We’re supposed to be better than the dogmatists who set up the self-fulfilling inequalities in our culture. We’re supposed to strive for high moral standards, not merely settle for being slightly better than the invisible sky monsters and their idolators. We’re supposed to blame perpetrators, not victims. We’re supposed to be sympathetic to the oppressed because we’ve experienced oppression. We’re supposed to be self-aware so that we don’t become oppressors ourselves. We’re supposed to tear down pretty facades to uncover the ugly truths. We’re supposed to disrupt a bad status quo, even if it means rocking peoples’ boats. We’re supposed to judge people by their character and merits, not by their claimed affiliations and labels. We’re supposed to criticize our heroes when they make mistakes.

We’re supposed to look at the merits of an argument instead of dismiss them with convenient ad hominem appeals to popular stereotypes and absurd narratives that were invented to dismiss them. We’re supposed to exercise extra scrutiny when someone claims biology supports cultural stereotypes. We’re supposed to know that our experiences are biased, limited, and not the whole context so that we can listen to other people’s experiences, look at raw data, and examine the logic behind a position with a genuine open mind. We’re supposed to act like skeptics if we call ourselves skeptics. We’re supposed to continue improving ourselves rather than idly pat ourselves on the back just for being atheists.

One point I raised in the conversation was the stealing of cars, since there were many in the movie with “don’t take” written on them. Given that gas went up to $40 per gallon in the movie, it left me wondering: Who would benefit from auto theft? Where would the black market demand come from? On the other hand, I could understand selling them for scrap metal. Then my brother, who is a fan of the Grand Theft Auto series, enlightened me to another theft motive and the flaw in my thinking.

I was thinking of a car as a durable good. I wasn’t thinking like a GTA player. To a GTA player, a car is a disposable good. Or a one-time service. You steal a car, drive it to your destination, hop out, and give precisely zero fucks as it coasts off a cliff. Parking is strictly optional. You’re not responsible for gassing it up, so gas prices don’t affect your decision to steal it. Essentially, you’re stealing the energy stored in the gas tank, not the car itself.

Last year, I slogged through writing that stream of consciousness review of part 1. Part 2 has made it onto Netflix, but this time, I won’t have my brother to back me up. He just doesn’t think he’ll be able to stand it. I should probably get myself psyched up and prepared for the horror when I go through it this weekend. I’ve never read the book, so I don’t know the fine details of where the story will go. Or linger in tight circles. Whatever. Cue commentators jealous of my innocence, providing dire warnings about how even indirect exposure via adaptation will fry my neurons.

One point of concern is that I’ve heard, at least in the book, this is where the legendarily bad, hours long author tract will be. I’m morbidly curious how the movie handled it. Trimmed down to minutes or even sound bites? Split up into voice-overs that parallel the “action” in the story? Relegated to DVD Special Bonus disk?

