Free Will & Other Fairy Tales

[I should probably point out that I started writing this post before I heard that Sam Harris just released a short book / long pamphlet about this subject. You’ll just have to take my word for it.]

Being a connoisseur of crazy ideas carries with it a sort of demarcation problem. Is there a clearly defined line between a belief being totally unreasonable and kooky, and a belief which is just simply wrong? What kind of method can we use to tell the difference?

Sometimes it can be tough to distinguish between one unjustified belief categorized as crackpottery while another equally unjustified belief escapes unscathed simply because it’s popular. As it goes with pornography and Supreme Court justices, we might not be able to clearly define woo, but we can know it when we see it. As hazily defined a term as it is, maybe it would help the cause to expand its definition to the point where it makes more people re-examine their positions.

When I was doing a little research to prepare for an interview with Sarah Posner a couple weeks ago, I stumbled across a blog post on her site Religion Dispatches called Dear Scientists: Please Stop Bashing Free Will! by John Horgan. Horgan writes for Scientific American, so it’s not like he’s stupid. But even smart people can be tricked into believing stupid things for stupid reasons. Free will is one of those unjustified beliefs that’s so ubiquitous that even a science writer will openly defend it using the kinds of arguments he’d be among the first to counter when used to promote creationism or cryptozoology.

Sarah Posner Interview

Sarah Posner is the author of  God’s Profits: Faith, Fraud, and the Republican Crusade for Values Voters and senior editor at Religion Dispatches where she covers politics. We talk about Republicans, contraception, my gambling debts, religious code words, the possible problems Foster Friess had with girls in high school, and lots more.

Blessed Are The Cheesemakers

So it’s getting close to the end of 2011 and like every other group of dipshits in the known universe, science-religion accommodationists are releasing lists of people and things which have warmed their hearts over the past 12 months. Like this one in Religion Dispatches, for instance.

It’s by some guy I’ve never heard of called Paul Wallace who appropriately enough writes at the nauseatingly terrible Huffington Post. Someone who shares a masthead with Jenny McCarthy and Deepak Chopra is trying to tell us the roles of science and religion. That’s cool…