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| I'm Paul Wright, a software engineer based in Cambridge, England. This is my blog, hosted by LiveJournal. I mostly blog about my interests: religion (I used to be a Christian, and then became an atheist), philosophy, science, and, occasionally, dancing. You can find out more about me and about this blog in my profile. Note that there are both proper blog entries and my link blog here: those links will let you filter for one or the other. You're welcome to join in the discussions here, though if you're new, it'd be a good idea to check the comment policy first. Note that because I get so much spam, I no longer permit anonymous comments: you'll need to log in with either a LiveJournal ID or another identity provider (like Google, Twitter or Facebook) and then confirm your email address to LiveJournal before you'll be able to comment here. If you want to keep track of this blog without having to keep visiting this page all the time, you can subscribe to the feed of it (or "friend" me if you're on LiveJournal yourself):  here's the feed, or you could use Google Reader:  . This blog is also syndicated over at Planet Atheism. Feel free to introduce yourself by leaving a comment below. | |
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|  There was apparently another Draw Mohammed Day yesterday: Hermant at Friendly Atheist covers it (that link may obviously contain links to pictures of Mo). My previous LJ entry on Muslims vs Student Atheist Societies provoked some discussion about whether criticism of Islam is necessarily motivated by racism, and whether white atheists ought to be involved in such criticism. During that, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2) cartesiandaemon linked to Yvain's utilitarian argument against Mo pics which appeared on Less Wrong. Yvain argued against Draw Mo Day on the basis of harm minimisation (Less Wrong orthodoxy is consequentalist so people there are likely to be responsive to such arguments). Vladimir M won the Less Wrong thread with the response that "In a world where people make decisions according to this principle, one has the incentive to self-modify into a utility monster who feels enormous suffering at any actions of other people one dislikes for whatever reason". He also made the observation (due to Thomas Schelling) that "in conflict situations, it is often a rational strategy to pre-commit to act irrationally (i.e. without regards to cost and benefit) unless the opponent yields. The idea in this case is that I'll self-modify to care about X far more than I initially do, and thus pre-commit to lash out if anyone does it". He adds "such behavior is usually not consciously manipulative and calculated. On the contrary -- someone flipping out and creating drama for a seemingly trivial reason is likely to be under God-honest severe distress, feeling genuine pain of offense and injustice.". Yvain then behaved excellently by formally withdrawing his argument. Muslims may be harmed by seeing Mo pictures. However, Vladimir M's point applies. So, what to do? There are things called "trigger warnings" which are popular in some parts of the Internet. Medically, a trigger is something which can set off PTSD symptoms. These trigger warnings are usually appear on links to, and the beginning of, pages about rape or domestic violence, where victims may suffer from PTSD on reading the text. [Latterly, the term has been broadened to encompass not just PTSD flashbacks, but that uncomfortable feeling you get when reading something which advances a view different from your own (for instance, the trigger warnings for misogyny and Islamophobia on this post mean "comments disagreeing with feminists/Muslims"), and has also become a way of signalling that one is down with the identity politics posse (this is well known enough for it to be parodied: see Is this Feminist?, for example). However, I think that few people would disagree with the idea that some Muslims' distress at seeing such pictures is more towards the PTSD end of things than the "people disagree with me"/signalling end.] It feels like a Schelling point in this conflict might be to agree that pictures of Mo should appear behind trigger warnings. These might be specific warnings; or a general warning that by continuing to read a site, one may encounter such pictures, or links to them. In the case of the atheist Facebook group, Jesus and Mo cartoons should not be used for public events (since the cartoons may then appear on the feeds of people who are not members of the group) but would be OK for events which are private to the group, assuming that the group is covered by a general warning. Obviously, all Draw Mo Day pictures should appear behind such warnings. | |
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| John Sentamu, the Archbishop of York, recently released a statement on gay marriage. It's doing the rounds on Facebook. Here's a comment I posted there: What an odd article: long on words, short on reasons why broadening the definition of marriage would be a bad thing.
