A former 40 year Atheist analyzes Atheism, without resorting to theism, deism, or fantasy. *** If You Don't Value Truth, Then What DO You Value? *** If we say that the sane can be coaxed and persuaded to rationality, and we say that rationality presupposes logic, then what can we say of those who actively reject logic? *** Atheists have an obligation to give reasons in the form of logic and evidence for rejecting Theist theories.
I've watched many of these Pervanado events go by without commenting... they seem to be daily fare these days. But this one is different, because the professor targeted is Lawrence Krauss, the famous Atheist and bogus science author, as well as one of the Doomsday Clock twits.
Arizona State University professor Lawrence Krauss, internationally known as an outspoken atheist and for his work on the symbolic "Doomsday Clock," has been put on paid leave by university officials after allegations of sexual misconduct were published in a recent BuzzFeed article.
The university, in a statement issued late Tuesday, said it began a review of the professor's conduct after it was contacted for the article.
"In an effort to avoid further disruption ... as the university continues to gather facts about the allegations, Krauss has been placed on paid leave and is prohibited from being on campus for the duration of the review," ASU said in a written statement.
Krauss, a theoretical physicist known internationally for his work, has denied the story's allegations. It includes at least nine allegations of inappropriate behavior or comments, some more detailed than others.
On Tuesday, Krauss resigned as chairman of the elite Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' board and reiterated that denial in a resignation letter to the board.
"As you know, I have denied the story's allegations. BuzzFeed was provided with abundant counter-evidence that was ignored or distorted in their story," he wrote in the statement.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists is perhaps most famous for its "Doomsday Clock," a symbolic pronouncement issued each year based on whether the events of the previous year have pushed humanity closer or further from destruction.
Krauss, 63, is a prolific author and speaker who was recruited to ASU in 2008 to become the inaugural director of the Origins Project at ASU. The research project explores questions about origins of the universe, human origins and origins of consciousness and culture. Krauss has an extensive Twitter following.
The Origins Project sponsors an annual Origins Symposium where it brings together leading scientists and thinkers for discussions and presentations.
Lately, though, Krauss has received less than flattering attention.
He was the subject of a lengthy BuzzFeed article on Feb. 22 that accused him of inappropriate behavior over the last decade, "including groping women, ogling and making sexist jokes to undergrads, and telling an employee at ASU, where he is a tenured professor, that he was going to buy her birth control so she didn’t inconvenience him with maternity leave.”
Krauss denied all of the accusations to BuzzFeed, calling them “false and misleading defamatory allegations.”
“It is common knowledge that celebrity attracts all forms of negative attention from many different angles,” Krauss told BuzzFeed in an email. “There is no pattern of discontent revealed here that suggests any other explanation.”
Some of the groups Krauss is associated with have moved to distance themselves from him amid the allegations.
The American Physical Society, for instance, withdrew its invitation for Krauss to talk and participate in its April meeting in Columbus, Ohio.
In a statement, the society said, "This action was taken following reports of allegations of sexual misconduct against Prof. Krauss. The APS deplores harassment in all its forms and remains committed to ensuring a respectful and safe environment at its meetings."
Krauss declined comment in an email on Tuesday to The Arizona Republic.
Krauss is well known for his bullying techniques as well as his blatant fraudulent book. It is not possible to have a dissenting position in a "conversation" with Krauss, because he will shout you down with epithets and demean you as a human.
Krauss is of the school of "theoretical" science, in which no proposition can be empirically tested, and the opinion of the expert reigns over any deductive logic which might be applied to even the most absurd propositions that are made up.
Should you question, or God forbid, threaten the logical integrity of Krauss' postulations, the counter attack on you, personally, will be shriekingly applied, all the while screaming about how HE is THE scientist, and everyone else is just cosmological detritus (dirt).
We'll see if he can ego his way out of this #MeToo problem he has.
