GCU Dancer on the Midway

TULIPs from Hamsterdam

2009-07-07T23:33:04Z

In this issue: more Alpha, more de-converts copying me, and more liberal Anglicans doing the Devil's work. Yes, it's time to close some more browser tabs before Firefox seizes up completely.

Beta

Chat continues over on my previous posting about Channel 4's documentary on the Alpha course. I found Jon Ronson, the documentary maker, had been on Alpha himself back in 2000 and written about it for the Graun. The link comes via Metafilter, where there's some discussion of the article and of Alpha, into which I've dipped my toe.

I de-converted before it was fashionable

Jamie Frost sounds like he had a experience of Christianity at Oxford which was similar to mine at Cambridge (except, of course, the Cambridge one was just better). He went to St Ebbes, which is the Doctrinal Rectitude Trust church in Oxford, as StAG is in Cambridge. He was, and is, a science student. He also left Christianity, and his tale (of struggling to keep the faith, being buoyed up by emotional sermons and then realising he didn't have reasons to believe) sounds awfully familiar. He writes about it in a meaty essay (I think it's even longer than mine), which is worth a read.

The link to Frost's essay came to me via the indefatigable Steven Carr, who helpfully posted it to the Premier Christian Radio discussion forum.

OK, so I've been watching The Wire

Yeah, so after the Templeton boys got lit up in a drive-by by PZ, I heard it was going down over at the Premier Christian Radio discussion forum, so me an' my boy Carr grabbed our nines and mounted up. I done showed that Richard Morgan (who used to be tight with the Ditchkins crew before he snitched to the Christers) how we do it, then I had interesting discussion on epistemology [You seem to have slipped out of character - Ed], and shit. [Better - Ed]

Bishops Gone Wild

Those crazy Anglicans and their schisms: I can barely keep up these days, so I don't usually bother. One thing caught my eye: Ruth Gledhill reports that Bishop Greg Venables, of the Fellowship of Mainstream True Christians Except If You're Gay, had said of the fight against the godless liberals that "We must remember we are not fighting flesh and blood. This is about principalities and powers."

If you weren't a CU Bible Study group leader, you might not be able to complete that quote. It ends "and spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms". Yep, liberal Christians are in league with the devil. John Broadhurst, Bishop of Fulham, allegedly said "I now believe Satan is alive and well and he resides at Church House." As Roy Zimmerman would say, "That was out loud, did you know that?"

Revelation: documentary on the Alpha Course

2009-07-04T18:01:50Z

Channel 4 recently screened How to Find God, Jon Ronson's documentary on the Alpha course. You can watch it online for a few weeks. Edited to add: Ronson also went on the Alpha course himself back in 2000: you can read about it in the Grauniad, and find some interesting discussion of his article on Metafilter.

The documentary follows one group of people taking the course at St Aldates, Oxford, a charismatic Anglican church. The group were a mixed bunch, from Dave, a psychology student who was feeling a bit guilty about drinking 12 pints in an evening; to my favourite, Ed, the unemployed freegan who liked to look for spare food round the back of supermarkets.

What we see of Alpha's apologetics is pretty bad: there's Josephus's reference to Jesus, Lewis's Mad/Bad/God argument, as appropriated by McDowell, and what ophe1ia_in_red's own review (which you should also read) rightly calls a false dichotomy between a life of meaningless debauchery and Christianity. At one point, the male small group leader says that God once spoke to him in his head to tell him he didn't have to give a talk he was nervous about. When the non-Christians ask how he knows it was God and not his imagination, his wife gets annoyed and accuses them of calling her husband stupid. A rationalist with too much time on their hands could probably have a bit of fun attending an Alpha Course, and it seems some have.

Nevertheless, I doubt that these arguments have a lot to do with Alpha's success rate (quoted as being about 1 person in each small group of about 8). As Ronson says, "Alpha is all about rigorously structured, almost mathematical, niceness. And this structure is a huge success." The free food (and the attractive Christian ladies serving it), friendly people and small group discussions are the most important parts of Alpha's methods.

Despite accusations of bias from the commenters on Channel 4's site, Ronson's style is non-confrontational. Rachel Cooke's review in New Statesman describes it as "like a religious version of Springwatch: instead of wondering which egg was going to hatch first, we were invited to wonder which agnostic would find Jesus first." I found it a bit like the "who's going to die this week?" stuff you used to get in the opening scenes of Casualty: Bob's using the threshing machine and once felt a "sort of energy" when he was a bit down, Alice is on the motorway behind a tanker full of petrol and is unemployed and a bit directionless: who's going to get Jesus'd?

The "Holy Spirit weekend", where the potential converts go off on a weekend break and are encouraged to try speaking in tongues, is the most controversial part of Alpha. Indeed, it's partly what lead the more conservative evangelical churches to replace Alpha with Christianity Explored (that and the conservatives' feeling that more emphasis is needed on the fact that we're all sinners who deserve to be tortured forever, and will be if we find ourselves unable to radically change our lives on the basis of insufficient evidence: this is what conservatives call "the Good News"). It certainly made for the most interesting part of the documentary.

After a few explanatory shots of the Toronto Blessing, we follow the group on to a conference centre near Oxford, which it turns out they're sharing with a conference for Ford GT40 fans. There's a Derren Brown Messiah suggestion session where everyone stands with their eyes closed, but alas, it's interrupted by the noise from the GT40s outside (modern day iron chariots, as one of Channel 4's commenters has it). They carry on, with the Christians singing songs and the pastor singing in tongues, but one of the non-Christians feels he's been manipulated and walks out of the room. However, the beer-drinking psychology student likes the atmosphere, asks people to pray for him, and says he'll be going on another Alpha Course. In the end, two of them walk away saying the experience has put them off Christianity, and the freegan says he respects Christians more now. I'd call it a no-score draw.

PZ Myers on the radio

2009-06-27T23:18:47Z

Did I mention I was on Christian talk radio once? No? Well, anyway, some other chap called PZ Myers was also on Premier Christian Radio's Unbelievable programme, talking about science and religion, a topic much discussed in blog-land recently. His Christian opposite number was Denis Alexander, who runs something called the Faraday Institute here in Cambridge, which was started by a grant from those naughty (but terribly well funded) Templeton Foundation people. You can listen to the audio on Premier's site, and read Myers's commentary on his blog.

It was an interesting programme. Myers is a strident shrill fundamentalist neo-rationalist atheist on his blog, but is softly spoken in person. The talk was pretty well mannered. Myers and Alexander agree that there's no place for god-talk in the science lab, and that evolution happened without divine meddling (amusingly, the presenter was careful to add a disclaimer that not all Christians believe the latter, presumably in an attempt to anticipate the letters in green crayon from creationists and intelligent design supporters). Myers was careful to limit the terms of the debate: he specifically objected to the project of using religious means to find out stuff about how the world works, saying that religion gets it wrong and science does better. Alexander accused Myers of scientism and argued that there are fields of discourse other than science which humans find worthwhile (law, art, and so on), but Myers kept coming back to how we find out how the world works.

Alexander argued that big questions like "why is there something rather than nothing?" are things we can reason about (specifically, using inference to the best explanation), but are not within the purview of science. He finds the human feeling that life has a purpose suggestive, because there's a dissonance between atheism and the feeling of purpose. Myers argues that a sense of purpose is inculcated by successful cultures. Justin Brierley paraphrases Plantinga, but nobody bites. Summing up, Myers says that religion is superfluous not just in science, but in the rest of life also. Alexander says that science isn't the only dimension to life, and that his personal relationship with Jesus makes his science work part of his worship.

I think I'd've been a bit less eager to attribute the human need for purpose to evolution, although Myers backed off that a bit when he talked about a cultural idea of purpose. Rather, I'd question the notional that an absolute, eternal purpose is the only real sort of purpose, just as I'd question the same assertion about morality.

I'd also question Alexander's claim that Christians are applying inference to the best explanation in a similar way to scientists. According to philosophers of science, that inference should only be applied when an explanation is clearly better than the alternatives. The idea that a specific sort of god did it doesn't seem clearly better, as Hume could have told you (unless by "better" we mean "in agreement with my religion", I suppose).

Myers and Alexander spent a lot of time talking past each other when they were trying to work out what Myers's objections were. Myers was wise to talk about methodology rather than disagreement about specific facts, on the grounds that science is a set of tools rather than a static body of knowledge. But Alexander is right that there are other legitimate ways to gain knowledge.

Perhaps we should talk about things that those legitimate ways have in common. As Eliezer says, if I'm told by my friend Inspector Morse that Wulky Wilkinsen runs the local crime syndicate, I'd be a fool to annoy Wulky. My belief is not established scientifically, but I've got some strong evidence, because Morse is much more likely to tell me that if Wilkinsen really is a shady character than if he isn't. As Myers argues, reliance on holy books doesn't work, but not because it's not science. Rather, because a report of a miracle in a holy book may occur with or without the actual miracle having happened, with at least even odds (to see this, consider how one religion views another's book, and note that if God wanted us to have a holy book, it would bear the 5 marks of a true holy book). As we saw last time, that your theory is compatible with the observation is not good enough. Rather, say, "Is this observation more likely if my idea is true than if it is not?"

What is faith?

