GCU Dancer on the Midway

Welcome to Planet Atheism

Tue, 05 Jan 2010 22:17:06 GMT

This blog is now syndicated over at Planet Atheism, the aggregator for all your online atheism needs.

If you're reading this there, hello and welcome. I'm a former evangelical Christian who's now an atheist. You can read the story of how I de-converted, and listen to me talking about it on Premier Christian Radio. There's more about me and this blog on my profile page.

If you're new here, you might want to start by reading the stuff in the "best of" category. Have fun!

Link blog: religion, funny, christianity, atheism

Fri, 01 Jan 2010 12:19:58 GMT

Chris Wood - atheist spiritual - Come Down Jehovah: Chris Wood's atheist spiritual/folk song, which I quite liked. HT to Andrew Rilstone.
(tags: youtube video music atheism folk religion jehovah)
Belle De Jour Is The New Pretty Woman - The Rumpus.net: "when somebody like Belle de Jour shows up, an astonishing amount of energy seems to get spent on rushing to remind the general public that she is not representative of prostitution"
(tags: media prostitution uk)
Is aviation security mostly for show? - CNN.com: Bruce Schneier: "When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense."
(tags: security terrorism politics travel news bruce-schneier)
Rebutting Reasonable Faith: Remembering the Lost: "William Lane Craig addresses a question from a Christian who's troubled by one of the most wicked doctrines of that theology, the dogma of Hell. Craig's correspondent wonders whether the saved will feel compassion for the damned, but also worries that it would be a violation of free will for God to erase their memories of their lost loved ones."
(tags: atheism christianity heaven religion hell william-lane-craig)
Salvaging Santa « de-conversion: "If we are to save our Santa culture from this insidious secularism that makes mockery of our faith, we need to acknowledge our weaknesses, and adapt to the changing cultural climate. Here are a few suggestions."
(tags: parody funny religion christianity santa christmas)
Kurt Vonnegut Motivational Posters | Sloshspot Blog: Motivational posters with Vonnegut quotes on them. I like: "PURPOSE: I tell you, we are here on Earth to fart around, and don't let anybody tell you different." (hat tip to andrewducker).
(tags: vonnegut quotations funny posters quotes)

My best posts of 2009

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 12:33:03 GMT

As 2009 is nearly over, here's a selection of what I think are my best posts this year:

On doubt: the post which got the most comments this year. Answers to questions various big name Christians like to ask atheists, and a question for the audience: what should I doubt?
Belief in cats: or rather, belief in belief: are "beliefs" really propositions people accept? Should we take people at their word when they tell us what they believe?
Religion and cartography or I Was a Teenage Theistic Evolutionist": is evolution really incompatible with Christianity? Yes and no.
Evangelism training or I Was a Teenage Evangelical: how evangelicals are trained to evangelise, what they think is wrong with non-Christians, and how to respond.
What is faith?: and is it a virtue? How the word is used by Christians and atheists. How making faith into a "relationship" makes it harder to discard incorrect beliefs.
Dawkins: a bit like Jesus: how those people who convert to Christianity were Not True Atheists. A parody of certain Christian responses to de-converts.
Pining for the fjords or I Was A Twentysomething Matt Redman Fan: belief in belief again. The Kara Neumann case, and why most Christians won't do what the Neumanns did.
Losing My Religion or The Truth About CICCU: talk to CUAAS: I spoke to the Cambridge University Atheist and Agnostic Society in October. My notes cover a lot of the reasons why I'm not a Christian, in brief, and also some stuff about what life was like when I was one.

See you in 2010.

The reason for the season

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:37:57 GMT

At this time of year, my thoughts are inevitably drawn towards the time when He will return. Here's a video which I hope will explain what I mean, which you should all take a moment to view. If you have any questions, this leaflet should help to answer them, or you could see my previous posting on the subject.

A very Merry Christmas to all my readers!

Edited to add: if you enjoyed that, you'll probably enjoy the rest: we were listening to them while putting the tree up.

Link blog: christianity, religion, education, science

Thu, 24 Dec 2009 14:22:12 GMT

Tabloid Watch: You can't upset a 14yo girl with leukaemia any more - it's political correctness gone mad!: The other shoe drops in the "Christian teacher sacked for offering to pray" story (mentioned previously): the parents of the 14 year old with leukaemia have spoken to the press about the teacher's actions. Tabloid Watch links to a bunch of places where it's been reported.
(tags: christianity religion education)
Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up | Magazine: "The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered, especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories. The problem with science, then, isn’t that most experiments fail — it’s that most failures are ignored."
(tags: science psychology neuroscience brain failure research kuhn)
Overtime by Charles Stross and Carl Wiens: The Laundry at Christmas, hurrah.
(tags: fiction horror laundry comedy charles-stross sf scifi sci-fi)
Whence Comes God’s Nature?: "God, so we're told, is eternal and unchanging. He is pure reason, pure mind, pure spirit - no physical needs to fulfill, no past history, none of the contingent events that make humana nature what it is. So how is it that he has, just like us, a complex nature with specific likes and dislikes? He did not undergo the process by which human beings acquire their preferences, so where does he get them from? Why does he prefer things one way and not another?"
(tags: theology religion christianity atheism)
Dark power: Grand designs for interstellar travel - space - 25 November 2009 - New Scientist: Bussard Ramjets collecting dark matter, and tiny black holes emitting Hawking radiation: two possible starship drive technologies.
(tags: science space flight physics interstellar)
Church recruiting drive targets two-year-olds: The Graun reports that the Church of England is trying to re-connect with children and teenagers, via youth clubs and providing material for the daily act of collective worship (still legally required in state schools, but often quietly ignored). While I think church schools should not get government funding, on the whole, school assembly Anglicanism is a vaccination against more serious sorts of Christianity, so I'm not as worried as the Graun or the commenters.
(tags: education religion children c-of-e church-of-england anglicanism christianity)