Over at Darwin's God, Cornelius Hunter (*) takes on Krauss' contention that having the sun available is explanation enough for the creation of proteins. I agree with one of the commenters there: Krauss is becoming increasingly unstable, in the form of radical irrational positions. It started to be obvious with the publication of his book, "A Universe From Nothing", which book demonstrated nothing of the sort. Krauss has had to defend his book from both ends of the intellectual spectrum. Yet he was selected by Dawkins to go on a two man speaking and discussion tour, where the increasing irrationality of both individuals became obvious to both Atheists and Theists.
*Ph.D. in Biophysics and Computational Biology, U of IL.
ADDENDUM:
There is more on Krauss' statements here:
Comparing a protein to a snowflake is stupid, even in Junior High School. A snowflake is algorithmic information driven, with simple physics law as the driver. The snowflake is actually a LOSS of information in the sense that water vapor information is random and highly complex. The snowflake is simple information, locked in by ordered physical relationships.
A protein is actually the opposite of both ordered, algorithmic information and random complex information, because it is very specifically complex in its structure atomically in a non-algorithmic and non-random fashion. And its utility to life depends upon its foldability, which is an added constraint and thus additional specific information.
If Krauss actually knew anything at all about the subject of cellular microbiology, even at the beginner level, then he would have known that.
Further he would know that Shannon Complexity does not apply except in defining information retention integrity, especially in transmission.
"If that was not enough, Krauss followed this with the equally absurd claim that the Sun’s energy fuels protein evolution. “Fortunately we have the Sun,” concluded the religiously-driven atheist."
Lawrence Krauss, physicist and cosmologist, travels frequently as he proselytizes for Scientism. Sometimes he is with Dawkins, others he is with Dennett. Here is a video of some of his choice gems, which I have transcribed below, and commented on. Because there are diverse clips, I have numbered them for ease of reference.
1. “Beliefs are not innocuous. Belief in things that aren’t true often results in actions that are often harmful”.
Yes, associating actions with false beliefs certainly condemns the Atheist regimes of Lenin/Trotsky/Stalin/Mao/Pol Pot/Castro/Chavez, etc. Their actions were beyond harmful, they were evil, massively so. And they were based on false principles of Atheistic, Scientistic Materialism. And yes, Dialectical Materialism is the belief upon which they were and are specifically based. And these are false, have been demonstrated to be false, and more importantly,have been demonstrated to be highly harmful, even bloodily eugenic (but in a logical way). So the implication of Krauss' claim must be held especially true, highly visibly so, for Atheistic, Scientistic, Materialism.
2. (a) “The point is that the doctrines of religion are outdated, and that’s for good reason. They were created by bronze age, or iron age peasants, who didn’t even know that the earth orbited the sun. So the wisdom in those books is not wisdom at all, and people take the wisdom – in fact, we have learned something over the last 20 centuries and science has taught us how the world works (7:50). Now for science… the interesting thing for scientists is that God is completely irrelevant to scientists. Most scientists don’t spend enough time thinking about God to even know if they are Atheists. Because they try and understand how the world works and God never enters into it. It’s just completely irrelevant. And in fact, the more we learned about the natural world, the more we’ve learned that you don’t need any divine intervention to explain anything.
(b) As far as morality is concerned and the person you want to be, which I think is really the heart of what religion…. When religion provides many things for people and we can’t deny that. The question is, how can we take the things that people need – community; support; hope – and use the real world to build those quantities. Because if you base your beliefs and your actions on myths that are incorrect, you’re inevitably going to take irrational actions. And so what we want to do is what science does which is to force peoples’ beliefs to conform to the evidence of reality rather than the other way around, and not assume the answers to questions even before we ask them. And use the RATIONAL WORLD to build a global society, not an exclusionary society, but a global world where people can live together based on the reality that we are all humans sharing this planet. And we need to work together to build a better place. A morality based on rationality and not outmoded religious beliefs.”