2009-06-20T13:36:43Z

Prompted by Rowan Williams saying that neo-atheist fundamentalists aren't attacking the religion ++Rowan actually believes in, the Barefoot Bum has a good bit on the role of the term "faith" in discussions with believers.

Getting killed on the next zebra crossing

The argument goes something like this: religious faith is sometimes taken by atheists to mean "belief without evidence" (Dawkins says as much in The God Delusion, for example). "Ah, no," say believers, "that's not what faith means, our belief is based on the evidence". There follows an interlude for examination of this evidence, which turns out not to be so impressive. "Did we say based on? We meant compatible with," say the believers. "That's not good enough", says the Bum, "all sorts of things are compatible with the evidence if you're prepared to add ad hoc stuff to shore up the core beliefs you really don't want to get rid of, but then those core beliefs are held without regard to evidence". "But," say believers, "you yourself have some core beliefs you hold without regard to evidence". "Well," says the Bum, "I don't think so, but anyway, you've just conceded that I was right about faith, haven't you?" "Oh dear," say the believers, "we hadn't thought of that", and promptly disappear in a puff of logic.

Six impossible things before breakfast

The believers' final attempt to parry the Bum is similar to an apologetic argument I've seen, whereby the believer says "If you have an unevidenced belief that your senses aren't under the control of the Matrix or of a cartesiandaemon, why not round it off by believing in my religion?" This is an odd argument: the believer mentions beliefs you might doubt if you're a radical sceptic (you'll recall that you risk becoming a radical sceptic if you're a university-educated Catholic), but which most people accept because it's impractical not to. It turns out that belief in gods is something we can get by without. (On a related note, the folks over at Iron Chariots have a reasonable article on the proposition that atheism is based on faith).

Three parts of faith

There's another thing missing from the popular atheist definition of faith. At least for Christians, faith has an element of trust as well as acceptance of facts. After all, even the demons believe.

Over at Parchment and Pen, C. Michael Patton separates faith into three parts: content (faith in what?), assent (affirmation that the content is true) and trust (the part that the demons lack). Patton blames the lack of assent (which requires an examination of the evidence) for the loss of faith of the ex-Christians he's encountered. He goes so far as to say that the statement "You ask me how I know he lives, he lives within my heart" is stupid. Patton seems quite different from other Christians, who say that the main reason they believe is the internal feeling of God's presence, what they call the witness of the Holy Spirit. One can perhaps forgive atheists for using "faith" in a way Christians don't like if the Christians themselves aren't sure what it's about.

The virtue of faith

A thought which should occur to anyone who reads Less Wrong: you can make people reluctant to give up religious faith by making them think that having faith is virtuous. And this is what we find: in Christian philosophy, the theological virtue of "faith" is holding on to belief in the face of doubt. But hang on, where is the virtue in this? Chopping and changing all the time would be impractical, but it's hard to see why it's wrong. I suppose that conceiving of a religion as a relationship with God makes faith seem virtuous, because then we apply our notions of faithfulness within a human relationship. But these notions do not apply to facts about the world (even the demons believe), and to think that they do is to fall victim to a cognitive trick (since if the facts of religion are not correct, maybe there's no-one to have a relationship with). Rather, say:

If the sky is blue
I desire to believe "the sky is blue".
If the sky is not blue
I desire to believe "the sky is not blue".

Music and dancing

2009-06-14T23:11:15Z

I muck around with music a bit (I tend to sing for better keyboard players, although I did bash out tunes from Andrew Lloyd Webber for Dummies at the last singing party we had), and I also dance. I thought it'd be fun to try to get these two things together in my head, by working out how the music for ballroom dancing works. After a bit of Googling for pages written by people who know more than I do, here it is. Seeing as there are better musicians and better dancers than me reading this, they can correct me if I get it wrong.

Foxtrot

Foxtrot is in 4/4 time, between 112 and 120 beats per minute (according to these people). It's typically danced to Big Band music. The music emphasises beats 1 and 3. I think I can see that in A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, where the accompaniment either hits more notes on the treble clef, or uses the bass line to keep that emphasis. In Bobby Darin's version, the brass is hitting those beats in the intro.

The steps are typically 1 beat or 2 beats long, and we call them "quick" and "slow", respectively (if I'm writing it down, I'll abbreviate to Q and S). The basic rhythm of the dance is slow-quick-quick, which means the first two steps hit the emphasised beats. Some figures in the dance vary the rhythm, but the "slow" step, if there is one, starts either on beat 1 or beat 3. Here are the Hiltons giving us something to aspire to, with music and the slows and quicks, starting about 1:25.

Waltz

Waltz is in 3/4 time, as any fule kno . The tempo for slow waltz is about 84 to 90 beats per minute. The music strongly emphasises beat 1.

The steps are typically one step per beat, one-two-three, leading off strongly on beat 1. Sometimes, to get more steps into a bar, one of the beats is split into two half beats, with the second half of the split beat being counted "and". For example, in the whisk/chassé combination we count the chassé "one, two and three". Once again, the Hiltons show us how it's done, starting about 1:20.

The Viennese Waltz is a lot faster, about 180 beats per minute. It's typically done to classical stuff from Johann Strauss, although other possibilities exist, and of course, a fast waltz gives you the opportunity to dance to silly songs. It's danced at 1 step per beat, and the steps are mostly turns in each direction as you progress around the floor, and the fleckrl, where the couple rotate about each other rapidly in the centre of the room to show off. There are no split beats in it, it's fast enough already. Here are some good people doing it.

Quickstep

Quickstep and foxtrot have common roots. Musically, quickstep is in 4/4 again with the emphasis on beats 1 and 3, but faster, at around 200 beats per minute. Again, it's typically danced to fast Big Band or jazz music, usually about a drum kit that's getting lonely waiting for its owner to come back from World War II, or some such.

The steps are timed as 2 beat slows and 1 beat quicks like in foxtrot, and the rhythm is typically slow-quick-quick. But the figures we dance in quickstep have more in common with waltz than foxtrot. It's also more common for figures to roll over the end of the bar, so that you lead off on beat 3 sometimes (the chassé and quarter turn that everyone learns as a beginner does this: it's phrased as SQQS SQQS). Despite it being fast, we still get split beats in quickstep, too, usually called "quick-a-quick" (there's obviously not enough time to even say the word "and").

Tango

La Cumparsita is the quintessential tango. We're still in 4/4, at about 130 beats per minute. The music is staccato (although I'm not sure how well the dots over the notes have come out in the image on the right). There's a sudden "ba-dump" into beat 1: the piano has a half beat on the bass line of the previous bar in the example on the right, which came from 8notes.com. We usually feel like there's an 8 beat phrase over the 4 beat bars.

Ballroom tango comes from Argentina via a bit of cleaning up in Paris. Again, there are 2 beat slows and 1 beat quicks, and the odd split beat too. Typically figures are danced quick-quick-slow. It looks nothing like foxtrot or quickstep, though: the style of it matches the staccato style of the music. The dancers stalk around on the slow steps and hit the quicks as quick as they can, and then stop as still as they can, so that the quicks end up being shortened. Here are Marco Cavallaro and Joanne Clifton having some fun with it. I saw them at a ball some years ago: they were great.

Next time, I'll try and work out what the Latin dances are about.

The role of Mach 1+ attack helicopters in apocalyptic literature

2009-06-09T21:35:49Z

Metafilter linked to a bunch of Star Wars versions of the opening titles of 80s TV programmes, which in turn lead me to Ernie Cline's Airwolf monologue (click on track 4), which had me chortling merrily to myself. You should listen to it.

Was Airwolf airwolf? The Lady sure is pretty (that's her on the right). The programme itself was usually fun, if you were young enough not to notice that they only had so many stock clips of Airwolf flying through a canyon or shooting at things. Wikipedia says the first series was darker than the later two. I don't remember that, though I do remember Hawke's love interest being left to die in a desert by the baddie, a sort of reverse woman in a refrigerator.

Two things made it stand out for me. One was that it has the best theme tune of any TV programme, ever.

The other was that bit which, at least in my memory, occurred in almost every episode. The baddies think they're having it their own way; then Airwolf rises over a ridge line with her guns out, howling like a demon, and the baddies realise they're about to have a very bad day indeed.

It is the expectation of this moment that kept me watching. The firefight after that was a foregone conclusion, it was the sudden reversal which was thrilling, the knowledge that justice would now be done. Airwolf as apocalyptic: there must be a paper in that for someone.

Dancing: Paul pp Clive: Cha-cha, Tango

2009-06-02T00:19:28Z

Ballroom and Latin B (t'other PaulW pp Clive)

Cha:
Natural top
Rotate body to R (&), step forward L, replace, cha-cha-cha to L (2 3 4 & 1). Lead lady to spiral on &, ending in cuddle hold side by side, both man and lady with weight on L. Let go hold.
Close RF to LF, transfer weight to LF, step to side RF (2&3)
Close RF to LF, transfer weight to RF, step to side LF (4&1) - the overall effect is hip rotations: the hips start facing the training leg, close up for figure of 8 and you push off the standing foot rotate to face the other trailing leg. Or so it seemed to me.
Back RF, replace, forward locks (2 3 4&1)
Spot turn to L, forward locks (2 3 4&1)
2 more forward locks (2&3 4&1)
Spot turn, (2 3), 3 more forward locks (4&1 2&3 4&1), the last lock the woman turns and steps back instead.
Forward basic,
Back basic leading alamana,
New Yorker to R,
New Yorker to L,
Fast New Yorkers, R then L
New Yorker to R,
Spot turn to L,
Natural top if you want to repeat it.