I am curious about something I heard was in the story, once. Most of the criticisms I’ve read were strictly about the crimes against literature and Ayn Rand’s economic and political naivete, but seldom much detail about the science. One science-related criticism I did read was pretty brief and went something like this: “If your ideal society depends on a free energy device, it’s time to rethink things.” Apparently Galt is such a self-made genius that he was able to violate the laws of thermodynamics because there was a market demand for it or something.I suspect I’ll be dealing with the “lone super-genius toiling in obscurity” trope in this, expanded to multiple such geniuses coming together for the sake of rebelling against the society that dared question their brilliance or “suppress” their research with peer reviews and ethics committees. In real life, this is the sort of hipster cliques we expect egotistical cranks to form when they’re too incompetent and out of touch to earn the respect of the scientific community.Once upon a time, it was possible for a lone scientist to unravel a lot of mysteries with powerful unifying theories that turn the scientific community on its head for a generation. They could do that because our ignorance was much more massive in the early days. These days, we’ve pretty much got all the broad strokes down. All that’s left are increasingly fine details like the bottom floor of particle physics and complex systems like those of biology. Researching those things require massive de facto collaborative efforts. Just knowing about problems in the first place often takes extensive research into the works of others, just to be sure no one else has already solved it, or to make sure no one else has already tried your hunch and failed. You don’t get to make your science from scratch like Cave Johnson.
Given the critiques of Ayn Rand’s books, I doubt she let scientific reality get in her way when she wanted to make a Mary Sue. If every scientist worked according to the lone genius trope, treating science like a private enterprise, I suspect we’d more likely be trapped in a dark age, with scientists acting like fantasy wizards. To avoid “theft,” they’d encrypt their knowledge alongside their misconceptions in deliberately obscure symbolism that only people indoctrinated into their tiny clique could decode. Knowledge so encoded would easily be lost if the clique died out or even if the younger generation couldn’t tie their brains into the same knots as their predecessors did to encode that knowledge. Put simply, science would devolve into a smattering of mystery cults. Thankfully, that’s not how scientists roll in this day and age.
The whole “Going Galt” trope smacks of obliviousness about the interdependency of humans, and I doubt watching the movie will smooth over the problems I have with the philosophy. I don’t expect the book to be any better, so I’ll pass on that for now. Yes, there are geniuses with natural talents out there who can do amazing things. They are arguably “superior” as individuals in terms of ability. But they can’t do those amazing things without an infrastructure that seeks out and nurtures those talents while negating their weaknesses. Not every genius can bootstrap themselves up, and in the vein of “what use is a child?”, genius isn’t obvious in childhood. Ironically, I think people like me stress equality of opportunity in hopes that all the geniuses will have a chance to demonstrate their inequality and use it to maintain and improve the system for their own sake as well as society as a whole.
So, that’s a lot of the problems I predict I’ll have with the movie and its philosophy.

For the physics people who love to crunch numbers: Wouldn’t this catastrophe end up superheating the planet or something? I seem to recall a LOT of the flood theories would do that.

Robert B. took on that task and produced this comment:

To condense the point: My problem is not that I think the supernatural is categorically impossible. My problem is that dualist categorization doesn’t make sense to me, so I don’t understand how or why scientific methodology should adapt to their asserted categories.

What inherent, objective properties do “non-material” things have that necessitates creating a special category for them?

That’s the big question I have for dualists. I see no reason to divide phenomena into “material” and “non-material.” I can’t think of any reason why we’d have to change or throw out scientific methodology for something I see as a junk drawer category. I think it’s a junk drawer category in part because its members are commonly defined by what they’re not, rather than what they are. I want a justification for the category’s existence. If I don’t understand why these things are lumped together and separated from all other phenomena, it means I don’t have a reason for looking at them differently.

If I had to come up with a common theme for the category, it’d be “common ignorance.” I think these things are lumped together because most people lack knowledge about them, not because they have common, inherent features. Human knowledge of them is circumstantial. Once upon a time, lightning was believed to be supernatural. It was a magical weapon gods hurled down from the heavens in anger or judgement. Now we know it’s made of electrons and we regard it the same as any other well-understood phenomenon. The only thing that changed about lightning was our level of knowledge about it.

An uglier theme that comes to mind includes debunked phenomena or phenomena with scientific explanations dualists find unsatisfying for whatever reason, positing their own. This version of “non-material” is a true junk drawer of ideas that have failed and ideas people want to rhetorically immunize against failure. It’s transparent special pleading. This particular version tends to result in a vicious rhetorical cycle I’d rather avoid: Numerous hypotheses are made unfalsifiable to provide ready excuses against scientific testing, rationalizing failures with reckless ad hoc hypotheses, for example. This typically has the side effect of making them useless for predicting results. These hypotheses are then lumped together under the label of “supernatural” and that label becomes associated with unfalsifiability. Casual skeptics buy into that association and preemptively dismiss “supernatural” claims as untestable, specifically because they’re “supernatural.” Opposite them, many dualists end up viewing untestability as a rhetorical advantage since it means they don’t have to deal with the risk of falsification and they can also use the gun-jumping rhetoric of those skeptics to depict the scientific community as a whole as closed-minded towards the category when it’s not so cut-and-dry.

The quickest way I can think of to break out of that cycle is to stop pretending I understand the category until a dualist defines it.