The first part, 2(a), is false. There is no law of physics that predicts that any mineral combination will be self-aware, much less a conscious agent, by virtue of deterministic laws of physics. There is no law of physics that even comes close. In fact, the practice of physics requires that physical existence be deterministic, regular, orderly, stupidly so. That alone falsifies what Krauss maintains as being complete knowledge of the world and how it works. To maintain such a thing necessitates an internal contradiction. And that contradiction falsifies his use of the term “rational world”
Further, it is pointless to declare that God is irrelevant to scientists, science and the investigation of material existence. In fact that is counterproductive to open thought and hypothesis formation. Material existence is not God, and there is no expectation of finding God there. But the fact that the universe is rational, we are rational, and the question of why should that be so in a purely material, deterministic universe cannot be answered under deterministic physical laws. The source of material existence and obviously non-deterministic, non-physical features of the physical universe are outside of both the physical universe and the ability of science to address. More on that below.
And it is annoying for a person, even and especially a physicist, to pretend to know things that he doesn’t and cannot, as he implies that there is nothing which exists that cannot be addressed by science in his hurry to eliminate a non-physical agency involved with the universe. He unabashedly declares himself to more wise than any wisdom found in the ancient texts, and he Ad Hominem’s the source of the texts by declaring them bronze/iron age ignorants who didn’t know science facts which he knows. The arrogance of this pretension to supremacy entails a belief in something which cannot be true, especially considering that Krauss fails to differentiate between contingent fact and wisdom as if he, himself, is ignorant of the difference. He appears blinded by the presumed brilliance of himself as he makes proclamations for other people who he obviously considers his lessers, even while demonstrating his own limitations.
Part 2(b): Morals. My first experience with Krauss was through his book, “A Universe From Nothing”, which gave me a firm impression of the type of integrity to which Krauss holds himself. The title is a purposeful fraud designed to sell books because the book does not give any actual empirical science in support of the “nothing” which he claims in the title. If he actually had such information, he would be enshrined as a second Newton, Einstein or both. But he has no such information despite the claim of the title. He has stalwartly refused to acknowledge any error or malfeasance in his action, despite heavy criticism from public and peers. So I am pretty sure that his brand of “rational world morality” would not reflect any recognizable form of actual morality which is not self-aggrandizing.
The terms “real world” and “morals” are mutually incompatible when placed in conjunction. Morality does not spring from the “real world”, especially not the “real world” of evolution, “red in tooth and claw”, or the Atheist Nietzschean concept of “Will to Power”, much less the forced elitist drive toward communal one-world, one-concept, one-think under elitist “rational” supervision. “Rational” actions are not selfless under the scrutiny of evolution, kin selection theory notwithstanding. The hypotheses of logic are only as good as their premises, form and grounding; they are not beholden to any morality of outcome. For example, world depopulation to accomplish the salvation of the planet might be declared logical but declaring it to be moral is not actual morality. That’s because the choice of objectives requires actual moral gating before logic is applied to the tactics for accomplishing the objective. This concept lies outside the scope of empiricism.
3. “This is an amazing picture, because it is a picture of gravitational lensing.” [omitting dialog describing galaxies] “When you look at images like this, they inspire you, in ways like nothing else that I know of can inspire.”
Here he has declared in essence that his personal ability to receive or produce inspiration is unfortunately truncated, severely so.
4(a) “Certainly there are limits to science; an empiricist – which is what I am – [smugness noted] empirically there are limits to what science can do. In fact, in my own field, cosmology, there are clearly limits because we are, we have one universe to observe and most of us live in that universe. The Republican Party in my country doesn’t, but, but, but, um, the, uh, therefore [11:13] there may be many universes and therefore there’s obviously in some real physical sense a limited domain in which we can explore, and that’s a key point. It’s not just tools. Every academic discipline uses tools, [11:27] in some ways they’re not that different. But the key part of what makes science, science, and what makes it work is that it is based on empirical evidence. So rational thought applies to empirical evidence. And therefore , you can’t measure, even in principle… I mean there are lots of things we can’t measure that we can talk about as theoretical physicists I think about things… a lot of things we can’t measure right now.
