[Correction: MWS chimed in in the comments to correct my misapprehension of his current attitude toward podcasting, which is considerably more complex than the paragraph above makes it seem. My apologies for inadvertently misrepresenting him.]

The two of them are generation one podiobookers who appeared in the space hot on the heels of the three founders, and seeing them throw in the towel has a lot of other creators wondering: “Are we all just being idiots giving stuff away for free?” And it’s got a lot of fans wondering “What’s going to happen now? Are all my favorite writers going to give up?”

The Gospel of Free has been pinging around the internet for a while now, it’s even got its own official book. There are folks in the fiction space – like Doctorow and Sigler – that have made it the cornerstone of their publicity strategy and turn a consistent profit at it. The use of free content in career building is a well-established promotional strategy, but it’s a difficult tool to use, and suffers from the reductio ad absurdum that most people hear when they first encounter the message, no matter how subtly it’s preached: “If you build it, they will come.”

So if I just put my stuff on the web I’ll find an audience? Well, no. You might find an audience, if you get yourself seen by the right people (and by “right people” I mean people who are prone to telling everybody they know about their latest new and great thing). You might even find a good audience – but you have to bear in mind, “Free” doesn’t mean what you think it does.

Let’s take what I do for free (well, free to my audience): I use a segment of my professional time as a writer and as a sound engineer to produce full-cast audiodbooks. I pay for this – billing my professional time out at normal rates, and factoring in what I pay my actors in trade (whether they’ve collected on it or not), my cost (not including what I should be paying the author) is in the neighborhood of $10-15k. Now, am I out of pocket that much? No. I do go out of pocket a little bit, but not a lot – however, that’s all time stripped out of my life that I could be billing at that kind of rate. If you’ve wondered why I do less in the way of publicity than some other podiobooks authors, now you know – the time is my main expense, and I have a life and a business. I intend, eventually, to have my writing income make up a greater-than-fifty-percent share of my household budget, but I’m not there yet. I’m nowhere near. This is what is called a loss-leader.

In business terms, a loss-leader is the bait on the hook – the hook is what gets the audience to spend money. Matching the right bait to the right hook and fishing in the right water is a learned skill set, and it relies somewhat on how fast one learns from experience, how lucky one is, and (in the writing game) how good a lawyer one is and/or has. There’s a reason more than 75% of authors wash out of the game after their first book contract runs out, and why only a minuscule percentage of people with authorial ambitions ever get even that far – being a good writer is not the same as being a successful author. It’s even possible to be a successful author without being a good writer (for example, Dan Brown), but I wouldn’t bank on it and I know damn few successful authors who would, particularly over the term of a career. Craft does matter – it’s just not all that matters.

If podcasting is your loss leader, what’s your endgame? If all you’re trying to do is get your voice heard, podcasting or blogging your novel is a perfectly fine idea. If you’re looking to get published, it might help, or it might be a distraction or a detriment, depending on your approach and a host of other variables. If you’re looking to build a sustainable long term career as a professional author, it’s time for you to stop and think about a few things before you go into podcasting:

1) What will podcasting give me?
2) What is my professional time worth – and if I were to bill myself for this, how much of a loss will I be taking?
3) What kind of author do I want to be?
4) Why do I think “getting published” is a worthwhile goal?

Why should you stop to think about these things? Because I guarantee you that your answers to at least one of those questions is wrong enough to set you up for some serious disappointment.

What will podcasting give me?
Podcasting will, if you stick with it and actually produce a decent product with broad enough appeal, give you an audience ranging anywhere from a few hundred to maybe twenty thousand regular listeners. If you’re very innovative in evangelizing your product beyond the established fiction podosphere, your chances for good numbers go up. If you host in a high visibility place like Podiobooks and leave your content there for a few years, your numbers will climb over time due to the long tail effect.

Podcasting may also help you learn the market in terms of audience. This is the primary reason I started fiction podcasting: Market research. I was looking to find out what kind of people would enjoy the stories that I’m interested in writing, so that I could figure out how to find and deliver to that market that, in the long term (and I’m talking about a time scale of decades) I will be able to consistently turn a profit on. Notice I said “stories”, not “books” – that will become important later.

Podcasting may give you a creative community – this isn’t something I was looking for, but I have made some friends through the process as well as more than a few good business contacts that have been helpful along the way.

Podcasting (if you’re good at it) will win you respect and accolades as well as the adoration of at least a few fans along the way, and this feels really good. Just remember that, as encouraging as it can be, it’s a limited kind of street cred. Audience tastes change, and what they love about you today they may hate about you tomorrow. Glory feels wonderful, even in small doses, and can put an extra bit of shine on a life well lived, but it will never make up for insecurity or the need for the kind of relationships you can only have with people who really know you.

Podcasting may give you pleasure – if you enjoy the process and enjoy interacting with people, it’s something that you might like even as a hobby.

But unless you are supremely lucky and very canny, there is something podcasting will not deliver: a paycheck of any substance. If you’re expecting to be have your audio audience put you on the bestseller list once you get that book deal, good luck to you. A few people have pulled it off. Those people are, without exception, people that – by chance or by cleverness – wrote exactly to market. They were selling stories that resonated perfectly (or at least well enough) with the public that a larger-than-average segment of their fan base wanted to own a physical copy, and the same larger-than-average segment went out of their way to pimp the shit out of the books to their friends, family, and strangers who might not even own iPods. A few others have pulled it off by their books being noticed on a site like Podiobooks, and subsequently selling film options.

