozen correspondents on the subject. As I said, I'm not an expert, so I'm really not in a position to debate them about the theory generally, but I'm into thinking and reasoning generally, and I'm very interested in diagnosing the kinds of cognitive errors people (myself included) typically make.

     In this case, I'm intrigued by the ways in which some people naively take issue with the views of the experts. Most of us, I'm guessing, would look at something like relativity or quantum mechanics, admit that we haven't really got a clue, and defer to the guy in the white lab coat scribbling formulae. But the ones who email me about relativity, at least, almost invariably seem to be convinced that they not only understand it, but understand it well enough to refute it. Relativity is just one example; somewhat more common are the creationists who argue passionately about how Darwin got it wrong. More troubling yet are the various conspiracy theorists, anti-vaxxers, sovereign citizens, climate-change-denialists and other similar movements, which not only are hopelessly confused about the actual subject matter but are actively doing real harm to themselves and others through their ignorance.

     Don't get me wrong: I am not saying that one should accept without question whatever The Experts tell us. Sometimes the authorities are wrong, and in any event, we all benefit from healthy dialogue about theories and issues, because even a wrong theory can help bring us to a better understanding of the truth. It's vitally important, in a free and democratic society, that people feel free always to question the conventional wisdom. It's not disagreement with the experts I want to criticize here, but rather methods. There is a right way and a wrong way to be a skeptic.
     In this post, I want to talk about the a particular error that's usually a dead giveaway that someone is not so much a brave dissident challenging the hidebound orthodoxy as a deluded crackpot. Specifically, it amounts to assuming that the experts are unaware of basic "common-sense" facts about their discipline.
     
     It's a safe assumption that if something is common knowledge, an expert in the field is probably aware of it.  For example, most people know that mercury is very poisonous, as are most heavy metals, so it's reasonable to assume that an expert in chemistry or medicine will also be aware of this basic fact.  I suppose you might find some expert who believes mercury is harmless, but at the very least, even that expert should be aware of the widespread belief that it's poisonous, and be accustomed to having other people disagree on that point. If you tell someone that mercury is poisonous, the expert might say, "Yes, it is," or give an exasperated sigh before patiently explaining how that's a common misconception.
     Yet anti-vaxxers will exclaim in alarm that vaccines contain mercury! MERCURY, for heaven's sake! I'm not sure how they expect physicians to react to this revelation: "Wait, what? I thought thimerasol was just a preservative! Good heavens, there's mercury in it? And mercury is poisonous?Why didn't anyone say something?!"
     Give them some credit. They already knew that mercury is poisonous, and that thimerasol contains mercury, when they decided to use it. Just like a surgeon knows that stabbing someone with a knife is usually bad for them. And yet somehow, the surgeon knowingly goes ahead and cuts people open with a knife in order to treat them, because they know a heck of a lot more about cutting people and putting them back together than a random layperson does.
     That's the thing about experts. They don't just know the really simple obvious stuff that everybody knows; they also know a bunch of complicated stuff that occasionally flies in the face of the obvious overgeneralization. Yes, cutting someone with a knife is usually bad for them, but it can be made less bad with proper preparation, tools and technique, and sometimes it's much less bad than leaving the condition untreated.

     Lots of things are obvious to everyone, expert and non-expert alike. But if we could rely on the obvious in all instances, we wouldn't need experts at all. Experts are those who understand the non-obvious parts of their disciplines as well as the obvious, the things that not everyone knows. So if your criticism of the experts is based on their apparently overlooking something really, really obvious, stop. Do not assume they're idiots for missing what is plain to you, and tell them they're wrong. That is how crackpots act, and rightly or wrongly, you will be dismissed as one.
     Instead, ask. "Wait, I thought mercury was poisonous? Why are you putting it in a vaccine?" Because then they can explain how the toxicity is much less when the mercury is tied up in certain kinds of molecules, and how the quantity involved is so tiny that even if it poses any risk it's far outweighed by the benefits of the vaccination itself, and if you've the time and patience they can go through the data with you and eventually you'll understand it like an actual expert yourself. Or, they might do what they actually did with thimerasol: "Well, it's actually quite safe, but since you're concerned about it, we can replace it with something that doesn't contain mercury."