(b) But, if you can’t ever measure it in principle, then... then science really has nothing to say about it. I would argue that anything else you say about it is not worth much either, but, uh, uh, but… it’s certainly a fact that science generally can’t address it if you can’t measure it in principle.
And that’s, um, that’s of fundamental importance and I think that we forget that.
(c) So I think, the difference that I would say is that I don’t know what the ultimate limits of science are; there are limits now, and there are many areas where science has little to say right now.
(d) But can I say that it will NEVER have anything to say about it? Absolutely not! There’s a huge difference between what’s unknowable and what’s not known. And so the only way you can find out if science has anything to say about it is, try. And if it has something useful to say, it makes predictions which agree with experiments, then you can make progress. But you could try it and it might not work.
(e) An example might be sociology, where they tried to use the language of physics to apply to society and it was far too premature, it was too complex and consciousness, which I was just telling Dan [Dennett, sitting nearby] - I do physics because it’s easy. If I wanted to do the hard stuff, I’d do consciousness.
Having this written out allows the reader to try to follow the train of thought by backing up as the train jumps tracks, and to attempt to apply linear logic to it by going slowly through the jump. The most obvious jump off track occurs between 4(b), where he outlines the limits of empiricism, and and 4(c) where he then claims not to know the limits. All in the space of two sentences.
Then he jumps further off track from 4(b) to 4(d), by assuming that there actually are no limits. But still he pulls back to “prediction/experiment”, at least briefly. By 4(e) he's completely derailed, as he claims that it is complexity which is limiting, not ability to test it in principle which make science difficult but presumably not impossible.
He has jumped off the limiting rails of empirical science into the derailed world of Scientism as is necessary for his ideology.
Lawrence Krauss is not one for thinking through the impact or consequences of the things he says. And for some reason he still gets published. He reminds me of the Kardashians in that regard. Published merely for blurting out some – any – nonsense.
This time Krauss is attacking religion on the basis of the “sanctity of doubt”. The premise is that in science, nothing is sacred, so therefore doubt is sacred. This stunning example of internal contradiction does not faze him in the least, for the reason that Krauss really means something else: religion is the only target here, not science itself, and certainly not Krauss.
Krauss singles out some admittedly embarrassing examples of religious belief, which obtuseness he implies applies to all who hold theist positions. Since he is arguing for doubt and the sacredness of doubt, his position is that everything must be doubted and that doubt must be the position taught in the education systems.
However, Krauss is known to get testy when his own bizarre personal definition of “nothing” – as is his veracity based on “a universe from nothing”… except some stuff – is doubted. His position appears to be that in his case, doubt is not applicable, because he is a physicist, who is a friend of Dawkins from who he might get a Dawkins Award someday. (Or maybe already did, I don’t keep track. Or maybe Dawkins got a Krauss Award from Krauss?) The two have been trouping around the planet proselytizing Scientism, Atheism and Philosophical Materialism, none of which either of them actually doubts.
Krauss doesn’t seem to understand a couple of points which are pertinent to his principle of sacred doubt, even beyond the shining salience of its internal non-coherence. First, it is much easier to doubt anything Krauss says since he is a known liar; second, doubt (or radical skepticism as others know it) does not produce knowledge.
In fact, one must be a credulous fan of circuitous obfuscation in order to believe that “doubt”, as a single concept held in a vacuum empty of modifying concepts, is a proper principle of thought. It is not until doubt is attacked by investigation, logical analysis and discernment that any knowledge can be teased out. In fact, doubt is not even necessary for starting the process; only a perceived need to know about something is required. Doubt, held by itself, is merely a precursor to pathological cynicism. Perhaps that explains some of the Kraussian effluent.
