UPDATE: Don’t miss the exchange of letters (published at New Humanist) between co-author Nicholas Beale and Anthony Grayling. Beale invited Grayling to yet another launch of their accommodationist book, but Grayling replied icily, including this paragraph about the “scandal” of launching Polkinghorne and Beale’s execrable religious book at the Royal Society.
The scandal resides in the fact that this was comparable to the premises of the Royal Society being used to promote astrology, healing with crystals, or worship of the Norse gods. For as your pamphlet yet again shows – it being familiar stuff, save for your novel but bizarre attribution of free will to nature as an “explanation” of natural evil – religious apologists are not in the same business as scientists, but wholly in the business of metaphysical casuistry: twisting, interpreting, rationalising, cherry-picking, appealing to ignorance and special pleading. It is very sad stuff you drag into the light again; if it did not rest on a continuum whose nether end lies in murder – heretics at the stake, fundamentalists wearing suicide bomb vests – it would be comic.
________________
I’ll deserve many encomiums if I make it through the latest theology book I’m reading (John Polkinghorne and Nicholas Beale. 2009. Questions of Truth: Fifty-one Responses to Questions about God, Science, and Belief), but it does contain lots of good stupid bits of theology. Here’s one I found within the first three pages. Of all the science-friendly theologians around, Polkie is the most odious in claiming that theology and science operate in similar ways.
It is easy to ‘prove’ that nothing can be both a wave and a particle, or that Jesus couldn’t have risen from the dead. Yet deep reflection on physics shows that all sufficiently small objects can manifest both wave and particle properties, and even superficial reflection shows that if Jesus is the Son of God in anything like the sense that Christians claim, then the resurrection is not only possible but in a certain sense necessary.
How many things can you find wrong with that quote?
Oh, and for a masterpiece of special pleading, there’s little to match Polkie and Beale’s explanation about why we can’t see obvious evidence for God in the world:
The Creator has not filled creation with items stamped “made by God.” [JAC: They thought he did before 1859.] God’s existence is not self-evident in some totally unambiguous and undeniable way. The presence of God is veiled because, when you think about it, the naked presence of divinity would overwhelm finite creatures, depriving them of truly being themselves and freely accepting God.
What is this—some kind of divine game?: “You can’t accept me freely unless you’ve done so without evidence.” And what about those finite Apostles? Were they overwhelmed and prevented from accepting God?
Polkinghorne, of course, was a theoretical physicist at Cambridge who left the university to become an Anglican priest. He is an official Sophisticated Theologian®. And he won the one-million-pound Templeton Prize in 2002.
Anthony Grayling wrote a scathing review of this book (whose publication was launched at London’s Royal Society) for The New Humanist. It’s vintage strident Grayling, and I can’t resist including the last bit:
What is not complicated, though, is the scandal that the Royal Society is allowing its premises to be used for the launch of this book. The accompanying publicity material has in the small print the statement, “This book is being launched at (not by) the Royal Society…” Indeed again. No doubt the Royal Society required this disclaimer to be entered somewhere, having reluctantly and uncomfortably felt that it had to give one of its Fellows (Polkinghorne was made one before becoming a vicar) use of its facilities because he asked. Of course the point is that Beale-Polkinghorne and their tuppence-halfpenny religious publishers wish to get as much of the respectability of the Royal Society rubbed off on them as they can. This is the strategy adopted by the Templeton Foundation too, of sidling up to proper scientists and scientific establishments and getting their sticky religious fingers on to respectable coat-sleeves in the hope of furthering their agenda – which, to repeat what must endlessly be repeated in these circumstances, is to have the superstitious lucubrations of illiterate goatherds living several thousand years ago given the same credibility as contemporary scientific research. Polkinghorne dishonours the Royal Society by exploiting his Fellowship to publicise this weak, casuistical and tendentious pamphlet on its precincts, and the Royal Society does itself no favours by allowing Polkinghorne to do it.