If you want your book to perform well enough to get to your next contract, you need a publishing house that will throw its weight behind you, a print run that is realistically scaled to your book’s performance, and a property that is going to sell in the current market. If you don’t have at least the latter two of these three things, then (again) good luck to you. You’re going to need it.

How Much Is My Time Worth?

I hate to sound like a schoolmarm (or worse), but time that you’re podcasting is time that you’re not doing four other things, all of which are arguably more important. It’s time you’re not making money at whatever your profession is, it’s time you’re not spending with friends and family building the memories that make life with living, it’s time that you’re not learning, and it’s time that you’re not writing.

If you intend to write fiction for any significant fraction of your life, you need to be doing all of those things. You have to write to grow as a writer, and you have to make money to be able to live while you’re writing. But if you have a life that isn’t worth living – say, a life without significant relationships or learning and enrichment – then it’s highly unlikely that you’re going to have anything interesting to write about (and you may be too depressed to write about anything at all, except stories about depression).

Every hour you spend podcasting is billable time – somebody’s paying for it, and it isn’t always just you. Don’t cheat on your mental accounting sheet – There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch. Even in a down economy, your time has a dollar value attached to it – figure
out what that value is, and then keep track of what you’re spending. If nothing else, being aware of the cost will help you keep from feeling cheated at the far end if you wind up not getting a good return on your investment, because you’ll be spending on purpose.

What Kind of Author Do I Want To Be?

If you’ve been in and around the writing business for any length of time, you’ve heard the old saw “you can’t make a living as a writer unless you’re in the top 1%.” This bit of conventional wisdom is what lies behind the blockbuster mentality on the part of authors: you want to have a brand name, you want to be the biggest thing ever, and you must relentlessly self-promote (the blockbuster mentality of some publishing houses is another animal entirely, and Charles Stross and Dean Wesley Smith have both covered it very well on their blogs recently).

If you’ve heard that and are still intent on trying, then you are either mind-numbingly stupid, a heroically-minded risk junkie, a hobbyist, or someone who actually has a clue about business and doesn’t listen to the conventional wisdom of creative people (in which case, good for you).

So you want to be the next Dan Brown or Stephanie Meyer? You’d be better off going to Vegas – that kind of trend really is a game of chance, and depends largely (though not entirely) on unforeseeable market forces. That said, there is a whole swath of writers who make a living on their names, which they worked very hard to establish, and who aren’t blockbusters (and yes, Scott Sigler is one of them. He might be a blockbuster by our standards, and his ambition is to be the next Stephen King, but by broader market standards he’s a respectable front-lister, and there’s nothing at all wrong with that).

But blockbusting is not the only way to win this game, and here’s why:

Most authors who make a living at it don’t make a living on their book advances. Oh, the advances help, but they’re not even close to the whole pie. Subsidiary rights sales, foreign rights, royalties from the long tail, article sales, and commissioned work for other commercial ventures (such as being tapped to do a Star Trek or a Dragonlance novel) make up a large part of the income flow, with investments helping keep the rent paid during lean years. These authors generally (though not always) sit solidly on the mid-list, and some of them write under a variety of names for different markets. I know and have known (personally) at least a score of authors who make their living with their words, and the two qualities that distinguish them from the authors I know who haven’t been able to pull it off are: 1) insufferable, bloody-minded perseverance, and 2) continual growth in craft and breadth. In other words, these authors actually treat it like a career, rather than a brass ring.

The truth is that most people who get counted as “authors” in surveys of author incomes are people who publish a single book, or who have a book they haven’t sold. They’re not career writers. They don’t count screenwriters, ad copy writers, stage play writers, or other such folks. In other words, this bit of conventional wisdom is horse shit because it counts every dilettante, aspiring amateur, and washout as an “author.” Authors such people may be, but professionals they ain’t. Some of them will become professionals (I must hasten to add, I’m on this tier — I’m not prolific enough or churning enough cash enough yet to be called a professional, but I’m heading deliberately in that direction) – others are hobbyists. I daresay that if such a survey were taken of all the auto mechanics in the world, with hobbyists and people that change their own oil counted with the same weight as ASE certificate holders, the numbers for auto mechanics wouldn’t be dissimilar to what we hear about with writing.

If you’re looking to do this for a living, writing is a professional business (i.e. a business that relies on being an expert in a particular domain), with all the problems that implies: It relies on individual expertise, a broad skillset, at least a vague awareness of market dynamics, a certain legal acumen, the ability to adapt to contingency, a high tolerance for risk and uncertainty, and a little bit of luck. You know, just like any other non-franchise business.

Why Do I think Getting Published is a Worthwhile Goal?

More than any other question, the answer to this gets to the heart of the matter for an author who is thinking of podcasting their work, because in answering this you’re probably going to answer a significant portion of all the other questions.

My answer to this one is simple: It’s a step on the road. I got a huge thrill with my first short story sale – now, after only a couple more, it’s an exercise in contract negotiations and another tick on the scorecard. It’s fun and exciting, but it’s not the life-affirming experience that the first sale was. Why? Because my sights are on the next set of goalposts, and I need to get to those so I can see the next set, and so on.