Civil partnerships aren't identical to marriage for some people: for example, married couples where one person transitions from one gender to another are forced to dissolve marriages and get civil parterships. For such people, it is very clear that a civil partnership is a second-class marriage: see http://www.sarahlizzy.com/blog/?p=87 for example.
The Archbishop claims that no Act of Parliament touches upon a definition of marriage, but then quotes a Canon which defines it as being lifelong. Did Parliament lack the authority to legalise divorce and re-marriage (a practice which, as I've said previously in http://pw201.livejournal.com/71272.html, has much stronger Biblical condemnation than homosexual relationships, and yet is curiously rather more acceptable to evangelicals)?
The Archbishop fears it may become "impossible to say how a good society needs most of its members to live". But, if we want government to be involved in marriages at all, it is presumably because we think they are a social good. The people who want to broaden marriage need not be seeking a free for all, they may just think that gay marriages would also be a good. The Archbishop gives no good reasons to think that they wouldn't be.
Despite saying that he is not merely advocating Christian marriage, his argument ultimately seems to rely on an (evangelical) Christian conception of it and of gender roles. I agree that Parliament has no warrant to define what that conception should be, nor what Pagan marriage or Quaker marriage should be (the fact that Parliament would prevent religious ministers from marrying two people of the same sex is a similarly unwarranted intervention). Let us have a civil conception of marriage based on public reason, and let everyone else do as they like: evangelicals can choose to marry only straight non-divorcees, Quakers can marry gays, and so on, in separate ceremonies, with only the civil marriage being recognised in law, and no compulsion on ministers of religion from equality laws. | |
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|  Stephen Law read a bunch of stuff by top apologist William Lane Craig and noted that Craig believes a bunch of odd things (apart from the odd things you'd already know about from Craig's debates, I mean). There was some discussion in the comments over this one: "Therefore, when a person refuses to come to Christ it is never just because of lack of evidence or because of intellectual difficulties: at root, he refuses to come because he willingly ignores and rejects the drawing of God's Spirit on his heart. No one in the final analysis really fails to become a Christian because of lack of arguments; he fails to become a Christian because he loves darkness rather than light and wants nothing to do with God."
[William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, (Revised edition, Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 1994), pp. 35-36.] This is all very Biblical: Craig's "loves darkness rather than light" is a reference to the verse following that famous verse in John 3:16: "And this is the judgment: the light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the light because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come to the light, lest his works should be exposed." As a good inerrantist, Craig apparently believes this and other passages like Romans 1 (see my old blog post about this) where the Apostle Paul writes that unbelievers are "without excuse". Atheists know there's a God really but don't worship him because to do so we'd have to acknowledge how bad we are, or something. This is a culpable error, not a mistake, too. The pathologising of non-belief based on knowing what people think better than they do is itself pathological, as Thrasymachus says, at least if it's used to dismiss atheist arguments without engaging with them (note that Craig does not do this in debates, though he seems to do it personally, and to advocate other Christians doing it, which is bad). In the comments, wombat suggests that the evangelical claim is that atheists are in the situation "where one accepts something intellectually but not at a more basic emotional level e.g cigarette smokers who continue in spite of acknowledging its dangers. The Christian apologists here are claiming that the "knowledge" is at that deeper visceral level." wombat also linked to Jamie Whyte's observation that religious believers don't really act like they believe what they say they believe. On that subject, there's also Georges Rey's " Meta-atheism: religious avowal as self-deception", where he argues that Christians generally don't act as if they believe what they say they believe. I've discussed Rey's paper before. There's a folk psychology where "thoughts" are propositional sentences that occur to us, and "beliefs" are the ones we hold on to as true over time and use to guide our actions. But the way the phenomenon we call "belief" really works doesn't seem much like that. This doesn't just apply to religion: see The Mystery of the Haunted Rationalist. If the evangelical claim is just to know that atheists are secretly lying, it's bizarre, as Thrasymachus says. On the other hand, if the evangelical claim is that atheists anticipate-as-if there's a God while avowing-as-if there isn't, I don't think that works. What are the things that atheists are doing which give away the fact that they are anticipating that way? And why does this make them culpable and deserving of Hell? I don't think the atheist version (i.e. Rey's or Whyte's) has the same problem, because there are plenty of examples of Christians who don't act like there's a God. | |
