‘Science Falsely So Called’: How Can You Prove Your Innocence, Professor Krauss?

Posted on Comments

Professor Lawrence Krauss on Australian TV, February 2013.

“O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: Which some professing have erred concerning the faith. Grace be with thee. Amen.”
— I Timothy 6:20-21 (KJV)

“Jeffrey Epstein is the infamous media mogul who was jailed in 2008 for paying underage prostitutes who said they were recruited by his aides. . . .
“One of the friends defending Epstein is none other than Professor Lawrence Krauss . . . he’s invoking the name of science to do it.”
— Rebecca Watson

“When women come to me to warn me about what speakers to avoid at conferences or confide in me sexual harassment they’ve experienced, Lawrence Krauss is by far the most common name I hear.”
— Jen McCreight

“One is almost tempted to pray that God might have mercy on these poor fellows, but why should we trouble scientific types with our primitive superstitions?”
— Robert Stacy McCain, “No Love for the Godless”

Have you ever heard of Lawrence Krauss? I had not, but then again, I’d never heard of Ben Radford until Karen Stollznow accused him of being a sexual “predator.” Frankly, I’ve paid no attention to the New Atheist movement that has flourished in the past decade or so.

The “profane and vain babblings” of these people are tedious. My attitude toward all such people has always been, “OK, we get it. You’re a scientific super-genius, and Christians are all idiots for believing the Bible, and you’re going to write another article ‘proving’ how much smarter you are than everybody else. Thanks.”

However knowledgeable and articulate the god-haters are, their logic is always backward. They begin with the conclusion that there is no God, then hunt around for “evidence” to prove the negative. “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools” (Roman 1:22).

“Science is based on telling the truth, which is a really important ethical boundary. It’s one that I don’t think religion shares, in fact. . . . I think that science can offer a better world.”
— Lawrence Krauss

God proves His existence by the truth of His word, and we see prophecy fulfilled every day when we behold the fate of arrogant fools.

Lawrence Krauss is a 59-year-old professor at Arizona State University whose curriculum vitae runs to 32 pages. The nature of academic tenure is such that nothing in the world could get him fired from his job. Lawrence Krauss is invulnerable — absolutely bulletproof — and so when atheist blogger Jen McCreight had the temerity to repeat what she said women told her about Krauss’s behavior, she had to delete those stories because Krauss tried to intimidate her:

Well, Famous Skeptic is vaguely threatening to sue me. Since Famous Skeptic is rich and I am poor, and since my two sources are too terrified to openly speak out again him (I wonder why), I have removed the part of my previous post that refers to him so I don’t go bankrupt with legal fees.

Such a tactic may seem rather familiar to regular readers of this blog. “Science is based on telling the truth,” Professor Krauss tells us, and if these women are lying about him, perhaps he can prove their accusations false, just as he claims to prove God does not exist.

Philosophy majors or attorneys may see that Professor Krauss has been presented with a more difficult problem than he imagines. If the case comes down to testimony and evidence, Jen McCreight’s sources may have less reason to be “terrified” than does Krauss.

Perhaps my good friend Herman Cain could explain to the professor how hard it is for a man to prove his innocence in these cases.

For years, however, it seems the terroristic intimidation of atheist women has kept them silent, as Rebecca Watson says:

I’ve heard of several other “big name” skeptics who loudly argue online against any and all anti-harassment measures who are known for actually sexually harassing women in the meatspace. I’m hesitant to name them for legal reasons . . .

But there is strength in numbers, and if it is true that Professor Krauss’s behavior has long been the subject of private complaints, then the current climate of public accusations — the Floodgate Effect, we might call it — has suddenly shifted the balance of terror. Every man in the atheist movement who has ever told an off-color joke in mixed company is a vulnerable target now, and Professor Krauss has the context of his own public record to deal with:

“Jeffrey [Epstein] has surrounded himself with beautiful women and young women but they’re not as young as the ones that were claimed. As a scientist I always judge things on empirical evidence and he always has women ages 19 to 23 around him, but I’ve never seen anything else, so as a scientist, my presumption is that whatever the problems were I would believe him over other people. . . . I don’t feel tarnished in any way by my relationship with Jeffrey; I feel raised by it.”

Professor Krauss defending a convicted sex offender? Professor Krauss defending Jeffrey Espstein, billionaire pedophile?