But my self-worth is not wrapped up in this. This is business. If I can’t make it work one way I’ll make it work another, and if, in the end, I turn out not to have the chops, I’ll shift my focus and continue writing as a hobby to whatever extent I can justify it. Yes, I am one of those rare people who will write no matter what – it’s the reason I’m making a go of turning it into a profession. But that doesn’t mean that everything I do will be available for free. Some things will, some things won’t – just like, right now, some things are and some things aren’t. My time is billable hourly, and my free stuff is there so that I can 1) build my audience, and 2) learn how to navigate in my marketplace(s). It’s an investment I’m making because it seems sound to me – I know what it costs, and for me the price is right.

Is the price right for you? Think hard about it. I daresay there will always be hobbyists in the podcast fiction space, but if you’re a pro or an aspiring pro, look at it as a business investment. It’s not a magic bullet, and it’s not a shortcut. Even podcasting’s biggest success, Scott Sigler, doesn’t see it as either of those things. Scott needed a platform to prove that there was a market for cross-genre horror, so he essentially invented one. His focus now is on figuring out where the next place to grow his audience is, and what books will be best to write next. There’s a reason he’s made this work, and it goes a lot deeper than “he writes in a popular genre” (although that also is very important).

Wrapping It Up

The Gospel of Free is a pernicious little meme that’s burned out some talented people and seriously burned others, but it’s not a new one. Every get rich quick scheme, every investment bubble, every motivational speaker that comes along has the same basic blend of bullshit and wisdom: “Look at this new thing – it’s no-lose! Look at its merits! Imagine how much you could do with this!” Network marketing, real estate flipping, dot com stocks – there’s always something, and it nearly always takes a pretty clever idea and isolates it from all good business sense.

Don’t fall for it. Free has always been with us, and it’s always been good business when done right. New tools, new media, and new toys are great, but excitement about the opportunities they present can easily obscure the most basic thing about business: supply and demand must meet, and they must trade. If they don’t, then at best what you’ve got is a rewarding hobby, and at worst you’re in a financial disaster. There is no such things as a fast buck except at the craps table, and there is never any such thing as a free lunch.

Me? I’m in this for the long haul. I’m building a business, with all the risk that implies. Right now, my business model includes podcasting. Will it in three years? It depends on what happens between now and then.

So, in sum, my advice to other writers and podcasters, for what it’s worth: Podcast what you will. Keep track of what it’s costing you. Cut your losses if it’s not returning what you need for it to be worthwhile. Above all, don’t buy the bullshit that motivational speakers and other sharks shovel. Celebrity status might be useful, but it’s like Monopoly money: not negotiable currency outside of the small circles that generate it.

For fans of mine and other’s podcast fiction: remember that while this is free to you, it’s not free for us. Your feedback, your cash in the tip jar, and your evangelism are much appreciated. We podcast authors know that we’re being wasteful and reckless – and not all of us will stay in this space forever. For now, I at least am getting what I want out of the bargain, and I do enjoy entertaining you all.

For everyone reading, remember: Life is precious. Don’t forget to enjoy whatever it is you’re doing, and treasure the memories it gives you. Treat your time like an investment, and savor what you buy with it. In the end, the moments are the only thing we have to make a life out of.

In an article on Beliefnet this week, Michael Ruse argues that the “new atheists” are a “bloody disaster.” He argues using a mixture of caricatures, complaints, and criticisms, so before I go into why I think the man is full of organic fertilizer on the broader issues, I will address the salient ones:

[Cut for opinionated rantings that might irritate some readers]

Caricatures:
1) “…the “new atheists” – people who are aggressively pro-science, especially pro-Darwinism, and violently anti-religion of all kinds, especially Christianity but happy to include Islam and the rest.”

Among the “new atheists” he names Dawkins, Dennet, Hitchens, P.Z. Meyers, and Jerry Coyne. Notably absent from this list is the movement’s galvanizing voice, Sam Harris, whose book The End of Faith busted the market wide open for everyone else. Harris is familiar with a number of religions, and in The End of Faith and in his lectures at the Beyond Belief symposiums makes nuanced arguments about the relative merits and demerits of different religions and different flavors of different religions, all while insisting that faith must no longer be socially sacrosanct. He argues that not all false ideas are equally destructive, and it may be that not all religious ideas are equally false, but that it is dishonest, dangerous, and foolhardy to continue to behave as if religious ideas are especially immune from criticism when compared to political, moral, ethical, economic, philosophical, scientific, or artistic ideas. His arguments may have problems – anthropologist Scott Atran has given them an extensive critique – but they do not fit the brush Ruse is painting with in the slightest.

A call to level the intellectual playing field by practicing what Harris calls “conversational intolerance” of religious ideas is the central program of the New Atheists. It’s what Dawkins, Dennet, and Hitchens explicitly advocate, and it’s what Meyers and Coyne deliberately practice. Dawkins frames it as “let’s have an argument.” Dennet frames it as “let’s break the spell that makes religious ideas specially immune from criticism.” Meyers desecrates communion wafers and pulls other provocative stunts to raise discussion and demonstrate that, when it comes to inquiry, nothing is sacred.

