I came upon a very interesting Rational Wiki article on Penn & Teller. This pair has bugged me for a very long time — especially after their ideological defense of Walmart. Their libertarian views skew everything they do. I generally have a problem when rich and successful people promote libertarianism. It is like someone who’s won a war saying, “Now let me explain why monarchy is the best form of government…” These are guys who had all the advantages of public education, unions and public sector jobs (Jillette’s father was a prison guard), and a safety net that allowed them to risk failure in a field where most fail. Yet now they have convinced themselves that it was all about them, and now they don’t want no stinking government to interfere with them — even at the cost to later generations having the same support that they depended on.

But the duo is interesting in that they are strictly rational when it comes to looking at claims like UFOs or ghosts, but when it comes to politics, they’re hopeless. On their show Penn & Teller: Bullshit! they couldn’t touch on anything even remotely associated with politics without falling into the ideologue’s trap: they started with their conclusion. (In fairness, their approach to UFOs and ghosts is probably just as predetermined — but those subjects have the advantages of having had actual scientists look into them.) Then their arguments were nothing more than setting up straw men to knock down and cherry picking data.

They were most notoriously wrong about global warming. Now a real skeptic looking into global warming would, I don’t know, talk to a scientist? Maybe James Hansen would have something to say on the issue. But Penn & Teller are far too smart for that! They went to the source of the best information on climate change: the Cato Institute. Because when you want objective information, the best place to go is to people who are ideologically committed to the science saying a particular thing. And even better, go to people who are ideologically committed in exactly the same way that you are! That way you can filter any actual information through that prism.

Okay, so that was back in 2003. There was little reason to doubt global warming then, but it was more understandable then. But in the years since, Jillette has only provided apologias for his previous positions. According to Rational Wiki, “In later interviews, Penn stated that anthropogenic global warming was probably real, but claimed that he was talking about not knowing whether ‘the whole package’ (ie the need for government intervention, presumably as opposed to a self-correcting market) was real.” But that’s not true: the duo was clearly making the case that all conservatives were making then, “We don’t know so we shouldn’t do anything!”

Further, Jillette (and Teller too, I assume) has only shown that he is doing the global warming denial steps. They are: (1) There is no global warming; (2) There is global warming, but humans aren’t the cause; and (3) Humans are causing global warming, but there is nothing we can do about it. There’s nothing rational about that. It is just, “I don’t want to believe and so I won’t.” And that makes him as rational and skeptical as your average fundamentalist Christian.

In 2008, the duo did an episode attacking the idea of carbon offsets. At that point, only loons were denying global warming. And there they were complaining about the most conservative response. Rational Wiki pointed out that in the episode, they used Argumentum ad Gorem, or Gore’s Law: “As an online climate change debate grows longer, the probability that denier arguments will descend into attacks on Al Gore approaches 1.” But what do you expect from a couple of libertarians? Rational argument?!

When it comes down to it, Penn & Teller will argue that they are just entertainers, “Just a clown! Just a clown!” But if that’s the case, why not step out of the skeptical movement? Why pretend that you are speaking the truth and not just pushing your own self-serving ideology? Why not stick to what you actually know? I would argue that the reason is because both these men are so deluded that they can’t even see their own biases. The same thing can be said for the New Atheist movement generally. And that’s probably why the New Atheists continue to admire them as their own.

See also: Philosophical Underpinnings of New Atheist Sexism.

I’ve been wondering why it is that the New Atheist movement has had such a problem with sexism. I’m not talking about any of the alleged sexual misconduct here. I’m interested in why men in the movement are so often anti-feminist. The usual answer is that it is just a function of its origins: that the groups that make up the movement have traditionally been overwhelmingly male. While that’s certainly true and an important aspect of the problem, I think that there is a philosophical basis for the sexism in the movement. And it rather gets to the heart of what’s wrong with the New Atheists generally.

Human beings are not especially rational. If we didn’t already know from our experiences, psychology and neuroscience tell us that it is so. It’s very simple: we don’t have the time to make rational decisions about the vast majority of things in our lives. What’s more, most decisions don’t lend themselves to rational thinking. Consider buying a tube of toothpaste: there are endless variables, most of which are purely subjective. This may seem like a trivial example, but humans don’t do much better when picking a president, a profession, or a spouse.

The most common statement I hear from people in the New Atheist community is, “I only believe in things that I have evidence for!” But that isn’t what they mean — based upon how they act. What they mean to say is that they only believe in things that science backs them up on. But they rarely understand the science itself. They might know the basics of evolution theory and climate change, but mostly, their opinions are a leap of faith: they have decided to trust the scientific establishment.

There is nothing wrong with that. The scientific establishment is generally a lot more enlightened than other sources of knowledge. But there is nothing fundamentally different from this kind of faith and the faith a Christian might have in her priest because he, like the scientific establishment for me, has never let her down. Clearly, science has a far better track record and I think that Christian would be better off turning to science for most of her questions. But science probably doesn’t have answers for most of her questions anyway, so maybe it doesn’t matter.

There are good sources of information and bad sources of information. The problem I see with the New Atheist community is not their reliance on science. I share their reliance. But they demonstrate an awkward and troubling dependence on one aspect of science: evolution theory. And it poisons their thinking in other areas. It leads to an unconscious (and sometimes conscious) acceptance of pseudoscientific nonsense like social Darwinism, and if not for the Nazis, I’m sure that eugenics would be popular in the movement.

If it weren’t for the hubris of thinking that they are solely guided by objective reality and rationality, this mightn’t be so bad. But thinking that you are only guided by rationality makes it easy to mistake your own prejudices for The Truth™. Take, for example, Penn Jillette’s beliefs about economics and global warming. I don’t think he’s doing it any more, but his arguments against global warming were exactly the same as Jim Inhofe’s. But Jillette’s thinking was based on his libertarian ideology and Inhofe’s is based upon his reading of the Bible.

Similarly, when Richard Dawkins wrote his Dear Muslima letter, it was just his attempt to stifle speech that made him uncomfortable. There was nothing rational about it. In fact, it was an amazing example of cluelessness. It’s like telling a person with an abscessed tooth that she should get over it because many people burn to death each year. Logical, perhaps, but hardly rational.

One thing that science teaches us is that we are all fallible. The processes and institutions of science allow us to slowly muddle our way toward a better understanding of the universe. But the widespread belief among New Atheists that they are ruled by reason and rationality is a delusion — call it the “atheist delusion” if you like. And it allows them to be awfully blind to their prejudices.