 Our next presenter is Russell Blackford. We have the extraordinary evidence exclamation point. Science, skepticism and denialism. Russell is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Evolution and Technology, which makes him a Borg, I guess. He's a fellow of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies and in the store is his another fantastic book, Freedom of Religion and a Secular State. Here is his haiku. We say we have proof. Tests, data, studies, yes, proof. To them, not so much. Please welcome Russell Blackford. Indulge me for one moment, folks, while I just say how pleased and privileged I feel to be speaking at this great event. I've come 8,000 miles to speak here but I find myself surrounded by all these welcoming, friendly and refreshingly rational and reasonable people and I feel very much at home. So thank you to Jay Rhett and thank you all for all that. When DJ Grothi asked me if I would speak at this convention I felt honored but I also felt some trepidation. I thought well what can I really say to a bunch of hardened, seasoned, scientific skeptics, right? I'm not a magician. I'm not a scientific investigator. I'm not any sort of scientist. I'm a philosopher. So what can I say that might be helpful but I think I can offer as a philosopher some kind of perspective that may be of interest to you and in offering that perspective I'm going to ask you to cast your minds back 500 years. I'm not a magician. I can't do that for you and I don't know about any of you but I'm not old enough to remember that far back and I don't believe in reincarnation which is something which will come up later in the talk. However, we have good historical records. We have good records of what was happening 500 years ago at least in many parts of the world and so we can rely upon the collective memory that's available to us. So I'm going to make some comparisons between let's say 1513 and 2013. The lesson here, the lesson that I'll be trying to draw is that what once seemed like ordinary or at least acceptable claims in 1513 might be extraordinary claims now and what would have been an extraordinary claim then might now in the relevant sense to us have become an ordinary one and that's not because I take some relativist approach to knowledge it's not anything like that it's because the evidence that's reasonably available to people has changed so much in those 500 years. In particular I want you to think of European civilization in 1513. That was four years before Martin Luther confronted the indulgent cello Johann Tetzel with his famous 95th thesis catalyzing the Protestant Revolution. It was 30 years before the publication of Copernicus's major work on the revolutions of the heavenly spheres. It was about a century before Galileo's great scientific discoveries that arguably marked the beginning of modern science and it was 300 years or more before Darwin. So there's our historical perspective 500 years ago 1513 versus 2013. People in Europe 500 years ago were in effect living in another world that is to say the information available to them at that time was radically different from what is available to us today so much so that it's no wonder that they understood the world very differently. The celebrated Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor has written something along these lines he's carried out an exercise a similar exercise for the one I'm asking of you when you cast your minds back 500 years ago. His exercise is specifically about the existence of God and the truth of Christianity. Now Taylor is actually a religious believer his book A Secular Age is not a book advocating atheism. If you want a book like that there are plenty available and one more that will be available later this year is my new book with Ida Schuchlenk 50 Great Myths About Atheism that's not really what Taylor is on about but in his 2007 book A Secular Age he discusses how things changed during that period of time to enable a movement from a society where belief in God was essentially unchallenged to the current situation in western societies where belief in God is as Taylor puts it understood to be one option among others and frequently not the easiest to embrace so that's that's Taylor's book A Secular Age published in 2007 I should say that a secular age won the much coveted Templeton Prize but we're not going to hold that against the book right okay as Taylor describes it it was virtually impossible or even unthinkable in say 1500 he sees in 1513 whatever the date we choose especially unthinkable not to believe in God well what has changed Taylor identifies you know a range of features of 16th century life in Europe that made the existence of God just obvious just obvious to everybody and some of those points that he identifies apply more widely than belief in God so first you said you had the natural world was seen as testifying to divine activity whether it was the regularities of the natural world or whether it was extraordinary events such as plagues and droughts and floods or even extraordinary good events you know such as seasons of a particularly fruitful harvest all of that was imagined within the ideology of the time as a testing to the action of God either maintaining regularity or interfering with these yeah these acts of God these extraordinary events and that idea was not challenged yeah that was that was the common kind of understanding second if you lived in Europe in the 16th century the whole political and social system was closely integrated with the religious system at all levels of society it was just assumed that human activity was underpinned by the activity of God and all communal life was pervaded with this all communal life was pervaded by ritual and worship thirdly there was a strong sense this is very important actually