Bulletin for Central Ohioans for Rational Inquiry
& Skeptics' Digest - January, 2005
QUOTE / UNQUOTE
“The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether or not it is the same problem you had last year.” – [John Foster Dulles]
"Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know." – [Montaigne]
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"What you think you know may not be so."
Skeptics’ Forum –
The Public Is Welcome
MEETING: Saturday January 8, 2005 at 10 AM LOCATION: Hilliard Branch, Columbus Metro Public Library; Cemetary Road in Hilliard
TOPIC: “The $800 Million Pill – Why are pharmaceuticals more costly for Americans?”
SPEAKER: Carl Miller
BUSINESS: Follows Speaker
LUNCH: Follows Meeting; attendees are invited to gather at a nearby venue.
IN THIS ISSUE:
ARTICLE: Fake Bible Era Relics - how forgers made grime seem ancient RATIONALLY SPEAKING: Massimo Pigliucci exposes “nonsense on stilts”
OPINION: Christopher Hitchens on “Jihadist Nihilism”
FALLACIOUS ASSAULTS: Stepford First Lady’s Secret Sign Language?
ARTICLE: Susan Blackmore tells WHY – after 30 years she has become a skeptic concerning psychic phenomena
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Fake Out! from Explainer – A regular feature in SLATE
How forgers made grime seem ancient
By Brendan I. Koerner – 12-30-2004
The Israel Antiquities Authority has advised museums worldwide that their Bible-era relics may be fakes produced by a team of forgers now under indictment. These forgers are charged with concocting the so-called James ossuary, which purportedly held the bones of Jesus' brother. According to the AP's account, they were skilled at creating "ancient grime" that fooled many scientists into authenticating their wares. How might a forger go about making grime that seems ancient?
For starters, with a bit of chalk and water. The forgers' key to tricking the archaeologists was crafting an authentic-looking patina. Like copper or bronze statues, which develop a green sheen after years of oxidization, stone slowly builds up a layer of geological soot as the centuries reel by. This is caused by the chemical reaction of elements like air or water with the minute traces of metals and other elements within the rock. To the naked eye, a thick patina is an immediate sign that an artifact is aged. Yet a skilled forger can fake a stone patina, at least convincing enough to fool all but the most advanced analysis. In the case of the James ossuary, for example, it's alleged that the forgers took an authentically old box that was inscribed simply "James, son of Joseph." According to Avner Ayalon of the Geological Survey of Israel, who studied the ossuary, the forgers may have then added the inscription "brother of Jesus" to the end of the sentence and used a solution of chalk and hot water to create a coating of calcium carbonate—a substance frequently found in stone artifacts excavated in and around Jerusalem. On cursory inspection, the patina appeared to be legitimate. Conventional verification means like ultraviolet light or simple chemical analysis could not differentiate the patina covering the first half of the inscription. Ayalon became suspicious, though, when he tested the patina's isotopic ratios—that is, the number of oxygen atoms containing 16 protons plus neutrons versus the number of oxygen atoms containing 17 or 18 protons plus neutrons.* These ratios are affected over time by an object's environmental conditions. Ayalon discovered that the portion of the patina covering the first part of the inscription was marked by an isotopic ratio consistent with Jerusalem's groundwater. The section covering the latter half, by contrast, betrayed evidence of having been created at high temperatures, probably well in excess of 120 degrees Fahrenheit—far above the temperature of ground water in caves, where ossuaries were stored. Strategies for crafting a convincing artificial patina can, of course, vary. Another alleged work of the indicted men was the so-called Jehoash (or Yoash) tablet, inscribed with what appeared to be proof that it had come from the 3,000-year-old Temple of Solomon. The tablet initially passed muster when chemical analysis revealed that trace amounts of carbon within the rock were, indeed, several millennia old. Furthermore, the patina featured traces of gold, and the temple was renowned in the Bible for its overlay of high-quality gold. But questions arose when further analysis was undertaken and it was discovered that the patina was imbued with microscopic marine fossils—quite odd, considering the temple was nowhere near the sea. Then one of Israel's top archaeologists, Yuval Goren of Tel Aviv University, found that the patina on the tablet's back was made of silica rather than calcite, which would have been consistent with Jerusalem's geology. (There were also several linguistic cues that tipped off researchers, particularly anachronisms.) Professor Goren proposed that the inscription had been chiseled onto a slab from a Medieval castle built by crusaders. A fake patina may then have been created by crushing up bits of identical stone, mixing the powder with water, and baking the whole concoction. Charcoal bits stolen from Jerusalem archaeological digs or university museums could have been added during the process, as could have specks of gold. It may have been more elegant than adding silver black to jewelry, a common trick used by charlatans to make new pieces look old. But it wasn't quite perfect. ================================================================== Click thumbnails to view