I write this post in part because I want other skeptics to think about these things and become more thoughtful as skeptics, rather than reduce the philosophy of science into easy slogans for quick dismissals. I also want dualists to think about their position so they can clearly express their ideas instead of rehearse arguments that assume I know what they believe. I’ve had far too many arguments with dualists who weren’t prepared to answer my most important questions, probably because they’re used to casual skeptics who humored their categorization scheme instead of questioning it.

“A chicken is an egg’s way of making more eggs.”

It touches on another important metaphor that’s useful for understanding evolution: The selfish gene. I haven’t read the Dawkins book myself, but I think I’ve got the general idea down. Evolution is more about genes than organisms, which is part of why altruism shows up in nature. Kin selection is where animals seek to aid members of their families. Your siblings likely share many of the same genes you do, so if there’s a gene or combination of genes that causes its organism to have protective instincts toward its siblings, the gene sequence is “selfishly” protecting copies of itself, even though they’re in an entirely different organism. Altruists can form trust among each other and join into groups, which gives them abilities they wouldn’t have as individuals. They can end up becoming dependent on being in a group, which means the altruism will be a conserved trait, since losing it means losing the group they’re dependent on. Groups can tolerate some selfish behaviors, but there’s going to be a limit of some kind enforced, whether it’s through punishments for selfish individuals or social breakdown.

The fun part is that, with our large brains, humans are capable of taking altruism and running with it. We can consciously appreciate the benefits detached from genetics, ironically rebelling against the evolutionary “purpose” in being altruists. We’ve ended up as memetic specialists: A huge chunk of our survival ability is based on our cultural heritage and modification, not just our genes. We value people for their individual character, not their reproductive potential. We can appreciate people for the ideas they can pass on. We can appreciate the value of alternative perspectives, including those that come from the disadvantaged. We can afford to be generous toward so-called “inferior” people because culture is such a huge benefit to our species, and you don’t need to be disability-free to contribute to that culture.

“I was just asking a question, but there was just so much negative response that that means the question can’t even be asked,” she said.

This is the sort of tepid excuse I’ve come to expect from a lot of woos regarding scientific questions. They can’t handle adversity like adults, and science is pretty adversarial. You don’t just dismiss criticism for being “negative.” You deal with criticism as rationally as you can, using logic and evidence to answer it. That’s a part of what it means to ask controversial questions. Criticism is supposed to be expected. Brainstorming without criticism is good for generating new ideas, but sooner or later, you need to sort the good ideas from the bad, and that typically means having a two-way conversation with critics. When you speak, you are not entitled to uniform cheering.

A lot of the time, people with the consensus view reacts negatively because the idea in question has been tested and failed or is implausible for well-established reasons. And with ideas like hers, the most likely outcome was that she’d harm herself. I care about people, even if they do stupid things. I criticize precisely because I care and want to dissuade them from harmful action.

Here’s the kicker: If you don’t have answers to criticism, question the value of your idea. You might be the one who’s wrong.

I’m glad she stopped, though I’d prefer if she did so for rational reasons.

There’s one human sacrifice in the Bible that, at least in my experience, doesn’t get covered so much: Jephthah’s daughter. I did some private Bible reading that got me onto the road to skepticism. I guess I missed it, possibly because I was skipping past yet another bloody slaughter, since the first I heard of it was from The Brick Testament. It starts with a poorly thought-out vow. He vowed to sacrifice that first thing that came to greet him when he came home if god gave him victory in battle. I suppose Jephthah was expecting it to be an animal, like a pet, but unfortunately for his daughter, it was her. One thing that kind of surprises me is how little there is about the whole incident. His daughter isn’t even named. He tells her about the vow, she agrees, but asks for two months to “bewail her virginity” with her friends, and after that, she gets sacrificed, allegedly still a virgin.