Top tips: either turn or step, not both at same time. Isolation of upper body from hips is important for those hip wiggles.

Tango:

First half of long side:

Start near corner, facing diag wall.
5 step: forward, side, behind, side, rotate body to PP (feet stationary) QQQQS
Diagonally forward L, through R, flick L, bring LF behind RF and ball change (ball of LF, flat of RF) SQQ&S
Ronde LF round to put you back in the usual PP (S)
Flick head and hips to R then L (feet stationary) (S)
Diagonally forward L, R (after step, rotate body to L after step to lead lady to close), forward L, lock RF behind L (SQQ&)
Usual tango turn (KEEEERwick quick slow, KEEERwick quick slow) ending on RF, OP on her RHS. On the final step, keep hips rotated to her but rotate upper body to left to lead her to raise her leg (she's standing on one with the other crossed in front just above the knee, I think).
Rotate upper body R (no step), recover weight to LF, return weight to RF, turn sharply to R and tap LF beside R (lady swivels and then taps), to end in closed position facing wall. (QQQQ)

Ballroom and Latin C

The tango above continues:
Step through L, side R, behind L, rotate upper body to R (no step, she swivels), forward R, side L, close R (QQQQ QQS) to end facing wall again.
Forward L, forward R, (SS)
Link (QQS)
Chase: through R, side L, forward R (OP, curving to R), back L (back along LoD, continuing to turn to R) (QQQQ), chasse to R along LoD (Q&Q), link to turn a corner (QQS),

Short side:
Forward R, forward L, lock R behind L (QQS) - stay in PP for the lock otherwise she can't tell what's going on, rotate to closed after final step.
Forward L, side R, behind L to end facing diag centre (diag wall of new wall) with her outside on your RHS (QQS)
Rock forward onto RF, back onto LF, step side R (QQS)
Start with the 5 step again. Phew.

There was also a samba, but who likes samba?

Creation Science 101

2009-05-31T21:47:52Z

Gambling at Rick's Bar

According to New Scientist, Francis Collins's BioLogos site (wherein Collins, an evangelical Christian, advocates theistic evolution) not only faces the wrath of the neo-militant atheist secularists like Coyne and Myers, but has also been criticised by the Discovery Institute, who advocate Intelligent Design. They have a new site at Faithandevolution.org where they explain why Collins is wrong by quoting the Bible.

I'm a bit puzzled by this, as I thought that Intelligent Design was a hack get around the firewall that is the United States judiciary. The courts say you can't teach religious opinion as fact in state schools, so if you want to get creationism into public education, you attribute creation to an anonymous Designer. You can then claim that you're shocked, shocked I tell you (your Honour), that some kids might reach the conclusion that the Designer is the Christian God. I don't want to tell these people their business, but setting up a web-site full of New Testament quotes gives the game away, doesn't it?

Sun, moon and bumper sticker cry "Jesus is Lord"

Anyhoo, as it happens, the Discovery Institute quotes Romans 1:20, which I've mentioned before as a verse that supports the common evangelical belief that everyone knows there's a God really, even if they don't want to admit it. The DI say that Collins's argument that God could have made stuff happen in such a way that his intervention was undetectable goes against the Apostle Paul's statement that God's existence is visible from what has been made.

I got into a discussion of undetectable divine intervention over on gerald_duck's LJ. gerald_duck had criticised atheists for saying that evolution proves there is no god, which is a valid criticism (if indeed there are any atheists saying that), but he's oddly attached to the idea that it's desirable to be agnostic about unwarranted beliefs, like Collins's belief that the Christian god did it and carefully hid his tracks. I don't really understand this. I accept that evolution is sufficient to explain the history of life after abiogenesis, because I think there's good evidence for it. If evolution is sufficient, I require further evidence before I can conclude that, say, a god was involved. Without that evidence, I do not believe a god was involved (if gods there be: again, this isn't an argument about their existence), just as I do not believe that any Flying Spaghetti Monsters were involved. I can't strictly rule it out, but gods and FSMs are one of an infinity of possible additions to the hypothesis which I don't seem to need, so why bother with any of them?

Over at the Discovery Institute, the cdesign proponentsists part company with Collins on whether evolution is in fact a sufficient explanation. If they could show that it isn't, and further show evidence of design, they'd be on firmer ground than Collins is. Unfortunately for them, they can't, but they were really following the evidence (which there's some reason to doubt), their methods would be more rational than Collins's.

New Scientist's Amanda Gefter has summarised it well:

Watching the intellectual feud between the Discovery Institute and BioLogos is a bit like watching a race in which both competitors are running full speed in the opposite direction of the finish line. It's a notable contest, but I don't see how either is going to come out the winner.

Logical Rudeness

2009-05-25T22:13:13Z

apdraper2000 joined the discussion on people who have fully general counterarguments against the opposition, with a link to Peter Suber's essay, Logical Rudeness. Suber's essay is well worth reading.

What Suber calls logical rudeness is a response to criticism which insulates the responder from having to address the criticism. Suber comes up with a taxonomy of logical rudeness:

The primary type is probably the application of a theory of justified dismissal, such as a theory of error or insanity, to critics and dissenters. Another major type is the interpretation of criticism as behavior to be explained rather than answered. This is closely connected to the type that refuses to see a meta-level in the critic's criticism, and will not allow critics to escape the object-language of the theory. A rude theory may reinterpret criticism as a special kind of noise, or as unwitting corroboration. A theory may evade criticism without rudeness by postponing as answer or referring the critic to the answer of another. The abuse of postponement may be rude, however, as when the motions of postponement are made shorthand for dismissal, or when the subsumption of an objection under a larger system of belief is made shorthand for refutation. A rude theory may be held for reasons other than its correctness, such as the support for the believer shown by voters or grant-giving agencies. A weak sort of rudeness lies in any unfalsifiable theory, and a strong sort lies in boon theories which identify critics as nonpossessors of a special boon. The theories of justified dismissal and the boon theories tell critics that they are disqualified from knowing truth or even deserving answers because of some well-explained foible or fault in themselves. All the types have in common an evasion of a responsibility to answer criticism on the merits, when that evasion is authorized by the theory criticized. All types are triggered only by expounded criticism, and only insulate the proponent from conversion or capitulation, not the theory from refutation.

There's the potential for this sort of thing in anyone with a belief whose scope is broad enough to explain why some other people don't believe it. As mentioned previously, some Christians tell atheists that atheists know there's a God really and are just being atheists to annoy, because they know it teases. Some atheists tell religious people that theists won't accept atheistic arguments because they're afraid of death, or too immersed in the church community to bear the social cost of leaving. In a conversation about race or gender, it won't be long before someone claims another person's view is held because of their privilege. And so on.

Suber calls this rude rather than fallacious because it is possible for people who hold true beliefs to be "rude" in this way (and in fact, rejecting arguments because they come from rude people is itself rude). Rather, rudeness violates the norms for debate, but by those same norms, we'd like even people who hold beliefs which lead them to be rude to be able to join in.

In Suber's taxonomy, some sorts of rudeness seem worse for debate than others. Towards the end of the essay, Suber distinguishes "fixed belief" from "critical belief", the difference being whether the believer is prepared to concede that they might be wrong. Suber says it's not clear that critical belief is possible or desirable in all cases. In particular, it seems to me that people who regard disagreement as a moral defect will find it hard to be critical believers.

Suber wonders about the value of debate (by which I assume he means the general to-ing and fro-ing of philosophical conversation, not merely formal public debates). It seems to me that this value partly lies in reducing the problems of filtered evidence. We ourselves filter the evidence we search for, but a multi-sided debate might serve to correct this. One way of squaring a desire for debate with beliefs which justify rudeness might be to admit that we hold such beliefs, but to avoid rudeness itself as a tactic. Beliefs which justify rudeness might legitimately influence whether we want to have the debate at all, but once committed, it seems worth holding our own beliefs critically.

Linkdump: Ehrman, divine hiddenness, morality, gays

2009-05-04T18:00:29Z

Time to close some browser tabs by writing about what's in them:

Ehrman not out to destroy Christianity

Bart Ehrman has a new book out. Jesus, Interrupted aims to make stuff about the Bible that Christian ministers are taught in seminaries available to the public. Ehrman was interviewed at Salon. Despite Ehrman's adoption by the neo-atheist fundamentalist secularists, he seems pretty mild-mannered about religion. In the Washington Post, Ehrman says he's not out to destroy Christianity, although he hopes that his book will show up the problems with an evangelical approach to the Bible.

Why is God hidden?

There's a good post from Jeffrey at Failing the Insider Test on the problem of why God is hidden if he wants people to know him. In previous discussions here, apologists say there's no evidence that God being more obvious would make people come into a loving relationship with him. They say the Bible contains examples of people who saw miracles and didn't believe, and as the Epistle of James says, even the demons believe (and tremble). Yet even granted the premise that the Bible's account is accurate (which seems to be generalising from fictional evidence), Jeffrey points out that the Bible itself contains examples of people who believe on evidence from God. Jesus complains that if Sodom had seen his miracles, it would have repented, unlike the towns he's been visiting. While compelling evidence doesn't reliably produce the relationship Christians say God wants, it can hardly make it less likely.