The charge that the New Atheists are violently anti-religion is, to put it frankly, a lie. None are in favor of any form of violence towards religion – all advocate argument. Nor is it true that their ire falls especially on Christianity. While Dawkins and Dennet talk about Christianity more than any other religion, neither says that “Christianity is the worst” – quite the contrary. In both cases, being raised in Christian environments, they focus on it simply because they are more familiar with Christian history and theology than they are with, say, Confucianism. On the other hand, Hitchens and Harris are familiar with a variety of western and non-western religions and single out Islam and some of the other more easterly religions out for more severe criticism than they level at Christianity.

Ruse is engaging in well-poisoning on this one. Shame on him.

2) “Francis Collins has been incurring their hatred…since Collins is a devout Christian.”

Ruse is here referring to the controversy over the recent appointment of Francis Collins, former head of the Human Genome Project, as head of the National Institutes of Health, but Ruse’s characterization of the controversy is disingenuous. As the head of the NIH, Collins will have influence in areas where he has a dogmatic ax to grind: embryonic stem cell research. At no time that I’ve seen (granting that the web is a big place and I can’t be everywhere at once) have any of the New Atheists impugned Dr. Collins’ scientific credentials, even when directly attacking some of the less scientific things he’s said in print. Check out Michael Shermer’s blog entry on the topic for a quick, representative summary. The question at issue is not Collin’s credentials, and it’s not Collins’ religion. It’s whether his non-rational dogmatic commitments compromise his ability to do the job of overseeing research budgets, and it’s every bit as legitimate a question as asking whether a Quaker or a Jain is an appropriate pick for Secretary of Defense.

Complaints:
1) Ruse complains that the “new atheists” are terribly mean to him – meaner than they are to the religious folks.

To be perfectly frank, I think Ruse’s complaint that the New Atheists have insulted him in their writings is more than a little childish, and also more than a little hypocritical.
First, as demonstrated by the depths he sinks to in this essay, he’s not above reckless and dishonest ad hominem attacks himself – complaining that someone is mean when you’re dishing it right back and worse is gradeschool behavior.
Second, he doesn’t publicly hold the people in the creationist community he considers friends (Gish, Dembski, Johnson) who are even ruder in print and in public (see Dembski’s nasty little cartoon about the Judge in the Dover case for an example).

It should also go without mentioning that, in the war of ideas, people can and do say very aggressive, hard things while telling the truth as they see it. This is an adult world, and Ruse should have learned at University that science and philosophy are not disciplines for the timid.

That said, let’s put this complaint in context, and consider the charges that the “new atheists” level against the priesthood(s). Religious leaders are, according to Dawkins and Hitchens, “child abusers” for their promotion of the doctrine of hell and of infant circumcision. Hitchens further characterizes the Catholic Church’s youth outreach activities as “No Child’s Behind Left.” They all accuse Imams of fostering an environment that might lead us to nuclear war, and Dispensationalist Christians of breathlessly searching for a silver lining (i.e. The Rapture) in the prospect of Manhattan going up in a mushroom cloud.
Whether these accusations are defensible or not is not at issue here. What is at issue is that Ruse evidently thinks a book review calling his ideas “so nonsensical that only an intellectual could believe them,” a book calling his condescending attitude towards religion “appeasement,” and a blogger labeling him “a clueless gobshite” is worse than being called a pedophile, a child abuser, a genocidal warmonger, and a fanatic.

I must say, his semiotic score-keeping system mystifies me.

2) Ruse complains that the New Atheists are mean to him because he doesn’t think all believers are evil or stupid, and that science and religion do not have to clash.

If Ruse honestly believes this is the source of the invective he’s found himself on the receiving end of, he is sorely mistaken. The book Jerry Coyne reviewed is stunning both in its ambitious scope and, more importantly, in its lack of intellectual rigor. The book in question, Can A Darwinian Be A Christian? might be a worthy subject for a book, but Ruse’s method in the book is blinkered toward both religion and with science. Its methods and hermeneutic are only applicable to a very small minority of Western Liberal Protestants and Catholics – the rest of the religious universe (including well over 80% of the world’s Christian population) is unaddressed by his argument, which tries to show the God-of-the-Gaps as the starting point for making Christianity and evolutionary biology mutually reinforcing.

Contrast this with a religious scientist that the New Atheists do not attack, Ken Miller. A conservative Catholic teaching at Brown University, Miller is the author of Finding Darwin’s God, perhaps the most nuanced and well-argued defense of theistic evolution ever written. In his book and arguments, he refuses to give short shrift to science in order to give comfort and shelter to his doctrines, and does not engage in the normal “God of the Gaps” or “NOMA” nonsense. He is an unapologetically religious man who has the courage of his convictions, both religiously and scientifically, and is very much respected by both his peers and his adversaries for that fact.

Criticisms:
1)“Their treatment of the religious viewpoint it pathetic to the point of non-being.”

Unfortunately, with the exception of singling out Dawkins for being philosophically simplistic (a criticism that is, to my mind, pretty near the mark), Ruse provides nothing to back up this assertion. He certainly doesn’t engage any of the arguments offered up in the New Atheist books, nor does he seem to notice that the “new
atheists” are in dialogue with believers. The notion that the New Atheists are boxing with a straw man is belied by the fact that believers in Islam and Christianity overwhelmingly pay lip service to scriptural inerrancy, prophetic infallibility, and a whole slate of other doctrines that the New Atheists are aggressively attacking.
Judging by his comments about Christianity in other contexts, it seems that Ruse considers as straw manning arguments that do not engage liberal theologians such as Bultmann, Tillich, et. al. These men are eloquent writers, and theologically subtle, but such men hold a position in the borderlands between religion and atheism, being held to their religion by personal spiritual experience but utterly unable to defend with argument a single doctrine, not even the existence of God. They are of interest to the academy, but not of much interest to the average pew-sitter. When it comes to the culture war, they are largely irrelevant.