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| Friend Iain recently read the New Testament and reviewed it. He made some comments on it, including the observation that the early Church members thought that Jesus would return within their lifetimes. This prompted some comments giving the standard evangelical gloss on these passages ( see also), to avoid the conclusion that the Bible contains errors. I wrote a comment: http://de-conversion.com/2008/11/09/the-psychology-of-apologetics-biblical-inerrancy/ is worth a read to understand what’s going on in the comments here :-) Short version: Quine says evidence alone doesn’t compel us to change a particular belief, because we can modify another one instead. Quine was writing in the context of scientific theories: if you don’t measure a difference in the speed of light in two directions, say, maybe there’s no luminiferous aether, but if you really think there must be one, maybe the Earth sort of drags the aether with it, or your instruments were faulty, or something. Paul thought Jesus was coming back within his life time, but if you really want Paul’s writings to be without error, what Paul actually meant is that you should live with a sort of Buddhist detachment to the things of this world.
Quine has clearly got something over the sort of naive falsificationism (i.e. if your theory is disprovedcontradicted by a single experiment, it’s curtains for that theory) which is supposed by some to be how science works. Nobody discards a trusted hypothesis so easily.
Still, something seems to have gone wrong with a theory when it allows anything: if you started from the position that the Bible contains no factual errors (call this innerancy1), you probably would not have predicted what Paul wrote in 1 Thess or 1 Cor 7:29ff, 1 Cor 15:51 (“sleep” = “die” here) etc; yet there they are, and what-evangelicals-call-inerrancy (call this inerrancy2) is somehow compatible with them. I think this means that inerrancy2 doesn’t compress anything: it’s just a list of what happens (the Bible) with a cherry on the top (“this list contains no errors or contradictions”). I’m using Eliezer’s ideas about http://lesswrong.com/lw/jp/occams_razor/ here. | |
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| Over on Ask Metafilter, there's a question about hope in a godless universe. Here's a response I just posted (the original poster's text is in italics):
Like where I could tell myself to turn it over to God or let things go and he will guide me and/or keep me from harm. This is so comforting to me
Suppose you "turned things over to God" or "let go and let God" in the past and things worked out. You now grasp there is no God, or at least, no God that makes any difference (gods that are identified with the good that is, in a very real sense, within us all; or with the universe; or any other gods which don't cause you to anticipate the world being any different are gods which make no difference in this sense). But this didn't become true at the moment you realised it, it has always been true! God did not in fact guide you or keep you from harm in the past, and you survived anyway.
What is true is already so.
Owning up to it doesn't make it worse.
Not being open about it doesn't make it go away.
And because it's true, it is what is there to be interacted with.
Anything untrue isn't there to be lived.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
- Eugene Gendlin
Can this feeling ever be replicated? What can I do to help guide myself through difficult times? I've tried to "act as if" there is a God (since I am in the camp that thinks we can never really know) but it seems empty and fraudulent.
When I was a child, I thought that my parents could make it all right and that nothing could truly harm me. It seems like your concept of God was a bit like that. Other people have suggested you can come to a kind of acceptance of the world as it is, a thread which seems common to the Buddhism and existentialism that people have been mentioning. In the real world, what hope there is must be tentative rather than sure, but I don't see why that means there must be no hope.
There are plenty of de-conversion stories on the web where people similar feelings to yours: depending on how much you'd invested in your beliefs, it can be very unsettling to lose them. Maybe reading some of those stories would help.
