Bill Maher is not the spokesman we need

Thomas Henry Huxley was Charles Darwin's public face in the 19th century. He acted as the public advocate for evolution, engaging in a well publicized debate with the English bishop Samuel Wilberforce. Huxley was a prominent biologist, a scientist and great thinker, open to new ideas, though skeptical, and, so far as I am aware, relying on evidence and reason. He is a hero, and helped bring the correct idea of the origin of species into the light of day.

These days, popular advocates for skeptics abound. They litter the newsmedia, encouragingly, and are doing their level best to reverse the damage in the US that religion has inflicted since the Second Great Awakening. In particular, Bill Maher has been out plugging a movie called Religulous, a documentary film he made with the director of Borat. Maher is outwardly intelligent; he holds a BA from Cornell and appears at least to be informed of current events. His weekly liberal salon on HBO, while unabashedly anti-Republican, does produce interesting discussion.

But Thomas Huxley, he is not.

Maher recently said on the Daily Show that he is agnostic. One wonders why, then, he believes in evolution. Evolution, by way of natural selection, is inconsistent with the idea that a god created the world. In fact, evolution is a science based on evidence. If you form your opinions based on evidence, then one cannot help be an atheist. It is worthless to say that you "don't know" about whether a god exists, in the same way that it is worthless to say you "don't know" about invisible dragons living in garages. Neither of these has any evidence to support it, nor is either verifiable. In other words, they are not there.

One wonders, in fact, how Maher came to believe in evolution and decry Intelligent Design, given that he holds no opinion on the issue of god. If you "don't know" about the unverifiability of god, then why do you "know" that Intelligent Design is untrue? Both have zero evidence in support of them; they are, in fact, logically equivalent (vacuous) statements.

Right-wingers like to talk about evolutionists. By appending ists they seek in an Orwellian way to put evolution and ID on the same playing field, which is to say that they imply evolution is a doctrine, or some sort of philosophy. People like myself argue that no such suffix should exist, since, rather than being merely a school of thought, it is a science backed up with many thousands of carefully researched results. However, if you merely believe it because you think the other side is dubious, due to a commonsensical notion, then you actually are an evolutionist. You believe in evolution for exactly the reason the other side believes in god: no particular reason.

Maher appears to hold other very stupid views on scientific matters. He says "I don't believe in vaccination either.", going on to cite that Pasteur himself renounced the principle by which vaccination works on his death bed. Similar slanders are perpetrated about Darwin, and Maher here acquits himself no better. He believes "people get sick because of an aggregate toxicity" in their bodies, a nonsense principle that is only espoused by those with just enough intelligence to rise to the level of what is sometimes called pseudointellectualism. Presumably, then, he is upset about the recent chelation study being aborted due to it being extremely unethical. Perhaps he uses Kinoki footpads as well.

And yet, Maher is on the side of the HPV vaccine. Why? I don't know, since I cannot understand the pathology of a man who believes in such things. Maher comes down on the right side of issues by accident, as with the student who, in performing the division 64/16, cancels the 6s and gets 4. He gets the right answer, but he is not perpetrating good mathematics.

Similarly, someone like Maher is unlikely to be persuasive if he himself has no ability to be persuaded by evidence. Richard Dawkins, Phil Plait, and Sam Harris do a fine job spreading the word of atheism. They argue based on evidence, on reason, based on their experience in science. Atheism and evolution speak to scientific principles. A comedian, perhaps, should think twice about including himself, when the nearest he's been to a biology class is lecturing the head of the NIH on his show about matters he clearly has been misled on.