a skeptical showdown of epic proportions
Chances are that you know about Bill Maher receiving the Richard Dawkins Award for advancing the nontheist stance and promoting scientific knowledge and education. And you’re probably also aware that Maher is fond of promoting all sorts of medical quackery and conspiracy theories involving pharmaceutical companies which have been refuted time and time again. But nevertheless, the AAI decided to give him the award and Dawkins played along with the highly questionable decision, making plenty of people rather upset to say the least. In the blog-based furor, skeptics with a focus on medicine allege that the AAI is effectively saying that as long as you give props to evolution, any other form of pseudoscience can be safely ignored even when it’s harmful to the recipients’ audience and undermines the efforts of people actually trying to promote legitimate science.
I’m not much for politics and this is why. Past idealistic speeches and grand proclamations, there’s always an ugly truth which involves backroom deals, temporary alliances and double dealing which is usually chalked up to realpolitik by those who do it. In the case of trying to advance atheism, the AAI decided to embrace a pundit who was openly talking about his lack of religious beliefs on a regular basis and overlook his long record of being almost as bad as noxious alt med ghoul and snake oil salesman, Mike Adams when it comes to the topic of medicine. I doubt there’s a whole lot of love for him among scientists involved with the AAI but they had to put a famous face on their organization to attract media attention and they picked Maher in much the same way the Singularity Institute organized itself under the weight and charisma of transhumanist Ray Kurzweil to work on issues involving AI.
Of course the question is how Maher satisfies the scientific requirements for the award since the only thing he really did to promote the atheist cause was to make a documentary mostly showing the outer, crazy fringes of theistic devotion which would be rejected by the overwhelming majority of organized religious groups. It wasn’t deep or thought provoking, just a collection of gotcha style clips meant to embarrass by the worst example. A more interesting idea would’ve been to take on the spectrum, from peddlers of literalist inanity like Ken Ham, to self-absorbed, esoteric theologians like Terry Eagleton, and show how their arguments fail to match what we’ve discovered through the scientific method. It would’ve required more intellectual heavy lifting and helped promote the value of sound science. So really, the AAI’s decision seemed to be driven by pure celebrity value, its leadership willing to settle on the best they could get rather than demand more from the people it adopts as the faces of their movement. It’s irritating at best and cheap at worst.
Even more bizarre is that the critics’ charge of the AAI simply embracing anyone who takes the right stance on the theory of evolution has a hard time sticking here because we don’t really know if Maher even understands it. You can embrace the theory and claim to promote its merits to the best of your ability, but if you don’t have a good grasp of what you’re talking about and throw out mistaken statements in public, all you’re doing is giving creationists ammo. This is why I’m not sure if I agree with Orac’s stance that medicine is just being ignored by Dawkins and the AAI for the sake of promoting atheism and evolution in that order. In reality, we don’t even know how stringently they examined Maher’s grasp of biology in the first place. They just know that he’s not an outspoken creationist which is all that matters to them. But again, let’s note the lack of scientific contributions being made here on Maher’s part.
This leaves us with the question of why Dawkins decided to go along with the decision and give an award for promoting science and atheism to someone who doesn’t do the former and isn’t very good at doing the latter. Maybe the politics at the AAI are so byzantine, he felt that this was the only way to go and he had to play along despite his reservations for the sake of promoting atheism. But why the AAI wouldn’t didn’t pick someone less controversial, I don’t know. Maher isn’t the only famous atheist out there and I’m sure if the committee thought hard enough, they would’ve found someone more fitting. Nevertheless, their choice shows that simply being an atheist doesn’t make you the paragon of logic and reason.