Of course, one question that immediately springs to mind is why didn’t god do the same thing he did for Isaac and stop the sacrifice? Heck, he even could have made it into a non-story by manipulating events so an animal came out to greet Jephthah first. It kind of undermines some efforts to “save” the story of Isaac’s near-sacrifice, since it shows that god’s perfectly willing to accept a human sacrifice done in his name. Though there’s limited information, we can speculate sexism may have had something to do with it, since women were pretty much considered livestock in those days. The fact that she’s unnamed might actually be an author’s attempt to limit our sympathy for her and sweep the whole thing under a carpet of begats. I don’t see much of a lesson aside from thinking about what you vow. If anyone wants to assert that their god is against human sacrifice, they’ll have to explain this story. There’s no punishment or condemnation for the act, only god’s inaction.

Seriously, fundies, tell me what the fuck is up with this.

Questions I would like to Ask an Atheist
out of curiosity I wish to ask :
1 . If there is no God, “the big questions” remain unanswered, so how do we answer the following questions:

A) Why is there something rather than nothing? This question was asked by Aristotle and Leibniz alike – albeit with differing answers. But it is an historic concern.

B) Why is there conscious, intelligent life on this planet,

and C) is there any meaning to this life?

D) If there is meaning, what kind of meaning and how is it found?

E) Does human history lead anywhere, or is it all in vain since death is merely the end?

F) How do you come to understand good and evil, right and wrong without a transcendent signifier?

G) If these concepts are merely social constructions, or human opinions, whose opinion does one trust in determining what is good or bad, right or wrong?

H) If you are content within atheism, what circumstances would serve to make you open to other answers?

(Reformatted by me for clarity)

That’s a lot of questions to put under one number. One important point I should get across: I’d rather say “I don’t know” rather than have an untestable or wrong answer. I also don’t see how theism answers them without retreating to “just because.”

A: It’s something of a weird question, and frankly, I think it’s somewhat presumptuous to assume there is an answer. There may be no reason aside from weird physics. It also touches on tautology, recursion, or something like that. For there to be a question or a reason, there needs to be something in the first place. I also question the coherence of the idea of nothingness. I don’t think we’ve ever observed a “true” nothingness.

B: The short answer is evolution. Consciousness is a powerful survival trait in many species, and humans are highly specialized to make use of our consciousness.

C: Life makes its own meaning. I don’t need a god to hand me one. I know what I want out of life, and it’s fairly mundane stuff, including the intangible things like friendship, fun, and wonder.

D: It’s made by self-determination by each individual. Family, friends, and community can certainly make suggestions for a person, but the individual decides.

E: I don’t know where human civilization is going to lead in the long run, barring stuff like nuclear war wiping us out in the short run. There will be an end, sooner or later and I accept that. I mostly want the ride to be an enjoyable and enlightening one for us all.

F: What do you mean by “transcendent signifier” and what does it have to do with morality? I determine good and evil by using moral reasoning. Spread out benefits, minimize harm and arbitrariness. That sort of thing.

G: Moral reasoning, again. I accept the opinions of those who argue a good case for justifying their actions. And that is on a case-by-case benefit per action, not person. I weigh benefits, risks, and the utility of moral precedents versus reasonable exceptions. There’s nothing all that special about how atheists do it. Frankly, the forms of morality that require a god are what appear strange to me and even a lot of Christians: They arbitrarily elevate the often baseless opinion of one authoritarian figure above all others and above questioning. The reward/punishment afterlife system just makes it worse, since it short circuits the moral reasoning process by actively changing benefit and risk to conform with the god’s whims (in other words, an arbitrary additional circumstance/preference) rather than basing moral decisions on the effects they would normally have on their own. It essentially requires that the god in question not be held accountable for his decisions about the afterlife, too.

H: I need a coherent, testable definition of your god and evidence that supports that hypothesis and a lack of contrary evidence despite efforts to find it. Essentially the same with any scientific question. Of course, even if you did prove the existence of your god, I’m doubtful I’d like him. My parents raised me properly, so I don’t affiliate with unsavory characters.

2 . If we reject the existence of God, we are left with a crisis of meaning , so why don’t we see more atheist recognize that in the absence of God, there was no transcendent meaning beyond one’s own self-interests, pleasures, or tastes. Without God, there is a crisis of meaning, and these three thinkers, among others, show us a world of just stuff, thrown out into space and time, going nowhere, meaning nothing.