there's a strong sense the 16th century Europeans of living in an enchanted cosmos full of miraculous beings and powers now a lot of people are still living in that enchanted cosmos a lot of people still have that kind of mentality but that was the common mentality back then and there was no real reason to think otherwise there's no real reason to challenge it no authority you could go to would be challenging that idea that that was the kind of world that we if we cast ourselves back to 500 years ago no authority would tell you anything other than that was the world we were living in and furthermore as Taylor and there was simply no well developed alternative there was no well developed naturalistic secular alternative to religion and to what we'd now regard as superstition so okay that's what Taylor says about life back then in in my view Taylor's book underestimates the degree to which science in particular changed things though there are a number of factors that change things urbanization changed the way we live to get and perceive the world their economic changes but very importantly there are scientific changes in the way we perceive the world and science was transformative in 1513 science as we now know it was in the future Copernicus was still a fair way away 30 years away to his great work Galileo was still you know 100 years away you know Galileo's first great observations with the telescope were 1609 and 1610 so that's a century away to what arguably is the beginnings of modern science even humanistic learning such as in various kinds of textual and historical scholarship you know I was at a relatively early age despite the Renaissance which had started in Italy in the 14th century if you were living in the 17th century you'd have no reason to doubt stories of supernatural events such as miracles hauntings the effects of evil spell spells cast by witches and all the rest of it it was well known to be sure that some seeming miracles probably had natural explanations it was well known that some holy relics were fakes and that some miracles were supposedly fraudulent there's reference to this in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales for example which was written a couple hundred years earlier still there's even references in St Augustine's work written you know a thousand years before when we're talking about or more than a thousand years well well over a thousand years before we're talking about so you know we have Chaucer's partner which Christopher Hitchens often refers to you know he often talked talked about his opponents who he was denigrating as Chaucerian frauds meaning like like this guy the partner Hitchens made that famous comment that when Jerry Falwell died that if you gave Falwell an enema you could bury him in a matchbox right well you know this guy and his horse if you gave them both an enema you could stick them in that funny hat that is wearing you know they were these people that were full of bullshit and it was known but all the same even if you thought that miracles and genuine relics were not here and now you'd think they were not very far away and you'd have no reason to believe that these things didn't exist you'd have no reason to think you did not live in this kind of enchanted cosmos that we've been talking about now today of course ordinary people still have problems knowing just who to trust who has genuine expertise we do live in a propaganda society and we know that much of what we read or hear is misinformation particularly when we turn on Fox News or the like but at least we're in a position to examine who might be genuinely qualified to talk on a particular topic in the 16th century there was no particular reason for an educated person yet to doubt the the church authorities for example or any of the authorities that told them they lived in a world where supernatural forces were at work and supernatural events took place if not here at least nearby and conversely this is important there was no reason to trust anybody who made such seemingly bizarre claims as that the earth revolves around the sun and rotates on its axis that the earth is billions of years old that human beings that ascended from ape like four bears or that the sacred history of the Jews laid out in the Hebrew Bible you know is pretty much false there's no reason to trust somebody who said those things those were extraordinary claims a reasonable person would have had no reason to believe those sorts of claims everything about the way society was structured anything any authority told you you know would have gone against believing claims like that those were extraordinary claims from the point of view of someone living in 16th century Europe yeah those claims were were anomalous in relation to everything that they knew or could trust of what they were told about the world if I had the time and I don't on this occasion I'd go into some detail about how a dramatic claim such as the claim that the earth rotates so controversial in the year of Galileo how that claim was actually established Galileo had to establish that in a situation that claim hardly even made sense to people he had to do a lot of arguing a lot of hardcore scientific world to challenge what was seemingly the common sense view that the earth is stationary right if you've never done so please read some detailed accounts of just what Galileo had to do how he went about this for example you could read Philip Kitch's wonderful book The Advancement of Science from back in 1995 for example Galileo had to respond to the argument that if the earth rotates if you drop an object from the top of a tower why doesn't the object fall as it were behind the tower that seemed to be the common sense sort of thing you'd expect and and of course Galileo put the counter argument well