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No-one is immune to being irrational. From time to time, everyone - without exception - commits logical errors. Some of these are trickier to understand than others, and one of them made little real sense to me until yesterday. In the hope that this will help anyone else who's confused about it, here's my short interpretation of the "appeal to authority" fallacy.
Asking for an expert opinion is not a fallacy in and of itself, but there are several ways in which it can become a fallacy :
1) They're not really an expert
Asking an expert for their opinion about something well outside their specialist field (sciolism). Stephen Hawking isn't especially qualified to talk about global warming, Richard Dawkins doesn't know jack about theology, and generally speaking engineers know nothing about flower arranging. You can certainly feel free to ask their opinion anyway, but there's not really any good reason to give Hawking's opinion on genetic engineering any more weight than that of Boris Johnson. It's an easy mistake to make, and possibly the most common form of the fallacy.
2) They're not an authority
If you want to build an aircraft, you hire an engineer, not a florist. When someone has a proven track record of successfully building aircraft, it makes sense to consider them to be both an expert and an authority on their subject. Engineers might not be correct 100% of the time, but they are vastly more reliable in their knowledge of what works and what doesn't than a team of a thousand florists.
But there's a difference between expertise and authority, especially when it comes to active research. Aircraft design is an incredibly well-tested and proven field. Meteorologists, on the other hand, make mistakes about tomorrow's weather all the time - there are no authority figures in meteorology. Of course, there are experts, and their opinions still count for more than those of pigeon fanciers. It's just that you can't use the opinion of a meteorologist to be certain of tomorrow's weather in the same way you can use an engineer's opinion as to whether a plane will be able to fly. An engineer can give you something close enough to certainty, a meteorologist deals in probabilities.
3) Because I said so
This seems to be the way the fallacy is most often stated but also explained the most badly. If you ask an expert for an opinion and they say, "well, I'm an expert, so I must be right", then they have committed a serious error. Their expertise doesn't by itself guarantee that they are correct. What their expertise should be able to do is allow them to rigorously justify their assertion - it does not entitle them to make sweeping claims based solely on their expert status and have everyone else kowtow to their infinite wisdom.
EDIT : Long after I originally posted this, I encountered a curious phenomena which may explain why people make the above error. It seems they sometimes confuse being asked (in good faith) for a demonstration of their expertise with having their expertise questioned. Of course no-one is obligated to participate in all debates, but when they choose to do so they should be careful to try and understand if someone is just trying to learn something or is using this as a veil for an attack.
Sometimes the experts themselves do this, worst of all when it's from one expert to another. Sometimes it's laymen looking to justify their own argument. "Well, this astronomer told me that the Moon isn't made of cheese, so it can't be." If the explanation stops there, then technically this is a fallacy. It amounts to saying, "I know this isn't true, so it can't be true" (or even more succinctly, "I must be right") which is obviously circular and doesn't even admit the possibility of error.
If, on the other hand, the explanation continues : "They said they measured the spectrum of the Moon and found it was inconsistent with that of any known cheese and actually is pretty similar to rocks, and I think they mentioned something about some sample return mission thingy..." then no fallacy has been committed. The astronomer has used their expert knowledge to rule out the Lunar Cheese Hypothesis, not relied on their status as an expert to quash the discussion.
The Appeal To Stupidity
On the other extreme, I also see people claiming the exact opposite : "they're an expert, so they must be wrong." Well, almost. The "I'm not a scientist, but..." defence is the idea that non-expert opinion can trump that of an expert in their own specialist field. Reality check time : unless that expert is exceptionally biased or has made a terrible mistake, it can't. True, experts might be wrong, and make mistakes just like anyone else. But though not infallible, they are far more likely to be right than any non-expert. That is, after all, their job. It's why we have them. There are cases where it is absurd to give equal weight to non-expert opinions.