Morality again

John W Loftus mentioned a debate between William Lane Craig and Shelly Kagan of Yale. You can listen here. Kagan does well against Craig, thus proving that it is possible to beat him.

As I've mentioned previously, the moral argument for the existence of God is pretty unclear to me: some people just seem to feel that if there's no God, there can't be "real" morality. Kagan talks about what rational agents would do and the idea of a veil of ignorance. Craig doesn't see how being moral matters if the universe will die a Heat Death. Kagan says that there is significance even if this significance is not eternal, and that eternal significance is not needed for morality.

I'm being oppressed

Slacktivist talks about that awful video which the National Organization for Marriage made, and the tendency of American evangelicals to believe both that they are, and should be, in a Chrisitan nation and that Christians are horribly persecuted.

I suspect that American evangelicals' persecution complex is an inevitable side effect of sectarian hegemony. Once you believe that your faith requires cultural dominance, and that it deserves it, then any threat to that dominance -- even just the unwelcome reminder of the existence of alternative points of view -- is perceived as a threat, as a kind of persecution.

The NOM video has spawned many parodies, of which A Gaythering Storm is perhaps the best. NOM were even advertising here on LJ until LJ's staff booted them. Well done, LJ.

LJ New Comments: Dreamwidth support

2009-05-04T15:40:47Z

Though I value its role in motivating LJ to be less stupid, I have not yet accepted Dreamwidth as my personal saviour. However, seeing as a lot of people have and one of them asked me about it, I've updated LJ New Comments to support it.

Heat is work and work's a curse or I Was a Teenage Physicist

2009-04-30T01:22:48Z

Ken again

Andrew Brown went to the lecture on God and evolution by Ken Miller, the one which robhu mentioned in the comments last time. Brown was impressed by Miller. I commented using the same arguments as my previous posting.

The wonderful thing about standards is

In other news, top geneticist Francis Collins has started his own Christian apologetics site, Biologos.org. Collins is a theistic evolutionist. He's got answers for those awkward creationist questions (mentioned last time) on evolution and the Fall and death before the Fall. Not just one answer, in fact, but several, which could all equally well be true, because as far as I can see there's no possible way to chose between them on the basis of evidence (except possibly on the evidence of a strong inner conviction, I suppose). Still, several answers are better than one, right?

Atheists can be wrong too

The usual suspects in atheist blogland are having fun with Biologos: here's Jerry Coyne, P. Z. Myers, and P. Z. Myers. The latter P. Z. Myers refers to a post at Evaluating Christianity. Myers says this article at Biologos is making the argument that evolution is impossible because of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, a (badly mistaken) argument that is popular among creationists.

This is unfair to Collins, who knows the creationist argument is wrong. Collins is actually making a God of the Gaps argument. The low entropy condition of the early universe is an unsolved problem in physics, as Sean Carroll explains in Scientific American (Carroll commented at Evaluating Christianity confirming this). Unsolved problems in physics are fertile ground for Christians looking for something for God to do.

I hope Myers will issue a correction, because I think it's important to get stuff like this right.

Religion and cartography or I Was a Teenage Theistic Evolutionist

2009-04-28T01:32:42Z

Following on from his review of two books by theistic evolutionists, Jerry Coyne recently wrote an article criticising the US National Academy of Sciences for saying that evolution and Christianity are compatible. Richard Hoppe at Panda's Thumb disagrees with Coyne, but P Z Myers supports him. Atheist fight!

Is evolution compatible with Christianity? Well, yes and no. I was a Christian who believed in evolution. This means not having good answers to some stuff Christians might care about: was the Fall a real event, and if not, where does original sin come from? Did physical death really enter the world through sin? If, as Christians usually argue as part of their theodicy on natural disasters, creation itself was corrupted in the Fall (whatever the Fall was), how exactly does that work? If you're a Christian who accepts evolution, you don't need atheists to ask these awkward questions, your Creationist brothers will do a much better job of it.

But that doesn't show incompatibility. If you keep running into these problems and have to keep adding ad hoc patches to your theory, you should consider discarding it, but there are things I don't have good answers to as an atheist, and that hasn't stopped me being one.

I was a student of science who was a Christian. That seems to be where the real problem lies. Theistic evolutionists tend to say stuff like "Evolution could have been the way God did it" or "Maybe God nudges electrons from time to time". They might make a wider point about "other ways of knowing". At some point, someone is probably going to say "well, Science cannot prove your wife loves you, but you believe that, don't you?"

The Less Wrong crowd recently discussed whether their community is and should be welcoming to theists. Theism, Wednesday, and Not Being Adopted is a good post which deserves reading on its own merits, but I was particularly interested in Eliezer Yudkowsky's comment about compartmentalising rationality.

If Wednesday [the child of Mormons mentioned in the article] can partition, that puts an upper bound on her ability as a rationalist; it means she doesn't get on a deep level why the rules are what they are. She doesn't get, say, that the laws regarding evidence are not social customs that can be different from one place to another, but, rather, manifestations of the principle that you have to walk through a city in order to draw an accurate map of it.

Sam Harris mocks this compartmentalisation in his satirical response to Coyne's critics (the paragraphs following "Finally, Kenneth Miller, arrives" are the key ones). Science is one manifestation of the principle that you draw a map by walking the streets, not by sitting in your room and thinking hard about it. There are other legitimate forms of cartography, such as the one you apply when you conclude that someone loves you (assuming you're not actually a stalker). Perhaps, like the Tube map, they're not doing quite the same precise measurement as you'd expect from science, but they make useful maps.

Recall the original point of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, before it developed into a cod-religion for annoying Christians with, like the worship of Invisible Pink Unicorn (PBUHHH). The FSM's inventor used it to point out that if you're going to say your god created the universe because you sat your room and had a strong inner conviction about it, on your own argument, the FSM revealed to me as a Pastafarian is as legitimate as the creator your conviction revealed to you. This point is not lessened if you say your god sometimes happens to do stuff in a way which isn't directly incompatible with known science.

Perhaps theism isn't incompatible with evolution, but it is incompatible with good cartography.

Book: The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod

2009-04-26T23:08:44Z

Irregular Apocalypse

The other Red Ken has a new book out. The Night Sessions is set in a future where the USA and UK have pretty much abandoned religion as a bad job. In the book's alternate history, the War on Terror became the Faith Wars, which culminated in tactical nuclear exchanges as part of a tank battle in the Valley of Megiddo (ya, rly). The US/UK won a Pyrrhic victory, and the people of those countries decided that it wasn't just the neo-cons who were to blame, but religion. Thus began what the churches referred to as the Great Rejection. Christians were persecuted, Muslims sent to filtration camps. The book opens in 2037. In the independent republic of Scotland, religion is now ignored as part of a policy of official "non-cognisance". Then a Roman Catholic priest is murdered by a bomb, and the Edinburgh police (some of whom were in the "God Squads" which put down protests by Christians about the closing of churches and church schools) have to investigate.

No More Mr Nice Guy

MacLeod's future Edinburgh seemed a bit like Iain M. Banks's Culture, writ small. The religious people are the ones who have, prior to the opening of the book, learned the hard way that you "don't fuck with the Culture". The coppers are aided by sarcastic demilitarised combat robots, who attained consciousness on the battlefield as the result of getting better and better at modelling other combatants' minds. There are the polybdsmfurrygoths in their silent nightclub (which used to be a church, naturally). The Great Rejection seems like unrealistic atheist wish-fulfilment.

God Told Me To Do It

Still, MacLeod has fun with his setting. The American fundies have buggered off to New Zealand and set up a creationist theme park, where one of the protagonists, John Campbell works. In the prologue, we meet him on a flight to Edinburgh, where he introduces a fellow passenger to the delights of presuppositionalism. If you doubt that people like Campbell exist in real life, check out what this guy thinks of people who allow evidence to modify their beliefs: I don't know MacLeod's own religious experiences, but he's done his research. There are jokes you probably need some acquaintance with Christianity to get.

MacLeod isn't silly enough to portray the religious characters unsympathetically. Campbell turns out to be a sensitive soul, rejected by one sect after another for increasingly hilarious reasons, who can't quite understand why people find his theology hard to get on with. Grace Mazvabo, an Christian academic who studies the history of her religion, is well drawn.

The first part of the story is a sort of police procedural with lots of satisfying SF stuff about the kit the coppers have access to. Other reviewers say that MacLeod deliberately avoided making DI Adam Ferguson a hard-drinking future-Rebus, which is fair enough, but he and the other police seem a bit thin, somehow (the one exception being the, ahem, undercover agent who spends a lot of time around the polybdsmfurrygoths).

In fact, my main criticism of the book is that everything's too thin. I wanted to know more about the world, and more about the characters. Maybe I've read too much Neal Stephenson, but I found the book too short. Still, it's a mark of how much fun I had with it that I wanted more. Worth a read.

Evangelism training or I Was a Teenage Evangelical

2009-04-12T23:33:10Z

Even the atheists agree: William Craig thrashed Christopher Hitchens in their recent debate. In The West Wing, we see Bartlet preparing for a debate as real politicians do, by practising against someone playing his opposition, presumably having studied the other guy first. Craig is formidable, but his arguments don't change, so it's odd that his opponents apparently don't take advantage of knowing what he's going to say. Transcripts and audio of his previous debates are available, and his arguments are also in his book, Reasonable Faith. Chris Hallquist responded convincingly to the arguments in Reasonable Faith: a review like that should be a starting point for anyone debating with Craig.

