Apparently, this site is full of "pseudo-skeptics"

[Darth Servo]

How to argue like a fundie fucktard:

2) If your opponent points out logic fallacies in your argument, declare that logic is not necessarily Truth. This way, you can conveniently ignore the fact that your argument attempted to use logic (any argument which includes words like "therefore" or "because" is attempting to use logic) and you were caught cheating.

The fundie moron on ST.com responds to accusations of logical fallacies with "we beat up kids like that in my school"

10) And finally, if all else fails, take offense at the fact that your opponent is attacking your religious beliefs. Accuse him of being a bigot for not treating your beliefs with the same respect that one would accord a human being. In effect, elevate your beliefs to the same status that a living, breathing person would have, so that an attack on them is like an assault on a person and "intolerance" of those beliefs is the same as intolerance of human beings.

Call all such criticisms "hatred" while simultaneously accusing the other side of being responsible for every atrocity of the last century.

[Kuroneko]

SDN: Effing the Ineffable Since 2002.

I apologize in advance for this tangent, but I do feel the need to stick up for Einstein just a bit--I cannot see his position as a blunder, but rather a very conscientiously thought-out position that was proven to be wrong. His rejection of quantum mechanics was not so much with its predictive power (he acknowledged its practicality), but the claim of its completeness. In other words, he believed that there must be a deeper theory and that quantum mechanics is, to use an analogy I've put forward before, somewhat like statistics--perhaps completely right in its results, but still not the real physics.

And it wasn't really an unreasonable position. For all his talk of "playing dice" or "the Moon is still there", what was really bothering him in QM was entanglement--the loss of both realism and locality. The Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paper makes the dillema explicit: either physics is non-local or quantum mechanics is incomplete. In this he was completely correct. Considering that his own General Theory of Relativity adopted the position that physics is local as a first principle (it's implicit in the principle of equivalence), his argument establishes that the principles of GTR and the principles of QM are incompatible--something just about every modern physicist agrees with. It's no surprise that Einstein would side with locality rather than with QM being complete; perhaps he was a bit biased towards his own theory, but in the end, it's not at all a careless or unreasoning mistake to pit the by-then accepted and unfalsified theory (GTR) against a relative newcomer (QM). A mistake it was, but the objective evidence to prove Einstein mistaken did not exist until after his death, in the results of J.S. Bell.

Thus, attributing Einstein's position to remnants of religion is an unfair oversimplification at best, since in fact anyone who accepts the principles of GTR would be logically forced to conclude that QM is incomplete, just like Einstein did. He did like to misuse the term "God" if understood in terms of any traditional religion, but his "God", lacking even consciousness, was something even deists would find too personal; a closer comparison would be the naturalistic pantheism. In his own words:

I believe in Spinoza's God who reveals himself in the orderly harmony of what exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fates and actions of human beings.

Ironically, many theists view pantheism (of Spinoza's variety or otherwise) as just a curious kind of atheism. Regardless of whether pantheists would agree with such an evaluation (hmm... Rye?), it's certainly the case that that sort of "God" is completely unlike any monotheistic variety, so invoking Einstein offers a very poor defense for any fundamentalist.

Again, I apologize.

[TithonusSyndrome]

That's all good and fine for Christian fundies, but for Hancock and his ilk it seems to me to be much more difficult to peg down any kind of similar pattern. They're not identifiable by their adherence to a moderately varied book like the Bible; some of them believe that the I Ching reveals all the mysteries of the universe because modern computing is purported to be based on Leibniz's principles who in turn is said to have taken them from the I Ching, others believe that moon craters prove that Atlantean civilizations conducted nuclear warfare, others yet believe that Emperor Fu Xi and his wife Nu Kua had an uninterrupted understanding of the human genome because of stupid fucking pictures like this one, and others still believe that man became intelligent after following migrating herds of cattle and eating hallucinogenic mushrooms that grew in their dung for a period of millenia. If there's a common routine to their madness, I can't see it.

[Darth Wong]

Thus, attributing Einstein's position to remnants of religion is an unfair oversimplification at best, since in fact anyone who accepts the principles of GTR would be logically forced to conclude that QM is incomplete, just like Einstein did. He did like to misuse the term "God" if understood in terms of any traditional religion, but his "God", lacking even consciousness, was something even deists would find too personal; a closer comparison would be the naturalistic pantheism.