So I rather disagree with the above meme, provisionally. There are some areas in which not being an expert does automatically make your point invalid. So you think you can build a rocket, and your qualification is, what... a degree specialising in Mesopotamian art ? You literally can't do basic arithmetic ? Then nope, sorry, your opinion is invalid. Of course there are areas in which intelligent non-experts can make valuable contributions and sometimes outdo the specialists, but sometimes it really is appropriate to dismiss non-expert opinions. It depends heavily on the details of the situation.
Summary
The "appeal to authority" argument, then, is somewhat subtle. When a subject is so well-established that there are figures who can be considered authorities, it's not a fallacy... as long as they're speaking about their specialist area. If the subject is controversial, then you should still give more weight to expert opinion, but you can't rely on one expert to be correct. This is especially true when the expert refuses to explain their reasoning. Being an expert is supposed to enable you to reason, not entitle you to pronounce judgement.
The "appeal to the consensus" argument is only a fallacy when experts do it in their own discipline. This creates a false consensus : it must be right because everyone else agrees with it, whereas a true consensus should be everyone coming to the same conclusion independently. Assuming the consensus has been arrived at properly, it's not a fallacy for non-experts to place more weight in the expert consensus than the opinions of non-experts - but it is usually wrong to assume it's 100% certain.
The "appeal to stupidity" argument is however very much worse than appeals to authority or the consensus. That experts are fallible in no way means that non-experts are somehow magically able to skip years of hard work. This doesn't mean that experts can use the "because I said so" fallacy to avoid discussing why they've come to their conclusions. Nor does it mean that when they take the time to explain the details to an intelligent non-expert, they can dismiss their opinion out of hand. It only means that if it's a choice between the opinion of an expert and an uninformed non-expert, the latter really is an appeal to stupidity.
Recently I wrote about the value of the humanities classes in teaching rational thinking. Understanding why something evokes an emotional response is critical to understanding the intent of an article, i.e. how the author is trying to manipulate you. And once you have that, you can begin to step outside the emotions and think logically.
But that's only the beginning. While some of the humanities courses in schools are very good, what we really seem to be lacking almost entirely is a good course on statistics for the under 16's. Because if you take a statistical view of the world, then it's really not as bad as you might think.
Of course I don't mean that we need more emphasis on teaching mathematical techniques - yes, it's important to understand the mean and median and why the median is usually the better, but those are hardly the most important aspects. What I'm on about are the much less mathematical, more philosophical aspects of statistical measurements. You don't need any maths to understand them, but I see a great many people who just don't seem to get them at all. Yet while they're really a lot simpler to explain than the mathematical aspects, they're probably even more important. So, in no particular order :
Anecdotes Are Not Evidence
I just said, "I see a great many people". But what does that mean ? How many people ? Where ? Did I actually talk to them in detail or just form a snap judgement based on one short quote ? You see, by itself, my observation that I personally have witnessed some number of people not understanding statistical methods proves precisely nothing about how many people overall really do not understand statistical methods. Without more details (which I'll get on to in a minute) there could be any number of reasons why my casual observation is meaningless.
But anecdotes aren't unrelated to evidence. For statistics they're a sort of base unit of evidence. As long as the witness isn't lying or delusional, they do prove individual things happen. The problem is that my statement, "I see lots of people who..." strongly implies that I think there's a majority of people who behave in a certain way. And I might think that. I might very well think that. But as to whether it's really true...
Ian Richardson is infinitely more charismatic than Kevin Spacey and anyone who disagrees is objectively wrong.
All my observation can tell us is that some number of people don't understand statistical methods. Sometimes that's good enough : "I saw that man attacking that adorable kitten, officer !". You can use anecdotes to refute sweeping, overstated generalizations ("All men attack kittens.", "Ah, but I knew a man who never attacked a kitten at all !"), but not to support generalizations ("It must be true, I've seen lots of men attacking kittens"). As an estimate as to what fraction of men really attack adorable kittens, it's useless. It's extremely difficult to overcome a personal bias when we witness something happening first-hand for ourselves, especially if we see it repeatedly. Which brings us neatly on to...