The good news for me is that the book is short. I know many of you think I’m wasting my time reading stuff like this, but I like to think I’m doing a service by repeatedly showing that Sophisticated Theology—of the brand touted by Terry Eagleton and supposedly ignored by Richard Dawkins and other New Atheists—is just empty and wishful thinking encased in a bunch of fancy words.
It’s clear you need to debate a theologian again … with a signed video release before the event, of course.
How fah king we todd it! (putting it politely).
Good luck with the book, not to be tossed aside lightly but thrown with great force..
Too many things wrong to count.
Some things aren’t even wrong: like the above quote: sure, IF Jesus is the Son of God, then I guess the supernatural isn’t out of the question either. But that’s an ‘IF’ I’m ready nor willing to accept.
And even if we WOULD accept it, then there is still something wrong with the statement: IF we’re dealing with an almighty entity, then you can’t claim necessity (not even in ‘a certain sense’, whatever cop-out that’s supposed to be): he can do and be as he pleases.
But the whole thing is just .. brainless waffle.
“How many things can you find wrong with that quote?” Only one – Inability to think coherently.
Or, Equivocating for jesus.
BINGO!
I don’t recall my parents concealing their existence from me in order to give me the chance to be myself and thus “freely” accept them, though they did leave me on my own now and then.
In “Hannah and her Sisters”, someone quotes to Woody Allen Einstein’s line about God not playing dice with the universe. Woody Allen replies “No, he likes to play hide-and-go-seek”.
To be fair, JP’s book “Quantum Physics: A Very Short Introduction” is pretty good and I learned a lot from it. It has no theology.
Yes, you can have a scientist widely published in Nature, Science, PRL, etc., but if you go to their website, you will be mystified. For example got to
http://www.ceesdekker.net/
and click on “personal”
I can understand that during Newton’s time the cultural-social setting was such that you could be an exceptional scientist and believe in alchemy, astrology and other forms of superstition. But today… ?
I looked at his site (I have to give him credit for one of the most elegant home pages I have ever seen) and went to his link, “Christianity Today”. Sappy Christian stuff. But I found an article titled “Why Women Hear God More Than Men Do”, with this ironic leader:
“To pray, you need to use your imagination. And men of this generation are given few tools to do so.”
Ironically, a good training in science is also a training in imagination.
Of course, this and the earlier physics BS illustrates a point.
These folks prattle on “accomodationistically” and yet they seem so clueless about the content (and the practice, but this is enough) of science. Why should one trust anyone’s conclusions about the nature of science and its “world view” who doesn’t seem to understand it?
Now, some physicists do know better than the subjectivist misreadings of their science, but then doublethink is a profoundly difficult mindset to shake. So it may very well be true to say that “part of them” doesn’t understand, even though work-a-day they do.
The standalone version of this post with comments is longer than the version on the main page.
I checked. They’re exactly the same.
I suspect my browser cache may have had the older/shorter version for the main page but not this page. At any rate, they’re the same now.
I always thought Thomas Young actually performed his namesake experiment. But now I know it was all just deep reflection!
“The good news for me is that the book is short.”
IME all apologist books are three pages long or less. That’s because I get no further without spotting the first flaw in the ‘argument’.
Ha, but yes, I know what you mean. Back in my “uncertain” days I could somewhat read theology books and found them unconvincing, mostly dull but I could actually persevere and finish them. Now I see red mist* rising in front of my eyes by the end of the first paragraph which is usually where the first logical fallacy or baseless assertions begin.
* not actually. But I’m sure my blood pressure rises.
The Wiki account of Polkinghorne attributes to him the following quote:-
“After all. if there is no God, the God is incalculably the single greatest creation of the human imagination.”
It would seem that Polkinghorne has not read Emile Durkheim’s Elementary Forms of Religious Life wherein the origins of theism are laid bare.
To nitpick, the Wiki account actually attributes that quote to Anthony Kenny.
It’s Polkinghome who just refers to it.
But it’s rubbish anyway. I can think of much greater creations of human imagination.
God is the easiest, basest of all the human imagination’s creations.
My 3 year old daughter has had a few imaginary friends already. She also constantly imputes agency where there is none. She also doesn’t quite understand why she shouldn’t always get her way.