Victims alleged that Epstein molested underage girls from South America, Europe, and the former Soviet republics, including three 12-year-old girls brought over from France as a birthday gift.

Certainly, Professor Krauss’s friendship with a pedophile sex offender cannot be considered relevant evidence as to whether Professor Krauss mistreated women who attended atheist events, but when the shadow of suspicion looms over a man accused of harassment, the relevance of evidence has a strange way of eluding strict rules of logic.

Lawrence Krauss and Michael Shermer celebrate their
victory, after debating against the existence of God.

Let’s talk about Professor Krauss’s good friend Michael Shermer:

At a conference, Mr. Shermer coerced me into a position where I could not consent, and then had sex with me. . . . I am very scared that he will come after me in some way. . . . I reached out to one organization that was involved in the event at which I was raped, and they refused to take my concerns seriously. Ever since, I’ve heard stories about him doing things . . .

Well, guilt by association is a terribly unfair thing, but if Michael Shermer is a rapist, and Jeffrey Epstein is a pedophile, one must ask if Professor Krauss has any friends who are not sex offenders. And if he habitually associates himself with such perverts, what does this tell us about his claims to “judge things on empirical evidence”? Or is the problem that all atheist men are lecherous creeps?

Professor Krauss is a man so brilliant that he believes he can prove that the universe is an accident created from nothing, by nothing:

A critic might reasonably question the arguments for a divine first cause of the cosmos. But to ask “What caused God?” misses the whole reason classical philosophers thought his existence necessary in the first place. So when physicist Lawrence Krauss begins his new book by suggesting that to ask “Who created the creator?” suffices to dispatch traditional philosophical theology, we know it isn’t going to end well.

No, I don’t think this will end well at all for the pedophile-defending, accused-rapist-befriending Lawrence Krauss. Remember that I said he is a tenured professor at Arizona State University, which means it is impossible that Lawrence Krauss could be fired. Yet seemingly impossible things have happened before, although only ignorant and superstitious people believe in miracles:

By what standard do atheists judge right and wrong? Other than religion, is there anything that an atheist is obliged to regard as evil and, if so, why? To say that science and reason can be our only guide in every circumstance — that we should be as coldly logical asStar Trek’s fictional Spock — may seem an obvious enough answer, but at times the evidence is ambiguous and not every situation can be easily reduced to a clear syllogism. This is not a moot discussion, nor is it a matter of mere hypothetical speculation what science says about sexual equality, at least not for Benjamin Radford.
Radford is the deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer magazine and was until quite recently among the most respected members of the so-called “skeptic community,” who esteem science above everything and regard all religious belief as ignorant superstition. So there is no one to whom Radford may pray for deliverance, now that he finds himself accused of sexual harassment, condemned as a “predator” and exposed to the wrath of feminists.
Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, but atheists don’t believe in Hell and, although some scientists have suggested an anthropological utility for mercy, feminists don’t seem prone to heed such talk when a man stands accused of doing what Radford allegedly did. . . .

Please read the whole thing at The American Spectator.

Did I mention that Jen McCreight has solicited the aid of Popehat?

“Grace be with thee. Amen.”

 

 

UPDATE: The floodgates having opened, there are more and more people describing “creepy” incidents with Professor Krauss, such as a 2011 cruise sponsored by the Center for Inquiry (CFI) during which Professor Krauss reportedly brought along a female companion. Professor Krauss “was a bit rambunctious the whole time” and at some point, “propositioned” a woman on the cruise “to join him and his guest in his hotel room, an offer the woman turned down.” And if you’ll read down in the comments here, at #244 you’ll find P.Z. Myers saying: “I have now heard directly from someone I trust that she was sexually assaulted by Lawrence Krauss. Shit.”

These are not accusations I am making. The accusers are not intolerant right-wing Christians, but rather Professor Krauss’s philosophical allies in the atheist/scientific/skeptic movement.

 

102 comments

  1. I agree that the attempt to divide Truth into different kinds of truth is a modern phenomenon that is unwise. Indeed, as a Christian I believe that it is more than unwise. It is wrong.