what if you drop an object from the top of a ship's a ship's mast he said well you'll find it doesn't fall behind the ship's mast and that illustration made some kind of sense receiver going culture but he had to put detailed argument produce the evidence to overcome common sense views like that why don't things fall behind us when we drop them in if I drop my classes now it should fall slightly one way because if the earth's rotating right that was the common sense way looking at things it is not obvious that the earth is going to rotate in a world where we don't have the science that makes that picture even thinkable so Galileo had to make that that thinkable and similarly the claim that we're descended through a naturalistic process from earlier primates that was a truly extraordinary claim now until the evidence was actually gathered and of course far more evidence has been gathered augmenting what Darwin had available to him about 150 years ago so the main point of this talk is that modern naturalistic ideas of the world a modern naturalistic picture that we have a picture that even most religious people operate with yeah from day to day when they're getting their car repeat they don't call for the priest to exercise it you know they call for the mechanic to try to work out what's wrong with the engine that did not come naturally that is not intuitive to human beings that's not something that just comes to us without a lot of hard work that view of the world was hard one extraordinary knowledge was won through extraordinary efforts by Copernicus by Galileo by Newton by Darwin and by many others including people whom we'd normally regard as humanity scholars rather than scientists for someone living in 1513 many of the most basic claims in our scientifically informed view of the world would once again have been extraordinary claims and the reason why we now quite rightly accept them is because we actually have the extraordinary evidence accumulated over those hundreds of years right so that's the perspective that i i want to offer don't even start me by the way on things like relativity theory or quantum theory and on how intuitive they are you know the universe opened up for our inspection by the advancement of science is actually very strange indeed and much of what we have learned in that time frame has gone against all our natural intuition so i won't read this quote from Edward O. Wilson i don't know if you can all read it in this large room but you know Wilson you know has this quote in which he says among other things the cost of scientific advance is the humbling recognition that reality was not constructed to be easily grasped by the human mind yeah there's been a huge historical effort to move from what might be intuitive to us to this modern conception of the world that's informed by science now i said don't even start me on relativity and quantum mechanics they're not say for non-scientists like me let alone to say primary school children but what i do say is there is an exciting story to tell there's an exciting story to tell about the advance of science and about just how that scientific knowledge was one you know how did Galileo actually convince people in the 17th century and where Galileo left off Galileo died in 1642 when Newton was born in the same year you know how did the scientists following Galileo actually get it to the point where we had the evidence for what seemed like us obvious things like the earth rotates there's a very exciting story to be told about that and that story should be you know told more often and more filling more more fully i think we should introduce our children to that story as early as possible in their education and we can always learn more about that story ourselves i take it there was some discussion on the panel i was on yesterday about scientific skepticism right i take it that when we talk about scientific skepticism where we're certainly not talking about skepticism about science what what we're really talking about is skepticism about claims that educated people who are informed by science should now regard as extraordinary and they're not regarded as extraordinary really because they are intrinsically bizarre or unintuitive that's not really the problem a lot of these sorts of claims under different conditions without being informed by science and not necessarily unintuitive at all it's actually in many cases the findings of science that don't come naturally to human beings so the point about these extraordinary claims is not that they are somehow intrinsically bizarre or intrinsically unintuitive to us or that they're just you know crazy on their on their face the void of any cultural context the point is that they are anomalous within our hard one scientifically informed picture of the world and the way that scientifically informed picture of the world was hard one is as i say an exciting story that we all need to we all need to know more about think again of reincarnation now that's an idea that seems pretty intuitive in a lot of cultures right but if reincarnation were true if reincarnation were a phenomenon that actually takes place if we found that out it would force us to revise our entire picture of the world we would need to find some mechanism whereby reincarnation can take place and that would change our entire world picture that is what makes the idea of reincarnation extraordinary what makes it extraordinary within our hard one scientific picture of the universe not because it's intrinsically bizarre compared to any other idea without all that hard work that has gone in by science over the past 500 years now reincarnation is an extraordinary claim in our sense it is a claim that would change everything it is a claim that is anomalous within our scientific picture of the world