But, as Gendlin says, the world is as it as always been, and you survived it before. At the end of my de-conversion story, there's a longer quote along similar lines: there is no abyss. | |
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| Stephen Law's paper Evidence, miracles and the existence of Jesus argues that the New Testament (NT) is not good evidence for the existence of Jesus. He takes an interesting approach: he argues that the evidence for the NT miracles isn't good enough, and that the presence of the miracle stories contaminates the non-miraculous parts of the story such that we should be sceptical of those too. Law introduces and defends two principles: P1 Where a claim’s justification derives solely from evidence, extraordinary claims (e.g. concerning supernatural miracles) require extraordinary evidence. In the absence of extraordinary evidence there is good reason to be sceptical about those claims.and P2 Where testimony/documents weave together a narrative that combines mundane claims with a significant proportion of extraordinary claims, and there is good reason to be sceptical about those extraordinary claims, then there is good reason to be sceptical about the mundane claims, at least until we possess good independent evidence of their truth.He then uses these in a deductive argument, concluding that "there's good reason to be sceptical about whether Jesus existed". Debating P2Most of the debate in the comments on Law's blog is about P2. Law says that "Because once we know that a powerful, false-testimony-producing mechanism (or combination of mechanisms) may well have produced a significant chunk of a narrative (e.g. the miraculous parts), we can no longer be confident that the same mechanism is not responsible for what remains."Bradley C. came up with some counter-examples to P2. Bradley rightly says that the false-testimony-producing mechanism is key. What feels different about the ancient miracle reports (and perhaps Law's "sixth islander" thought experiment) compared to Bradley's examples is that in the ancient reports, we don't really know what the mechanism was, we just know something has gone wrong. (In Bradley's examples, we know that magicians and faith healers do tricks). If we don't know quite what has gone wrong, we have to consider various possible mechanisms, which includes ones where the mundane testimony is also false. If we give such mechanisms any weight, that makes the mundane testimony less convincing (though it may still be positive evidence for the mundane events). But I think we'd have to consider how much weight to give them based on the circumstances, which makes it hard to come up with something general like P2. So, I think Bradley's come up with the equivalent of Gettier cases for P2 as it stands: even if they're contrived, they show P2 needs changing. Law responds to Bradley saying "You need to identify a mechanism as being the likely mechanism accounting for the false miracle claims, and then explain why that mechanism wouldn't quite likely result in false mundane claims too."I don't agree with Law here. If all we know is that something's gone wrong with the testimony but the mechanism is obscure, perhaps it's reasonable to say that it's as likely that we'd have the testimony if it's mundane parts were true as it is that we'd have it if the mundane parts were false. Then the testimony is no evidence for or against the mundane events: you should consider the events as likely as you did before you heard the testimony. I'm not sure I'd want to go further than that and say that the burden of proof is on the people who believe the mundane portion of the testimony to show why it isn't contaminated: mightn't they equally well argue that the burden is on you to show that it is? But that's what P2 says, I think: in P2, the testimony becomes evidence against the mundane events. If you give a mechanism, though, maybe that's just what you can argue: if you think Jesus' disciples made it up, for example, who's to say where the made up stuff ends? (Though why not make stuff up based on a real person, for verisimilitude?) It looks like someone who wants to justify their belief in the mundane stuff has a motive to push the unbeliever to identify the mechanism so they can criticise it. The problem with my "average over possible mechanisms" idea, above, is that it's pretty hard to identify them all. I don't think we have a duty to do that with every weird testimony, though. Earlier, in defence of P1, Law correctly says that "the fact that it remains blankly mysterious why such reports would be made if they were not true does not provide us with very much additional reason to suppose that they are true." So, I'm not that convinced by Law's general contamination principle, but I think he makes some good points along the way. For example, Law says: It would also be foolish to try to construct a two part case for Jesus’ miraculous resurrection by (i) bracketing the miraculous parts of the Gospel narrative and using what remains to build a case for the truth of certain non-miraculous claims (about Jesus’ crucifixion, the empty tomb, and so on), and then (ii) using these supposedly now “firmly established facts” to argue that Jesus’ miraculous resurrection is what best explains them (yet several apologetic works – e.g. Frank Morrison’s Who Moved The Stone? – appear implicitly to rely on this strategy). William Lane Craig's rebuttalThe apologetical strategy Law talks about is used by William Lane Craig in his "4 facts" defence of the resurrection (see Craig vs Ehrman, for example). Craig read Law's paper and attempted a rebuttal on his own blog, which