Link blog: funny, politics, equality, humour

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 20:30:19 GMT

Heresy Corner: Equality before the law: "If Harriet Harman's odious Equality Bill reaches the statute book in anything like its current form (in other words, if the House of Lords doesn't manage to delay it before a general election intervenes) then there may well be social and legal chaos in this country. There will also be a lot more work for lawyers. A lot." - Heresiarch reckons the Equality Bill is a bad thing.
(tags: law politics equality)
Killing In The Climb - rathergood.com: Why have them vying for the Christmas number one when you can combine them?
(tags: music video rathergood funny mashup)
DAVID SIMON - Vice Magazine: "David Simon is responsible for one of the greatest feats of storytelling of the past century, and that’s the entire five-season run of the television series The Wire." - Vice Magazine interview him.
(tags: vicemagazine the-wire tv-programmes tv television wire crime drugs politics journalism)
Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World | The Onion - America's Finest News Source: Members of the earth's earliest known civilization, the Sumerians, looked on in shock and confusion some 6,000 years ago as God, the Lord Almighty, created Heaven and Earth.
(tags: religion funny onion history creationism)
IEEE Spectrum: Math Quiz: Why Do Men Predominate?: "among top math performers, the gender gap doesn’t exist in some ethnic groups and in some countries. The researchers conclude that culture is the main reason more men excel at the highest math levels in most countries."
(tags: maths mathematics gender feminism equality)
The C Programming Language: 4.10 by Brian W Kernighan & Dennis M Ritchie & HP Lovecraft: "C functions may be used recursively; that is, a function may call itself either directly or indirectly. Uninquiring souls may take this as just another peculiarity of those C folk, of whose ways their neighbours speak little to outsiders but much among themselves.

Keener news-followers, however, wondered at the events of the winter of 1927-28, the abnormally large number of calls placed upon the stack, the swiftness with which that list was sorted, the disturbing lack of heap allocation throughout the proceedings, and the secrecy surrounding the affair."
(tags: funny humour parody C programming lovecraft horror)

"Teacher suspended in prayer row"

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 21:03:00 GMT

The BBC reports that Olive Jones, a school teacher who's also a Christian, was suspended for offering to pray for a sick pupil. This case looks similar to that of Caroline Petrie, a nurse who was also suspended (though later reinstated) after she offered to pray for a patient.

The Daily Mail has a longer interview with Mrs Jones than the BBC. I take articles in the Heil with a pinch of salt, but I assume they wouldn't directly misquote her, as they're on her side. Some salient points from their story: Jones is a supply teacher who visits the homes of kids who are too ill to come to school. After a previous incident, she'd been warned before that it wasn't appropriate to pray with her pupils. The parent who complained had previously complained after Jones gave a testimony (evangelical jargon, usually referring to a story about how someone became a Christian, told for the purpose of evangelism, though in this case it was about how God saved her from being crushed by a tractor) in front of the parent, but the complaint hadn't reached the right people, so when she did so again in front of the parent and child and also offered to pray, the parent complained to the school. Mrs Jones is now suspended pending an investigation. It's not clear whether the decision to investigate happened after the press got involved: it looks like Jones is a contractor who can be fired without notice, not a full time employee of the school.

Inevitably, the Heil's commenters, and those at Cranmer's blog, blame Muslims, political correctness, New Labour etc. etc. I suspect that if the story had been about a Muslim or Pagan doing what Mrs Jones did, the Mail's take on it would have been rather different (though I hope that the school's response would not have been).

Jones's actions as described by the Heil seemed to me to be deserving of disciplinary action from her employers. The same would apply if a Muslim or a Pagan had done the same, or if a strident neo-sceptical toxic rationalist neo-atheist had told the kid there's no God and no miracles. Teachers aren't paid to give unprompted religious "testimonies", and shouldn't assume that they're welcome (especially in someone's home). If the parent or the kid had asked about Jones's religious beliefs, it'd be different, but there's no evidence that this happened. It's beholden on the school to ensure they comply with employment law, and firing for the first offence seems too harsh, but if someone's on an at-will contract and has been warned once before, I can perfectly understand the decision to fire them.

I don't think this is a free speech issue: Jones is free to pray on her own time (which will surely be as effective as praying with the family), and indeed, she was free to do what the Heil said she did and accept the consequences.

Tom Harris, MP and Ian Dale have further thoughts on the matter.

Edited to add: Tabloid Watch has the story from the parents who complained. Their daughter is 14 and has leukaemia, and they'd endured Jones's evangelism for a while before complaining.

Evidence that doesn't demand anything very much

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 00:47:50 GMT

A couple of the blogs I read recently had discussions on the resurrection of Jesus: Common Sense Atheism and Parchment and Pen.

The wrong kind of God

In the comment thread over at Comment Sense Atheism, I wondered about the role of natural theology (that is, stuff like the Kalam Cosmological Argument) in preparing the ground for belief in the resurrection. When William Lane Craig debated against Bart Ehrman, Craig said "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." According to Ayer (that is, the commenter over at Common Sense Atheism, not the logical positivist), "Natural theology shows the existence of the monotheistic God; the resurrection, in its religio-historical context, shows that that monotheistic God is the one described by Jesus and the disciples, whose redemptive purpose is laid out in the Bible."

There's an unwarranted assumption here. Suppose we grant, for the sake of argument, that the Kalam argument is valid. This gets us as far as deism. To get to Christianity, we need the resurrection, as Ayer says. But if God didn't do it, the resurrection is fantastically improbable, which I think means the New Testament evidence alone shouldn't convince us unless we assume that God is the sort of god who might raise Jesus from the dead. But why should we assume that? Remember, we need that assumption to bolster the NT evidence sufficiently for us to believe it, but the only available "evidence" that God is that sort of god is the resurrection itself, the very thing we're seeking to prove. I've not seen an argument from Craig (or any other apologist) which avoids this apparent circularity.

Simple explanations

So we're stuck with being deists, which is a bit boring: as far as I know, they don't have any choons. Perhaps we might instead argue that the New Testament evidence is sufficient on its own: it shows Jesus rose, and hence (if we're feeling charitable about it) that there's a god of the right sort, Christianity is true, greatest hits of Charles Wesley here we come.

This was what the Parchment and Pen posting was about. C Michael Patton argues that alternative explanations are less simple than just accepting that Jesus rose from the dead. There was a thread on the local newsgroup, cam.misc, where another Christian made the same argument.

