Man, that star fell fast!

Alternate title: Virtue has triumphed! The sword of retribution has cut down Pro-fessor Lawrence Krauss!

Just the other day I commented on Lawrence Krauss's guest post on one of (if not the) most popular atheist blogs on the planet: PZ Myers's Pharyngula.

LK was riding on top of the Gnu atheist world!

Then--scandal!

Krauss has a friend. A billionaire friend. More importantly the friend is also a scumbag sex offender of the Roman Polanski genre. This post from skepchick denounces Krauss for defending his friend.

Krauss handled this all rather stupidly. Granted it is tough to be in a situation where you are asked to denounce a friend--but there are non-weaselly ways out. You could simply say: He is my friend. I denounce his crimes, but remain his friend and hope to help him find the professional treatment he needs. Or something like that. Instead it appears that Krauss looked for loopholes.

That's all I'll say about that--because I don't really care about Lawrence Krauss and his piece-o-crap friend. You can judge for yourself should you find the affair interesting. I don't. What I find interesting is the fact that on day one he is a hero to the gnu atheists while on day two he is a goat.

I will say that skepchick's (Rebecca Watson) blog post title: Lawrence Krauss Defends a Sex Offender, Embarrasses Scientists Everywhere is incredibly stupid. Krauss's behavior is not an embarrassment to scientists everywhere. It may reflect on his character and may be an embarrassment to Krauss--but it is not an embarrassment to scientists everywhere. We are not a priesthood-we are people who are lucky enough to do science for a living. We come with all the human foibles found in the professions. If Krauss was a house painter, would he now be an embarrassment to house painters everywhere? Dumb.

As an aside, PZ--having just given LK a big ole' soap box--now faced a dillema--not totally unlike Krauss's situation, though different in scale. In my opinion he approached in a rather cowardly way. Without ever mentioning Krauss by name he made a post about himself (well, no surprise there) with oblique links to other bloggers who were doing the heavy lifting, such as Rebecca Watson. Go on, read his post and tell me, apart from following the links, would you have any clue what the hell PZ was discussing?

Among the Pharyngula regulars there is very little wiggle room granted Krauss due to the circumstance that he was defending a friend. The friend's crime was indeed repulsive--but what really prevented the Gnus from any sort of nuanced look at Krauss (not at the friend who committed the crimes who deserves no nuance, but at Krauss who was dumb and evasive in his lukewarm denouncement) are the feminist-flag-raising overtones of Krauss's attitude. Now the Gnu atheists are a tough crowd when it comes to feminism. On Pharyngula they even engaged in atheist blasphemy: His Worshipfullness Dick the Dawk was deemed sexist¹ because of high crimes such as attributing gender differences too much to biology and too little to culture, and using "man" and "female" too close together. (I don't know if order matters, or if {man, woman} is preferred over {male, female}, but I do know that {man, female} in too close proximity is the Unpardonable Sin.

I'm not sure I worded that clearly, so here is a summary of what I am trying to say:

1. Krauss has a scumbag friend who has exploited child prostitutes for sex.
   
2. Krauss was an imbecile in the manner he chose to defend his friend.
   
3. Since the pedophile is Krauss's friend, Krauss's behavior might be looked at through the lens: it is never easy to throw a friend under the bus--even when he richly deserves it.
   
4. The free-thinking Gnu crowd is incapable of such nuance, because what Krauss did strikes them as anti-feminist, and nothing anti-feminist deserves a nuanced look.

---

¹ Much of that discussion can be found by wading knee deep through this thread of pure gnu atheist open mindedness and free thinking. A couple back-to-back examples of free-thinking directed at Dawkins. From free-thinking commenter Ing:

The offensiveness and bad science in some of your [Dawkins's] latest displays is not that there is are differences between the sexes or even currently seen differences in behavior. The problem is that you uncritically contribute those to genetics rather than culture. For one, your million dollar chanalge things ignores the HUGE cultural difference between a women asking a stranger for sex and a random MAN asking a woman for sex. (HINT: ONE SENDS OFF RAPE ALARM BELLS).