Anyhoo, Hallquist's review of Craig's book brought back some memories of my time in evangelicalism, specifically about how I was taught to do evangelism. (Reminder: Evangelicalism is a particular subset of Christianity, emphasising the inerrancy of the Bible and the need for personal repentance and faith; people who believe in evangelicalism are evangelicals. Evangelism is the process of making converts; people who try to make converts are evangelists. Clear? Then off we go.)

When I tap on the dashboard, I want you to recite "Two Ways to Live" as quickly and as safely as possible

Sometimes non-Christians are disturbed to learn that evangelicals commonly receive training in evangelism, as if such training were somehow cheating. But there's nothing inherently sinister about wanting to be better at evangelism, especially if you value the sort of propositional consistency I've mentioned previously: evangelicals who evangelise are anticipating-as-if there's a Hell, rather than merely speaking-as-if they believe it (I've previously mentioned an evangelical evangelist who definitely anticipates-as-if there's a Hell).

The training provided to a typical church-goer doesn't cover spanking ill-prepared atheists in formal debates, but rather the every-day evangelism which is the responsibility of every Christian. It might start off with overcoming the British reticence about religion to get Christians to casually mention to friends and colleagues what they do on Sunday mornings and Wednesday nights. The church itself would put on fun events (film screenings, dinner parties, Ceroc nights) to which you could bring non-Christian friends, and there'd be a "short talk about Jesus" in the middle. Once people know you're a Christian, you might get to talk to them about it, so the training goes on to having conversations about Christianity with non-Christians, maybe learning some sort of salvation schema like Two Ways to Live and some answers to common questions.

What kicked off memories of this was Hallquist's review of Chapter 1 of Craig's book. I remember being told to try to move the conversation away from issues like theodicy or the reliability of the Bible, to personal issues of sin and repentance. If you watch the BBC documentary on Deborah Drapper, you'll see her doing this several times, using Ray Comfort's Are you a good person? script. If you'd like to see Christopher Hitchens win for a change, you can also listen to an unfortunate Christian trying the script on him.

Bad faith

The advice to move the argument to personal issues reflects the common evangelical belief that philosophical debates and requests for evidence are a smokescreen: the non-Christian knows there's a God really but just doesn't want to worship him. One Biblical source for this belief is this passage in the Apostle Paul's letter to the church in Rome, where Paul says that God's nature is clear from creation, so that people who don't worship him have no excuse (verse 20).

Hallquist quotes Craig:

[W]hen 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, my hyperlink

Craig advises Christians to ask objectors "If I answered that objection, would you then really be ready to become a Christian?" This is something like the rationalist technique of getting to the core of disagreements by asking "Is that your true rejection?" (see also The Least Convenient Possible World). However, Craig departs from the rationalist use of this technique in that he seems to argue it cannot legitimately be applied in reverse ("If I substantiated that objection, would you be ready to leave Christianity?"). He also takes the stance that non-Christians are culpably arguing in bad faith.

Hallquist's review does a better job of arguing against Craig than I can, so you should read that if you come across assertions that Christianity is evidenced by the inner witness of the Holy Spirit, or indeed, if you should happen to get into a debate with William Lane Craig. Rather, as is traditional, let's end by drawing out some practical applications, and then go in peace.

Evangelism training

One of the less memorable new phrases invented by Neal Stephenson in Anathem is Hypotrochian Transquaestiation, which means "to change the subject in such a way as to assert, implicitly, that a controversial point has already been settled one way or the other". Watch out for this, for example, in the switch from discussion of the existence of God to whether you are a good person.
Cognitive biases exist, and seeking a person's true rejection is a useful technique if the debate seems to be going nowhere. However, it cuts both ways, so...
Beware of your conversational role. If you've accepted a passive role as potential buyer and the evangelist's active role as sales-person, there are thoughts which won't occur to you (like the seeking the evangelist's true rejection).
If you're aiming for dialogue rather than the buyer role, it's probably not worth discussing things with someone who sees every argument you raise as evidence of your culpable self-deception. Craig's position on an atheist's motivations together with his experience of the witness of the Holy Spirit serve as a fully general counterargument to anything the atheist says (but note that knowing Craig is in possession of this argument doesn't itself invalidate his specific arguments). If you find yourself in conversation with an evangelical evangelist, it is worth asking whether they agree with Craig.
- One exception where it would be worth arguing is if there are people watching, as in a public debate, online, or if you found yourself at one of those evangelistic dinner parties.

O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us

2009-04-09T00:00:29Z

In another place, I'm told that in my postings here I seem more interested in annoying Christians than in genuine dialogue (if you happen to know where the other place is, don't harass the management there, comment here instead: this post is not calling in an air strike from the United Atheist Alliance).

In this blog, when I'm writing about religion, I try for a mix of serious discussion posts and cheerleading for atheism ("give me a D, give me an A, give me a W" etc. etc). The last couple of posts are examples of a serious discussion post. Comparing EvangelicalGod with Cthulhu and the Bishops Gone Wild series are examples of cheerleading. The recent stuff on C.S. Lewis is a mixture of the two.

What's the value of the cheerleading? It's light relief from the serious stuff, seeing other people doing the "theists do the funniest things" stuff gives others permission to doubt, and it's cathartic for me when I've just read about some bishop saying something stupid.

I don't believe that someone's religious opinions are morally worthy of more respect than, say, their politics (another reason for the cheerleading is to promote this idea: would people be bothered if I were laying into Gordon Brown?) However, religion is currently a more sensitive subject than politics and this is not going to change overnight. As a matter of tactics, I don't want to annoy people so much that they don't bother reading the serious stuff, and as a matter of empathy, I don't want to actually upset people.

So, I'm interested in what the people reading this think of my postings on religion. Here's a poll about it (if you're not an LJ user, you'll need to login in with OpenID or create an account to fill it in). Let me know what you think:

View Poll: Reader survery on pw201's posts on religions

Did Jesus Rise From the Dead? Richard Carrier vs William Lane Craig

2009-04-02T00:55:13Z

Richard Carrier recently debated with William Lane Craig. That's them in the picture, you see (I'll leave it to you to decide which one's which). The topic was the Resurrection of Jesus. You can listen here, though the audio is a bit crappy, or watch the debate on Youtube.

Carrier doesn't think he did very well. He correctly says that he was a lot less organised than Craig and couldn't keep up with all the things he'd need to rebut. As I've previously noted, Craig has a lot of arguments and a very polished delivery.

Craig's main points are that Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea; Jesus's tomb was empty; the tomb was discovered empty by women; Mark's story is simple and lacks theological embellishment (unlike Matthew's, presumably?); and finally that the earliest Jewish response, that the disciples stole the body, recorded in Matthew, pre-supposes the empty tomb. He backs these points up with references to NT scholars and historians.

Carrier's response takes issue with Craig's evidence. He attacks both the NT gospels and Paul's letters. He notes that Paul says Jesus was raised and appeared to people (1 Cor 15), not specifically that Jesus's tomb was empty. Appearances can be hallucinations. Looking at Acts and Paul's letters, it seems the early Christians did have visions. Paul himself says his gospel came from God, not men. Carrier is not saying the early Christians were mentally ill, but rather, that hallucinations in the sane are common in some people, who may even find them comforting (Carl Sagan's The Demon Haunted World also makes the point that hallucinations are more common than we think and don't mean that the person experiencing them is crazy). We know these hallucinations have a role in other religions, so why not Christianity? So far, fair enough.

Carrier then argued that that gospel accounts were full of myths, that is, stories told to express a point rather than being historical narrative. He outlined a theory that the release of Barabbas was an allegory for the scapegoat ceremony on Yom Kippur. This has been noted by scholars and also by Christian believers. Though the Christians would argue that just because something is an allegory doesn't mean it didn't also happen, Carrier claims that the gospels are chock full of these sorts of things, and so we cannot tell what they record as history.

Craig says in his comments prior to the debate that for the purpose of debating the Resurrection, it doesn't matter whether the gospels are completely reliable (Craig thinks they are, but wisely doesn't attempt to defend inerrancy in debate), because we accept that historical sources may contain errors and truths. But Carrier's argument is that the gospels are chock-full of symbolic tales, so it's unlikely that any given account is historical: the gospels are not just a mixture of history and myth, but mostly myth.

Carrier talks about a hypothetical world where Jesus appeared to lots of people in lots of places after his resurrection, with records of appearances in many countries. Carrier thinks that in that world he would have much greater chance of accepting that Jesus was raised, so the fact that we're not in that world is better explained by atheism than Christianity. Craig initially refuses to address this, saying that the question of what God would do is a theological one, not a historical one. When pressed in the Q&A, Craig says that there are Christianities where it makes sense that Jesus didn't appear all over the world: for example, one might be a universalist, that is, a Christian who believes nobody goes to hell. Of course, Craig's not a universalist. He's a Molinist, so he believes God knows what would have happened in every possible circumstance. If Jesus didn't appear all over the world, Craig says it must be because doing so wouldn't make more Christians. Craig seems fond of saying that having more evidence for God's existence wouldn't make more people become Christians: see, for example, this thread where robhu linked to an article of Craig's. Yet Carrier seems to be saying he would believe in the resurrection in the hypothetical world, and a lot of ex-Christian atheists say they left the church when they realised there wasn't enough evidence for their beliefs.