I fail to see the crisis, and I fail to see how a god would bring any additional meaning. I fail to understand how a god could provide a “transcendent” meaning, whatever that means. You’re also dehumanizing humanity in general, since many of us see meaning in helping others and we actually feel good about doing good. Sometimes I do good deeds just for the pleasure I get in knowing someone will benefit, even if I never get to see the effect myself. A good deed can indeed be its own reward, in my experience.

I don’t know your life’s circumstances, but if you stopped believing in god, would your life suddenly become unhappy? Would you stop getting warm fuzzies out of making someone smile? Would your hobbies become uninteresting? Would you stop getting the satisfaction of a job well done? I used to be Christian, and deconverting to atheism didn’t change the way I feel about life all that much, aside from adding a little bit more urgency to make the most of it.

3 . When people have embraced atheism, the historical results can be horrific, as in the regimes of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot who saw religion as the problem and worked to eradicate it? In other words, what set of actions are consistent with particular belief commitments? It could be argued, that these behaviors – of the regimes in question – are more consistent with the implications of atheism. It could be argued that the socio-political ideologies could very well be the outworking of a particular set of beliefs – beliefs that posited the ideal state as an atheistic one.

The big problem here is that you can’t sort out the enormous feature that those evils have in common: Authoritarianism. They were motivated to eradicate religion forcibly because it was a competing authority. The atheists you typically meet online have no love for those dictators. Stalin would likely have us thrown in a gulag or executed for believing in genetics instead of Lysenkoism, for one thing. From our point of view, they’re little different than fundamentalist theists in their mindset. I’ll even go so far as to say they emulated religion, which also falls prey to cults of personality, substituting supposedly infallible leaders or states for the supposedly infallible god or clergy.

We aren’t restricted to the narrow ideas of religious authoritarianism or atheistic authoritarianism. All the atheists I know reject both because we don’t want to fall into the same traps they do. We may want to get rid of religion, too, but we have moral precedents against violence and unethical discrimination against the people we disagree with. It’s my intention to get rid of religion by open criticism, not by gun point. It’s my opinion that religion is wrong, both morally and epistemologically, and I’ll argue that case over the blogosphere using logic, moral appeals, and scientific evidence as applicable. I restrict myself to those tools because using violent methods would set a precedent for using those tools against good ideas and artificially shelter me from their arguments. I could be wrong, and if I’m wrong, I want someone to be able to show me without unnecessary risk to his life or livelihood. The freedoms of speech and religion (which includes freedom from religious imposition by the state) benefit everyone because it allows lively, critical discussions where people don’t have to hold back out of fear of authority. If someone’s wrong, he won’t be artificially shielded from criticism, which gives him the chance at self-correction.

That’s why authoritarian societies so often end up falling behind in science: The truth isn’t always politically convenient for the authority, so they repress it as heresy against church or state and run the risk of enshrining bad ideas as unquestioned dogma as a result. The same thing happened to Communists for the same reasons as it happened in theocracies over the ages.

4 . If there is no God, the problems of evil and suffering are in no way solved, so where is the hope of redemption, or meaning for those who suffer? Suffering is just as tragic, if not more so, without God because there is no hope of ultimate justice, or of the suffering being rendered meaningful or transcendent, redemptive or redeemable. It might be true that there is no God to blame now, but neither is there a God to reach out to for strength, transcendent meaning, or comfort. Why would we seek the alleviation of suffering without objective morality grounded in a God of justice?

How does god solve the problem of evil? It’s not a problem for atheists because we humbly accept the universe wasn’t made to appeal to our idea of perfection. Shit happens.

Suffering is tragic, period. We’re motivated to alleviate suffering because we have empathy for others. Put simply, we care. Without a god to deliver perfect justice, that means we can’t just sit by in sloth and apathy, expecting some cosmic judge to sort it all out for the better for us. We can’t expect a god to provide strength and comfort to us, so we’re obligated to reach out to others and help them. Because of this, our choices matter. It gives us a sense of responsibility. It gives us a reason to carefully think about the morality of our actions instead of simply idolizing harmful traditions. Atheists like me can’t eliminate suffering, but many of us find meaning in trying to minimize it.