I remembered that Heinlein once said the simplest explanation is always "The lady down the street is a witch; she did it." What's wrong with that explanation? It hides complexity behind language, as Alex Selby explains. I ended up saying that the Christian account is "simpler" in some sense, but not in a sense that lends it credibility. In this sense, the "simplest" explanation for what you see in Derren Brown's stage shows is that mind reading really works and he's a master at it: all that other stuff he does to achieve the effects is extremely convoluted in comparison. Alex doesn't think we should describe that sense as simple. I can see his point, and perhaps I should have said that the Christian account feels simpler, rather than that it is.

At this point, a popular apologetic move is to accuse your opponent of assuming naturalism, materialism, scientism and other bad -isms (remember: if you have no other arguments, you can always play Name that Worldview). I'm not sure whether that's a valid move. I think you'd need an argument that using this informational Occam's Razor won't do the job in the case of non-material stuff, which again, I haven't seen anyone attempt.

Books: the Greg Mandel trilogy, by Peter F Hamilton

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 00:14:56 GMT

Peter F Hamilton's Greg Mandel books are the only cyberpunk stories I know of set in and around Peterborough. As my memories of the place are of being dragged around the big shopping centres there as a kid, it's hardly a name to conjure with: it's like setting your story in Milton Keynes, or something (though Charles Stross did that successfully). After global warming, Peterborough has a Mediterranean climate (a little far-fetched, perhaps, but I can't quite remember how much we knew about global warming in 1993, when the first book was published). At the edge of the flooded Fens, it's thriving port, filled with refugees from the floods, smugglers and whatnot.

The trilogy follows Greg Mandel, a former officer in the English Army who fought in the Jihad Wars. Mandel was given psychic powers as part of an experimental unit, the Mindstar Brigade. He can sense strong emotions, and gets flashes of intuition. Now a civilian, he makes a living as a private detective. As the trilogy begins, England has just revolted against the People's Socialist Party, who took power in the chaos after the Warming. When the PSP largely disbanded the army, Mandel spent some time as an urban guerilla on the council estates of Peterborough, fighting with the PSP's supporters. As we first meet him, he's on his way to assassinate a former member of the hated People's Constables, who used to beat people well with their magic wellness sticks. He's soon tangled up in solving problems for Event Horizon, an emerging English mega-corporation. Event Horizon aren't a stereotypical evil corporation: they're the good guys, a sort of mega family firm. Julia Evans, the boss, is another recurring character in the books, though, reassuringly, she's not Mandel's love interest.

Reading the books after The Magicians, I found Hamilton's style tight and easy to read rather than sparkling or poetic. Sometimes we get a cyberpunk version of Hello magazine: he's got an irritating habit of carefully describing what people are wearing when he introduces them and detailing the makes and models of cars, weapons and so on; and almost everyone is beautiful. That said, the plot rattles along satisfyingly, with some gripping set-pieces. Of course, there are big corporations who duel via their hired mercenaries, spies and hackers, but these standard cyperpunk elements are combined with mysteries for Mandel to solve, mixing the SF stuff with detective fiction.

Hamilton went on to write several door-stops in the Night's Dawn trilogy (the dead come back... in space, with Al Capone as the principal villain: strangely not as bad as it sounds, although the ending was a let down) and the Commonwealth Saga (which contains the neat idea of running railway lines through stable wormholes). I like the Greg Mandel books for their comparative brevity, pace, and their English take on cyberpunk.

Link blog: religion, dualism, francis-collins, discovery-institute

Mon, 14 Dec 2009 21:53:24 GMT

Substance dualism: QualiaSoup has a new video up, a short argument against substance dualism (the idea that consciousness arises from separate kind of mental substance outside the physical world).
(tags: consciousness philosophy dualism qualia)
Theodicy III: Primo Levi versus Francis Collins: Jerry Coyne has been reading Francis Collins's "The Language of God" as well as Levi's works on Auschwitz. Not surprisingly, he doesn't find Collins's theodicy very convincing.
(tags: theology religion jerry-coyne francis-collins)
Rowan Williams' choice | Andrew Brown | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk: Andrew Brown kicks some righteous ass: "Under Williams, the church that marries two women who love each other is to be thrown out of the Anglican Communion. The church that would jail them both for life, and would revile and persecute their defenders, stays snugly in his bosom. Not even the Archbishop's remarkable gift for obfuscation can conceal these facts forever."
(tags: homosexuality politics uganda uk religion christianity anglicanism rowan-williams)
Discovery Institute: The Mask Falls Away: The IDers at the DI go bonkers about the Climategate emails: "A cabal of leading scientists, politicians, and media concubines have conspired to lie about global warming. The reasons are obvious: power and money. … I’m not sure that the scientific community can or will respond to this debacle in a courageous or ethical way. The ID-Darwinism debate clearly demonstrates that venality and shameless self-interest, as well as a toxic leftist-atheist ideology, runs very deep in the scientific community." I'm adding "toxic" to my standard "neo-sceptical strident fundamentalist neo-atheist" spiel.
(tags: lolxians climate global-warming intelligent-design discovery-institute)

Book: The Magicians by Lev Grossman: Harry Potter and the postgraduate ennui

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 23:48:36 GMT

Lev Grossman's The Magicians is Harry Potter meets Narnia meets Brideshead Revisited meets Douglas Coupland.

The protagonist, Quentin Coldwater, starts off as a maladjusted geek who's in love with his best friend's girlfriend. He escapes into the Fillory books, which describe the adventures of a family of English schoolchildren in a magical land filled with talking animals. After his interviewer for a place at Princeton drops dead, he's invited to join Brakebills, an elite magical college.

Brakebills is Hogwarts, but with more grit. Without the magic, Hogwarts is an English boarding school. The nearest mundane equivalent to Brakebills is a small Oxbridge college. Undergrads drink and screw, as undergrads do; everyone knows everyone's business; new arrivals end up reeling from the shock of being given work which taxes them and of being surrounded by people as intelligent as them, if not more so. It turns out that magic isn't about learning the secrets of the universe, or waving a wand and uttering some cod Latin and having everything just work: it's more like learning Basque while juggling. So far, so very familar.