I think was only partially successful. Craig's stuff about Ehrman is weird. I guess Craig's point here is to show how reasonable he's being by pointing out that even this bloke he beat in a debate (Ehrman) agrees with him. But Ehrman is not a radical sceptic, Law is not die-hard mythicist. The conclusion of Law's argument is that we should be sceptical about J's existence, not "Therefore J never existed", so it's not even clear that Ehrman's ire applies to Law, or that we should care if it does, unless Ehrman's arguments are made more explicit. On Sagan's dictum that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", Craig writes: "This sounds so commonsensical, doesn’t it? But in fact it is demonstrably false. ... Rather what’s crucial is the probability that we should have the evidence we do if the extraordinary event had not occurred. This can easily offset any improbability of the event itself."Craig makes a reasonable statement of Bayes Theorem. However, Sagan's dictum can be read in a Bayesian way (by incorporating all the probabilities Craig mentions, so that the evidence is Bayesian evidence). Craig gives no good argument that the dictum must mean what Craig takes it to mean, or that Law's argument relies on taking it to mean what Craig thinks it means. Craig continues: "In the case of the resurrection of Jesus, for example, this means that we must also ask, “What is the probability of the facts of the empty tomb, the post-mortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection, if the resurrection had not occurred?” It is highly, highly, highly, improbable that we should have that evidence if the resurrection had not occurred."This might be Craig's attempt at that argument, namely, Craig saying that Law hasn't considered that it's unlikely we'd have the evidence we do if Jesus didn't do miracles. But Craig plays fast and loose: the facts are that we have the gospel narratives (and whatever other historical documents we have to hand). The empty tomb and post-mortem appearances are not facts, and Law's argument against the "bracketing" strategy is that they cannot be treated as facts. Craig cannot have the empty tomb or the post-mortem appearances as "facts" without addressing Law's arguments. Oddly, Craig doesn't address really P2 or Law's arguments for it at all: he just says "oh no it isn't". Craig's strongest when he says that there is extra-Biblical evidence for Jesus' existence. I'm not an expert, but my understanding is that Josephus' mentions of Jesus is thought by historians to have a core around which Christian interpolations accreted, for example. Since even if we grant P2, Law's argument fails without premise 6 ( "There is no good independent evidence for even the mundane claims about Jesus (such as that he existed)"), perhaps this is a good tactic on Craig's part. Law appears to agree that premise 6 is his weakest empirical premise: "6 is at the very least debatable". In a way, it's odd that everyone is concentrating on P2. So, I think Craig casts doubt on Law's conclusion about Jesus' existence, but he doesn't do much to convince us that Jesus rose from the dead or did any other miracles. Jerry Coyne's blog has some good comments on Craig's rebuttal. David B Marshall's rebuttalDavid Marshall also had a go at rebutting Law. He didn't do as well as Craig, as his arguments relied on attempts to differentiate Law's thought experiments ("Ted and Sarah", and "The Sixth Islander") from the claims about Jesus, but the distinctions he made between these weren't relevant to Law's arguments, as far as I can tell. You can see my response to him here , his reply here and my response to that here. I think this rebuttal is interesting for what it shows about what ordinary believers (rather than super-apologists like Craig) think are good arguments. Marshall appears to think that because the Jesus story is more fleshed out and more meaningful, it's more likely to be true. I'm not sure whether this is a straightforward example of conjuction bias ( obligatory Less Wrong link), or of the notion that the point of religion is to be in a meaningful story. Charitably, it might be an attempt at inference to the best explanation, but I don't think the stuff that Marshall mentions means that the best explanation of the NT stories is that they are true. So what do you think?There was bloke called Jesus who was the basis of the NT stories. Pre-moderns had porous selves, so it's pretty difficult to understand their writings in modern terms, but there is no good evidence that this bloke did miracles or rose from the dead. I don't know how much of the NT is true, but I don't accept Craig's bracketing or 4 facts arguments: taking out the core miracle but leaving the context which points to a miracle does look like cheating without independent evidence of the context, because mechanisms whether both the context and miracle are made up seem pretty likely to me. - Tags:bart ehrman, bible, blog, christianity, epistemology, jerry coyne, jesus, philosophy, religion, resurrection, stephen law, william lane craig
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| - gmancasefile: TSA: Fail
- "I have dealt with TSA since its inception and FAA security prior to that. I have witnessed TSA operate since they became a separate organization in 2002 and seen their reaction to intelligence provided them. I have now watched them operate for a decade, and I have respect for their hard-working employees who are doing a thankless job. But I have come to the conclusion that TSA is one of the worst-run, ineffective and most unnecessarily intrusive agencies in the United States government."