Selection Effects
It's almost impossible to get everyone's opinion on any topic or analyse everything in any sample, which is why we need statistics in the first place. But questioning as many people as you can could be utterly useless if you question only specific people. If you're trying to find out how many people enjoy reading, you don't go and only ask people visiting the library, because that's just plain silly.
Of course, you can't ignore the evidence of your own eyes. You see youths being aggressive day in, day out, and it's easy to conclude that young people are aggressive. And it's even true in your experience. But if you're walking the same route each day and see the same youths, you've limited your sample. Or you might be going through a park where the local ruffians choose to congregate, so you're only seeing the dregs and not the far greater numbers of young people who are busy in school.
It's very difficult to eliminate all selection effects when collecting data. But if you don't try to do this at all, you'll end up with a very warped view of the world. Which is probably why people seem to think that most immigrants in Britain are Polish plumbers, even though they're actually highly skilled twenty-somethings.
Think Of The Big Picture
Statistical thinking cautions us to remember that while what we observe is always true, it isn't necessarily representative of what's going on everywhere. Maybe most teenagers in parks are hooligans, but most teenagers overall are just lovely. The point is that you have to be very careful about generalizing from specific observations. The more data you've got, and the wider variety of sources it comes from, the better.
For example, the media often focus on stories about individuals. Being basically empathetic creatures, we react strongly to emotional, personal stories. The trouble is that it doesn't matter how many "violent immigrant" stories you report, all you're doing is picking out anecdotes without reporting the full story. It's a bit like only reporting plane crashes - obviously, there's no story when a plane doesn't crash, because people aren't interested. But we all know planes are safe enough, we accept the small risk that comes with flying because we're at leastbroadly aware of how many planes don't crash.
It's harder to escape the emotional impact of a violent, personal attack. Our pattern recognition skills tell us, "That dangerous person is in some way different, therefore any people which share that difference might also be dangerous." But unless you also consider the number of such people who aren't dangerous, you are not thinking statistically. You also have to consider how people in other groups behave, otherwise you have nothing to compare with. For instance, 98% of all terrorism in the Western hemisphere is carried out by non-Muslims - which is hardly the view one gets from the media*. People like fear because it stops them from the more difficult task of actually thinking. That sells newspapers but it doesn't tell you what's really going on.
* Strictly speaking if you want to find out if Muslims are more violent, you should look at how many violent acts occur per capita by Muslims compared to all other demographics.
It also puts into perspective how some awful crimes just really aren't that much of a problem. Statistically, terrorism causes about as many annual fatalities as pregnancy, and no-one is talking about a "war on babies".
Underlying Causes
Your local observation of gangs of young ruffians consistently appearing in a local park tells you that you should be wary of those ruffians in that park. It does not, by itself, tell you that you should be wary of all parks or all youngsters. What if that park is in a city with a very high crime rate anyway ? It could be that you're seeing kids in a park because kids hang out in parks; that they're also violent could be related to the fact that the whole area has a high rate of violence in all age groups. There's nothing wrong with your specific knowledge of the area, but you're jumping the gun to assume that all parks (or all youths) are the same everywhere.
It's easy to see why we think this way : we have monkey minds in a modern world. It makes sense to run away from all tigers, because all tigers really are dangerous. The trouble is that we try to apply this thinking to far more complex, modern situations, and it's failing miserably. Instead of making us safer, it's making things more dangerous - our unfounded fears about certain groups cause us to hate them, which causes them to hate us, and the cycle of hate and violence can be difficult to break.
But even when your specific observation is borne out in more general trends, that doesn't necessarily mean anything either. Even if you did see that all kids in parks were violent, it would be silly to conclude that parks make them violent. Similarly it's plainly ridiculous to say that being tall and skinny is a sign of intelligence. Doing intelligent things, like completing a degree in mathematics, is a sign of intelligence - that you're a sexy partygoer is completely and utterly irrelevant, and really quite insulting.