Quite frankly, putting a god into the picture makes things disturbing. A divine plan essentially means he’s using people against their will, deliberately choosing to bring suffering on them. He justifies it by saying it’s for the greater good and that we should just take his word for it. Or rather, that we take the priest’s, witchdoctor’s, or ancient book’s word for it, since we can’t get consistent answers from gods through prayer. One believer says one thing, another says something else.

It’s a form of the Just World Hypothesis, too, where being a victim is effectively a conviction for an unspecified crime. That rationale encourages injustice and apathy because people under its sway seem to assume that all suffering is necessary, either as a punishment for unspecified crimes or as necessary to achieve some greater good. By that token, anyone who tries to alleviate suffering is working against the greater good. It’s a subversive anti-morality.

5 . If there is no God, we lose the very standard by which we critique religions and religious people, so whose opinion matters most? Whose voice will be heard? Whose tastes or preferences will be honored? In the long run, human tastes and opinions have no more weight than we give them, and who are we to give them meaning anyway? Who is to say that lying, or cheating or adultery or child molestation are wrong –really wrong? Where do those standards come from? Sure, our societies might make these things “illegal” and impose penalties or consequences for things that are not socially acceptable, but human cultures have at various times legally or socially disapproved of everything from believing in God to believing the world revolves around the sun; from slavery, to interracial marriage, from polygamy to monogamy. Human taste, opinion law and culture are hardly dependable arbiters of Truth.

History tells me that gods’ opinions are no better than human opinions, and arguably worse on average. From the arguments I’ve had to date, Divine Command Theory is simply enshrining a god’s arbitrary personal preferences and justifying them with magic-sounding labels instead of giving them reason or purpose. Morality is not like personal preference. Rational people form their morality through reasoning, trying to benefit as many people as they can while harming the fewest. Moral consensus forms for general cases and personal preferences might modify the definition of benefit and harm for that particular person. It’s not absolute or perfect, but it’s hardly as arbitrary or chaotic as divine morality. That’s why we still have moral arguments, and our fallibility means we won’t be running out of them. But not all social consensus is reached using this process. That’s why we use moral reasoning in hopes of overturning irrational prejudices and unjust laws.

We give moral decisions weight because we’re able to understand that our actions have consequences for others and social consequences for us in how they would respond to unfair treatment. We need morality to be able to function as a society. Societies exist to benefit their members. People determine morality because it’s about finding the fairest way for people to benefit. Essentially, as members of a human society, we’re all stakeholders.

Lying is generally wrong because it often leads to one person having an unfair advantage over another. Even when it’s meant for the victim’s benefit, it can harm them from making them unable to make truly informed decisions. It violates that person’s trust, and society needs citizens to have at least some minimal level of trust to stay together. If you want to make an exception, you have to be prepared to justify it.

Adultery is a violation of trust, like lying.

Child molestation is a crime like rape because, by default, children aren’t considered competent to understand all the consequences or make informed judgements on matters of sex. There’s some wiggle room as they approach adulthood, but that doesn’t mean the general rule is meaningless. I don’t know which is the more disturbing thought: That the original writer was feigning ignorance of the matter or that he sincerely doesn’t know what makes rape immoral.

The standards of morality come from the nature of human societies combined with reasoning and empathy. That doesn’t mean that we have to view governments as gods handing down arbitrary laws that can’t be questioned. We can question the government by using reasoned arguments, just like we can question anyone else. The major theme I sense from this list is that the writer can’t grasp that we’re not substituting one absolute authority for another, we’re rejecting absolute authority as a viable concept as well as inherently subversive to society when taken seriously.

6 . If there is no God, we don’t make sense, so how do we explain human longings and desire for the transcendent? How do we even explain human questions for meaning and purpose, or inner thoughts like, why do I feel unfulfilled or empty? Why do we hunger for the spiritual, and how do we explain these longings if nothing can exist beyond the material world?