The Brakebills section is enjoyable: Quentin grows up a bit, acquires some comrades, chooses to face a trial, and overcomes it. But on graduating, he and his friends are lost. Not just in the come down after the party, or the come down after an intense intellectual effort (recall Philip Swallow in Changing Places, who saw the run up to his final exams as the high point of his intellectual career), but because as magicians they've become the idle rich, people who can have anything they want, if only they knew what that was. Only Quentin's much more sensible girlfriend, Alice, seems to be able to cope with the existential problems of being a wizard. The rest of them need a story to be in, and don't have one.

Many people in that situation end up finding a religion and writing their lives as fan-fiction. The magicians go one better, and find their way into a story by finding their way into ~~Narnia~~Fillory. Will this finally give their lives some meaning? I won't spoil the ending by telling you.

Grossman's borrowings from other works are done knowingly: the Brakebills students are as media-savvy as any teenagers, so of course they make jokes about Quidditch; the Fillory section reads like someone's report of a dungeon crawl (albeit a particularly well-written one), so the magicians arm themselves with spells they name Magic Missile and Fireball after their D&D counterparts. But Grossman's not merely mugging for the camera, writing a modern Bored of the Rings. He wants to jar us by combining a modern novel with a children's fantasy setting, and he succeeds. Watching the magicians stumble through Fillory is like hearing someone swear in a cathedral.

Grossman can write, and supplies us with wit as well as grit. I read the book in one sitting, after which the sound of birds outside the window reminded me that sleep might be a good idea. Abigail Nussbaum (whose review you should read, although be warned it gives away more of the plot than I have) wishes that Grossman had the courage of his convictions. I like the relentlessly grim SF novel as much as anyone, but I find it hard to fault Grossman for giving his protagonist a second chance. I enjoyed it in any case. Recommended.

Link blog: religion, funny, science, atheism

Mon, 07 Dec 2009 23:31:43 GMT

The Punchtape Letters: "My Dear Malware,

Thank you for your latest news. I agree that your bombarding of on-line programming sites with questions about “cascading style sheets” (whatever they may be) and “rounded corners” (as if anyone cared) will irritate and annoy a certain number (possibly even a large number) of programmers, but it seems a lot of effort to go to."
(tags: funny programming computers c.s.-lewis parody screwtape c++)
Creating God in one's own image: Research in the psychology of religion shows that people tend to think God thinks what they think: "People may use religious agents as a moral compass, forming impressions and making decisions based on what they presume God as the ultimate moral authority would believe or want. The central feature of a compass, however, is that it points north no matter what direction a person is facing. This research suggests that, unlike an actual compass, inferences about God's beliefs may instead point people further in whatever direction they are already facing."
(tags: religion psychology science politics god morality)
Atheism: Proving The Negative: Encyclopedia Entry: Atheism: Matt McCormick's draft of an encyclopedia entry on various arguments for and against atheism.
(tags: atheism religion matt-mccormick theodicy design kalam)
In the Pipeline: Things I Won't Work With: Derek Lowe, a medicinal chemist, has a section of his blog on the subject of really nasty chemicals. Light hearted yet terrifying.
(tags: science funny humour smell chemistry dangerous explosives)
Troy Jollimore on Karen Armstrong’s ‘The Case for God’ - Book Review: "Armstrong may perhaps make a plausible claim in asserting that faith, as understood by mainstream religious traditions before the advent of modernity, involved more than “mere” belief in the modern sense; but if the problem with religious life is that it encourages false, absurd, unjustified beliefs, showing that it does other things as well is not sufficient."
(tags: religion philosophy atheism karen-armstrong apophatic christianity)

Philosophy of Science: Jeffrey L. Kasser

Thu, 03 Dec 2009 16:47:29 GMT

Jeffrey L. Kasser's lecture course on the Philosophy of Science is currently on sale at a reduced price from the Teaching Company. It's $50 (£30) for the MP3 downloads, a quarter of its usual price. You get 36 lectures of 30 minutes each, so I reckon that's good value for money.

The reviews on the Teaching Company site are almost all positive, but almost all say the course is densely packed and makes you work. I'd agree with that. I'm not sure how previous knowledge of science or philosophy you need as prerequisites, but I reckon any reasonably educated listener could get something out of the course.

Personally, though the subject matter was dry in places, I really enjoyed the course: Kasser isn't a boring lecturer, and leavens the dry bits with some humour (the broco saxo dile and the 500 pound beagles stuck in my mind). I'd recommend the course if you're interested in discussions of what science is, how and whether it makes progress, whether science discovers the "truth", and so on; or indeed if you're just interested in trouncing religious apologists who persist in describing Richard Dawkins as a logical positivist (he's a naive scientific realist, FFS).