The excellent Spurious Correlations website is full of examples of this, although my favourite has to be this one :
Does eating more chocolate increase your chances of winning a Nobel prize ? Probably not. First, we could turn it around. It doesn't make a lot of sense to say that a few academics winning Nobel prizes causes the whole populace to eat more chocolate, so you can't assume the reverse is true. There could be any number of common reasons why both chocolate consumption and Nobel prize winnings increase simultaneously. In poor countries the population are starved of all foods, so they aren't healthy and have little time to spend on science, while the reverse is true in richer countries. There's a very strong selection effect at work here : why only look at chocolate ? What's the correlation like with other foods ?
Determining what the underlying cause really is is difficult. Ideally you perform an analysis where you see how one variable correlates with lots of other variables, not just one. If you find a correlation and there's a physical mechanism to cause it and no other variable seems to correlate as well, then maybe you've found something interesting.
Ask ALL The Questions !
If a study is focused on a very narrow area, you might think that you can get away with asking very short, simple questions. Not necessarily. You might be introducing a selection effect and miss something very important that's going on. If you're monitoring library usage and find that it's dropping, you don't just ask people whether the chairs are uncomfortable. Ideally you want as much data as possible, so that you can consider both causes you consider likely and unlikely on an equal footing.
Then there's the hugely complicated topic of asking the right questions in the right way. I'm not going to go into this one save to mention this brilliant Yes Minister scene which shows why it's so important :
You've also got to ask the same questions, even if they're not ideal. If you ask people, "Do you like pork pies ?" in Hull and, "Are pork pies your favourite food ?" in Doncaster you will inevitably get different results. This is an even bigger problem when it comes to international studies, since different countries don't always cooperate to get public opinion in the same way. For example, recently there was a claim that America is a less violent place than Britain, which is revealed as pure nonsense when you realise that the two countries have very different definitions of violent crime.
Outliers Are More Noticeable
Selection effects are constantly at work in human memory. We only notice events, we don't notice non-events. A plane that doesn't crash isn't memorable. An immigrant who never breaks the law doesn't stand out. Negative outliers are perhaps even more memorable, because it's safer to remember danger than it is to remember the examples of success. The thing to remember with media stories is that in general, stories only make the news because they're unusual. For that reason, be extremely wary of judging whether anything the media is reporting is typical of what's usually going on. And also be acutely aware that because of this, the media are feeding you a series of unusual events, which will inevitably bias your memory and impressions of what usually happens.
Oddly enough, while it's always possible to point to events in which people were killed, it's not always possible to say when lives are saved - at least not specific, personal examples. It's easy to say when someone dies of heart disease. It's impossible to point to individuals who never get heart disease in the first place because, say, of changes in food regulations or campaigns for healthy eating.
One of my schoolteachers taught me a classic example of what happened when the British government decided to stop moving the clocks back an hour in winter. Campaigners said this would prevent unnecessary deaths in the evening (i.e. schoolchildren walking home in the dark getting hit by cars). And it did. There was also an increase in the number of deaths in the morning, but it was less than the decrease in the evening. So statistically, lives were saved.
But was the media full of stories of children who were, inexplicably, not dead ? No, because you have no idea who was saved by this, but it's very easy to find examples of children killed in the morning, when it was now darker. Of course, you really have no idea who exactly was killed as a result of this either - they might have been run over anyway. Really it makes no more sense to interview the parents of one dead child and say, "this is an example of this law killing children" than it does to to interview the parents of one child who's not dead and say, "this is an example of the law saving lives".
This kind of statistical thinking can seem cold, even cruel and inhuman. In situations like this it's important to remember that we're dealing with probabilities and risk, not individuals. You might think it's a choice of saying, "I want to kill lots more children in the evening and a few less in the morning" or "I want to kill a lot less children in the evening and a few more in the morning", so that basically it boils down to how much killing you want to do - you do not have the luxury of a good choice here.