Humanity makes a lot more sense than you give credit. We’re imperfect creatures created by an imperfect process taking place in an imperfect universe. So we have needs. We have consciousness that evolved because it helps organisms make decisions that fulfill those needs. Of course, with more complex consciousness, we become aware of “meta-resources” as we evolve instincts to seek them out because they help us seek out more basic resources: We seek out companions because teamwork makes it easier to do things we can’t as individuals, for example. Humans have gotten conscious and technologically enough that survival is relatively easy in developed nations, but we still have our instinctive desires and tribal modes of thought. The DNA and developmental processes that build our brains don’t simply take away the desires just because we can fulfill the basic ones.

Define “spiritual.” I’m a monist. There is only one reality and I see no point in drawing lines in the sand by arbitrarily labeling them as “spiritual” or “supernatural” versus material. I need a coherent definition and a clear purpose for bothering with the categorization. Where applicable, I need to see good evidence for “spiritual” phenomena before I accept their existence. Meanwhile, I’m content with my range of material emotions like love, joy, and wonder as well as the means with which I can produce them.

The beginning of wisdom is, ‘I do not know.’ [gestures toward the “hole in space” on the viewscreen] I do not know what that is.

– Lt. Cmdr. Data, “Where Silence Has Lease“

“I don’t know” is a phrase that probably should get more mileage. When used appropriately, it’s humble. It’s honest. It’s open. The universe is a big place with lots of tiny details, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that there is still much that we don’t know as a species, let alone as individuals. Being aware of that ignorance inspires both caution and curiosity, virtues of science. We can devise hypotheses to explain unknown phenomena, but a scientifically minded person doesn’t jump to the conclusion that his hypothesis is true without carefully testing it. Sincerely admitting ignorance typically means being open to entertaining new ideas as well. Those ideas still have to be tested before they’re accepted as knowledge, of course.

There’s an annoying idea I’ve encountered with various pseudoscience trolls, quacks, and especially with Creationists. They treat any admission of ignorance from their opponents as a victory for their ideas. It doesn’t work that way. For an example, let’s say a particular type of cancer has no known effective treatment. Just because the scientific community doesn’t have an answer doesn’t mean that we should accept a quack’s answer, especially if that answer wasn’t informed by scientific research into its plausibility.

Science is cautious by nature. The world is a complicated place, and there’s always the possibility of discovering new nuances and exceptions to the rules we’re familiar with. We can’t have absolute certainty in what we do know because of our human limitations. The language of scientists typically reflects this, since they will mention nuances, limitations, exceptions, and uncertainty from simple probability.

Pseudoscience doesn’t like humility or measured confidence, often characterizing it was “weak” language. Statements of absolute certainty and absolute rules are much more marketing friendly and easier to fit into a slogan. Religion is quite aware of this and sets up gods and holy books as absolute authorities with circular reasoning. Quacks and pseudoscientists often follow suit and enshrine their gurus and particularly the original creator and his texts. In either case, they often implicitly or explicitly claim they have all the answers in a convenient package. This tends to lead to stagnation. The scientific community knows that it doesn’t know everything. If they did, science would stop.

I think treating “I don’t know” as a concession taps on an unhealthy obsession with completeness and perfection that overrides the healthy desire to know the truth. One problem with many religious, supernatural, and pseudoscientific ideas is that they can explain anything. If you’re sympathetic to those sorts of hypotheses, that’s not a strength. If an idea can explain anything, that’s actually a big problem: It can explain things that don’t exist just as readily as those that do. It can explain failures and success equally. It essentially means that we can’t use it to make predictions to verify its accuracy. We can’t use it to make predictions or decisions. It’s ‘heads I win, tails you lose.’ Such ideas are essentially a way to deceive yourself with the comforting illusion of understanding without the practical benefits of real understanding.

There’s another idea that any answer is better than none. This is simply not true. Actions based on an incorrect idea can be more harmful than inaction. They can waste resources better spent elsewhere. I can understand desperation in the face of death and the desire to go down fighting, but that doesn’t mean I should rhetorically support those who can exploit desperate people just because I don’t know the true answer.