Dennet, of course, isn’t engaging in this kind of argument anyway. He raises questions about how religion got the way it is, how it might have served an adaptive function, what is it that, if we discover parts of it are false, should we hold on to and learn from?

P.Z. Meyers and Jerry Coyne are interested in scientific education and intellectual rigor in that field, and make precious few forays into arguments against religion except when directly addressing the Intelligent Design crowd.

Harris and Hitchens are the only two left, and both have come under a goodly amount of fire for generating more heat than light. However, Ruse’s notion that they are philosophically naive or religiously uninformed is bogus – that they differ in outlook from him is certain, but disagreement does not idiots make. In The End of Faith, Harris articulates an entire epistemology that dialogues with Kant, Bacon, Descartes, addresses postmodernism, and takes heavy account of Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper.
Hitchens, on the other hand, is highly conversant with all of the great socialist thinkers, and references many of them directly in his book, as well as A.J. Ayer, C.S. Lewis, Bertrand Russel, and many others that would take too long to list here. There may be places where their arguments are sloppy or just plain wrong, but to dismiss the entire crowd as “poor quality,” “pathetic,” “a disservice to scholarship,” and “knowing nothing” of the subject matter is calumnious.

2) “The new atheists are doing terrible damage to the fight to keep Creationism out of schools.” Ruse develops this further, saying that “if science generally and Darwinism specifically implies that God does not exists, then teaching science generally and Darwinism specifically runs smack up against the First Amendment.” He goes on to say “This is the claim of the new atheists.”

Ruse again proves himself aptly named by gracing his audience with a rhetorical ruse. Taking these items in reverse order, the new atheists do not say that science generally and Darwinism specifically imply that God does not exist. The closest you can come, other than statements of personal conversion moments (such as when Christopher Hitchens relates his childhood revelation that our eyes are adapted to the environment and not vice versa, or Dawkins’ lack of ability to comprehend how someone can believe in a god that would ordain a bloodthirsty process like evolution), is Dennet’s observation in Darwin’s Dangerous Idea that the idea of natural selection acts as a universal acid, dissolving away our common-sense notion that things are designed from the top down rather than the bottom up.

Now, that may imply that the God promulgated by religion is less likely than not, but let’s not confuse weak implication with necessary conclusion.

Secondly, Ruse is manifestly wrong on the question of Constitutional law. Children are exposed to facts in school which contravene their religious heritage all the time. From Galileo onward, the western world has been inundated with facts that strongly imply that some religious doctrine or another is false, from the corruptible heavens to the expanding universe, from the realization that species can go extinct to the discovery of geologic strata, from the atomic theory of matter to the heliocentric solar system expanding universe, from the discovery of female gametes to neurologically embodied mind, from plate tectonics to ancestral genetics to evolutionary theory.
We forget now, because we don’t realize how profoundly these scientific discoveries affected the doctrinal development of different religions – we assume that the religions we have today are as they always were. But that’s not the case. Each one of the above accepted scientific paradigms either threatened to unseat or completely obliterated at least one accepted religious doctrine that was, at the time, considered fundamental to the faith of Christians, Mormons, Muslims, and/or Jews. The Constitution does not protect believers from inconvenient facts in a government-run school, it protects everyone from proselytization by anyone representing the government. Saying “The Grand Canyon was formed by geological forces over millions of years” is not a religious dogma, even though it specifically gives the lie to the Genesis creation and flood accounts and, if the evidence is followed down the geologic column, eventually calls into question the foundations doctrines such as original sin and biblical inerrancy.

This criticism, the ultimate point of Ruse’s entire essay, also turns out to be wrong on both the facts and the logic, and thus the whole of his article amounts to little more than vacuous grandstanding.

For myself, the thing I find most disturbing about Ruse’s little diatribe is the lack of intellectual honesty (the same problem I have with Gould’s NOMA nonsense). The epistemology Ruse espouses in this article is highly unethical, as his strategy (again, like NOMA) is a bait-and-switch con game with believers. Does this sound unfair? How else can you describe someone who says “We must not tell people that Darwinism implies that there is no God, because it endangers science teaching.” [paraphrased]. If Darwinism does imply that God doesn’t exist, then telling religious folk that “only a few cranks think that” is a lie. If Darwinism does not imply that God does not exist, then all that need be done is argue with the people who say that it does. In neither case is it necessary for an honest person to perpetrate a confidence trick upon people whom he’s trying to sway to his side.

In the article, he also conflates two disparate concerns. First, the scientific:
While what people believe about the universe is their own business – I certainly have my own weird handful of notions – if one wants to play in the science classroom one must adhere *at least* to the doctrine of falsifiability. Thus far, all creationist hypotheses have proved false on every testable point. This is true of even the strong version of Intelligent Design, known as irreducible complexity, whose original examples of irreducible complexity (the immune system, the bacterial flagella, etc.) have since been proved reducible, thus falsifying the hypothesis.