What is god but an amalgam of these three childish ways of thinking?
Grayling’s review is actually hilariously funny; take this for example:
And of course Beale-Polkinghorne have to be mind-brain dualists (see their chapter on this, in which their dualism is described in their own version of Newspeak as “dual aspect monism” in which “mind and brain are not identical” – work that one out!) in order for them to keep a place for the concept of “soul”, itself explained in a cloud of fudge by analogy with piano and the music played on it: “…layers…indeterminism…er…Penrose…chaos theory…quantum mechanics…er…blah blah…see my book chapter 9, all rather complicated…”
ROFL 🙂
1. So Jesus is both a wave and a particle? How does this fit in with that whole Trinity thing? Is Jesus made of trinitite? (Don’t know what trinitite is? Check it out here):
http://www.mindat.org/min-11131.html
2. If God is all-powerful and created humans, couldn’t he have made them able to view the “naked presence of divinity” without requiring supernatural fig leaves?
3. I have a young fig tree in my yard. If I look under the leaves, will I see a wave, a particle, or the naked divinity in all his glory…or just mud-dauber tracks where the wasps gathered after last night’s watering?
No no NO, my dear friend!
You have to carefully READ Polkinghome’s text:
The above is ONLY true if Jesus is sufficiently small!
I see…
Since the argument for Jesus is “god of the gaps”, and the gaps are getting smaller, Jesus must be getting smaller too.
The smaller Jesus gets, the greater his wave component. This would explain why Jesus and theology increasingly lack substance.
Nothing new here, just positioning for another Templeton grant.
I don’t understand why theologians in any given religious tradition don’t take the elementary step of applying all their arguments to a rival religion and see what it is that breaks down. This is the one of the easiest tools for use or spotting errors in mathematical or logical arguments: whenever you have an argument giving you a very strong unexpected result, always find where, if anywhere, it breaks down, by applying it to a similar statement you know a priori to be false. I would assume Polkinghorne, having been a theoretical physicist, must be rather used to this procedure. Why doesn’t he explain then the error in the following argument (changes underlined):
Oops, the underline tag doesn’t work. Changes marked in bold this time:
Q.E.D. And very nicely, too. 😉
“the poetry-based genesis of the Universe is not only possible but in a certain sense necessary.”
Brilliant
Myself, I’m more often bothered by the superscript and subscript tags not working than the underline; makes math notations more difficult. Might be nice if Dr. Coyne would turn all three on.
Eh. His toy.
I believe this might be a WordPress problem, with little that Dr Coyne can do about it. WordPress also does not allow MathJax for example, because it requires Javascript.
I’ve known enough Christian accomodationists that I think the response to that would be “absolutely – there’s no way we could know”. Somehow it doesn’t convince them that Christianity is wrong and that they need to convert to Hinduism though. Strange that.
Of all the science-friendly theologians around, Polkie is the most odious in claiming that theology and science operate in similar ways.
Doing the hokey Polkie …
Although I would argue that he is at least partly right in that the use of inductive logic by science to generate the hypotheses on which deduction and empirical testing operate is somewhat similar to the gestalt that seems to underlie various religious revelations. Just that theologians and the religious in general tend to miss the boat in not realizing that such revelations and hypotheses tend to be a dime-a-dozen and that that deduction and testing are crucial parts of the equation.
I know many of you think I’m wasting my time reading stuff like this ..
Not I. “Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.” [Sun Tzu]
Doesn’t this actually require evidence, not mere deep reflection?
Actually, given this particular statement, all it takes is observation.
Also note how Polkinghome quickly morphs from “nothing can be a wave and a particle” to the more correct “can manifest both wave and particle properties”.
This is a deepity and making injustice of science both. If Polkinghorne was a physicist once he should be ashamed:
– As Greg Esres suggests, you have to research physics before you *observe* and then *test* a theory that quantum objects can manifest properties of waves and particles.
– That quantum systems can have both properties doesn’t mean that there is a ‘duality’ of having waves sometimes and particles at other times.