     Another way to put it is like this: it's okay to disagree with someone, but it's not okay to disrespect them, and assuming someone is so stupid as to be completely unaware of common sense notions of her area study is fundamentally disrespectful, and empirically wrong. Common sense does not trump expert knowledge. You don't have to believe the experts, but don't presume they're idiots.

Root Canal, Cancer, and Terrorism

     Last year, I wrote a bit of satire applying some of the same arguments I've heard about abortion to root canal, in an attempt to show just how silly it is to bring moralizing arguments to bear on medical procedures. If someone needs treatment, they need treatment, and it's too late to argue about whether or not they ought to have engaged in the behaviour that led to that need. You can certainly argue about whether or not they do need the treatment, or whether the procedure itself is morally acceptable, or you can call attention to the risks and side effects involved, but that's a very different thing from saying, "Well, you should have thought of that before you [had sex/ate candy/went bungee-jumping/dressed that way]!"
     Anyway, in that piece, I alluded to this claim that root canal causes cancer, which is apparently still in circulation because a friend forwarded it to me recently. The big, bold headline:

97% of Terminal Cancer Patients Previously Had Root Canal Procedure

especially caught my eye, as of course it was meant to. You might think, given that I had a root canal about thirty years ago, and that I had a cancer that would have been terminal but for timely surgery, that I'd be inclined to find this at least credible. And yet, I'm unimpressed.

     First of all, the statistic isn't actually all that reliable. If you read the article, the source turns out to be a Dr. Issels, who simply recounts that in his 40 years of practice that many of his terminal cancer patients had the procedure. And maybe that many did, although it's just as likely he picked "97%" to emphasize "a lot". This is not a careful clinical study; the actual number could be wildly off.
     Even if the number isn't wildly off, it still doesn't mean anything other than that most of Dr. Issel's terminal cancer patients had had the procedure. There's no reason offered to think that 97% of all terminal cancer patients everywhere have had root canal. There could be any number of reasons why Dr. Issels' patients had a higher than average rate; perhaps he got a lot of referrals from an endodontist friend. Or perhaps the kind of person who puts off going to the dentist until a root canal is necessary is also likely to put off getting checked out for cancer until it's terminal. Or, maybe it's just that anyone who lives long enough to develop cancer has also lived long enough to make the odds of having had a root canal pretty high, as well.

     But that's only part of the problem with this statistic. Let's just assume for the sake of argument that it's completely accurate, that 97% of all terminal cancer patients have had a root canal operation. By itself, this still means nothing, because we have nothing to compare it against: how many people without cancer have had root canals?  According to the article itself, 41,000 root canal procedures are performed in the U.S. every day. (This is probably the source for that claim.) That's 15 million a year, for a population of 300 million people; on average, that means each person has one every 20 years. Obviously, some have more than their share, and many have none, but the point here is that root canals are extremely common. If 97% of everybody has had a root canal, then the fact that 97% of cancer patients have had it should come as no surprise. (Of course, for the reasons in the previous paragraph, I'd actually expect cancer patients to have had a somewhat higher rate of root canal than the population at large, if only because they tend on average to be old enough to have lost their baby teeth.)

     Enough of the statistics. Now some lay-person's background on the science. Root canal is basically a massive filling, where decayed bits of tooth are drilled out and replaced with artificial material. The difference is that in a routine dentist-visit filling, the cavity only goes into the outer layers of the tooth, and can be quickly patched up with a bit of gold or amalgam or whatever it is they use these days. In a root canal, the decay has reached into the softer living tissue inside where there are nerves and blood vessels and especially nerves, which is why ouch. So in a root canal, they have to clean out all that infected softer tissue, and then fill it all in with something to keep the rest of the tooth from breaking in when you chew. In the bad old days, they'd have to just yank out the whole tooth, but this is a way of saving as much of your original dentition as possible.