Of course, the weak version of ID (“There must be some designer somewhere out there”) doesn’t make a falsifiable claim, which makes it a philosophy without even an hypothesis. It is not even bad science. To quote Wolfgang Pauli, it’s “not even wrong.”

Second among Ruse’s conflated issues is the sociological:
People love their pet beliefs, particularly when it comes to notions about creation or design, which most people erroneously conflate with metaphysical notions of purpose. Fortunately, affection doesn’t give one the right to have their beliefs coddled in a science classroom, nor should it. Science has always, and (so long as it continues to progress) will always be a philosophically and theologically unsettling enterprise – not just for the religious, but for all of society. As our data about the universe changes, our ethics, philosophy, beliefs, laws, and values change in reaction to it. Sometimes it’s subtle – sometimes it’s hugely traumatic. In neither case may one claim an exemption from coping with that fact because it conflicts with something someone taught in a church or read in a holy book.

The argument over the teaching of evolution is one of four major arguments now brewing that effect the whole of the scientific endeavor. The others are neurology, biogenetic research (particularly, but not exclusively, on human embryonic stem cells), and nanotechnology. All three of these fields profoundly threaten a variety of doctrines from a variety of religions in ways at least as profound as evolutionary theory does – and all of them are indispensable in dealing with climate, famine, pollution, disease, and a host of other engineering challenges that either loom on the horizon or are already with us. Ruse’s strategy of accommodationism didn’t work in the last 50 years of the 20th century – it seems that a different set of tactics are needed. Direct confrontation and argument is a more honest and, quite possibly, a much more productive mode of engagement in the culture wars of all sorts than is ingratiation.

In every form it has been hitherto proposed, creationism is either a falsified hypothesis, a con game, or an assertion without
any content. We scientifically literate folk should treat our adversaries in this culture war with the dignity that they’re due as adult human beings and be clear that, in so many words, we’re fairly certain that they’re full of shit. It is both dishonest and insulting to pat them on the head and point at the sandbox in the corner and say “over there we have a little room for your theology, and we promise not to wreck your sandcastles – at least not today.”

Of course, there are different levels of pugilistic engagement – P.Z. is a provocateur, and proud of it. So be it – the world needs people like that, lest we all get so afraid of offending someone else that we lose our willingness to participate in the arena of ideas. A free culture needs its assholes like a pond needs water.

Friends arguing philosophy over beer in a pub have the option to be kind – that’s the kind of forum I participate in at Apologia, and I’m proud to do it. But friends don’t generally take kindly to being treated like children by their peers, and there is a difference between kindness and mealy-mouthed passive aggression; practicing the latter in a friendly conversation might well get you snubbed at the next get-together, because it displays both cowardice and condescension.

However, intellectual pugilists in the arena of ideas do not have the option of sparing the feelings of the other side. It is possible for one side to be completely wrong on a given issue, and in such circumstances, seeking a middle ground is dishonest. So, I say “Hooray” for the new atheists, and wish more people, especially those who think they’re assholes, would actually read them. I’ve known more than a few Christians (including very conservative ones) who find the new atheists refreshingly honest and who can make common cause with them in the matter of intellectual ethics, even as they disagree completely on matters of theology, morality, politics, et.al.

Let us stop honoring opinions as sacred, and instead honor those who are willing to have an argument – regardless of what they believe.
And let’s honor them by informing ourselves and actually engaging the argument, rather than complaining that they don’t like us.

*** Appendix ***

In the comments below, Todd Stark points out a basic dichotomy of approaches to intellectual arguments – how some see them as a fight, while others see them as a conversation. He’s right about this, but his comments point up that I wasn’t clear enough about the basic premise from which I was operating.

I don’t think “argument” equates to “fight” – but then, I also don’t think “adversary” equates with “enemy.” There is a place for the friendly conversation (for example, Apologia). There’s also a place for the boxing match. Both are an argument, defined well by Michael Palin in the Monty Python sketch “An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.” It’s not “the automatic gainsaying of something the other person says,” neither is it abuse. In such a sense, both are conversation, fraught with all the normal difficulties you point up in conversations.

In other words, The fact that open societies exist shows that people can be pragmatic about their irreconcilable differences. Argument separates the substance of the opinion from the person holding it for the purposes of understanding – you may think I’m batshit crazy for thinking it’s worthwhile to have humans living on mars, and I might think you’re batshit crazy for reading a horoscope, but I know from arguing about those things with you that you’re ethical in the way that you think, so we can still have a business relationship, or a friendship.

I think the whole reason to have an argument is to ferret out the substantive differences from the semantic ones, whether that argument is friendly or adversarial, the basic structure remains: I’ll stack my facts and logic up, you stack up yours, and we’ll critique each other.

Some particularly colorful arguments, particularly those between public intellectuals like Ruse and Meyers (or William Dembski and anybody, or Christopher Hitchens and anybody), can contain abuse, but if abuse is the entire argument, then there’s nothing to see. My objection to Ruse’s paper is that it consists of very few facts (almost all of them wrong), with the balance spent abusing his opponents while complaining that they abuse him. He has jumped into the boxing ring and is complaining that he’s getting hit, which seems, to me, childish.

Thanks for the comment and the constructive criticism, Todd!

—Also check out the responses to Ruse by two of his targets. Jerry Coyne’s reaction is here. P.Z. Meyers’ reaction is here.