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Nonsense on stilts, an example …
Philosophy is supposed to be about clarifying concepts and bringing rigor and critical thinking to the analysis of complex problems. Socrates, for example, thought of himself as a philosophical midwife, helping people bringing into the clear what they really believed by questioning them until they were aware of the contradictions in what they thought. Unfortunately, much technical and popular philosophical writing seems to do exactly the opposite, with authors indulging in statements that equivocate and obfuscate matters, resulting in the regrettable propagation of much nonsense. As an example, I will comment on a recent article by John-Francis Phipps on the philosophy of Henri Bergson, which appeared in Philosophy Now (October/November ‘04). I am picking on Phipps not because his article is worse than many others, nor because Bergson’s ideas are particularly bad, but simply because it just happens that I’m writing this column during a trans-Atlantic flight, and my most obvious example of nonsense on stilts (as philosopher Jeremy Bentham famously referred to shacky reasoning) was Phipps’ essay.
Phipps starts out with an unequivocal example of purely rhetorical statement: he says that he read Bertrand Russell’s critique of Bergson and found that it “provided unconvincing reasons to justify his [Russell’s] prejudice.” Why was Russell’s opinion of Bergson a “prejudice,” rather than an informed opinion based on the examination of the Frenchman’s philosophy? When people begin their attacks with rhetoric rather than substance, one can smell more nonsense coming up, and I was not disappointed just a few lines further into Phipps’ article. Bergson, apparently, started out his career being “wholly imbued with mechanistic theories” (his words), and as we all know this quickly leads to the cold and unfriendly view of the world and humanity promoted by science. Fortunately, Bergson saw the light and produced a new theory of time as soon as he recognized “to my [Bergson’s] great astonishment that scientific time does not endure” (original italics). Come again? What does it even mean that time does not endure?
If Bergson had simply pointed out the difference between time as conceived by science and psychological time as perceived by human beings in the course of their lives (the starting point for his doctoral thesis), all would have been well -- if a bit dull. But he had to go on and claim that the mechanistic time of science is (as Phipps summarizes) “based on a misperception: it consists of superimposing spatial concepts onto time, which then becomes a distorted version of the real thing.” The trouble is that science does not have any such concept of time at all. In science, and in particular according to Einstein’s theory of relativity, time is a dimension of the fabric of the universe, akin to the three classical dimensions of space (and to a few more that we cannot perceive directly, if more recent physical theories are correct). Indeed, Bergson publicly debated Einstein on the question of time, and soundly lost (except in Phipps’ view, since he claims that “there aren’t really winners or losers in any debate about time” -- a sweeping generalization that is simply handed to us with no argument to back it up).
Phipps then moves on to Bergson’s conception of the relation between mind and body. While indubitably the Frenchman had several interesting things to say on this (as on much else), he proposed an entirely unhelpful analogy, which Phipps takes to be a deep insight. This mistake is so commonplace in much popular philosophical, scientific, and especially mystical/new age literature that it is worth quoting the paragraph in its entirety; Bergson says: “As the symphony overflows the movements which scan it, so the mental/spiritual life overflows the cerebral/intellectual life. The brain keeps consciousness, feeling and thought tensely strained on life, and consequently makes them capable of efficacious action. The brain is the organ of attention to life.” What? Once again, what does this mean? If Bergson is telling us that it is the brain that allows animals to keep track of and react to events in the world that may affect them, this is a truism that requires no particularly deep philosophy or science. If one tries to unpack the terms embedded in the paragraph in search of a deeper meaning, one immediately runs into a quagmire that Phipps doesn’t bother to clarify (presumably because the stunning insight is, well, so stunning!). For example, why is mental equated with spiritual, and cerebral with intellectual? Is the mental somehow supposed to be separate from the cerebral? Can we have a mental life without a brain? But you can see how my mechanistic prejudice clearly shows through...