It's true, but of course altering risk is not the same as either lining up people for a firing squad or rescuing them from a hungry shark. You'll never know who was saved and who was not - you have to go on the numbers, because that's all you've got. You can't avoid taking risks. You can only control which risks you take.
Significance
Unlikely events still happen by chance. If something has a 1 in 10,000 chance of occurring, you can expect that it will occur if the requisite scenario actually does happen 10,000 times. So if you get 10,000 people to flip a coin ten times and one them comes down heads ten times in a row, it's not because one of the people was psychic.
Measuring how statistically significant an event is - the probability that it didn't happen by chance - can be mathematically complicated. It also relies on accounting for those all-important selection effects. Be especially wary of the phenomenon of small number statistics. The smaller your sample, the greater the chance that it can appear to show a trend where actually none exists. For example, if you ask a million people if they like cheese and 600,000 say yes, the result is far more decisive than if you poll ten people and nine of them said yes.
The point is that you should be cautious when an unlikely event happens because it might have happened by chance anyway. Weather prediction is a good example. You can never attribute an individual very hot summer to global warming, because it might have happened anyway. A run of three hot summers is also difficult, because the Earth has been around an awful long time so has probably had umpteen bouts of three hot summers in a row. At what point you can start to say, "this is significant" you'll need to call in a climate expert.
Conclusions
So can these few simple lessons really make you happier ? Possibly. It certainly teaches caution : just because you feel something is true from your own experience doesn't mean that it really is. To be more accurate, personal experience is not a good guide to general trends. Without having experienced other situations, you don't know what selection effects are at work. So anecdotes can tell you something about individual situations, but they're nearly useless when it comes to the big picture. Even your general impressions about what's going on in the world at large are coloured by a media for whom selling emotional but statistically irrelevant stories is de rigueur.
I shall return to the "generation of spoiled idiots" in a moment, but the main point is that we don't often stop to think about how much worse things could be. This is what I call the Grandparent Paradox (nothing to do with the time-travelling Grandfather Paradox). Grandparents are old, experienced people, and experience is valuable. Yet despite having survived World War II, my grandmother was convinced the world was getting worse. Yeah, really, worse than say, being bombed by Nazi Germany, or having to live in a world where women couldn't do equal work for equal pay, homosexuality was illegal, and being an abject racist was just normal.
"More bad news", she'd say, having just read the latest edition of the Daily "we supported Hitler" Mail. As though the assassination of the Tazenikistani Royal Family (or some such) was somehow impinging on her own need to turn up the heating to a level able to roast a turkey, set the telly on full volume and go off on racist rants for no apparent reason (with hindsight the Daily Mail probably had a lot to do with that).
Statistical thinking means you don't lose your head because something awful happened. Awful things happen all the time, and they probably always will. What they don't indicate is that things are getting worse - you have to look at numbers over time for that. "I see this happening more and more" means precisely diddly-squat without numbers.
Over the last century we've gone from a situation in which racism was normal to, if far from gone, then at least being hated by the majority of people. We're living longer. Our standard of living is immeasurably higher. Women and minorities have equal rights, if not yet equal treatment. And yes, progress hasn't been linear, but inferring that the apocalypse is round the corner because something bad just happened is just dumb.
The other notable quote my gran used to say was that my generation couldn't possibly have fought the Nazis. How she came to this conclusion was anyone's guess, never mind the ridiculous notion about how people "were nicer in those days." It's not my generation that put up signs in pubs saying, "No blacks or Irish". Similarly, the idea that we're a generation of "spoiled idiots" does have a base emotional appeal, but is it really true ?