and therefore it is the sort of claim that requires scrutiny there's reason to investigate it in what i would say is in a spirit of suspicion and now by way of analogy i mean we're talking about scientific skepticism skepticism about you know extraordinary claims that are anomalous given everything we know from science from what's been put in by science over the past hundreds of years but by analogy there are other claims that are anomalous given the knowledge we have i mean some people as we said yesterday some people deny the authenticity of of Shakespeare's plays or at least the authenticity of Shakespeare's composition of those plays a lot of people tell you you know the earlier Oxford wrote them or Christopher Marlowe wrote them or or Francis Bacon wrote them or whatever people will make those claims in in the humanities and by analogy you know here we have claims that are made in the face of overwhelming evidence and some people will deny other things some people for example will deny your terrible truths that we have from history they will deny terrible historical events such as the the Holocaust there was a time ladies and gentlemen when the claim that the Nazis murdered nearly six million Jews in their concentration camps there was a time when that claim should have been regarded with suspicion especially because there was so much in the way of false propaganda that was spread about the Germans in the first world war that you know it'd be worth your while you're digging out the information about the propaganda campaigns by the country's allied with us in the first world war given that experience there was a time when it would have been reasonable to be suspicious about that that claim and we should in fact always be suspicious about atrocity propaganda especially the atrocity propaganda promulgated by our own side because it's all too easy to believe that kind of propaganda however the fact of the matter is that the Nazi Holocaust did take place we we have the extraordinary evidence that was required to convince us that those horrific events took place and we have that evidence in much detail you know given the picture that was built up by investigators immediately after the second world war and by historians since we actually do have the extraordinary evidence needed to believe in the occurrence of something as vast and horrific as the the Holocaust someone who now denies those events someone who now denies those events in the face of that accumulation of evidence does not deserve the honorable title of skeptic they are in denial of the evidence and they deserve the title denialist right we live in a society where there are many kinds of denialism many kinds of suspicion of claims that do not deserve the honorable title of skepticism ladies and gentlemen those extraordinary claims that actually we acquire extraordinary evidence thereby change our picture of the world and in the case of something like the Holocaust they change much of the picture of how we understand you know humanity and history and our and our place in it once extraordinary claims are established by the evidence of course they become normalized once they are sufficiently well established those once extraordinary claims can then be used in arguments against new claims that are inconsistent with them and when that happens all of that cumulative evidence that supports such a claim then stands as evidence against any inconsistent claim so I think for example of the rotation of the earth that was once an extraordinary claim and the onus was on proponents such as Galileo to gather the evidence skepticism about that claim was rational and warranted what was not rational and warranted of course was looking Galileo under house arrest the rest of his life you know Jonathan Presk's work but the suspicion and skepticism and investigation you know in a mood of suspicion that was warranted but the evidence was gathered someone who denied that claim now would not deserve the title of skeptic and earth rotation skeptic if there was such a thing you know would not be would not deserve the honorable title skeptic such a person would be a crackpot or a denialist or something else a crank perhaps don't ask me just what the difference is you'd have an interesting talk perhaps on what is the difference from a crank a denialist or a crackpot but they'd be one of those okay and we have in our society now holocaust denialists we have climate change denialists we have evolution denialists and we have the nihilists of many other important claims to which we do actually have the accumulation of the evidence we have denialists of claims for which extraordinary evidence probably was needed but that evidence has been gathered and this distinction between a skeptic in the honorable sense and a denialist that is a distinction that needs to be more widely understood our children need to be taught that distinction just as they need to be taught what I was saying earlier they need to be taught about how hard one our current evidentially informed picture of the world actually was I don't believe those things are well understood by our children generally I'm not going to stood by your children but they don't they're not generally understood by the children in our society and generally speaking they're not well understood even by adults so I suppose the challenge to the bottom here is let's do more about that thank you for your attention colleagues and friends my very last slide was a thank you slide which said question times here but the question time will have to be in the Delray lounge I think but no we have good conversations about these issues wherever we have those conversations thank you once again friends and colleagues and thank you to Jayre for hitting me here thank you Russell Blackford Russell Blackford