     So the claim in the article is that bacteria gets into the filled-in core of the tooth, and festers there, releasing toxins into your blood which cause cancer. I should say that this is not by itself completely ridiculous, because there are all sorts of things that can cause cancer, including viral and presumably bacterial infections. There's no reason to rule out the possibility that a long-term infection in the body (whether in a tooth or a bone or a wart or whatever) could promote cancers. And we know that abscesses are really nasty in lots of other ways (which is why we often need root canals in the first place).
     The part that doesn't make much sense, though, is how this is supposed to relate to root canals specifically, especially on the scale implied by the shock-inducing 97% claim. The problem is that if the filled-in tooth canal is sealed off enough to allow anaerobic bacteria to thrive, then it's probably also sealed off enough to keep them and their toxic byproducts away from the bloodstream.
     Moreover, bacteria are like any other living thing: they need energy, which those of us who can't photosynthesize have to get by eating things. So sealing off nasty microbes inside the tiny spaces of a tooth might give them a nice hiding place for a while, but they'd exhaust the available nutrients in there pretty soon, and then they'd starve.
     Of course, there may be just enough circulation of fluids to bring in a little food for the bacteria, to keep them alive, but that kind of bare subsistence infection isn't going to be able to do you much harm, either. The conditions after a root canal are not special, and there are no doubt many little colonies of germs trying to establish a foothold throughout your body at any given time. This is natural, and typically they don't last long, because we have immune systems. A big infection, like in an abscess, can overwhelm the defences, but a microscopic one is a pretty routine event, and at most a successful root canal replaces a huge potential abscess with some negligibly tiny germ hangouts.
     This is the thing that so many health panics don't seem to understand: germs are freaking everywhere. They aren't harmless at all, and they're trying to kill us all the time. But that's no big deal; that's how it's always been, and our immune systems and repair mechanisms are awfully good at what they do. They are more than capable of dealing with a Hole-In-The-Wall gang of bacteria hiding out at the site of a root canal, because they're always dealing with that sort of thing. Whether or not you've ever had a root canal, your immune system is right now dealing with exactly the same kinds of invaders and their associated toxins from some other source.
     The same argument applies to the mercury they once used as a preservative in vaccines, the fluoride in our drinking water, and a host of other unpleasant chemicals. Yes, we should try to minimize our exposure to these things, but when the amount we're worrying about is drowned out in the background noise of what our bodies are used to dealing with, it's time to go worry about something else. We are much better off trying to reduce that background noise than we are obsessing about a trivially small component of it. (Especially when it comes to things like root canal, fluoridation and vaccines, things which are specifically meant to give net health benefits that far outweigh whatever trivially tiny risks they might carry.)

     Which brings me to terrorism. Yes, terrorism exists, but it's really just a particular form of violence. There are, and perhaps always will be, people who believe that violence is a way to solve their problems. Sometimes they just get angry and lose control, or sometimes they coldly calculate that someone's death will bring them an insurance payoff, or sometimes they fall prey to a radical ideology. Whatever the cause, it's bad, but our civilization has developed systems for dealing with violence. People commit crimes, the police track them down, they stand trial, they go to prison. It's not ideal, but it generally works to keep us relatively safe (and it's worth repeating that we live in the least violent time in human history.)    
     The reason we shouldn't worry about terrorism is the same reason we shouldn't worry about getting cancer from a root canal: the actual incremental risk of being hurt or killed by a terrorist is many orders of magnitude lower than your already low risk of being a victim of criminal violence generally. We will do much more to improve our safety from violence, including terrorism, by adopting policies and attitudes which serve to make ours a more just, more compassionate, more connected community, in in which people do not become so alienated and disenfranchised that they turn to violence as a way of affirming their significance.