That's probably the internet meme I hate the most, because every single damn thing about it is wrong. First, I've never seen this in any school playground*. Cardiff, Arecibo, Prague... nope, not happening. Show me the evidence that this does happen and I'll believe you. Second, what's wrong with kids playing with smartphones and not playing sport ? I freakin' HATED sport ! I'd have wounded small puppies for the chance to get out of P.E. lessons and play with a handheld computer. Why the hell would it have been better for me to suffer ? Kids having access to more advanced technology is a good thing. That's how technological progress is supposed to work.
* Of course, all my anecdote proves is that kids don't avoid sports in every school.
Our continual raising of our own expectations is a mixed blessing. We're continually driven for self-improvement : racism isn't considered normal any more, and homophobia is heading the same way. The downside is that whenever things do get worse we tend to forget how far we've come overall, and because we continually shift the goalposts we're never happy.
Grandparents, in my experience, also seem to have a view that that the modern world is a more dangerous place. "Oh we were allowed to wander off by ourselves when I was six, and we could eat dog poop if we wanted and it never did me any harm", they say. Sure you were. That doesn't mean the world or dog poop was safer (or that medical advice was wrong*) - it could just mean that your parents were stupider, or less well-informed, or didn't love you as much, or just weren't paying attention, or in fact were better at parenting because they let you have more fun. The idea that the world has become more dangerous is only one possible explanation, and just because you see a lot more media reports about murderers doesn't mean there are more murderers around.
* Yeah, you may have gotten away with not washing your hands once in a while. Cleanliness doesn't guarantee survival any more than dirtiness guarantees death - all you're doing is altering the risk. Some changes can't be seen on an individual level - they require a much larger statistical view. There's also a selection effect here : of course it did you no harm, because those people who it did harm are dead and can't complain about it.
The main lesson of statistics isn't that you should jump around in some kind of orgasmic ecstasy about how great the world it, because large aspects of the world are pretty darn crappy. But it reminds us that while we don't live in a Utopia, we do live in something that's infinitely better than many alternatives. We've escaped warlords and petty kings and absolute monarchies and emperors, serfdom and slavery and the workhouse. True, the world isn't what it once was - the only constant is change. But in so many ways, that change has been for the better. I think if we grew up learning about these basic statistical effects, we'd all be a lot more rational. And maybe - just maybe - we'd all be a little bit happier too.
I know, I know - every half-wit on the internet has their own opinion on the recent terrorist atrocities in Paris. Personally I find the commentary by Google's Yonatan Zunger to be probably the closest to the truth. If I might make a humble effort to simplify this (but you should really read it yourself), it would be something like this : the causes of terrorism are complicated and cannot be attributed only, or even mostly, to religion - other factors, such as poverty, war, and government collapse are all to blame. I would also strongly urge, nay insist you also read this article on the cause of the Arab Spring.
Zunger further contends that Muslims haven't integrated into some European societies because they have been prevented from doing so by laws and prejudice. Whereas Charlie Hebdo provoked violent terrorism from some Muslims, The Life of Brian merely provoked anger from some Christians. This wasn't because Christianity is innately more peaceful, but because Christians didn't really feel threatened by Monty Python. They weren't "integrated" into society, they were and are society.
Some Muslims do not feel like that. They don't see satire as satire; they see it as part of a much larger attack not just on their beliefs, but on them. That is not to say they are correct, only that if they felt truly a part of society, they wouldn't react violently to legitimate criticism. Which is evidenced by a surprisingly small proportion (albeit a majority) of Muslims who believe that violence in response to cartoons is never justified. Maybe they feel this way because as Zunger suggests, they are constantly excluded from society and "their" extremist element reacts in the same way extremist elements react in all groups.
Because I know full well that I am not an expert on international politics or psychology, I am going to try and limit the scope of this post as much as possible. I do not want to examine in detail the cause of or the solutions to the problem. Instead I have only one point to make with this post : terrorist attacks caused by Muslims are not occurring because the instigators are Muslims.
