Biologist PZ Myers: Bill Maher is a goddamn moron

[pokerfan]

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2015/02/07/bill-maher-nevermore

But that’s not the part that had me fuming. It’s the bit around 4 minutes in, in which he pretentiously announces to us that not all science is alike, and climatology is a good science, so he accepts global warming, and he also explains that there is also consensus among climate scientists (he also argues that the earth is just a rock, so it’s simple enough to understand — but then, as he demonstrated so well on this night, Bill Maher is a goddamn idiot). And then he tells us that medical science is nothing like that, "because they’ve had to retract a million things". "People get cancer, and doctors just don’t know why," he says, condescendingly. His father had ulcers, and they treated it wrong when he was a kid.

Good god.

Science is a trial and error process. It is not an infallible track that leads invariably to correct answers, instantly and every time. When he says that climate science is completely right, that’s because he has only the most superficial knowledge — he knows a little bit about the conclusions they’ve reached now, but nothing about how they came to those answers. I guarantee you, there was a long slow gradual effort to understand climate, with false starts and dead ends and pointless detours all along the way, because that’s how science works.

When medical scientists retract something, it’s because they’re doing normal science. Of course there are errors along the way! The whole point of science is that you generate hypotheses, you make tentative conclusions, and you test them, and sometimes you’ll confirm your hypothesis (which means you’ve learned something), and sometimes you’ll falsify it (in which case you’ve learned something else). Do you know why Maher’s father got the wrong treatment? Because the cause of ulcers, the bacterium Helicobacter pyloris, was not discovered to be the causal agent until 19-fucking-84. Maher is complaining about an important medical discovery, one that won the Nobel Prize, because scientists didn’t discover it soon enough for him.

[Silent3]

1. There are things I like about Maher, but this isn't one of them. n/t

[Warpy]

2. I remember his being vehemently antivax a few years ago

to the point I wanted to reach through the computer screen and strangle him. He seems to have moderated that view somewhat, probably because of measles and whooping cough epidemics in California over the last few years.

However, he doesn't seem to realize his knowledge is only superficial and that at some point, he needs to talk to people who have studied various things in depth in order to form an informed opinion.

He's not dumb. He's just arrogant.

[pokerfan]

3. He's fairly uninformed on this subject

As Myers notes:

Maher tries to argue that maybe the bad thing about vaccines is that they insulate us from our environment. "your immune system is not up to par," he implies, because "you don’t use your immune system". Christ. Vaccinations specifically challenge your immune system, that’s how they work, and there are multitudes of pathogens you encounter — we’re not living in bubbles, you know.

and

Finally, just to confirm that he’s a goddamn moron, the man who just complained that doctors don’t know what causes cancer sneers that doctors "demonize things like the sun". Guess what, Maher? We do know that genetic damage causes cancer. Radiation causes genetic damage. And that great big glowing ball in the sky is great big radiation source.

I suspect it's some form of Dunning-Kruger effect,

As it's a matter of public health, I would like to see him invite someone on his show that would actually challenge him on this particular nonsense.

[salib]

4. The objections here are fairly weak

One needs to be a little bit careful here. Medicine is not science. Medicine certainly attempts to use scientific understanding, results, etc. however, medicine is taking on a much more difficult challenge: treating people and trying to improve their lives. In medicine, one may not understand everything, or even very much, about causes but one can still apply treatments which nevertheless have proven more helpful than otherwise doing nothing to something else.

So, there are elements of reasonableness in what was said on the show. Lame and pretentious things also, but this attack also smacks of a lack of understanding about medicine. That lack of understanding really undermines the power of the comments.

[EvolveOrConvolve]

5. Are you calling PZ Myers' objections weak, or Maher's objections weak?

[Fortinbras Armstrong]

6. I agree with Meyers about Maher

But the problem I have is that Meyers himself is guilty of an advanced version of the same thing. Meyers is an atheist, and he has a response to those who say that his attacks on religion, specifically Christianity, are made in ignorance of actual Christianity.