Law is not Rocket Science

     I would be surprised if there were anyone reading this who is unfamiliar with the term "pseudoscience". Although it's often used simply as a pejorative to condemn any claim about the natural world one disagrees with (creationists call evolution pseudoscience, oil company flacks call climate change pseudoscience, etc.) there really is a meaningful distinction to be made between actual science and pseudoscience. Science is not so much a body of knowledge as it is a method of acquiring and testing that knowledge; something is properly said to be pseudoscience when it attempts to establish credibility and authority by adopting the superficial trappings of scientific claims, without actually following scientific methods.
     To some extent, I can understand the appeal of pseudoscience, especially because the subject matter of real science is usually so complex and difficult to understand. When someone speaks confidently about enzymes and antioxidants and leptons and Higgs bosons, it sure sounds like they know what they're talking about, even if we don't, so for most of us just accepting what a pseudoscientist has to say is no different from accepting what a real scientist has to say. We defer to the person who sounds like an expert.
     And the reason science is often so hard for non-experts to understand is that the natural universe was not built for the purpose of being easily understood by us. The only reason we are able to understand as much of it as we do is because our brains, which evolved to solve certain kinds of problems (including some rudimentary physics problems), are also reasonably good at general problem solving. That makes it possible to make sense of physics (we hope), but there's no reason to expect it to be easy. Indeed, when you start getting into areas of physics that are completely outside of our ancestral experience, such as the quantum mechanical realm of the extremely small or the relativistic realm of the extremely fast/massive, the discoveries of modern physics become extraordinarily difficult for our hunter-gatherer brains. So I have some sympathy for those who are taken in by pseudoscience. Science is hard, and so people who don't get it do have a kind of excuse.

     But I have less sympathy for pseudo-law, which may not be a word but is enough of a thing to prompt an Alberta Court of Queen's Bench Justice to compose a lengthy and thorough refutation of what he calls Organized Pseudolegal Commercial Arguments. A common feature of many of these arguments (often promulgated by people calling themselves "sovereign citizens" or "freemen on the land") is that they seem to understand law as being some kind of arcane magic, complete with special and secret incantations. OPCA theories often include bizarre and unnecessarily complex entities, like the following graphic which came across my Facebook feed some months ago:

     This is kind of preposterous. A corporation is an artificial person, a legal fiction, invented and modelled upon the ancient and pre-legal concept of the natural person. Yes, plain old ordinary personhood. You are not a corporation, you are not stock, you are not collateral. You're just a person, and you have been since you were born. There's nothing magical about your social security number (or our Canadian equivalent, the Social Insurance Number). It's just a unique number meant to allow the government to know which John Smith is which for its various administrative purposes. This nonsense about corporate entities is all just ignorant hocus-pocus from people who know just enough legal terminology (and just little enough of its actual meaning) to get themselves hopelessly confused, and then to try to turn that confusion to their advantage.

     To be fair, even lawyers seem to be subject to somewhat superstitious beliefs about the law, particularly when it comes to drafting contracts and other legal documents. There is tremendous risk-aversion, so simply copying the language of previous instruments is perceived as safer than drafting up new language from scratch. That's actually a pretty reasonable strategy most of the time, but it can get a little silly on occasion, especially if one is refusing to change something not because the existing text is exactly what one means, but because one is uncertain what will happen if this or that word is removed.
     For example, the reason many legalese documents include redundant phrasing ("I hereby give, bequeath and donate...") is a legacy of the time after the Norman Conquest, when the Engish nobility spoke French, the commoners spoke English and the people who could read and write spoke Latin. It wasn't that "give" and "donate" had different meanings; it was that the courts wanted to make sure everyone understood the meaning, so they included as many synonyms as possible to ensure that at least one of them would get through. Of course, the adversarial process being what it is, some clever shyster might call attention to one of these words being missing at some point ("Normally, my Lord, in a contract of this sort, one gives, bequeaths and donates the property in question, but clearly here both the latter two words are absent, meaning that the contractor could not have intended to bequeath or donate the property..." so there has always been a kind of pressure against simplification. Lawyers don't want to get into trouble by messing with something that seems to work, even if they don't fully understand why it works. But the lawyer who doesn't understand exactly why a particular contract precedent is the way it is generally isn't stumped by a cosmic mystery, but rather faces an eminently solvable problem she just doesn't have the time or inclination to bother solving.