Link blog: religion, science, politics, christianity

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:07:02 GMT

How to Think About Science: Metafilter links to a bunch of podcasts from modern historians and philosophers of science. I've linked to Mefi rather than the podcasts as there are some interesting comments from valkyryn in the thread, on what Shapin and Schaffer were saying about the role of trust in the scientific community.
(tags: audio science metafilter history philosophy)
The late, mannerist years of identity politics: "I am X, and I am different from Y. Other people are ignorant of the difference between X and Y. They must be educated. People, you must call me X and respect my difference from yourself, and from Y. You must refer to me by the term I have chosen to refer to myself by, and stay tuned for any changes I choose to make in this label, and new terms you must use to describe me -- those new terms which the stigma treadmill or reclamation of previously-taboo terms may, from time to time, make it necessary for me to substitute."
(tags: identity politics gender feminism transexualism)
A gay witch hunt in Uganda: Andrew Brown: "A bill currently before the Ugandan parliament (pdf) proposes seven year prison sentences for discussing homosexuality; life imprisonment for homosexual acts; and death for a second offence. Sober observers believe it will be passed. The Anglican church in Uganda appears to support it, and the Church of England in this country is absolutely silent."
(tags: homosexuality morality anglicanism religion christianity sex uganda john-sentamu sentamu)
Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name: Christian commenter on Unreasonable Faith: "All ex-Christians are in league with Satan and are fully aware of it, don’t let yourselves be fooled into believing otherwise." Bugger, I've been rumbled. Time to buy a red cape...
(tags: atheism ex-christian de-conversion satan lolxians christianity religion)
Because As We All Know, The Green Party Runs the World.: Peter Watts on the email leaks from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. "That’s how science works. It’s not a hippie love-in; it’s rugby."
(tags: global-warming climate science peter-watts politics environment email leak)
Richard Norman - Beyond belief: Richard Norman on the "New Believers": Terry Eagleton, Karen Armstrong and such like, the people who say religion is not remotely about believing stuff. "I cannot see how, in the end, a distinctive religious identity can be possible unless it is based on the acceptance of at least some non-metaphorical factual beliefs – beliefs about the existence of a personal deity and about how his intentions and purposes explain our world. Those beliefs do, inescapably, need to be rationally defended. And they can’t be. On that point, certainly, Dawkins is right."
(tags: richard-norman belief religion karen-armstrong terry-eagleton eagleton richard-dawkins)
'The Evolution of Confusion' by Dan Dennett, AAI 2009: Dennett on his project to interview clergy who no longer believe but are closeted (Dennett explicitly makes the analogy with gay people in the 1950s), on "deepities" in theology (interestingly, he rejects criticisms that other 3 horsemen don't know enough theology or philosophy), and on how we needn't suppose some people sat down and conspired to make up religions.
(tags: religion video dennett evolution daniel-dennett theology memes deepity)
The Daily Mash - CLIMATE CHANGE EMAILS STOP GLACIERS FROM MELTING: "This is the smoking iceberg that fires a polar bear of truth between the eyes of hysteria and communism."
(tags: funny climate environment satire global-warming science)

My inner witness is tingling

Sun, 29 Nov 2009 22:54:15 GMT

In her series on Christian Belief Through the Lens of Cognitive Science, Valerie Tarico reports on the work of neurologist Robert Burton. Burton argues that "Despite how certainty feels, it is neither a conscious choice nor even a thought process. Certainty and similar states of knowing what we know arise out of involuntary brain mechanisms that, like love or anger, function independently of reason." I thought of Burton's stuff recently: over on Common Sense Atheism, Luke Muehlhauser linked to William Lane Craig's Q&A blog. Someone asks whether Craig would still be a Christian if his favourite arguments were defeated or if Jesus' bones were found, and Craig responds by saying that "even in the face of evidence against God which we cannot refute, we ought to believe in God on the basis of His Spirit's witness". Muehlhauser remarks that Craig "doesn't give a damn about evidence".

Muehlhauser is right to say that the inner witness of the Holy Spirit cannot be good evidence. People will believe God has caused certain beliefs to arise in them regardless of whether God has or not. It's hard to see how evangelicals like Craig could disagree with this, since, for example, they presumably do not think that God convinced Muslims to be Muslim, whereas at least some Muslims do think this.

My sensus divinatatis is tingling

Unfortunately for atheists, lack of evidence will only worry evangelicals if they accept that all beliefs should be derived from evidence. Craig, following Alvin Plantinga, does not accept this (although Craig disagrees with Plantinga on Christian theology: Craig thinks that God "witnesses" to people, Plantinga thinks that people have a sensus divinatatis, a faculty which enables them to know things about God). According to Allen Stairs, Plantinga argues that some beliefs are formed legitimately, but without being inferred from other statements which serve as evidence. Take, for example, my belief that I have a headache, or my belief that I can usually trust my senses, or that the world was not created 5 minutes ago with the false appearance of age. Plantinga calls such beliefs "properly basic", and says there is no good reason not to put belief in God in the same category.

One objection to Plantinga is that this sort of argument proves too much: Matt McCormick wonders whether he might have a sensus atheistus which assures him that anyone who claims to have experienced God is mistaken. This seems weaker than Plantinga's claim (since it's not clear where the atheist sense comes from, whereas Plantinga claims his divine sense comes from God), but then, who cares whether the argument goes against you when you have a sensus atheistus? What of other religions where people claim revelations from God? Craig says his job is to use factual arguments to convince those people that their apparent revelations are merely internal experiences. He says this is what atheists should also do with him, though this seems to contradict his earlier statement that such persuasion shouldn't work on him.

There's also the problem of the content of this revelation. Just what is included in it, and how can you tell? Christians are a bit reticent about it, in my experience: Sye the presuppositionalist never did tell me whether he could distinguish between knowledge revealed by God and knowledge he obtained by other means, nor did I ever find out whether the Holy Spirit witnesses to robhu that Hebrews is inspired scripture but 1 Clement isn't.

Craig seems to go further than Plantinga in one important respect. Plantinga's work, as described by Craig, tries to address the allegation that Christianity is unmotivated or irrational, by shifting the burden of proof onto people who disagree with it: they must show I'm wrong, Plantinga says, I don't have to show I'm right. Craig goes further, and says that no arguments or evidence should convince him: that's unmotivated and irrational.

Dancing: Bruce: Paso Doble

Thu, 26 Nov 2009 00:12:48 GMT

Start square to wall with feet apart, upper body rotated left a bit and right arm reaching around and supporting the woman's back, she's in front of you leaning back into it so her head is on your left.

1 2: wait 3: rotate right so she straightens up, 4&: she spins to man's right 5: close RF to LF, man catches her left hand in his right, right arm outstretched to the right, 6&7 8, lead her by pulling on the arm, she spins back to man's left side, man catches her right in his left, and you're facing each other, not too close together.

& appel RF, forward walks as she walks backwards: 1 2 3 4 (L,R,L,R) aiming for her RHS so you catch up to her by 4

& appel LF taking promenade hold (she turns to walk forward with you), walks: 5 6 7, on 8 step across her raising left hand hand (R, L, R, L).

Twist turn: 1: step behind on ball of RF without weight, &: twist to R, unwind so you're facing along new LoD (assuming you've just hit the corner), lowering left hand to waist level 2: forward RF, continuing to push left hand forward and up 3&: wait, turning her under left hand 4: small jump on both feet, leaving weight on RF, now facing her, normal hold, 5&6 chasse to L (L,R,L), 7: step through with RF, 8&1 chasse to L (L,R,L)

The woman's doing all the work with the spins in this one, so it's a small matter of getting the arms in the right place to help her while also getting the footwork and timing right.