He calls his response to such statements "The Courtier's Reply". This refers to an imagined defense a sycophant might give of the naked emperor of Hans Christian Anderson's story: "Haven't you read the discourses of Count Roderigo of Seville on the exquisite and exotic leathers of the Emperor's boots?" and so on. The idea is that complaining about an atheist's lack of theological knowledge is no better than the courtier's complaint that the naked emperor's critics haven't read the works of Count Roderigo. In other words, it is just the same old question-begging "Pastafarianism" pseudo-defense, now tarted up with a clever marketing tag.

How does it work? Well, suppose an atheist is confronted with evidence that his "objections" to Aquinas (or whomever) are as impressive as the fundamentalist's "chicken/egg" objection to evolution. What's he going to do? Say, "OK, I don't know the first thing about Aquinas. But I'm not going to let that stop me from criticizing him!" That is weak at best. But now, courtesy of Myers, he's got a better response, "Oh dear, not the Courtier's Reply" followed by some derisive chuckling. Of course, intelligent listeners will be baffled, wondering how shouting "Courtier's Reply!" is supposed to excuse not knowing what one is talking about. In the confusion, the atheist can slip out the back door before anyone realizes he hasn't really answered the question.

Meyers and Co. have a stake in the claim that religion is inherently irrational. They want a society in which religious believers are no more welcome than racists or Holocaust deniers are. To admit that there really are respectable arguments for religion -- that it is something about which reasonable people can disagree -- would be at once to admit that all the extremist talk about religion being tantamount to child abuse, no more worthy of respect than belief in the tooth fairy, and so on goes out the window.

One final thought: Suppose you are Richard Dawkins, former Charles Simonyi Professor in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford. You've spent years criticizing creationists and Intelligent Design people for not doing their homework before attacking Darwinism. You've staked your reputation as a scientist on a crusade against religion, dismissing it as the province of ignorant, bigoted yahoos and without a single serious argument in its favor. You've written The God Delusion, presenting it as a once-and-for-all demonstration of the truth of this proposition. Theologians and philosophers of religion have criticized you for not knowing what you are talking about. Fellow atheist academics have done the same. And you have dismissed them all as allies of the fundamentalist bigots. The people who actually know the stuff are wrong (you claim) and you are right -- despite the fact that this is the very attitude you rightly condemn in fundamentalist bigots themselves.

So. what are you going to do? Admit that the critics are right? Admit that you've been making a fool of yourself? That you've done an injustice to the believers you despise, and who would relish your public humiliation? That you are a hypocrite? Not a chance.

So "Courtier's Reply!" it is. Your atheism must be touched by philistinism, deliberately closing its mind to the serious consideration, or even the reading, of the arguments of writers like Augustine and Aquinas, lest these dangerous ideas tempt one to doubt the secularist creed. Or, in the words of a better-known exercise in doublethink, "Ignorance is strength!"

[ProfessorGAC]

8. I Don't

I think he mischaracterizes what Maher said. I watched the show and i don't think it's what was said.

I don't agree with Maher on his flu vaccine perspective, but he does acknowledge the value of vaccines. So, he's NOT anti-vax. To even slightly insinuate he is would be a fabrication.

Secondly, i think it expects too much for every person who comments on anything scientific need to be dogmatically aligned with the path of, method of, and language of science. He's a college graduate. Not a scientist, but an educated person nonetheless.

Third, he's a freakin' comic who has a ONE HOUR SHOW and has to truncate some things that might result in him not being able to explain in every detail that backgrounds his point of view. If one immediately assumes he's an idiot just because he doesn't have time to explain every nuance of his position, then the assumption may be the problem, not Maher's position.

I'm quite certain Maher is not an idiot. And since part of his money comes from agitating, he's an equal opportunity agitator.

[Orsino]

7. He seems to be getting meaner and stupider as he gets older and richer. n/t

[HuckleB]

9. Recommended!