     That's the difference with science. Science studies the natural world, which doesn't care whether or not we understand it. Law, however, is ultimately about human interactions and how to resolve disputes between humans about what ought to be done. In other words, law by definition must be intelligible by human beings; it cannot be some inscrutable mystery. Sure, no single individual understands all of it, but the very nature of law is such that all of it is human-made reasoning about human choices. Moreover, it is supposed to be transparent and available to everyone; the very notion of a secret law is absurd. There can be secret contracts and proceedings conducted behind closed doors, but a secret law cannot be binding on people who can't know about it.
     So, for example, consider the preposterous claim that some Sovereign Citizen types like to make in Canadian courts. They point to the motto displayed on the wall, "Ad mare usque ad mare" which is Latin for "From sea to sea", and claim that it means the Canadian court is an admiralty court with no jurisdiction on land. What's wrong with this argument, apart from the complete failure to understand what a motto is? Well, it implies there's some kind of secret "real" law that we're all in the dark about, and this secret law is somehow binding upon the courts and prohibits them from exercising authority over those who cite it.
     That isn't how courts work. There may be points of law that the courts take time to understand correctly, but there are no secret laws. In practice, the law really is whatever the court says it is. You absolutely can argue that a court has no jurisdiction, and such arguments are often made, and successfully, too. But here's the thing: you actually have to convince the court, which means if they say they have jurisdiction after you've made your argument, well, too bad. If you think she's wrong, you can appeal to a higher court, but it will be a higher court that decides.

     Don't get me wrong. Law can get complicated, and yes, you probably should talk to an expert (i.e. a lawyer) if you have any questions, and even if you don't think you have any questions, you probably should have some. But a lot of the time, the reason you need a lawyer is not because the law is complicated so much as it is because lawyers are trained to see disputes in a dispassionate, non-partisan way, and when you're in the middle of a dispute it can be very hard to get the emotional distance to be even a little bit objective. The basic principles of law itself are easy, and not at all mysterious.

A challenge to anti-vaxxers

     Today, a friend suggested I google for "vaccine chemicals", and click "feedback" on the boxed link that comes up on top, which as of this writing is this ridiculous monstrosity of stupid. I did, and indicated that the link was "inaccurate", which hopefully will help Google to refine its algorithm in selecting reliable results.

     Now, I realize that calling something stupid isn't particularly constructive, although I'm trying to use the word in a clinical rather than pejorative sense. The reasoning in the linked article really is preposterously deficient and ill-informed, but what that's not what makes it clinically stupid. Ignorance is ubiquitous, after all, but stupidity is something more profoundly debilitating. Ignorance can be treated by learning new facts, but stupidity is a pathological inability to receive and process new information, and here (in boldface italics) is the telltale marker of genuine stupidity in the article:

That's the real purpose of vaccines: Not to "protect children" with any sort of immunity, but to inject the masses with a toxic cocktail of chemicals that cause brain damage and infertility: Mercury, MSG, formaldehyde and aluminum. The whole point of this is to dumb the population down so that nobody has the presence of mind to wake up and start thinking for themselves.
This is precisely why the smartest, most "awake" people still remaining in society today are the very same ones who say NO to vaccines. Only their brains are still intact and operating with some level of awareness.

     Stupidity comes in many forms, some of them genetic and some of them memetic. This is a classic form of memetic stupidity, a kind of ideological immune system designed to shut out any consideration of information that might conflict with the ideology. It's a very common mechanism, found in religious cults, political movements, and (as here) in crackpot conspiracy theories. It works by selectively filtering out and discrediting any criticism, by positing that criticism itself is inherently suspect. Examples:

