 Newsletter
33
November 6, 2003
"...we must refrain from all explanations of
the design of nature, drawn from the will of a supreme being, because this
would not be natural philosophy, but an admission that we have come to its
end." -- Immanuel Kant
In this issue: Talk at Sacramento City College;
The Skeptic's Dictionary selected for the Quality Paperback Book Club
and reviewed in the Skeptical Inquirer and by the Irish Skeptics; a
few new entries; conference on hoaxes a success; a couple of interviews;
some feedback on the Brights, my one-sidedness, and my pedigree; and some
news about government grants in Norway for psychics.
Announcement: Tonight, Nov. 6,
on Frontline: The Alternative Fix (or
view it on your computer), a one-hour
program exploring the ins and outs of alternative medicine.
Next Appearance On November 11 at high noon in room LR105
(Learning Resource Center) at
Sacramento City College, I will be discussing my book and some of the
benevolent hoaxes mentioned therein. The question I'll be addressing is "Do
'Enlightenment' Hoaxes Do Any Good?"
The Book and the Web site
The Skeptic's Dictionary is
featured as a selection this month by the
Quality Paperbacks book club. The print flyer, if folded out, juxtaposed
my book to two books on witchcraft. Coincidence?
The book was favorably
reviewed by Amanda Chesworth in the Skeptical Inquirer
(November/December) and by Paul
O'Donoghue in the Skeptical Times (Vol. 1 Issue 5, November 2003),
the newsletter of the Irish
Skeptics Society. I have been corresponding with Mr. O'Donoghue and Mike
Reen of the Irish Skeptics about addressing their group in Dublin next June. I'll keep
you posted once a firm date is established. ***
Because of some
complaints from M., a spiritual healer, I have removed my critical
thinking mini-lesson on fallacies (from Newsletter 29) that used his letter
to me as an exemplar of fallacious reasoning. I will post another article in
its place soon. ***
Since the last newsletter I added a critical thinking
mini-lesson on the
straw man
fallacy and revised the EMDR
entry to correct a misleading claim I made about the American Psychological
Association (APA). While it is true that the APA does not approve of the
therapy, it doesn't disapprove, either. I completely redid the
homeopathy entry and added
several related entries:
anthroposophic
medicine, complex
homeopathy, isopathy,
and nosodes.
I posted a
reader's criticism and my response regarding the
argument from design.
Activity CSICOP Conference on Hoaxes, Myths, and
Manias I don't know if CSICOP considers the conference a success but
from my perspective it was great. More than 200 people showed up for my talk on
"Hoaxes From Around the World" and the conference bookstore sold out of
The Skeptic's Dictionary (25 copies). I also met some very nice people
from around the country. I met Alex Boese, for example, who is finishing up
his doctoral dissertation at my alma mater, the University of California at
San Diego. Alex has a wonderful little book out called
The Museum of Hoaxes: A Collection of Pranks, Stunts, Deceptions, and Other
Wonderful Stories Contrived for the Public from the Middle Ages to the New
Millennium (based on his Web
site of the same name). I highly recommend both the Web site and the
book. Phil Plait was there ranting about Madame X (or was it Planet X?).
Anyway, Phil was very entertaining and very informative, as usual.
I won't go
through the litany of saints, however, but I must mention Jim Alcock's
wonderful speech as he presented Ray Hyman with CSICOP's In Praise of Reason Award.
You can read the entire speech on the
Skeptical Inquirer website.
I should note that the conspiracy guy, Jonathan Vankin, was a no-show.
*** I was interviewed about
creationism by Toby
Henry, a reporter at the Brattleboro
Reformer newspaper in Vermont, on October 29th. Mr. Henry was
preparing for an interview he's going to do with Steve Grohman, curator of
the Mobile
Creation Museum, who will be
lecturing in Brattleboro about creation science. One of Grohman's pieces of
evidence for a young earth (no more than about 6,000 years old) is "Niagara
Falls' erosion rate (approx. 2 feet per year) indicates an age of less than
10,000 years. (Don't forget Noah's Flood could have eroded half of the
seven-mile-long Niagara River gorge in a few hours as the flood waters
receded through the soft sediments)." Geologists place the age of the falls
at
about 12,000 years, but why this is relevant to creationism needs some
explaining. Maybe it has to do with an error made by Charles Lyell and
accepted by others that the falls are about 35,000 years old, a date that
contradicts Archbishop Ussher's calculation from the Bible that the earth is
about 6,000 years old. But unless one assumes that nothing existed at Niagra
Falls until it was created at the same time as everything else on earth, the
erosion rate of the area is of little significance in establishing the age
of the planet.
I bring up this particular argument from Grohman because Mr. Henry asked
me about it and I told him I'd never heard of the argument but I was very
familiar with the tactic used by creationists to find errors or questionable
claims made by scientists and use those errors or questionable claims as
support for creationism. For a list of such claims, go to
Grohman's
Web site. All I could say to Mr. Henry was that the tactic is a good one
because it leads to a Never Ending Quest. No matter how many pieces of
evidence for a young earth we explain away, the creationist will dig
up ten more. But will the creationist ever develop a theory of anything that
will provide a basis for research and discovery? No. The creation scientist
is not interested in scientific research. He thinks he already knows the
truth so his job is an apologetic one: defend the faith by whatever means
necessary. This requires being very selective in what pieces of evidence one
does put forth. Don't mention geographical places where the
evidence indicates millions of years of development. And throw in a few
claims that might befuddle the naive, e.g., "The erosion rate of the
continents is such that they would erode to sea level in less than
14,000,000 years (destroying all old fossils)." If true, this means that the
erosion rate wasn't always what it is today. And so it goes on and on and
on.