There are an estimated 2-6 million Muslims living in France today. Since 2000, there have been a total of 14 terrorist attacks, nine or ten by Muslim extremists, involving a total of perhaps twenty individuals. Twenty ! Out of maybe five million Muslims ! Islamic terrorists are outnumbered by innocent Muslims by something like two hundred thousand to one*. Fearing Muslims makes no sense.
* EDIT : As rightly pointed out in the comments below, the number of extremists may be somewhat higher than that, especially given that around 1,000 individuals have left France to join ISIS in the Middle East. Still, the number of individuals who have remained within France and actually want to hurt France is vanishingly small.
Let that ratio sink in. It's exactly equivalent to saying that you wouldn't visit Luxembourg or Rouen or Swansea or Venice because you'd heard there was one murderer present. Or better yet, to say, "Sir, before you enter this establishment, I have to check if you're from Venice."
Gondoliers : you just can't trust 'em.
And yes, there have been protests in which large numbers of Muslims said really, really stupid things. But how many of them acted on that ? Practically none.
"But," you might say, "you just said that most of the attacks were carried out by Muslims. Doesn't that mean that we should hold Muslims in greater suspicion when looking for terrorists, even if it is only a tiny minority that commit terrorism ?"
No. You still haven't grasped the scale of how very, very few terrorists there are. The numbers are so low it makes no sense to be more suspicious of Muslims than any other group. If you have an event at which you're concerned about terrorism, you need security procedures that detect terrorists. If you resort to using someone's religion to determine if they're more likely to be a terrorist or not, you've basically admitted you have no idea what you're doing.
Let's consider the terrorist attacks in France in the 20th century :
1900 - 1950 : Five attacks, all politically motivated, none by Muslims.
1950 - 1975 : Seven attacks, all politically motivated, none by Muslims.
1975 - 2000 : Fifty one attacks, thirty two by Muslim extremists (how many were French and how many were foreigners is unclear).
The attacks by non-jihadists include a wide variety of causes, from mental illness to various ideologies such as communism and nationalism. So jihadists form the largest single group responsible for French terror attacks in the 20th and 21st centuries. And they have escalated in recent years : i.e. there was a time not so long ago when Muslim terrorism was just not a thing. EDIT : It's worth bearing in mind that when considering the number of attacks overall in Europe (unfortunately I don't have data for France alone) - that is, the attempts that were foiled - the number of attacks by Islamists is negligible compared to those by other causes.
Something grimly interesting emerges when reading the list : the stochastic nature of the attacks. 1994 saw no less than nine Jihadist attacks, whereas from 1997-2003 there were none. If merely being Muslim caused a propensity toward violence, we might expect to see a more consistent level of violence. In fact it tends to occur in bursts, often caused by organizations. There are a few lone extremists, but they are by far the minority.
Similarly, while the anti-religious ilk are quick to point out that the Crusades and Inquisition as being agents of Christian medieval terror (quite correctly), we don't often think of the Catholics as being violent terrorists today. But it does happen. You might not like Catholic ideology, but few people worry about the Catholics plotting to blow up Parliament, because Catholic terrorism is just so vanishingly rare. Yes, once it was considered a serious threat. It isn't any more, even though Catholicism has hardly gone away. So Catholicism looks to be very unlikely as the root cause of terrorism.
Sometimes antitheists say to me, "Just because a theist donated money to charity doesn't mean you can infer that theism is a good thing." That's very true. And by exactly the same token, just because some theists kill people doesn't mean you can infer that theism is a bad thing either. Since theism can cause people to do both good and bad things, to judge whether theism is a good or bad thing you'd need at the very least a statistical estimate of how many good and bad things (whatever those are) theists and non-theists commit. Do you have one ? No, you don't. You only have anecdotes. This is not a sensible way to judge religion or the religious.
Right, yes, as opposed to, say, poverty and oppression. This is an example of sciolism : giving an opinion on something well outside one's area of expertise. I suppose I'm doing it too, of course.