Krauss is not concerned with teaching doubt as a general principle – his own Reductio Ad Absurdum would suffer the worst, of course. What Krauss actually wants is for government schools to teach anti-religious propaganda, and that it is not to be doubted. His claim that,
“if our educational system does not honestly and explicitly promote the central tenet of science—that nothing is sacred—then we encourage myth and prejudice to endure”,
Is a purely a religiously held Scientistic ideology requirement which would be placed as a hamstring on actual open thought processes. If we must doubt everything, then we must doubt the principles of logic and even the First Principles; that leaves us in the Nietzschean stew of a Universal Unknowability which leads directly to a philosophy of anti-rationalism.
And if “nothing is sacred” actually were the central tenet of science, then why is evolution sacred? Why would Dawkins (evolution’s Chihuahua) hang around with Krauss, if that is Krauss’ position? Well, again, that is not Krauss’ actual position, because science IS sacred for Krauss, and not to be doubted. It’s the basis for Krauss’ self-anointed credibility. One might demand credibility as a science expert in some narrow discipline, but there is no discipline called “doubt”. So here again Krauss uses terms which he defines and delimits for his own purposes.
Actually doubting evolution and AGW would be anti-science, wouldn’t it Lawrence? Of course it would.
So the entire article is Special Pleading, and is merely a bigoted attack on religion. Certainly it is not meant that anyone should doubt Krauss, doubt his books, doubt anything called “science”. Under the Principles of Krauss, doubt applies only to religion.
But a final point to be made is that doubt is NOT the “central tenet of science”; objective discernment of physical cause and effect relationships of physical phenomena is the central tenet. And its pursuit is motivated by any or all of the following: curiosity, money, and the personal desire to outshine Einstein and Darwin in the history of intellectual achievement.
I do doubt that Krauss knows very much about the roots and underpinning logic of his own field, after statements like that one. He is much more interested in the ideology of Scientism than in the restrictions of logic and empirical theory.
It's been several years that Krauss' book, "Universe from Nothing" has been out, and while Krauss has found love and devotion from Dawkins, he has run into plenty of critical acrimony, even from physicists and certainly from philosophers. That only boosted the hair on the back of Krauss' neck, and he and Dawkins have charged forth even more energetically spreading the darkness of Atheism in their wake.
I missed this 2012 review of Krauss' book in the NYT by David Albert. It is well worth reading, because it gives a succinct synopsis of both Krauss' assertions and the failure of those assertions in light of actual science. That takes understanding the use and limits of science (which Krauss either does not comprehend, or at least refuses to acknowledge) and Albert manages to insert some concise paragraphs which could enlighten Krauss. But apparently did not.
It boils down to Krauss' Atheist evangelism; he might be good at math perhaps (I don't know), but he is very poor at separating his concepts of Truth from blatant ideology. And he is more passionate about his ideology than about truth. Possibly that is what he has in common with Dawkins.
Lawrence Krauss, virulent Atheist and anti-christian, is incensed at Hollywood. Apparently they told him that his film showing himself and Dawkins talking back and forth kicking Christianity around wouldn't sell well.
Well, Larry knows better, and thus it is that Larry understands now that Hollywood is hopelessly anti-Atheist, catering to religions and producing evil movies like Noah, and all these other bible movies that people will actually go to see.
It truly is tough being an Atheist in Hollywood, according to Larry. Maybe he should try a soft porn version. That would be suitable for prime time TV.
Maybe if he named the film some fraudulent name, like he did his book...
Sometimes I agree with Massimo Pigliucci, and this is one of those times. Massimo is re-running some of his posts, this post refers to that “brilliant (as a physicist) moron”, Lawrence Krauss. If you are interested in observing blatant intellectual dishonesty in a physicist, then you will be interested in Massimo’s Krauss crunch.
Of particular note is the observation (in concert with my own) made by David Albert in the NY Times, where he confronts Krauss with the observation that his book, A Universe From Nothing actually doesn’t produce what the title claims. In fact, the universe in Krauss’ book required a pre-existing quantum field, not “nothing”. Read Krauss’ reply, and his subsequent attitude. Massimo and Albert and I agree that Krauss is not intellectually honest, and that his book, based on its title, is a fraud.