Link blog: religion, humour, video, politics

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 22:22:36 GMT

Is Obama About To Become Just Another War Criminal?: "Aghanistan is not a country, it's a criminal enterprise" - Evert Cilliers wonders what America is doing there, a question you might also ask about the UK.
(tags: drugs politics war afghanistan taliban pakistan islam)
George Carlin - Religion is bullshit.: Carlin's classic routine on religion, in which he tells us how he worships the Sun and Joe Pesci. May be "strident".
(tags: religion video youtube funny atheism humour god carlin comedy)
36 ARGUMENTS FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD — By Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: The Edge introduces and gives us an excerpt from Goldstein's novel. The 36 arguments (and their rebuttals) are included in the excerpt, handily: the moral argument and the cosmological argument are in there.
(tags: religion philosophy god atheism books morality)
Caveman Science Fiction: From the same people who brought you "Dungeons and Discourse": Caveman SF.
(tags: comics scifi funny science satire comic humour)
The Open Road London (1927): Colour footage of London in 1927. Pretty amazing stuff.
(tags: london video history youtube archive)
Renouncing Islamism: To the brink and back again - Johann Hari, Commentators - The Independent: The stories of former Islamists who came back from the brink, and just what went wrong to put them there in the first place. "From the right, there was the brutal nativist cry of "Go back where you came from!" But from the left, there was its mirror-image: a gooey multicultural sense that immigrants didn't want liberal democratic values and should be exempted from them. Again and again, they described how at school they were treated as "the funny foreign child", and told to "explain their customs" to the class. It patronised them into alienation. "
(tags: islam religion politics terrorism culture war hari johann-hari jihad islamism)

Evangelicalese: the author reminisces

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 01:21:01 GMT

scribb1e enjoyed Valerie Tarico's article on evangelicalese, and even watched the video Tarico linked to, of Susan Hutchison speaking at a prayer breakfast. If you'd like a shorter example of more of the same, here's evangelical Christian Peter Vadala being interviewed on Fox News about how he was fired for telling a lesbian co-worker that homosexuality was "bad stuff" after the co-worker repeatedly provoked him by mentioning her fiancée. Intriguingly, Vadala once wrote a "Christian musical": urbaniak has the full story, including a copy of the termination letter from Vadala's former employer and links to MP3s of the musical.

Trigger Warning: watching the videos may provoke flashbacks for ex-evangelicals. To aid your understanding while watching them, here's a brief glossary of terms I remembered from my misspent youth:

Prayer breakfast: An easy one to get you started: it's a communal breakfast where you pray. My former church had "men's prayer breakfasts". I never found out what went on at them, as I regarded getting up before 9 am as an abomination before the LORD ("Woe to them that rise up early in the morning", as Isaiah 5:11 says).
Speaking the truth in love: There's a well known provision of the Highway Code which says you can park where you like as long as you leave your indicators on (well known, that is, to drivers of white vans). Likewise, in evangelical circles, the rule is that you can be as rude as you like as long as it's done "in love". A reference to Ephesians 4:15.
Lifestyle: You'd think this might mean "the way someone lives their life", but in fact it always refers to having sex in a way God disapproves of (such as outside marriage, which obviously includes gay sex, as gays can't really get married).
Convicted: What you feel when God tells you you've been doing something bad, like not telling off a so-called homosexual for brazenly flaunting their so-called engagement. Traditionally, one is convicted by the Holy Spirit, a reference to John 16:8.
Struggling with: Regularly enjoying something, and then feeling convicted (q.v.) about it afterwards. Always to do with sex, e.g. "struggling with pornography". (I also liked revme's definition).
Bad stuff: That's a new one on me, though it does follow in a long tradition of using understated words for things you really deeply disapprove of. When I was a lad, those things were "dodgy", but that may be a Britishism.

Let's not accuse of all Christians of being unreflective about this: Adrian Plass does a fine line in sending up this sort of jargon, as does Stuff Christians Like (Crafting the perfect Christian dating profile is particularly excellent) and Stuff Christian Culture Likes. Back in my misspent youth, I even had a go myself. Still, Vadala could do with a dose of Plass, I think.

Link blog: christianity, religion, science, humour

Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:11:35 GMT

'Good Reasons for 'Believing' in God' by Dan Dennett: Dennett talks about why it's sensible to profess belief in God. He lives up to his reputation of being a bit fluffier than Dawkins.
(tags: daniel-dennett philosophy religion atheism)
Valerie Tarico: Christian Belief Through The Lens of Cognitive Science: Part 6 of 6: The final part of Tarico's series, which links to the others. "Despite its boundaries, cognitive science, does offer what is rapidly becoming a sufficient explanation for the supernaturalism that underlies organized religion."
(tags: christianity science religion brain psychology cognitive-bias cognition)
WHY DOES THE UNVIERSE LOOK THE WAY IT DOES: A Conversation With Sean Carroll: "Inflation does not provide a natural explanation for why the early universe looks like it does unless you can give me an answer for why inflation ever started in the first place. That is not a question we know the answer to right now. That is why we need to go back before inflation into before the Big Bang, into a different part of the universe to understand why inflation happened versus something else."
(tags: physics cosmology big-bang universe inflation string-theory)
RegEx match open tags except XHTML self-contained tags - Stack Overflow: "If you parse HTML with regex you are giving in to Them and their blasphemous ways which doom us all to inhuman toil for the One whose Name cannot be expressed in the Basic Multilingual Plane, he comes." Quite right: you should use Beautiful Soup like everyone else does.
(tags: funny programming humour xml parse lovecraft stackoverflow regexp regex html)
The Disenchanted Naturalist’s Guide to Reality: Alex Rosenberg argues that scientism is a good thing, and puts forward a very reductionist naturalism which he applies to consciousness, morality and a bunch of other stuff philosophers like to worry about. His fellow naturalists disagree in the comments (notably, Richard Carrier and Tom Clark produce good arguments against him).
(tags: naturalism philosophy science reductionism morality consciousness)
Riffs: 11:14:09: Patrol Magazine and Evangelicals Who Won’t “Get Over It”: "It is astonishing that so many intelligent Christians seem to believe there is a deficit in emphasis on evangelism and scriptural literalism, and that, if the hatches are just battened down on a more solid “worldview,” evangelicalism can resume explaining the universe to new generations of believers."
(tags: evangelicalism christianity)
I’m Belle de Jour: Former blogging prostitute Belle de Jour reveals her real identity to the Times. She was an impoverished PhD student.
(tags: culture sex identity anonymous science prostitution)
What Stormtroopers do on Their Day Off: Funny photos of stormtroopers at play.
(tags: humour funny scifi images starwars toys photo photography)
Valerie Tarico: Speaking Evangelese: Tips for Politicians: Tarico's article on evangelical jargon phrases and dog whistles. Some of these sound familiar
(tags: evangelicalism christianity politics religion jargon language)
Experimental Theology: Christians and Torture: Part 6, Hell and Torture: Richard Beck over at Experimental Theology has been doing a series of posts on Christian and torture. His survey said: "Christians who believed in a horrific and never-ending hell were more likely to endorse torture. As God tortures so we torture." Unsurprising, perhaps, but interesting to see it backed up by research. In the comments, Beck notes the correlation is not strong, but is significant.
(tags: hell torture politics religion christianity morality)