Phipps correctly points out that Bergson’s best known work is his 1907 book, Creative Evolution, in which the concept of “vital force” is put forth to “explain” why living beings are fundamentally different from inanimate matter. Any modern biologist who hears about vital forces automatically reaches for his gun, but this isn’t because of a mechanistic prejudice: the fact of the matter is that saying that living beings are different from rocks because the first have a vital force that the latters lack explains precisely nothing. It is the same as “explaining” the motion of objects by saying that they are compelled by the moving force, or that someone got sick because his health left him. Duh. This, incidentally, is the problem with much (if not all) mystical or non-scientific “explanations”: they sound deep and insightful, until one applies a modicum of critical thinking and scratches just below the surface, to find simply an empty and useless tautology.
Phipps reaches the apotheosis of nonsense toward the end of his article, when he speculates on what sort of world we would live in if we had paid more attention to Bergson, abandoned our ill-conceived scientistic prejudice and whole-heartedly embraced Bergson’s “greater respect for all expressions of the life force.” What a world it would have been! Apparently (with no argument to butress his speculations, of course), Phipps thinks that “by now we would have had an environmentally-friendly form of global politics ... Political and economic priorities would by now have changed dramatically and war would be seen as an absolute last resort ... There could therefore be no question of any nation, however powerful, embarking on pre-emptive wars against any other nation.” And so on.
Wow, and all of this didn’t happen because we insist on science and its despicable reductionist attitude! Never mind, of course, that in this so-called scientific era, and in the most scientifically-minded country in the world (the United States) about half of the population believes that the earth is 6,000 years old; moreover, it is apparently irrelevant to the argument that both the 9/11 attacks and the counter-attack against Afghanistan and Iraq have been informed not by science and reductionism, but by the sort of mindless “vitalism” butressed by non-sequitur arguments that is so similar in structure (although, thankfully, not in effects) to new age thinking and the sort of philosophy that Bentham referred to as “nonsense on stilts.” I am no friend of radical reductionism, and I am mindful of the limitations of science as a tool to understand the real world. I would also not deny that the realm of human experience is much richer than a purely scientific framework can account for. But this does in no way justify sloppy thinking, obscure metaphors, and an anti-science attitude that is all too common in this era supposedly overwhelmed by scientific thinking. Please, let’s get off the stilts and pay more critical attention to what we (and others) say!
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Death to the Intellect!
On “Jihadist Nihilism” - CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
Hitchens says: "Osama bin Laden is a kind of pseudo-intellectual, with a rough theory of history and a highly reactionary desire to restore a lost empire. But he negates even this doomed, pseudo-Utopian project by his hysterical Puritanism, which bans even music and which of course would deny society the talents of women as well as driving out anyone with any culture or education. Thus, any society run by him or people like him would keep on going bankrupt and starving itself to death, with no ready explanation of why this kept happening. …
Below even the bin Laden level, however, there are those who insist that they prefer death to life, and who really mean it. Suicide is not so much their tactic as their rationale: they represent a cult of death and they are wedded to destruction. It's amazing how many people refuse to see this. They persist in saying that it's a protest against something, or a reaction to some injustice. They are right to an extent: as long as there is a non-Salafist Muslim anywhere, or a Jew or Christian or rationalist, or an unveiled woman or a profane work of art, the grievance can never be appeased.
Of course this does have something in common with fascism - "Death to the intellect! Long live Death!" was a favorite slogan of some Francoists: I think it was coined by General Quiepo de Llano - but even fascism could build an autobahn or design a rocket, while these primitives only want to steal enough technology to wreak devastation. So far, they have mainly brought down their own house (as in Afghanistan and now in Iraq) but we can't allow ourselves take too much comfort from that. However, there is some encouragement to be derived. The 1990s Islamist insurgency in Algeria, for example, was crushed partly because the GIA (which now seems to have gone out of existence) had no political demands and had more or less excommunicated all other Algerians as heretics. This same dead-end for jihad is perhaps being reached in Palestine …
But wait . . . Isn’t it ironic?
(Aren’t “intellectuals” and/ or “elites” – under fire from the very national leadership that has assumed for the United States of America the unilateral role of protecting Western Civilization? – Ed.)
It is ironic that the United States should have been founded by intellectuals, for throughout most of our political history, the intellectual has been for the most part either an outsider, a servant or a scapegoat.
[Richard Hofstadter]
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Fallacious Assaults
OMG! LAURA BUSH SHOWS HER ALLEGIANCE!