So much for Craig, what about Carrier? In Are You a Solar Deity?, Yvain cautions against theories which can be applied to anything (the specific example Yvain uses is related to religious myths, in fact). Some of Carrier's examples of myth seem a bit of a stretch. He needs to do more work to show that the gospels are generally unreliable, more than he has time for in a debate, it seems. He's written a book outlining his theories, but I don't think he's carried out a Spot the Fakes test. I'm not convinced the gospels are mostly myth.

On the other hand, the gospels do contain mythologised history based on Old Testament passages. Christians without a prior commitment to Biblical inerrancy recognise this, as do other readers. For example, scribb1e noticed when she read through the Old Testament. (If you're an inerrantist, you can accommodate this evidence into your web of belief in other ways, for example by saying that the OT passages were foreshadowing). Craig concedes this for the sake of argument, but says we still extract history from unreliable sources. True, but historians don't extract belief in miracles from other sources either, do they? The apologist is right to argue that the gospels should not be treated more strictly than other historical documents, but historians don't believe that Vespasian cured the blind, either. Without the presumption that the source is totally reliable, they're going to treat miracles as the unreliable part.

That steers things back into the territory of the Ehrman vs Craig debate I've mentioned previously. When you've watched enough of these debates, you realise there are standard openings, like in chess. If you're an evangelist and someone says to you that historians don't accept your religion's miracle, you counter by accusing the historians of metaphysical naturalism and hence of begging the question. Your sensible sceptic will say that this has nothing to do with grand philosophical statements about how everything supervenes on the physical, and more about the way everyone, even Christians, agrees that miracles are pretty uncommon. You need a lot of evidence to back up a miraculous claim, and in the case of the Resurrection, if you really start with a low prior probability, there just isn't enough evidence.

Notice that Craig never puts numbers into his equation when he's beating Ehrman with it (not that this would have helped Ehrman, because he's an arts graduate, poor soul). Craig doesn't seem very sure what his prior would be. Barefoot Bum and I argued about this, because I'd not noticed Craig talks about it in two places in the Ehrman debate: at one point he says it's "terribly low" but then, as the Bum notes, he later says "That Jesus rose naturally from the dead is fantastically improbable. But I see no reason whatsoever to think that it is improbable that God raised Jesus from the dead." Craig's argument seems to be that there's sufficient evidence to believe in the Resurrection if you already believe that God is the sort of God who'd do something like raise Jesus from the dead. That seems fair enough, but as an evangelist, shouldn't Craig be concerned with how people come to believe in that sort of God? Not by examining the evidence for the Resurrection, it seems.

Still, Craig duffed Carrier up. Let's not lose heart: over at Evangelical Agnosticism they talk about the rare atheists who don't get duffed up by Craig. Paul Draper did well, and is well worth a listen. Also, Craig's debating with Christopher Hitchens on 4th April, which will be entertaining, if nothing else.

Dollhouse

2009-03-28T22:13:10Z

Contains general discussion of the premise, but no other spoilers.

Dollhouse is the new Joss Whedon thing (you know, Buffy, Firefly: that Joss Whedon). It stars, and is produced by, Eliza Dushku, who played Faith in Buffy. Dushku plays Echo, one of the "dolls" in the Dollhouse. The dolls are reprogrammable people: their personalities are wiped and replaced with whatever the clients of the Dollhouse ask for. The Dollhouse isn't just a brothel, although it's part of what it does.

When the first episode appeared, there was a lot of debate on here on LJ, with posts heavily laden with feminist theoretic jargon about agency, the male gaze and so on. It's easy to see why the feminists objected: the idea of being able to program Eliza Dushku to do whatever I want certainly causes some triggering in my safe space, let me tell you.

Still, a more telling criticism was that it wasn't really that good. In his other work, Whedon does witty dialogue to keep us amused while the story draws us into the relationships between the ensemble cast, and there's always a story arc which rewards watching the series in order rather than as individual episodes. This sort of thing was initially absent from Dollhouse. The first few episodes of Dollhouse are pretty much Quantum Leap (which must count as one of the neatest tricks you can do with episodic SF) without the fun bits.

Things have been looking up for the last couple of episodes, so perhaps we can forgive the early stuff as really laboured scene setting. It looks like there is an arc, we're finding out more about the characters' pasts so we care about them more, and the last one was funny. Worth a look, I'd say.

Less Wrong

2009-03-26T22:26:47Z

William liked the bit in my last post where I said that most believers are carrying a map of the real world somewhere, because they know in advance what excuses to make for the apparent absence of gods and dragons. Of course, I stole it from Overcoming Bias (mentioned previously here). Carl Sagan's point in the original invisible dragon story is about falsifiability. The crew over at Overcoming Bias use it another way, to think about what's going on in dragon-believer's head when they know enough anticipate the results of testing for the dragon, but not enough to say "there's no dragon".

It's that sort of keen observation that keeps me going back to Overcoming Bias despite all the stuff about freezing your head when you die. The aim of the game for Biasers is to have a map which matches the territory, and to be able to read it aloud. They've started Less Wrong, a new site where anyone can contribute something they think will help achieve this aim. It's based on the code for Reddit, where users can vote stories up or down, though at Less Wrong, the editors manually promote stories to the front page, and there's a separate page where you can view stuff that's merely popular. You can follow Less Wrong on LiveJournal by adding less_wrong to your friends list.

The community is working pretty well so far. Watching the decline of Kuro5hin makes me worry that community moderated sites will turn to crap (although there's still some good stuff over at k5, such as an article about the tendency of community moderated sites to turn to crap), but having real humans in charge of promoting articles might mitigate that. The system has given some new voices a chance, notably Yvain. Here are some of my favourite articles so far:

The Mystery of the Haunted Rationalist talks further about layers of belief. If you're a materialist and get scared in a haunted house, do you actually believe in ghosts?
Don't revere the bearer of good info: how to avoid worshipping Eliezer Yudkowsky.
Eliezer Yudkowsky facts: why you should worship Eliezer Yudkowsky. Possibly only funny if you've read all his stuff, so off you go.
The power of positivist thinking, in which Yvain admits a closet liking for A.J. Ayer.
Cached Selves: alarming research on how freely chosen past actions bind us to consistency with them in the future.
The least convenient possible world is a tool for working out what your real principles are.

I've made a few comments over there, although nothing earth-shattering: sympathising with someone whose girlfriend left him for Jesus, or talking about Bernard Woolley and irregular verbs.

I've been thinking about posting some more about what I've got out of Overcoming Bias and Less Wrong here on LJ. It's all very well ranting about religion, but rationality isn't graded on a curve. Don't worry, religion-rant fans: I've got a few more of those lined up too.

Belief in cats

2009-03-23T00:37:52Z

A while back Andrew Brown over at the Grauniad posted a list of the 6 Points of New Atheism. There was a bit of a bun-fight among the atheists about this, because, though Brown's an atheist, he was criticising Dawkins Our Leader. It got even more fun when Dawkins turned up in the comments. (My own contribution was to treat the 6 Points as one of those LJ quiz memes: I score 2.5/6 for New Atheism, which makes me slightly more Old Skool than New, I suppose). It's a bit like that Southpark episode where the Unified Atheist League fights the Allied Atheist Allegiance. What's the fuss about? Here's part of it.

Most Christians say God is omniscient and omnipresent. Yet the Christian woman whom Yellow blogged about, the one who wrote to a Christian problem page with her self-pleasuring problem, clearly doesn't really believe God is present and watching her all the time. But she at least believes that believing those things is virtuous for a Christian. The philosopher Daniel Dennett calls this latter sort of faith belief in belief.

This doesn't just apply to religion. palmer1984 posted a poll which suggest similar things apply to moral beliefs. It is virtuous to say that we should care for people in other countries as much as we do for those in our own, but most people don't really believe it.

Some people, especially those with a scientific education (or a certain sort of evangelical Christian background), think of belief as affirmation of a set of propositions. To those people, it's obvious that these propositions should not be internally contradictory or conflict with reality. But, as Saunt Yudkowsky observes "it is a physical fact that you can write "The sky is green!" next to a picture of a blue sky without the paper bursting into flames". The same applies inside our heads. Dr Vilayanur Ramachandan's fascinating experiments on anosognosia patients seem to show that explaining why a belief is valid and changing your beliefs are separate systems in the brain.

I take Yudkowsky's point that speaking of belief doesn't capture the psychology here precisely because "beliefs" are often taken to be propositional sentences, but our brains don't deal in those much. Instead of talking about what someone "really believes", I suppose he'd prefer to say that the woman speaks-as-if she believes God is omnipotent and omnipresent, but, at least in some instances, behaves-as-if God is not.

Brown says he's annoyed with neo-atheist rationalist fundamentalists sceptics because neo-atheists think that all brains work like theirs or can be convinced to do so, but that thinking is wildly optimistic. This is the point of Brown's Freud vs God post, which you should all go and read. See you in 5 minutes.