First, the appearances. You can find me on recent episodes of Podioracket, The Dead Robots Society, and doing voice work as the German Army in Philippa Ballantine’s Weather Child. You can also hear my fantasy story Buried Alive In The Blues, for which I also did some of the voice work, on the excellent (if racy) anthology series Erotica A La Carte.

For those of you who enjoy my Open Source madness will be pleased to hear that there are new LinuxJournal articles – one is a review of the Indamixx portable recording studio, and the other, which hasn’t yet published, is a review of OpenGear’s new KVM management console. I’m currently stalking a couple more regular writing gigs, so if the internet gods smile upon me, you may be seeing quite a lot more out of me in this vein in the coming months.

Podcast monkeys, you may have noticed the new buttons on the right side of the page – each podcast feed now has an iTunes one-click subscription link, as well as the normal RSS buttons. There’s also now an Uberfeed, which will give you everything I podcast (except Apologia, which you can get here).

You also may have noticed that I’m now podcasting my new novel Down From Ten. This is a comedic country house mystery with elements of romance, horror, and science fiction around the edges – it’s a change of gears from The Antithesis Progression. It’s also listed on iTunes now, so if you’re listening and enjoying it, please leave a review and tell your friends.

I’m also the subject of, and participant in dialog to, a blog series about the doctrinal foundations of Christianity by Scott Roche on the Spiritual Tramp blog. If you like my arguments on Apologia, you’ll definitely find this one entertaining.

I’ve also recorded MORE Reprobates Hour episodes, which, along with all the other special features I have on my hard drive, I’ll hopefully start spooling out here again this month.

As far as writing projects go, Free Will is picking up steam and is now officially on schedule for a November release. I’m also working on a couple more secret projects, which hopefully I’ll have news about soon here.

Finally, I hope to have some good news on sales in the next couple weeks, so watch this space!

This year, particularly the second half, has seen a lot of people turn very pessimistic about, well, everything. Yeah, the economy’s slowing down. Yeah, people like me are scrambling just to make ends meet – when money goes slow everywhere, it hits the arts hard. And yeah, some things just sucked. But you know what? Today’s “awful” is a hell of a lot better than “great” was when my grandparents were growing up. Despite environmental problems, terrorists, crooked investment bankers, and crookeder politicians (yes, in all parties), I’m living in a time when “five-percent unemployment” is really bad. When I was a kid in the early 80s, that would have been music to everyone’s ears. Ditto for crime, poverty, war casualty, plague death, and violence figures almost everywhere on Earth (though some of us are a lot luckier than others, through no merit of our own).

So, yeah, 2008 might have been a scary year. But as I look back at the global “Big Picture” there aren’t a lot of things that are truly scary in the long run – not like there were twenty, fifty, or eighty years ago – not to mention longer ago than that.

On a personal level, it’s been a mixed year, but as I was drawing up this list I can’t help but be staggered by how far the scales tip towards the wonderful. Click on the link to read my self-indulgent recap.

The Bad or Bittersweet

In May of 2001 I started preproduction on a film I’ve spent the intervening years working on. Hunting Kestral, a science fiction action film set in the universe of Antithesis, was officially retired from the active projects list. Of all the things I’ve done in my life, this project has to be the most important so far. I met people I still work with to this day, I learned the meat of the different trades I now call my career, and the process irrevocably altered the story and universe of Antithesis. Perhaps most importantly, I spent some of the most rewarding months of my life to that point in the company of actors who taught me far more about life than I ever thought I’d learn at the age of 24. Unfortunately, I had to admit that on this one I bit off way more than I can reasonably hope to finish chewing in the foreseeable future, so the dream of doing a professional level live-action independent film is something I have to set aside for now. I’m planning on a post-show article on it sometime in January.

My first website, Blenderwars, which had for years been a vibrant hobbyist community, finally died. It was a long time coming, but last May I finally gave in to the inevitable and pulled the plug. We were online from 1999 to 2008, hitting our peak of half a million page views per month in 2002. Some of the folks I met through there have gone on to work with me on various film projects, and have proved to be excellent people all the way down the line.

A lot of death touched my life this year, both first and second degree. I’d say I could have done without it, but the truth is that I’ve lived an unusually long time without someone close to me dying – I was expecting it sooner or later. Needless to say, I’d have preferred “later.”

My nonfiction publishing momentum slowed down in the second half of the year as a result of my podcasting endeavors.

The Unfinished
Filmed and have nearly finished (finally) a short film called “Lights Out” for Project Obsidian. Early 2009 will see its completion. Better late than never.

Began writing The Auto Motive, a steampunk young-adult urban fantasy novel. It’s got a ways to go, but it’s rocking.

Sculpting God: Bedtime Stories For Adults is half done – the final half will see the light of day in mid-2009.

The Good
Saw eight friends and acquaintances get book deals.

Made my first fiction sale: My steampunk story “Cold Duty” went simultaneously to Steampod and ClonePod and did very well among fans of both podcasts.

Finished and garnered publisher interest in book one of the Antithesis series. Plotted, outlined, and roughed out the remainder of the series.

Podcasted the first 15 episodes of the 27 episode audio version of Antithesis, Book 1: Predestination and Other Games of Chance with full cast, full production sound, and an original score.

Did my first professional publicity events.

Wrote a 6 hour miniseries for Canadian TV. The deal fell through, so the script is now in the process of novelization. The resulting novel, Down From Ten, is now 25% done.