This is followed by Phodopus's reply, again directed at Richard Dawkins who foolishly asked "Why is the word 'female' insulting?"

Do you not agree that having women referred to as females while in the same conversation men are referred to as men, has a connotation of the former being a kind of object of study rather than fellow human beings, if only slightly?

Lawrence Krauss: No, I won!!!

Lawrence Krauss, in a guest post on Pharyngula, is in a hissy-fit over a debate he had with William Lane Craig. I haven't watched the debate—debates are usually unedifying matters of style over substance. Unless I get a critical mass of recommendations to watch, my going in assumption is that any given debate is ignorable.

Furthermore, given that, as I understand it, this debate was not about, say, the self-consistency of a world view assuming the Christian god but rather about scientific evidence for god I would have, reluctantly, been on Krauss's side. I don't believe there is any direct scientific evidence for god or any satisfying philosophical "proofs" for god. Good thing I’m a confirmed presuppositionalist, eh?

Krauss is whining, as near as I can tell, about Craig's post-debate behavior. Apparently LK is miffed that Craig has been going about declaring victory to his own supporters. To counter this unspeakable breach of ethics, Krauss has penned a guest post on Pharyngula to, well, declare victory to his supporters.

If Krauss debates like he writes I am certain he must have lost on style points. His Pharyngula essay is ponderous and sleep-inducing. Prop you eyelids open with toothpicks before reading.

One of several topics about which Krauss declares himself the winner is, unsurprisingly, fine-tuning. His writing on the subject, though better than Coyne’s (at least Krauss knows what he is talking about) is far from laudable. He starts:

The appearance of design is one of the most subtle and confusing aspects of our Universe.

which is bit of a strawman. Fine-tuning is not an "appearance of design" but a question about whether and why the universe's ability to synthesize metals (heavy elements) is sensitive to the values of the fundamental constants and the strengths of the basic forces. Some theists philosophically interpret fine-tuning as prima facie design evidence. Some scientists philosophically interpret fine-tuning as multiverse evidence. But if we stick to just science and ignore philosophy (always a good idea!) fine-tuning is agnostic with regards to any particular apologetic claim. Krauss calls Craig disingenuous—but here it is Krauss being disingenuous—sneakily setting up fine-tuning as, out-of-the-box, a religious argument.

He proceeds down this path, transitioning willfully or ignorantly into the common error of conflating fine-tuning with the anthropic principle. He concludes with a bloody awful example embedded in some hideous prose:

And, beyond this, just as bees are fine tuned to see the colors of flowers which they can pollinate as they go about their business does not indicate design, but rather natural selection, we currently have no idea if the conditions of our universe represent a kind of cosmic natural selection. If there are many universes, for example, as may be the case, and as are predicted in a variety of models, none of which were developed to address God issues, we would certainly expect to find ourselves only in those in which we can live.

Ahhhhhhreh? LK, go to the board and write 500 times: cosmological fine-tuning is not the same as the anthropic principle.

If past experience is a reliable guide Pharyngula's commenters, on the question of fine-tuning, will be as clueless as Jerry's kids, At the time I write this there is only one relevant comment, from a Kevin:

Fine-tuning. Really? In a universe that is 13.7 billion years old and 40+ billion light years across, that required the death of not one but two stars -- one in a supernova -- where humans have appeared in the last 0.00004% of that time, the entire enterprise was built with US in mind? Unbelievable arrogant self-centered narcissism.

No Kevin, what is unbelievable is that you think that the fine-tuning argument is the same as "the universe was made for us" argument.

I guess you can blame Krauss--since he couched his fine-tuning comments in a like manner.

Scandalous!

When we moved to Virginia and joined our present church, I was tapped almost immediately to teach adult Sunday School. The topic was the compatibility of science and Christianity. My bride, having heard me teach on that topic before, was not all that enthusiastic about repeating the course.

On the first class she arrived late. In no time great laughter erupted from near where she sat. I only found out why later. When she sat down the woman she sat next to (who didn't know us all that well, at the time) said, "You're late!" To this my wife responded, "It's OK, I'm sleeping with the teacher."

Here is another scandalous post involving my wife, from 2005.