Argument, authority and batshittery

Sat, 14 Nov 2009 17:56:34 GMT

Following on from my link to The Ad Hominem Fallacy Fallacy, londonkds wonders how legitimate it is to say "This person has previously shown themselves to be ignorant/misinformed/lying/batshit on this subject on several occasions, therefore I have better things to do with my time than to rigorously investigate all their arguments this time". I've replied on the original thread, but I thought I'd create a new post with my reply in:

Reminds me of Yudkowsky's stuff on reversed stupidity and the follow up, Argument Screens Off Authority.

If someone is reliably wrong (a well informed liar), you can learn something by listening to them: you just increase the weight you give to beliefs which contradict what they say on topics where you know they tend to lie. But this might not be useful, if you already strongly believe stuff which contradicts what they say.

In practice, the people are ignorant or batshit haven't carefully studied how to be wrong. There are more ways to be wrong than right, so they probably are wrong, but you don't learn anything by listening to them, because their statements aren't tangled up with the truth at all. As Yudkowsky and brokenhut say, you can decide not to listen to such people because life is too short, but that decision shouldn't influence your opinion on the truth of their argument (though it's hard not to be influenced in practice). So I think your quoted statement is a justifiable one as long as you don't append "and I'll believe their argument less as a result".

Suber's stuff on logical rudeness covers the case where your belief that they're batshit is because of some theory you hold which includes explanations of how all critics of the theory are batshit (examples exist in evangelical Christianity, atheism and feminism, that I've seen). ISTM that such a theory can't be used to dismiss critical arguments, though it can be used to explain why so many people apparently don't believe the theory.

(You can comment on the original post: I've disabled comments on this one to keep all the discussion in one place).

Link blog: debate, funny, game-theory, humour

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 00:03:10 GMT

Mitchell and Webb - Stalin Vs Hitler (arguing the moral toss): "Welcome to Arguing the Moral Toss". You know who else said that: Hitler!
(tags: hitler stalin mitchell-and-webb funny video youtube morality humour debate)
The Redheaded Skeptic: "Notes on the journey from minister's wife to atheist". Laura from Arkansas was married to a Baptist pastor who sounds like a real charmer. She writes about the emotional side of her transition to atheism.
(tags: atheism christianity religion de-conversion fundamentalism complementarianism)
The ad hominem fallacy fallacy: What is, and is not, an ad hominem argument (for example, insults aren't, unless they're part of an argument).
(tags: logic philosophy argument language fallacy writing debate ad-hominem)
The Loitering Presence of the Rational Actor: A review of "The Bounds of Reason: Game Theory and the Unification of the Behavioral Sciences" by Herbert Gintis. The reviewer goes into examples of where human behaviour deviates from economists' ideas of rationality.
(tags: rationality economics cognitive-bias game-theory prisoners-dilemma)
pshift man page: The manual page for the paradigm shift utility on Unix. An oldie, but a goodie.
(tags: funny unix paradigm kuhn)

Link blog: philosophy, morality, science, video

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:54:46 GMT

Why the Big Bang Singularity Does Not Help the Kalam Cosmological Argument for Theism -- Pitts 59 (4): 675 -- The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science: Paper on whether the Big Bang supports theistic arguments for creation ex nihilo, and particularly the Kalam argument. Notably, the author points out that if the singularity in the past requires a Creator, surely singularities in the future (such as black holes) require a Destroyer.
(tags: science religion creationism kalam bigbang big-bang Singularity philosophy)
August and Everything After (San Francisco, 2004): Adam Duritz singing the Counting Crows song whose lyrics are on the album cover of August and Everything After (but which doesn't appear on the album itself). There are a couple of live versions of this: this one's better because the crowd aren't yelling through it.
(tags: counting-crows adam-duritz music)
Gastronomic Realism—A Cautionary Tale: Loeb's charming paper comparing Moral Realism and Gastronomic Realism (the idea that some foods are simply better than others, independent of individual tastes).
(tags: philosophy morality food realism gastronomic don-loeb system:filetype:pdf system:media:document)
“The Collapse Of Intelligent Design”: Ken Miller demonstrating why ID is not backed by evidence. Miller's a Catholic, not a neo-sceptical atheist neo-rationalist.
(tags: ken-miller intelligent-design id evolution creationism science biology dna)
Don Loeb – Moral Irrealism: Philosopher Don Loeb in conversation about moral irrealism, the view that there are no moral facts independent of our beliefs about them. Touches on whether introducing a God would help moral realism: Loeb thinks not.
(tags: philosophy morality atheism don-loeb)
Mr. Deity and the Identity Crisis: "any time anyone's said anything comprehensible about the Trinity the Church has declared it a heresy." - Gareth
(tags: funny video religion christianity trinity mr-deity)
The Non-Expert: IKEA by Matthew Baldwin: A walkthrough of the various levels of the IKEA game: "As you continue through the main SHOWROOM you will see groups blocking the walkways while chatting and others moving against traffic. These people should be killed immediately."
(tags: funny humour culture parody games ikea furniture shopping)
David Nutt: Governments should get real on drugs - opinion - 04 November 2009 - New Scientist: David Nutt's opinion piece in New Scientist.
(tags: drugs science badscience government law medicine politics david-nutt)
A life changed by evidence: Series of videos by a former evangelical Christian explaining why he became an atheist. Well produced and informative stuff. The chap makes a palpable effort to show how he was a Christian and how, for much of the time before his deconversion, he thought the things he was learning could be incorporated into Christianity rather than working against it.
(tags: video youtube de-conversion christianity evangelicalism bible morality)

God and physics or Who is this Kalam person, anyway?