  2. Science is an outgrowth of religious faith. The religious person asks ‘how’ and pursues science to learn how. The religious person asks ‘why’ and pursues theology and philosophy.
    Without religious faith, there would be no science. What Hawking and Krauss and others have done is theoretically explain how, and because they have theoretically explained it, consider themselves to be the ‘who’ who created it. Rather like a landscaper who takes credit for a nicely mowed lawn, disregarding all else about that lawn.
    The larger issue is that a philosophy that scorns morality, good & bad, ethics refined over millenia will draw men and women who seek to impose their own self, and to gain pleasure which is the highest form of worship when one is one’s own god. “Victim” is the bleating complaint of lesser gods who should feel honored to have been so poorly used.
    As the Feminazis seek to replace the god-philosopher-kings with equally degraded and degrading women, the silver lining is America gets to view how truly corrupt Academia is. The better outcome for this evil will be enraged parents suing the Academy into near nothingness.

  4. It was not always thus. Modern science got its start because the truth of one statement “God is a reasonable God, consequently, we may know his creation through reason.”

    Long ago, in the mid-stone age, when I was but a sophomore in Engineering School, I saw a cartoon in the Physics lab that a bunch mathematical gibberish on two ends of a blackboard with “Then a Miracle Occurs” separating the two. One of the white coats standing in front of the board tells the other that “you need to do a little more work on that middle part.”

    There is nothing wrong with explaining things without an appeal to that miracle, really God. Without knowing how things work, Engineers can’t design all the wonderful things you enjoy in modern life. However, it is a large jump from avoiding an appeal to God in your explanation, and denying there is a God at all.

    That is where over educated morons like Meyers, Krauss and Dawkins go wrong. Consequently, I am forced to view those men as Pseudo-Scientists. As one that camp of morons put it, “We don’t fear Physics anymore.”

    Physics, however, is *THE* basic science, and Physics is utterly cruel to Darwinian Evolution. It is an impossibility in so many ways it’s pathetic (Ancient Greeks originally held the concepts of Darwinian Evolution. They had an excuse for their ignorance, the modern Biologist has none – it’s intentional).

    Modern Physics has brought us to the limits of reality. As one Physicist put it, “we live in a digital simulation, inside a larger reality.” There is a quantum of almost everything, a minimum pixel size, if you will. That includes length.

    We live in 4 dimensions (Euclidean space + time) and the evidence infers 6 more dimensions which we seem to be unable to get into. A Neutrino, for example, seems to exhibit interdimensional behavior.

    The Cosmos is beyond what Krauss thinks are the facts, and he avoids the facts like the plague. The reason he does is because, like a lot of atheists, they fear that at the end they will find the very one they fear – God.

    Rottsa Ruck avoiding the creator Krauss. You may not “believe,” but he knows more about you than even the NSA, CIA, or KGB together, and all things will be revealed when you are at the final judgment bar.

  7. 1) Why do the heathen rage, and the people imagine a vain thing? 2) The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the LORD, and against his anointed, saying, 3) Let us break their bands asunder, and cast away their cords from us. 4) He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh: the Lord shall have them in derision. 5) Then shall he speak unto them in his wrath, and vex them in his sore displeasure.inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession. Psalms 2.

  8. The book “The Bell Curve” laid out the research on IQ, or what has become known as “G,” or general intelligence which includes the ability to learn complex subjects. Large groups, like a race, for example, show certain attributes as a mass group, but that can not be applied to just any given individual. The average IQ of Blacks in this country is about 85. It is about 99 for US whites, 102 for Brit whites and so on. East Asians are much higher. That alone, however, does not explain why western Civ did so much, yet, with a higher IQ, the east Asians are basically followers of, and users of what has been produced by western civ. Just note, I’m not talking about political forms here, just the aggression that led to European Empires and the Engineering that supported them.

    As for Krauss telling the truth. By teh standards of his academically addled mind, he’s a saint. By the measure of reality, he needs to be in a rubber room for his own protection.

  9. Paul explains further,

    ” 18) For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men, who hold the truth in unrighteousness; 19) Because that which may be known of God is manifest in them; for God hath shewed it unto them. 20) For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead; so that they are without excuse: 21) Because that, when they knew God, they glorified him not as God, neither were thankful; but became vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened. 22) Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools, 23) And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and fourfooted beasts, and creeping things. 24) Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies between themselves: 25) Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever. Amen. 26) For this cause God gave them up unto vile affections: for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: 27) And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly, and receiving in themselves that recompence of their error which was meet. 28) And even as they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient; 29) Being filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, wickedness, covetousness, maliciousness; full of envy, murder, debate, deceit, malignity; whisperers, 30) Backbiters, haters of God, despiteful, proud, boasters, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, 31) Without understanding, covenantbreakers, without natural affection, implacable, unmerciful: 32) Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that do them. Romans 1:18-32.