When certain Irish republicans were waging a campaign of terror against the United Kingdom, no-one said they were doing it because they were Irish (except for racist bigoted idiots). Nor was believing in an independent Ireland cited as the cause of the violence. It was what they were trying to use violence to achieve, but it wasn't what made them violent. Rather it was their unquestioning devotion to that cause and the extremist belief that anything they did was justified that made them violent.
When a Christian murders someone, should we automatically assume that it was Christianity that made them do it ? Does anyone honestly think that during every single murder, someone who happens to believe in God is thinking, "Jesus told me it's OK !", or that Christian thieves rob houses because they think the Angel Gabriel commanded them to ? Is it not at least plausible that in some cases, religious people do evil things for reasons completely unrelated to their religion ? Poverty seems a far more likely cause of theft, anger a more likely cause of murder, than a book telling people not to kill or steal.
Maybe, just maybe, hungry people steal food because they're hungry. That they happen to follow a religion can have nothing to do with it.
Murderous people can always come up with an ideology to "justify" murdering people, be it religious or otherwise (communism comes to mind). If it wasn't religion, it would probably be something else. Lunatic idiots will always be lunatic idiots.
Not that it's quite as simple as that though. True, sometimes religion can turn good people into evil people - the Aztecs surely weren't all born with a desire to rip out people's hearts, but they did so on a massive scale to appease their gods. Yes, this was due to religion - a very specific kind of ultra-extreme religion into which people were brutally indoctrinated. Aztec religion was a form of extremism in itself. It wasn't the belief in the gods that made them sacrifice human beings on an industrial scale, it was the belief that those gods needed to be fed human hearts to keep the world from ending.
ISIS are equally extremist. It isn't the belief in Allah that's making them kill. It's because they are, when you get right down to it, a bunch of nutjobs - unlike the millions upon millions of Muslims who are absolutely no threat to anybody.
Terrorism exploits two things : fear (please read), and our terrible natural skills at analysing statistics. We are not designed to think statistically. If anything, quite the reverse : we have evolved to see more threats than there really are, because escaping threats that aren't there is far safer than not spotting threats that are there.
The total number of fatalities due to terrorism (of all causes) in France in the whole of the 20th and 21st centuries is 305. Even if all of those had occurred during a single year, as an individual you should be more scared of hot weather. Literally. The 2003 heatwave is estimated to have killed over 14,000 people in France alone. Yes, terrorism is evil and yes, we should try to stop it. But with a French population of over 60 million, the chances of any individual being killed in a terrorist attack in France are close to nil. EDIT : You are far, far more likely to drown, die because of nasty weather or a transport accident or because you fell over, than by a terrorist attack of any motivation. Statistically, terrorism is not much more dangerous than getting pregnant.
The conclusion from this is inescapable : it does not make sense for us to feel unsafe. Our reactions are driven by gut emotions, which are there for a very good reason but are not logical. In the jungle, almost all tigers are dangerous, so it makes sense to run away from them. In modern European cities, practically no Muslims are dangerous, but our hyper-inflated pattern recognition abilities tell us otherwise.
The real danger comes from our reaction to the terrorist attacks. If we give in to hate and start discriminating against European Muslims, we will make the problem worse. ISIS will say, "look how they hate you" and more people will join their cause, not because they are Muslim but because they are hated. I agree with Zunger that in the Middle East, military action may be the only way to stop ISIS - but it will utterly fail in the long-term if we don't also look at the underlying causes. The challenge in Europe is to differentiate any foreign military intervention from the treatment of Muslim citizens of Europe.
A few months ago I probably would have agreed with most people that Muslims need to be more vocal about distancing themselves from terrorists. Now I'm not so sure. Maybe all our insistence that they stand up and differentiate themselves is just another way of excluding them from European society, potentially creating a problem where none existed. Maybe the answer isn't less tolerance, but more.