• Creationists sometimes argue that fossil evidence for evolution was placed there by the Devil to lead us astray, or alternatively by God to test our faith, but in either case the evidence must be disregarded because it conflicts with the favoured view. More broadly, some fundamentalists claim that all criticism comes directly from Satan.
• In an interesting twist on this phenomenon, Scientologists claim that people only ever criticize Scientology in order to divert attention from their own crimes, and so in addition to distracting Scientologists away from the substance of  criticism towards the investigation of the critics, even more perniciously it trains them to scrupulously avoid thinking negative thoughts themselves about Scientology for fear of being a critic, and thus a criminal.
• In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler asserts that only a "born weakling" would dispute his claims about race and evolution, and then only because of his "feebler nature and narrower mind". In other words, demonstrate your strong mind and independent will by accepting without question what this guy says.
• "That's just what they want you to think!" is the cry of every conspiracy theorist, especially those who are fond of the "false flag" concept, the idea that any incident or evidence that might go to support the claims of their opponents is actually faked by their opponents in order to discredit them. There are gun nuts (and in this case, yeah, the term is apropos) who claim the Sandy Hook shooting was faked to raise support for gun laws, and other nuts who claim 9/11 was carried out by the White House to raise support for invading Iraq. Now, while I'm not saying there's no such thing as a real false flag (the most famous probably being the attempt to provoke a war between the medieval kingdoms of Florin and Guilder), seeing everything as a false flag is a convenient way to discredit absolutely anything that might not support your pet theory.

     So, look again at what Natural News is claiming about people who support and people who oppose vaccines, and consider what that would mean for the ability to receive, process and formulate unbiased conclusions based on new data. If you accept that non-vaccinated people are the "smartest, most awake" people and that vaccinated people are all brainwashed dupes, then you're automatically going to disregard what any pro-vaccine person has to say. Even if an intelligent unvaccinated person takes a careful objective look at all the available evidence and decides that vaccination is a good idea, by the time they talk to you to explain their conclusions they've probably already been vaccinated and you can dismiss them on that basis. In other words, the means by which you might otherwise obtain and process useful information to make up your own mind has already been sabotaged by this claim that unvaccinated people are smarter and more "awake" than vaccinated people

     But let's leave that aside. I'm going to propose a way to actually put that claim to the test. If you're going to claim that unvaccinated people are "the smartest, most awake" people, well, that's a pretty ambitious claim, because "smart" is a pretty big word. When we describe someone as "smart", we don't just mean that they don't believe in vaccines; we mean that they have good general cognitive abilities: they think and learn and understand and solve problems well. After all, if you're trying to argue that smart people avoid vaccines, then you must mean that the decision to avoid vaccines is the result of better and more informed thinking than the decision to be vaccinated. And obviously, if the motive in promoting vaccines is to dumb down the population into compliant sheeple, then you're claiming it's not just the ability to reject vaccines that is affected; it should also affect the ability to think critically about government policies on the environment or crime or the economy or international relations or anything else. In other words, you're claiming that non-vaccinated people are generally smarter, not just making the fortuitously correct choice about vaccines.

     So bring it on, then. Show me that anti-vaxxers are actually smarter on a variety of issues other than vaccination. Show me that they're genuinely more independent thinkers, that they have a better understanding of other issues, and better problem-solving skills. Show me that they should pay lower car insurance premiums because they make better decisions while driving. 

     Or hey, let's even make this personal. You think you're smarter than me? Seriously, I'm asking. I've had most of the vaccinations that have been available for someone of my age, and I was born in 1965.  I get my flu shot most years, and I've also been vaccinated against Hepatitis B. Oh, and I've also been through chemotherapy for colon cancer, a regimen of some really nasty chemicals that are decidedly bad for you. So by rights, I ought to be a sitting duck for your towering unvaccinated intellect. You should be able to dance rhetorical circles around me, gracefully refuting my pathetically flawed fallacious arguments.

     Sure, I may think I've made carefully considered and reasonably well-informed decisions about my health care. I may think I disagree vehemently with some of the asinine policies of my government, and I may think I write letters to my MP and argue with my fellow citizens, but if you're right, I'm just a brainwashed dupe, going along with the Powers That Be. You should be able to crush me with your enlightened sagacity.
   
     C'mon. I dare you.