    Paul is kinda hard on the type Krauss and Dawkins represent.

  11. Exactly right! That judgment bar reveals all the consequences of your actions, intended and especially the unintended. There is no hiding or weaseling out of any responsibility.

  12. Nah! The scientist discovers the principles, but the Engineer is the guy that puts it to work. As my Hi Skool Physics instructor put it so well, “Physicists will say something can’t be done. But then some damn fool Engineer will go out and do it.” Yes, he was an Engineer. Held an MSEE in fact and, while he didn’t ridicule the Physicists he worked with at Sandia, he did needle them from time to time.

  14. QM, my high school senior son, a math whiz who will be studying math and physics at college next year, was contemplating some calculus this week and stopped, turned to me and said: “How can you understand the beauty of math and not believe in God? It’s just too perfect.”

  15. I pointed out, in a backhanded way, that as science has advanced, and this is particularly true in Quantum Physics, the uncertainties in science have only increased. Much of what is going on in the Engineering world uses very little of the basic discoveries of recent years because it is beyond our ability to uses them. The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle is a huge mountain to climb all by itself, and makes Quantum Physics difficult to apply. Semiconductors are a quantum phenomena, but it is about as far as we have been able to go.When I didn’t want to answer a question, or was just wanting to be waggish, I would say something like “That’s a long story involving Calculus.” I quit that about 10 years ago and substituted “That’s along story involving Quantum Physics,” Or I would speak of “Quantum Relativity.” Little did I know, that such a thing actually exists. The real truth of science is getting as complex as a good novel. It’s just true, is all.

  17. And yet the anti-God folks cannot see the absolute elegance in the design nor admit that such things predicate an intelligence that created them. Blind mice is all they are.

  18. QM, my EE father told a joke about the difference between mathematicians and engineers, which involved one of each and a scantily clad young lady 10 meters away from them. The punch line is “The engineer said, ‘I’ll be close enough for all practical purposes.'”

  19. Some of my Theologian friends objected, at first, when I called God an Engineer. When you define what an Engineer is, God fits the definition perfectly.

  22. ‘I gave my love a cherry / That had no stone / I gave my love a chicken / That had no bones / I gave my love a story / That had no end / I gave my…’

    Bluto: [grabs the guitar and smashes it against the wall] Sorry.

  25. I’m familiar with the book. The problem is people like, well, Krauss will take that “science” as an excuse to arbitrarily limit individual human opportunity and potential. Because They Know Better.

  27. I hate climbing the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. If you can figure out where the damn thing is, you can never figure out what time you’re making up it.

  28. I don’t think we really know what IQ means, quite frankly. My IQ is supposedly in the low 130s, yet there are people with lower IQs that are far better Engineers than I.

  30. Engineers call God the Great Engineer, lawyers call him the Legislator of the Universe. I prefer not to speculate upon what the stablehands call him but I’m pretty sure it involves one of Herakles’ twelve tasks…

  31. Good argument for a debate is Romans I:
    Whether the atheists of the world like it or not, mankind (WE) were ALL created in the image of God. Therefore, God created all humans with a conscienctiousness of Him. I just can’t, because of this Scripture, believe there are any “true” atheists. They have no choice in the matter, but part of Satan’s job description is to get others to believe that and to descredit the works of Christ on the Crosss. But by dying on the cross and resurrected from the grave, Jesus already destroyed the works of the devil.
    Christians do believe by faith, but there is so much “evidence” in the world that it had to be created by intelligent design. I have watched debates on the John Ankerberg show with creation scientist and
    Astrophysicists that could take these clowns out in a NY minute. They all probably believe in global warming, maybe they should read a lot of Biblical Scriptures on the subject of Hell. While they still have that option available to them.

  32. difference between us and you is that our faith is based on logical probabilities. your faith is based on nothing more than emotion. you are weak

  34. Zoe, I like your style 🙂 I wish you could add me on facebook, we could have some really good conversations and fun. 🙂 oh, these people are believe if someone does not believe in having a religion forced down their throats, their religion is being oppressed and a war is on against it. Funny huh?

Comments are closed.