***
I was also interviewed by Patrick Beach of the Austin (Texas)
American-Statesman for an article on the JFK assassination and
conspiracy theories. The article is to appear in the Nov. 16th issue. It's
hard to believe that we are coming up to the 40th anniversary of the
assassination of the President by the Military-Industrial Complex because he planned to withdraw from Vietnam. Of
course, this was done in conjunction with the Mafia who had him killed
because he refused to invade Cuba again after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. Now I
don't mean to imply that Castro didn't have him killed in retaliation for
CIA efforts to assassinate the Cuban leader. Nor do I mean to imply that the
CIA didn't orchestrate the whole thing nor that Lyndon Johnson wasn't a
co-conspirator. What is most interesting is that at
least half a dozen conspiracies to kill the president took place
simultaneously in Dallas and they all suckered Lee Harvey Oswald into taking
the rap. What are the odds of this happening by coincidence?
Feedback Dear Sir:
Bright? Too fraught with innuendo and baggage.
Skeptic. That's it. Definition not fully understood by the public in
general but still concise and accurate and has a long and honorable history.
Atheist? Takes too much hubris on my part to go against the thinking
of so many minds down through history. Agnostic. Says all that needs
to be said without getting into anybody's face. Regards, Robert H. Galloway
*** A reader of my FAQ said
he feels "uncomfortable" reading my writings because I don't include
responses from pseudoscientists. Those familiar with my work know that I
have included hundreds of such responses in the reader comments
sections of many articles. In fact, quite a few readers have told me that
they find the reader comments with my responses to be the best part of
The Skeptic's Dictionary. Anyway, I added a couple of paragraphs to the
FAQ to make it clear that even though mine is intentionally a one-sided
book, I have allowed "the other side" to have their say. The new paragraphs
reads
I have, however, invited critics and proponents of opposing viewpoints
to send me feedback. I have posted many of their remarks and my responses
to them. So, while I did not write the book to set forth the best
arguments pro and con on the issues, these postings provide a taste of how
I handle criticisms of my views and arguments in defense of the
paranormal, etc.
In addition, I have incorporated many entries into the book that should
help the critical thinker who is examining not just my arguments and
opinions but those of "the other side." A list of these entries may be
found at Logic & Perception.
*** A reader who identifies himself only as J. Chambers wrote
Dear Mr. Carroll:
I ran across a photo of you on the internet and am curious to know
whether Todd Carroll is your original, birth name. You seem to have
decidedly Semitic features but your name is wholly Anglo-Saxon. Would you
by any chance have any Semitic ancestry, Jewish or Arabic, that you are
aware of? Thank you for your feedback.
I have taken the liberty of capitalizing Semitic, Jewish,
and Arabic. Chambers had them in lowercase, though Anglo-Saxon is
capitalized in the original. I didn't reply to the impertinent Chambers but had
I, my remarks would have been along the following lines:
You ask if I have any Semitic ancestry. I certainly hope so. I don't know
anything for certain about my ancestors, but my father claimed to be Irish
and I had no reason to doubt him. My grandmother's name was Kennedy. My
great-grandmother's name was Kelly. My great-great-grandmother's name was
Dugan. My mother claimed to be Italian. So did her mother. My grandmother's
maiden name was Rivelli. My great-grandmother's name was Veci. My
grandfather, Robert Taylor Todd, was said to be English and German. He died before
I was born, so I never got to ask him about his Semitic or antisemitic
past.
News Norway has awarded a government grant worth 53,000
kroner ($7,500; £4,500) to Lena Skarning so she can start up a small
business devoted to witchcraft. Forest Witch Magic Consulting, according to
the 33-year-old witch, will tell fortunes, teach magic tricks at corporate
seminars, and offer potions and creams to cure problems ranging from
sleeplessness to bad habits.
Officials from the regional development fund said that her proposal was
"pretty reasonable and well thought out." As evidence of their own
reasonableness, they made it a condition of the grant that she not cast any
harmful spells.
Skarning, who claims she has been a witch since she was about 20, was
quoted in a BBC
article as saying: "I'm an ordinary witch who came up with an original
business idea." She noted that she is "Norway's only state-backed witch."
How did she come up with idea of asking the government for seed money for
her witchcraft business? Did she cast a spell on government officials,
causing them to temporarily lose their senses? No. She said came up with the
idea after attending a seminar on entrepreneurship.
***
More bad news for the Brights
movement. "The Irish Skeptics
had a discussion on it recently and the unanimous verdict was that it was a
terrible idea which needed to be reined back in as soon as possible."
***
I stumbled across something on the WWW called
International Skeptics Meetup Day,
the 4th Saturday of every month. The Web site says: "Had enough of
astrologers, UFO buffs, psychics, homeopaths, and spirit channelers?
Yearning to talk with someone rational for awhile? Meetup with other local
skeptics for some refreshing and sane conversation."
Anybody heard of this
outfit? Apparently, Meetup.com will set up meetings around the world for
anybody on any subject or issue.
Request
The Skeptic's Dictionary was reviewed along with several
other non-fiction works in The Times (UK) on October 25, 2003. If
anyone has a copy, I would appreciate seeing it. My editor tells me the
review said "Use this book as protection against attacks by New Agers,
alternative therapists and others who have chosen to abandon reason."
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