Back? Brown's getting this stuff from Dennett and from anthropologists who study religion, such as Pascal Boyer. Boyer details his views over at a sceptics' website, where he tells sceptics off for their narrow understanding of religion. Another anthropologist, Scott Atran, does a similar thing on edge.org, responding to Sam Harris and others in the wake of the Beyond Belief conference back in 2006.

The anthropologists say that religious beliefs should not be understood as propositional statements about the world, however much they resemble them. What of God's omnipresence and omniscience? One thing religious people do with this belief is check whether an action is morally right by imagining what their model of God would think of it. This might be done retrospectively, if a religious context provokes thoughts of God. They certainly don't anticipate-as-if God is in the room and watching.

Brown has linked the ideas of the anthropologists with the observation that most people don't try to formulate coherent propositions on anything, including religion. I don't know whether the anthropologists would agree with this, I'd need to read more of their stuff to tell. It's clear that most religious people do try to draw a map of the real world. As Yudkowsky illustrates with his dragon-believer example, most believers already know what excuses to make for the apparent absence of dragons or gods, even as they claim belief in them, so they're keeping a map of the real world somewhere. The believers without the map are the ones other believers regard either as shiny-eyed lunatics, like the folk who don't go to doctors because God will heal them; or as heroes of the faith for showing such belief, like the monks and martyrs. I'd paraphrase Brown's argument as "most people don't see the virtue of having one map for all occasions, or of being able to articulate it".

Of course, if you're a religious believer, you might find the anthropologists' approach a little patronising. Some of you seem to have beliefs which are propositions about how the world is. As I said over on robhu's journal a while back, Dawkins at least does believers the courtesy of taking them at their word. What do you think?

Galactica finale: disconnected thoughts

2009-03-21T17:17:42Z

Contains spoilers, obviously.

The pace was good until they reached Earth, at which point there were multiple "endings" as we saw in the Lord of the Rings films. infinitemonkeys said Golgafrincham, and I mentioned shaggy God stories (there's this guy called Adama looking for Earth: see what they did there?).

I was sceptical about the way the survivors all decided to chuck away their technology. As Pratchett and Gaiman said, people who try going back to nature soon find out why civilisation has been a quest to get as far away from nature as possible. That seemed like forcing the characters to meet the demands of the plot.

Speaking of Good Omens, Angel Gaius and Angel Six reminded me of Crowley and Aziraphale, somehow (perhaps because Gaius looked a bit demonic). In a way, I thought the explicit talk about God (who doesn't like that name) spoilt the mystery of just what the angels were. If it'd been me, I'd've ended with Adama on his hilltop; the stuff about modern robots made it look like it was going to turn into the Sarah Connor Chronicles.

They got the supernatural stuff right with Kara: she just vanishes, and we never quite find out what she was. She walked with God and was not, for God took her.

Loved the nods to the original BSG: the old style Centurions, and the old theme playing as Adama takes one last look at Galactica (this video and this one are fun if you remember the old series).

The opera house stuff was a nice way to tie off that mystery. The flashbacks worked well to show us the beginnings of the endings we saw. The endings were satisfying (and in Roslin's case, moving). I think Ron Moore did well there.

Now to re-watch the miniseries :-)

Edit: Peter Watts describes it as emotionally satisfying but intellectually empty. Metafilter has more thoughts.

Atheist women

2009-03-15T22:52:04Z

Inasmuch as there's an atheist movement (Dawkins for Pope!), it seems pretty male dominated, both online and off. So, what about the atheist women? They're out there, and this is a post to link to some of them.

Greta Christina is gay and atheist, and draws some parallels between the two. Atheism seems to be a lot harder in the USA than it is here. Greta writes about how to be an ally to atheists in the same way that you might speak of being an ally to any other disadvantaged class of people.
Mathurine (not her real name, for obvious reasons) is an ex-Muslim woman. She wrote a three guest posts over at Tree Dreamer: one the hijab, another on making atheist communities friendly to ex-Muslims, and another answering atheists' questions on Islam.
Lily originally blogged at Leaving Eden, writing about her experiences as a closet atheist at Wheaton College, a Christian college in the USA. Since graduating, she's been blogging as Peaceful Atheist (I've mentioned her before in my posting on doubt). There's an article over there specifically on women in atheism.
No Longer Quivering is the blog of two women who were once part of the Quiverfull movement. As Salon explains in an article about them, that means that as well as accepting the standard evangelical stuff on male leadership, they also rejected birth control and sought to have as many kids as possible. They got out, and are blogging about how they feel about it.

I traditionally googlebomb the word complementarian with a link to Houseplants of Gor. Of course, there are differences between the Gor series and the Bible: one is a historically-based fantasy which, although some people have found it rich enough to base their lives on, undoubtedly advocates a patriarchy based on the "natural roles" of men and women; and the other is a set of books by John Norman.
Deborah Drapper isn't an atheist. She's the Christian girl who was the subject of Deborah 13: Servant of God, a BBC documentary about her and her family (the link goes to a post on the Dawkins site where you can watch it on Youtube). She's something unusual in this country: she's part of a large family (there are hints that they subscribe to the Quiverfull idea) and home-schooled. I was reminded of her after No Longer Quivering because of the point in the documentary where she explains that she belongs to her father until she marries someone.

Deborah comes across as bright, articulate and a firm believer in evangelical Christianity. Her blog has been inundated after the screening of the documentary, but I hope she'll continue to write. Her father also has a blog where you can find out about how the EU is part of the coming world government of the Antichrist, and that the King James Version of the Bible was inspired by God.

Dogs in the Vineyard: sex, religion and guns in a West that never was

2009-03-06T19:38:08Z

The Thursday crew were down a couple of people, so we decided it'd be a good time to run a one-off of Dogs in the Vineyard (mentioned previously here).

The Dogs are young men and women sent to the frontier towns established by the Faith (which isn't quite Mormonism), to bring practical and spiritual help to the community. Sometimes it's the sort of help that comes from the barrel of a gun. After the basic character generation stuff, the game starts with each player saying what they hoped their character accomplished in training, leading to a conflict where the GM takes one side and the player the other, and the character gains another character trait as a result. All the conflicts in the game are like poker matches with dice, with each side having a pool of dice for raising and seeing.

Dramatis Personae

Brother Jeb, played by Tom who jacquic knows: ex-thief who converted to the Faith. At 30, he's a bit older than the other Dogs, who are in their late teens/early 20s. Jeb hopes he can beat a demon. He wakes up in the middle of the night having sleep-walked into the storeroom of the Doghouse, mysteriously left unlocked. Whispers in his head are tempting him to steal the valuables in the storeroom but he spots something like a shadow in the corner and throws some sacred earth (which is also in the storeroom) at it. Brother Jeb got a trait of "I exorcised a demon".

Brother Isaac, played by Rob who is not robhu: child of converts, very strictly brought up on an isolated farm, tends to see things in black and white. Hopes he can learn something about the real world. As suggested in the rules, Rob played Brother Isaac before the change his player wanted, and scribb1e played the thing trying to make him change. Isaac follows a thief who steals fruit from a stall in Bridal Falls (which isn't quite Salt Lake City) and finds he's taken it to his home to feed his starving family. Great raises and sees: Isaac: "You should have gone to the Faith for help", Thief: "You're the Faith, you help" (what the rules call Reversing the Blow). scribb1e ran out of dice and Isaac's player narrated how Isaac makes the man take the stuff back and then Isaac buys him food instead. At Tom's suggestion, Isaac got a trait of "There's always a perfectly reasonable solution".

Brother Ezra, played by me: 3rd generation Faithful, brought up on a big farm with brothers and sisters all over the place. Overcompensates to get attention. Ezra already had "I was top in Sunday school" as trait, so I decided Ezra shoots scripture from the hip and thinks that can solve anything. I wanted him to learn some humility. The conflict played out in the Faith's hospital, where he tried not very successfully to comfort a dying girl with words from the Book of Life. She died, and he got "I can't do everything by myself". He took quite a lot of fallout, which lead to a relationship to the dead girl, and a bump to his "Heart" stat.

The town, played by scribb1e, was the rule book's Tower Creek example with the names filed off as scribb1e knew I'd read the rule book. Tower Creek is recommended for new players as it's hairy: it goes all the way to hate and murder in the Something's Wrong progression, stopping off for some adultery and false priesthood along the way. In our version, it was called Dove Hill. Brother Ezra has a great aunt there, Sister Polly, and Brother Isaac has a cousin, Celestina.

Dove Hill

The Dogs ride in to Dove Hill and end up at the Steward's place. He's asking for a blessing on his wife, who can't conceive. The players think he's talking about Sister Eleanor, who's with him, but it turns out he's also married to Sister Celestina, and she's the one who can't have kids. The Steward has 3 daughters by Eleanor who are married off, but hopes for a son to run the farm. The Faith allows polygamy (but not polyandry) but Eleanor doesn't approve: Celestina is an interloper and young and pretty to boot.

Ezra and Isaac go with Eleanor to the local creek and find Celestina. They split up to have private conversations with each woman. Eleanor tries to persuade Ezra that Celestina should be made to divorce the Steward: the lack of children shows the King of Life doesn't favour the marriage. There's a conflict but Ezra knows that the Book of Life says the King of Life hates divorce, and he wins easily.

Isaac talks to his cousin. Celestina says that Eleanor won't leave her and the Steward alone together, which makes the whole conceiving thing a bit tricky.