(tags: america 911 hijacking usa government fbi politics DHS security tsa)
- Open letter to violent Muslim protestors | The Chronicle
- "I really don’t understand how my fellow Muslims do not see that, with their reactions, they actually prove what has been said about them by their enemies. You call my religion evil or terrorism and, in order to “disprove” this insult, I will go kill people, burn embassies, act like a bloodthirsty crazy person…. Don’t you fellow Muslims see the ridiculousness of this logic and actions! The uncivilized images of these violent protests by these irresponsible and violent Muslims shape the image of 1.6 billion Muslims all around the world. "
(tags: violence religion terrorism quran islam)
- Verisign seizes .com domain registered via foreign Registrar on behalf of US Authorities. » blog2.easydns.org - Happenings and observations
- Don't register a .com if you don't want the US authorities to be able to take it down, apparently.
(tags: SOPA web law DNS verisign internet domains icann)
- 24/192 Music Downloads are Very Silly Indeed
- "there is no point to distributing music in 24-bit/192kHz format. Its playback fidelity is slightly inferior to 16/44.1 or 16/48, and it takes up 6 times the space." Includes good stuff about how ears work. Via andrewducker.
(tags: Nyquist sound sampling mp3 science music audio)
- The Crazyist Metaphysics of Mind by Eric Schwitzgebel
- "Crazyism about X is the view that something that it would be crazy to believe must be among the core truths about X. In this essay, I argue that crazyism is true of the metaphysics of mind. A position is “crazy” in the intended sense if it is contrary to common sense and we are not epistemically compelled to believe it. .... Well developed metaphysical theories will inevitably violate common sense, I argue, because common sense is incoherent in matters of metaphysics. No coherent and detailed view could respect it all. Common sense is thus impaired as a ground of choice. Nor can scientific evidence or abstract theoretical virtue compellingly favor any one moderately specific metaphysical approach over all competitors. Something bizarre must be true about the mind, but which bizarre propositions are the true ones, we are in no good position to know."
(tags: crazyism david-chalmers epistemology descartes dualism idealism materialism consciousness metaphysics philosophy)
- Tags:consciousness, david chalmers, internet, islam, law, link blog, music, philosophy, politics, religion, science, security, usa
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| - What is the proper place for religion in Britain's public life? | World news | The Observer
- An exchange between Dawkins and Will Hutton. D: "That doesn't mean religious people shouldn't advocate their religion. So long as they are not granted privileged power to do so (which at present they are) of course they should. And the rest of us should be free to argue against them. But of all arguments out there, arguments against religion are almost uniquely branded "intolerant". When you put a cogent and trenchant argument against the government's economic policy, nobody would call you "intolerant" of the Tories. But when an atheist does the same against a religion, that's intolerance. Why the double standard? Do you really want to privilege religious ideas by granting them unique immunity against reasoned argument?"