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:22:46 GMT

Over at Ex-apologist's blog, the former apologist links to a paper and a response to it which straddle the boundary between physics and theology. I'm a sucker for this sort of stuff. The paper is J. Brian Pitts's Why the Big Bang Singularity Does Not Help the Kalam Cosmological Argument for Theism, and the response comes from William Lane Craig, who revitalised the Kalam argument for the existence of God.

There are some real physicists reading this, so I'd be interested to know what you think of this stuff. I've left a comment over on the ex-apologist's blog, which I've pasted below:

I love this stuff: it combines physics, philosophy and religion. I don't think Craig's response addresses Pitts's paper terribly well: they appear to be talking past each other. I have a physics degree gathering dust and a passing acquaintance with the philosophy of science, and I don't find Craig terribly convincing (but then, I'm also an ex-Christian atheist, so I wouldn't, would I?)

Craig seems to have misunderstood Pitts. Craig says the Kalam does not rely on a singularity but merely on the universe having a finite age, but as a matter of fact, Craig does appear to argue that the Big Bang singularity represent divine intervention, so Pitts's Cosmic Destroyer argument seems to have some force. When Pitts makes this argument, he accepts, for the sake of the argument, Craig's own claim that the past singularity of the Big Bang represents God's creative intervention, and asks why someone who accepts that claim would not also say that God intervenes destructively in black holes. The idea that God would do so probably seems silly to Christians, but Pitts says that on Craig's own argument, this feeling of silliness isn't well motivated. On the other hand, if the feeling of silliness is correct, perhaps Craig is wrong about singularities. A third possibility is for Craig to find some way to distinguish between the singularities, but Craig does not address this directly in his response.

Pitts's thoughts about possible other theories aren't necessarily an expression of Pitts's theological commitments (whatever those may be). The reference to van Fraassen is a clue (and the fact that this stuff is published in a philosophy of science journal): Pitts is talking about the arguments between scientific realism and more empiricist philosophies of science which owe something to logical positivism, such as van Fraassen's own constructive empiricism. He's taking a middle position: the unobservable objects posited by theories are meaningful but we ought to be careful about how far we believe they are real (van Fraassen says we can have no grounds to do so, though, contra positivism, we can accept that our theories meaningfully make such claims about unobservables; realists say there are grounds for believing in unobservables). Craig appears to be quite a bit more of a realist about General Relativity than Pitts, or indeed than working physicists like Sean Carroll.

The references to Bach-Weyl and so on are waved away (I'm no expert, but I think in that specific case, rightly, since as far as I can tell Pitts is talking about an early, failed attempt at a unified theory of gravity and electromagnetism), but the possibility of a theory which does not give lengths (durations) to curves should worry Craig, unless he is completely committed to GR. What does it mean to say "the Universe began to exist" on such a theory, or if the universe looks like Carroll thinks it does? Dennett: "What Professor Craig does, brilliantly and with a wonderful enthusiasm, is he takes our everyday intuitions—our gut feelings about what’s plausible, what’s counterintuitive, what couldn’t possibly be true—and he cantilevers them out into territory where they’ve never been tested, in cosmology where whatever the truth is, it’s mindboggling." (thanks to Daniel Fincke for that one).

Link blog: richard-dawkins, science, funny, psychology

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 10:01:19 GMT

Give us your misogynists and bigots: Dawkins on the Poaching Pope. "Whether one agrees with him or not, there is a saintly quality in the Archbishop of Canterbury, a benignity of countenance, a well-meaning sincerity." How strident!
(tags: richard-dawkins catholicism religion christianity anglicanism pope)
Triple negatives and Conservapedia’s support for Hitler « Gowers’s Weblog: Gowers shows that Conservapedia's article on Richard Dawkins proves that Conservapedia is evil, using MATHS.
(tags: funny mathematics maths conservapedia richard-dawkins morality)
Out of LSD? Just 15 Minutes of Sensory Deprivation Triggers Hallucinations: Interesting stuff. Reminded me of Carl Sagan's "The Demon Haunted World", where he talks about how common hallucinations are.
(tags: psychology science hallucinations wired brain neuroscience)

Dancing: Pat pp Bruce: Waltz, Clive: Waltz

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 01:29:13 GMT

Pat pp Bruce: Waltz

Start facing diag wall about half way across a short side.
Spin turn, turning lock across corner (end in pp, ready to move diag centre on new line)
Running weave.
Back, side, cross (sway to R to lead cross).
Double reverse spin.
Forward, side, cross (sway to L to lead cross).
Back, side, rotate to throwaway oversway.
Recover and chasse out.

Clive: Waltz

Start facing diag wall at the beginning of a long side.
Two steps of a natural (forward R, side L), stretching L side up, step back R (back diag centre) and pivot to face diag centre as you lower. Clive was dancing this as "bouncing off" the full extent of the stretch into the pivot, I think.
Open telemark (end in pp ready to travel diag to wall)
Open natural (cross over her, right shoulder back on step 3)
Back under body (L), heel pull (pull R heel in and push it away to the side, then put weight on it), curve walks L, R to end OP facing back diag wall with sway to R (1,2&3) (she has a heel turn followed by the curving walks)
Back L, heel pull R, forward L, to end facing LoD
Double natural spin (like double reverse, but opposite feet): forward R, side L starting to turn, turn and lower onto L leaving RF free). You're going to step OP on her RHS with your RF, so you need a bit of body rotation at the end to put her a bit more on your RHS than usual, but not too much.
Wing (forward R on her RHS, draw LF to RF without weight for 2, 3)
Chasse to R (in St C's this is across the new LoD on the short side),
Weave ending.