Finished Season 2 of The Polyschizmatic Reprobates Hour. Recorded Season 3, and it is now half edited.

Garnered my first cover story in a magazine.

Interviewed (either for podcast or for publication) Michael ShermerM, Cory Doctorow, Elizabeth Pisani, Tee Morris, Richard Carrier, Philippa Ballantine, J.C. Hutchins, Seth Harwood, and Mur Lafferty.

Apologia, a show I participate in, got picked up for radio distribution.

Got to hang out at the Googleplex.

Technically this and the next item both belong in “unfinished,” but they’re here because they are undeniably good. First, I had great fun doing some very satisfying photo shoots with both new models and old, and made serious progress on bringing the long term Sophi and Logos projects together.

Hit BayCon and SteamCon with my friends, and got to moderate a few panels along the way.

Discovered Twitter.

So many other memorable moments of wonderfulness I can’t even begin to enumerate them.

Final word count for the year, including novels, short stories, screenplays, articles, and non-trivial blog posts: ~350,000

Parting Thoughts for 2008

From my very limited perspective on the world, I wouldn’t trade this year for any other. 2008 saw a lot of reconnection with old friends, strengthening of connections with new friends, and meeting more fascinating and decent people than I dare to count – some of them well on the way to becoming close friends. It’s been an emotionally intense year, much moreso than I expected. This time last year I said that 2007 was my best year so far, but I think 2008 surpassed it handsomely, despite the heartbreaks and hardships which I’m sure none of you want to read about here.

For all of you who’ve touched my life this year – friends, fans, colleagues, and fellow travelers – from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

The chapter ends, and always on a cliffhanger. There is only one question:
“What happens next?”

That’s right, boys and girls and intermediates, it’s time once again for that most pleasant of games, the “Find Dan Sawyer in LinuxJournal” contest. This month it’s easy – I’m in their twice. In my first article I show you how to fake a UFO landing that’ll make you the envy of YouTube using a little bit of Voodoo — I rather like the irony of using ancient Creole magic to hoax lovers of the paranormal, myself.

After that, we go out to coffee with the Cradlepoint PHS300 just to prove that we can get broadband anywhere we damn well please.

It’s a killer issue, with some other great home-brewing articles on it, including an excellent one about MythTV. Give it a gander!

The Official Cory Doctorow verbal word rate (on a day when he’s jet-lagged and taking things slow) is:

148wpm.

And I’ve met the guy in person when he’s at the top of his game, and I’ll bet you my left toe that he was running slow in our interview.

Hat’s off, Cory. Next target: The MicroMachine Man!

Check out Cory’s other blog, BoingBoing.

Well, how about two consecutive months of two articles per month in LinuxJournal?

Last month, you may have noticed my initials scrawled across two articles, the “Podcaster’s Shootout” comparison between Skype and Gizmo, and the more hardware-oriented review of the Teak 3018. Well, this month the state of IT writing got even worse with the publication of the modest little volume you see at left. Inside you’ll find my comprehensive review of CeltX screenwriting software, which I’ve recently used to write the script of a miniseries entitled Down From Ten. Also buried within these silken pages is a survey of some of the best and most useful Firefox extensions, including some for circumventing totalitarian firewalls and other such nonsense.

What can I say? I’ve been busy. And you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.

Needless to say, I am shamelessly opinionated on the topic.

For an encore, I team up with my hardware engineering genius friend Lynx Crowe to bring you a review of the Teak 3018, a nice little box that alleges itself to be a network appliance. Does it live up to its own hype? Find out in this month’s LinuxJournal Magazine, with a cover that looks supiciously like this:

Click here to go to the issue!

Okay, they’re not salacious stories. Not yet. They’re tech articles. You gotta admit, though, the alliteration is all right. Seriously, salacious storytelling sales will subsequently follow, sometime before next Saturnalia, says I.

So harken, ye great unwashed, and away to the nearest newsstand or bookstore to pick up this month’s LinuxJournal. Guarranteed to rot your brain in all the most geeky ways. The cover looks something like this:

In other words…I think you’ll find it useful

The issue’s cover looks like this:

It’s a disgraceful, disreputable thing to do. It undermines good old American values of oligarchic software pricing.

Which, of course, make it worth doing in the first place.

But Open Source multitrack video editors are finally becoming viable contenders, which makes my day-job as a video producer much more fun and interesting, so, naturally, as a writer I find it useful to whore myself out for money and name recognition to essentially do the “Ooh, come look at my shiny new toy. Sure, it’s not perfect, but look how shiny!!!” routine.

So go forth! LinuxJournal is usually carried by Barnes and Noble and other distressingly reputable establishments and newsttands. The cover looks something like this:

This time, you can judge a magazine by its cover – it’s dark and dangerous and has an ominous-looking linuxphone on the cover, so you know you’re descending into darkness.

Well, kinda.

Actually, High Dynamic Range Imaging has been around for a while, but it’s only now that the equipment is getting cheap enough for hacks like myself to be able to play with all the fun new toys and write articles on them so that other hacks and wannabes can get in on the action.

So go forth! LinuxJournal is usually carried by Barnes and Noble and other distressingly reputable establishments and newsttands. The cover has Shrek on it, so it looks innocent enough, but don’t be fooled: this kind of thing will rot your brain, and it’s cheaper than heroin!