(tags: uk secularism politics religion dawkins richard-dawkins will-hutton)
- The Sins of the Fathers - Richard Dawkins - RichardDawkins.net - RichardDawkins.net
- Dawkins sez: "Yesterday evening I was telephoned by a reporter who announced himself as Adam Lusher from the Sunday Telegraph. At the end of a week of successfully rattling cages, I was ready for yet another smear or diversionary tactic of some kind, but in my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined the surreal form this one was to take. I obviously can’t repeat what was said word-for-word (my poor recall of long strings of words has this week been highly advertised), and I may get the order of the points wrong, but this is approximately how the conversation went." Lusher says Dawkins's ancestors owned slaves and wonders whether D will make reparations. Bizarre and desperate.
(tags: adam-lusher slavery dawkins richard-dawkins journalism newspapers telegraph)
- Stephen Law vs. William Lane Craig Debate: Argument map » » The Polemical MedicThe Polemical Medic
- "there’s lots of debate over who won the Law/Craig debate. Instead of joining that, I though I’d do something niftier: I’ve mapped the whole of the debate in argument form, to give a more intuitive way of seeing how all the arguments and objections interact". This is excellent stuff.
(tags: religion theodicy philosophy christianity atheism debate william-lane-craig stephen-law)
- Evangelism, disbelief, and being 'without excuse' » » The Polemical MedicThe Polemical Medic
- "Christians who indulge in evangelism and apologetics often hold to a thesis of disbelief as epistemic pathology – that disbelief is the result of some culpable error of judgment. Such an attitude is a poor fit for the facts and counter productive to the cause of evangelism. Ironically, the urge of these people to pathologize disagreement is diagnostic of their own epistemic pathology." I've mentioned this attitude (inspired by Romans 1) before: Thrasymachus neatly dissects it.
(tags: philosophy epistemology christianity religion apologetics evangelicalism evangelism)
- Tags:atheism, christianity, evangelism, journalism, link blog, philosophy, politics, religion, richard dawkins, stephen law, theodicy, william lane craig
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| - Hegemonic Heterosexuality
- "hegemonic heterosexuality is the vast cultural conspiracy to describe all heterosexual relationships as the unending war between stupid people and crazy people." Good observation of the view of the world promoted by TV and film. Via auntysarah.
(tags: psychology relationships sex)
- The Apologist's Turnstile
- "the idea that no particular level of knowledge is needed to assent to a religion, but an impossibly, unattainably high level of knowledge and expertise is needed to deny it. In the minds of many believers, the entrance to their religion is like a subway turnstile: a barrier that only allows people to pass through in one direction."
(tags: apologist epistemology religion atheism)
- Cancer is just as deadly as it was 50 years ago. Here's why that's about to change.
- "We spoke to cancer experts to find out why the death rate from cancer hasn't changed in the past 50 years — and we learned how genetic therapies could transform cancer treatments tomorrow."
(tags: medicine biology science genetics cancer)
- How not to attack Intelligent Design Creationism: Philosophical misconceptions about Methodological Naturalism - Maarten Boudry
- "In recent controversies about Intelligent Design Creationism (IDC), the principle of methodological naturalism (MN) has played an important role. In this paper, an often neglected distinction is made between two different conceptions of MN, each with its respective rationale and with a different view on the proper role of MN in science. According to one popular conception, MN is a self-imposed or intrinsic limitation of science, which means that science is simply not equipped to deal with claims of the supernatural (Intrinsic MN or IMN). Alternatively, we will defend MN as a provisory and empirically grounded attitude of scientists, which is justified in virtue of the consistent success of naturalistic explanations and the lack of success of supernatural explanations in the history of science. (Provisory MN or PMN). Science does have a bearing on supernatural hypotheses, and its verdict is uniformly negative."
(tags: creationism intelligent-design religion science naturalism philosophy)
- Tags:atheism, biology, creationism, intelligent design, link blog, philosophy, psychology, relationships, religion, science, sex
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