Back at the Steward's place, before the Dogs can get into this, there's a knock on the door. Sister Maria wants something, and holds a whisphered conversation with the Steward. "You can't ask them to do that, it's wrong", he exclaims. "That" turns out to be naming Maria's baby. Fine: it's one of the duties of a Dog. The only problem is the baby is dead. Stillborn, and buried in a pathetically small grave near the meeting house. The players hew pretty closely to the Mormon idea of baptism for the dead, even though the rules allow them to make up the Faith as they go along. There's no conflict as all the Dogs decide they'll perform the naming ceremony over the grave, and do so post haste. Ezra decides to name the baby Grace. Maria sings "Amazing Grace", and it's kind of poignant.

On the way back, the Dogs meet Brother Nathan, the local lawman. He wants them to carry out a wedding. Fine: it's one of the duties. But he actually wants them to confirm a wedding that Sister Polly carried out, between him and Sister Celestina. Turns out Nathan and Celestina were having an affair, and Polly got it into her head that the best way to deal with it was to marry them: after all, a man can have two wives, so why can't a woman have two husbands? Ezra and Isaac win a conflict with Nathan on whether they'll promise to do the wedding.

Meanwhile, Jeb wanders away from the lawman for some reason, and finds Polly's house. She admits to the wedding, but says she was just trying to do the right thing. She tries to persuade Jeb to leave town as nothing good can come of the Dogs' presence, but loses the conflict: Dogs have a duty to sort this stuff out.

The Dogs sleep in the Steward's haybarn. Jeb is awoken by the feeling he got when the demons attacked him in the storeroom. He tracks it past the Steward's house and thinks it's gone to Polly's place. The conflict here was odd: the stakes were "Do I track the demon?", but scribb1e and Tom weren't too sure how to raise and see in this metaphysical conflict. scribb1e gave away more of the location each time she had to block, which seemed wrong: if she'd taken the blow or Jeb had reversed it, maybe. Anyhoo, Jeb came back for the other Dogs. It was morning by now, and they all rushed over to Aunt Polly's.

Jeb continued to experience the Reek of Wrongness about the place, but the other Dogs sense nothing, and just see an old lady in her nightgown. Maybe she's in danger. They rush inside. It's a one room house with no visible demons. Hmmm... Jeb asks Polly to hold his Book of Life for him, but she demurs. Uh oh. We kick off a conflict with stakes of "Do we find out what's going on?", which escalates suddenly when Polly becomes possessed and starts flinging kitchen knives. At this point, it's pretty obvious what's going on, and we decide we've probably got the stakes wrong. scribb1e reckons she should have just narrated us finding out Polly's a sorceror and then let us decide what to do as a conflict. As it was, when Jeb accused Polly of invoking the demons to try to help Celestina, scribb1e gave way: we'd worked out what was going on.

We were running out of time and didn't want to start a follow on conflict. Jeb's all in favour of shooting Polly, but Ezra's reluctant to shoot his old aunt, even if she's been summoning demons which, rather then helping Celestina get pregnant, have been causing miscarriages and stillbirths. Just for fun, Ezra's the only one with a sidearm (the other two have long rifles which are back in the barn) so there could even have been some conflict between the Dogs.

We'd decided Nathan can't marry Celestina because it'd be condoning adultery, and their marriage was invalid in any case, because Polly's a false priest. scribb1e reckoned Nathan might try to leave the Faith and take Celestina with him, but we never played that out.

In the end, we had to stop as it had gone midnight, but alas, the juicy conflicts were still to be played out. lumpley recommends against spending too much time with everything shrouded in mystery: the fun in Dogs is resolving the impossible situations, not in working out who's sinning against whom. I don't think scribb1e did too much of the mystery stuff, but we did spent a while resolving the initial conflicts where everyone in town wants to persuade the Dogs to back their side.

I think another hour would have enabled us to sort the sinners out to our satisfaction, and that more practice at the game would have enabled us to sort out stakes for conflicts better. We spent some time sorting out how the rules worked, too. The co-operative story telling was interesting. scribb1e said that GMing it felt not too dissimilar to being a player, and indeed it was Tom (in his initiatiory conflict) who turned the supernatural dial up from demons as bad luck to demons having some visible presence, albeit as shadows where none should be. I enjoyed it and liked the poker raise/see mechanic for conflicts, even if it wasn't clear how to use it for conflicts which weren't with a particular person. Would play again.

Grilling Dawkins

2009-03-04T23:15:39Z

Dawkins Our Leader was on Minnesota public radio. I was interested because some people on the radio station's live blog of the interview were saying that Kerri Miller, the presenter, was too aggressive. I don't think she was. Dawkins isn't a Muslim or Christian in need of molly-coddling lest he accuse people who disagree with him of being disrespectful. Her directness got quite a few interesting responses from Dawkins:

Deism is Wrong but Respectable. There was a bit of fuss on some Christian blogs about this when he said it in the Dawkins/Lennox debate. It seems as if people have an idea of Dawkins as the Pope of Atheism. His arguments are soldiers and any concession towards theism is a sign of victory for God. As Ruth Gledhill found, he seems the opposite of the Pope of Atheism in person.

Theism is Ignorant and Infantile. Dawkins feels no shame in referring to popular theism as a belief in an imaginary friend. Rilstone says this metaphor is actually pretty close in some ways, so it's not clear why so many Christians get upset about it.

Dawkins wonders why sophisticated theists bother to call themselves Christians when they don't believe in any of the uniquely Christian stuff (virgin birth, water into wine, even resurrection in some cases). He shows a touching faith that a Church of England clergyman would accept this stuff (he's talking about Polkinghorne, whose theological position I don't know).

Theist scientists like Francis Collins show a double-mindedness that Dawkins finds curious. Not everyone is convinced that single-mindedness is a virtue, though, as recent convert Sam Harris argues: "If Francis Collins wants to believe that the historical Jesus was actually raised from the dead and still exists in an ethereal form which renders him both clairvoyant and mildly disapproving of masturbation, these beliefs do not even slightly detract from his stature as a scientist."

Mysteries exist to be solved, not celebrated. Dawkins says he has faith (I'm looking forward to seeing the first theist quote mining of this statement), not that the mysteries will be solved, but that trying to solve them is worthwhile. The greatest mystery he's aware of is the subjective experience of human consciousness.

What of the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus? Dawkins reckons the evidence is poor. Like evolution, we have to rely on the clues that remain. Those for the resurrection aren't very good.

Will Dawkins be an atheist on his deathbed, without hoping for an afterlife? Probably: minds and brains seem to be linked, there's no reason to think you can have a mind without a brain.

Why has Dawkins written The Greatest Show on Earth? Not to reach the dyed-in-the-wool Creationist, but the people who haven't thought about it yet, the same people he hoped to reach with The God Delusion.

Not a tame lion

2009-02-24T01:46:20Z

Wandering around the web recently, I found Prisoner of Narnia, an article by Adam Gopnik in the New Yorker from 2005. It's about the life of C.S. Lewis, and the enduring attraction of the Narnia books.

The link to the article came from Daylight Atheism, where they liked this bit:

A startling thing in Lewis's letters to other believers is how much energy and practical advice is dispensed about how to keep your belief going: they are constantly writing to each other about the state of their beliefs, as chronic sinus sufferers might write to each other about the state of their noses. Keep your belief going, no matter what it takes — the thought not occurring that a belief that needs this much work to believe in isn't really a belief but a very strong desire to believe.

It's that belief in belief thing again. This has also come up in my sporadic discussion with apdraper2000, where he's asking why I spend so much time blogging about theism. If you want to know what my motivation is, you can read the thread.

Of course, any Christian worth their salt would be able to you that the reason it's so hard to keep believing in the existence of God as compared to say, believing in the existence of atoms, is because the world is currently a hostile place, where the believer is a footsoldier in a cosmic battle, facing the flaming arrows of Original Sin, Satan, Dust, the BBC's blatant bias, the Patriarchy, the Illuminati, New Labour, Zionists, and Communists. Let us waste no more time on the naive idea that if you keep having to shore up your belief in something, it just might be because you're wrong.

Rather, it's the article's insight into Lewis's psyche which is interesting. Gopnik portrays Lewis as a mystic who saw Christianity as a way to keep the magic, the joy of life, real. I was reminded of Jesus in John's gospel, promising life in all its fullness.

Cardinal Manning agonized over eating too much cake, and was eventually drawn to the Church of Rome to keep himself from doing it again. Lewis didn’t embrace Christianity because he had eaten too much cake; he embraced it because he thought that it would keep the cake coming, that the Anglican Church was God’s own bakery. “The story of Christ is simply a true myth,” he says he discovered that night, “a myth working on us in the same way as the others, but with this tremendous difference that it really happened.”

It sounds like Lewis might have agreed with my contention that scriptural religion is lived fan-fiction, although, of course, he'd have said it was fan-truth.

Gopnik says that the believer and unbeliever can agree on the importance of imagination and stories as a way to reach the parts that both institutional Christianity and a narrow materialism do not reach. The final couple of paragraphs are particularly good, and we learn a lot about Lewis and Tolkien along they way. Definitely worth a read.

Edited: I changed "it just might be because it's bollocks" to "it just might be because you're wrong" after a Christian found the former form offensive. I'm recording that here so it doesn't look like I'm hiding something.