"All hail the Dark Lord, y'all!" giggled Laura.
Wonkette (AKA Ana Marie Cox) writes, “We thought it was a way to summon The Dark Lord's efficient minions. The only reason (to go) to Texas was for the devil worship! Better tell dad to let those virgins out of the basement ...”
Laura is flashing the above sign in honor of the University of Texas win in the Rose Bowl … More embarrassing: We didn't realize it was a symbol for the "longhorns"!
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First Person - Into the Unknown
Dr. Susan Blackmore
Dr. Susan Blackmore is a freelance writer, lecturer and broadcaster, and a Visiting Lecturer at the University of the West of England, Bristol. She has a degree in psychology and physiology from Oxford University (1973) and a PhD in parapsychology from the University of Surrey (1980). Her research interests include memes and the theory of memetics, evolutionary theory, consciousness, and meditation. She practices Zen. Sue Blackmore no longer works on the paranormal. Come to think of it, I feel slightly sad. It was just over thirty years ago that I had the dramatic out-of-body experience that convinced me of the reality of psychic phenomena and launched me on a crusade to show those closed-minded scientists that consciousness could reach beyond the body and that death was not the end. Just a few years of careful experiments changed all that. I found no psychic phenomena - only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a sceptic. So why didn’t I give up then? There are lots of bad reasons. Admitting you are wrong is always hard, even though it's a skill every scientist needs to learn. And starting again as a baby in a new field is a daunting prospect. So is losing all the status and power of being an expert. I have to confess I enjoyed my hard-won knowledge. Yes, I have read Michael Faraday's 1853 report on table tipping, and the first 1930s studies in parapsychology, and the latest arguments over meta-analysis of computer-controlled ESP experiments, not to mention the infamous Scole report (Feedback, New Scientist, 22 January). Should I feel obliged to keep using this knowledge if I can? No. Enough is enough. None of it ever gets anywhere. That's a good enough reason for leaving. But perhaps the real reason is that I am just too tired - and tired above all of working to maintain an open mind. I couldn’t dismiss all those extraordinary claims out of hand. After all, they might just be true, and if they were then swathes of science would have to be rewritten. Another "psychic" turns up. I must devise more experiments, take these claims seriously. They fail - again. A man explains to me how alien abductors implanted something in his mouth. Tests show it's just a filling, but it might have been… No, I don’t have to think that way. And when the psychics and clairvoyants and New Agers shout at me, as they do: "The trouble with all you scientists is you don't have an open mind", I won't be upset. I won't argue. I won't rush off and perform yet more experiments just in case. I'll simply smile sweetly and say: "I don't do that any more."
New Scientist, 4 November 2000, p 55
At last, I've done it. I've thrown in the towel, kicked the habit and gone on the wagon. After thirty years, I have escaped from a fearsome addiction.
To be truthful, I'm not really sure I've gone cold turkey yet. Only last month I was at a psychical research conference. Only days ago, I emptied the last of those meticulously organised filing cabinets, fighting the little voice that warned: "Don't do it, you might want to read that again" with a stronger one that urged: "You've given up!" as I threw paper after paper on ESP, psychokinesis, psychic pets, aromatherapy and haunted houses into the recycling sack. If cold turkey does strike, the dustbin men will have taken away my fix.
Dr. Susan Blackmore presents a more detailed account, including investigations into the bio-electric shield and alien implants in: Blackmore,S.J. (2001) Why I have given up.
In Skeptical Odysseys: Personal Accounts by the World’s Leading Paranormal Inquirers, edited by CSICOP’s Paul Kurtz, Amherst, New York, Prometheus Books, 85-94.
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Gerry Dantone writes in the Inquirer (March 2004):
Item: It was reported in Elle Magazine that Paris Hilton explains what studying kaballah has done for her: “It helps you confront your fears. Like, if a girl borrowed my clothes and never gave them back, and I saw her wearing them months later, I would confront her.”
Comment: Instead of kaballah, perhaps she was thinking of karate. In any event, this is too deep for me.
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CORI Bulletin And Skeptics’ Digest
Our 10th Year of Bologna Detection!
Volume: Number 10 | Issue: Number 1| Date: January 2005
For the Members of Central Ohioans for Rational Inquiry
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Founded by Ann Pratt in 1996
Correspondence: To contribute to the Bulletin or to comment –
Contact Rev. Art Hites, Editor
[email protected]