Yes, it's an oversimplification. But when you're dealing with sound-bite arguments, you really have no choice but to oversimplify matters. If the person wants to get into the nitty-gritty of Einstein's attitude toward QM, you can always hit him with the nitty-gritty of what Einstein actually believed about the entity he called "God" and what he really thought of religion. But I find that you're more likely to throw them off-balance with a counter-attack from a completely unexpected direction.

That's all good and fine for Christian fundies, but for Hancock and his ilk it seems to me to be much more difficult to peg down any kind of similar pattern.

Is it? Take a look at that list of ten items; most of them do not require you to be a religious fundamentalist, and can in fact be equally applied to all of these new-age bullshit artists.

[TithonusSyndrome]

I guess most of it applies, but appeals to popular opinion are seldom useful for the lunatic fringe, and for deadheads who think that everyone should "just do their own thing, man" because God is some lovey-dovey meta-energy field, appeals to consequence are seldom that useful either. Now that this book is looming large and may become the lunatic fringe's "God Delusion", I think most of their attacks are going to be lifted from there from the point of it's publication onwards.

[Darth Wong]

I guess most of it applies, but appeals to popular opinion are seldom useful for the lunatic fringe

On the contrary, I wish I had a dollar for every time some New Age dipshit lectured me about how humans don't function based on pure logic.

and for deadheads who think that everyone should "just do their own thing, man" because God is some lovey-dovey meta-energy field, appeals to consequence are seldom that useful either.

Aren't they? Those guys aren't any more keen on fading into oblivion after death than the rest of us.

Now that this book is looming large and may become the lunatic fringe's "God Delusion", I think most of their attacks are going to be lifted from there from the point of it's publication onwards.

I don't see anything so far that doesn't fit the "strawman" classification I used earlier, nor do I see anything that creationists have not been using for decades. It's really just creationist logic, without the actual creationism.

[TithonusSyndrome]

I guess most of it applies, but appeals to popular opinion are seldom useful for the lunatic fringe

On the contrary, I wish I had a dollar for every time some New Age dipshit lectured me about how humans don't function based on pure logic.

Oh, alright, I thought you meant "a billion people can't be wrong" style arguments.

and for deadheads who think that everyone should "just do their own thing, man" because God is some lovey-dovey meta-energy field, appeals to consequence are seldom that useful either.

Aren't they? Those guys aren't any more keen on fading into oblivion after death than the rest of us.

Well, since most of those druggie deadheads are more or less neo-hippes, I doubt they'd want to advocate violence that could find it's way to them, but I mostly meant that they didn't care about things like "sexual immorality" or what kind of meat you eat on what day of the week.

Now that this book is looming large and may become the lunatic fringe's "God Delusion", I think most of their attacks are going to be lifted from there from the point of it's publication onwards.

I don't see anything so far that doesn't fit the "strawman" classification I used earlier, nor do I see anything that creationists have not been using for decades. It's really just creationist logic, without the actual creationism.

I agree, but if you try to reply to the accusations they crib from the book by telling them they're strawmanning, they'll just guffaw and loop back to the book again. Rebuttals to this anti-skepticism are going to have to be, in my opinion, tailored slightly differently.

[Darth Wong]

That's easy. Just accuse them of treating this book like a Bible

[TithonusSyndrome]

Then I assume they'd make a detour into tu quoque territory and say the same things about Dawkins and the scientific community at large. This book more or less purports to expose anyone doubtful of the supernatural as a complete charlatan with a chip on their shoulder whose every tactic is automatically a flawed logical device, as per the strawman of Occam's Razor. It's printed word and it supports their worldview, and of course any attempt to counter the book is already circumvented by it's anti-empiricist content.

I already had one encounter today that could be considered at the very best a Pyrric victory attained only by exhausting my cousin after enough circular arguments. I'd rather not have to do that with every whackaloon Atlantis-phile brimming with newfound gusto after picking up this book.

[Darth Wong]

Then I assume they'd make a detour into tu quoque territory and say the same things about Dawkins and the scientific community at large.

That's when I hit them with the fact that I've never even bothered to read Dawkins' book.

[Dooey Jo]

One of my favourite arguments from anti-sceptics is that "sceptics will always find a way to explain a [miracle/psychic power/street magician's act] away". They actually think that people who can explain it must be rabid sceptics, and rabid sceptics are always wrong, as everyone know, and so it reinforces their own belief. In other words: "Something is explainable, therefore it is unexplainable."

Somewhy, they all seem to be very selective about employing this wonderful logic, though. Perhaps they subconsciously know how full of shit they are...