This has become what I know a modern consensus that this is an erroneous way of seeing it, trying to “accommodate” old views. When combined with relativity, quantum field theory renders these concepts meaningless. A field can have wave solutions, and its Lorenz group representations are its particles. It is both, not either.
– Classical physics weren’t any different! It also observed systems that manifested properties of both waves and particles. That is why the theories of light went back and forth on this, waves can have momenta and particles can disperse and so on.
Polkinghorne makes, of course, a sleight of hand to drag in “wavicles” which where never suggested but makes it possible to state a deepity for woo.
It is easy to ‘prove’ that nothing can be both a wave and a particle, or that shit couldn’t be the same as shinola. Yet deep reflection on physics shows that all sufficiently small objects can manifest both wave and particle properties, and even superficial reflection shows that if shinola is anything like the shoe polish we know it to be, then the presence of shit among its primary ingredients is not only possible but in a certain sense necessary.
I can haz Templeton?
What is this—some kind of divine game?: “You can’t accept me freely unless you’ve done so without evidence.”
I’ll let Oolon Colluphid take this one:
Polkinghorne and Beale have taken a Douglas Adams joke, stuck a cheeky “when you think about it” on it (that’s a standard philosophical term, I presume), and claimed it as a excuse for their own lack of evidence.
+1 for the DNA reference!
It’s remarkable how Doug Adams managed to demolish/lampoon most of the philosophical arguments for God in a popular SF book/TV/movie.
I vote Doug Adams for God!
Long ago, as a freshman, I took a course in quantum mechanics from Polkinghorne. Unusually for a Cambridge lecturer, he arranged a question-and-answer session for the students. (Lecturers just lectured; actually answering students’ questions was left to supervisions.) It was a bit of a fiasco, because we, being young and beguiled by the ineffable[1], wanted to talk about interpretation, and he wanted to talk about the mathematical techniques needed to solve problems. I remember one young lady asking why, given the analogy between Schrödinger’s equation and the diffusion equation, the universe was not a homogeneous mush. She got the answer that observation causes the collapse of the wave function, halting the diffusion. This led to the only note I took, “Human consciousness is the glue of the universe.” Even at the time, I realised that was my own pseudo-mystical take on a man desperately trying to keep the whole thing from wandering off into quantum woo. Given his hard-headed attitude there, I was quite disappointed when he decided to get ordained.
I’ve always thought that “Polkinghorne” should be one of those names, like “Cholmondeley”, whose pronunciation can only be intuited by true-born Englishmen; unfortunately it’s pronounced as it’s spelled. Might I suggest that it should be represented here by a transliteration of my preferred pronunciation, “Puckoon”. I think it’s a bit more dignified than “Polkie”.
[1] Nowadays my attitude is “eff the ineffable”.
Hoary Puccoon (the plant):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Lithospermum_canescens_Leatherwood_Lake.jpg
I like this pronunciation of ‘Polkinghorne’ very much, thanks!
Thanks to J.P.we now can ‘prove’ that Jesus was both a wave and a particle. Whew, the other Anglican priests had a hard time with this until a real theoretical physicist joined the ranks and sorted this one out. Be still my heart.
I’d like to see that on a church sign:
Good news! Jesus is a wave AND a particle!
(And that of course is reminiscent of Shimmer: http://www.hulu.com/watch/61320 )
If we can’t observe him, then his wave function will never collapse.
And, if a fish had a bicycle, it could ride it, you know, if it had legs and arms and maybe binocular vision and a larger brain or if the bicycle was made for fish …
Monophyletically, we’re fish, aren’t we? Problem solved.
/@
PS. “On a bicycle made for tu… na!”
So, putting two and two together, and getting the square root of pi over e, we see that Jesus was a haploid wave?
This is confusing. The image I get here with God’s “naked presence … overwhelm(ing) finite creatures” is someone standing too close to a nuclear blast, without sunglasses. If God wasn’t shielding Himself from us we would all melt into a big gooey mess while clutching our eyes and screaming “it burns, it burns!”
Except Polkinghorne doesn’t seem to be talking about the problems with being in the physical presence of the divine. He seems to be suggesting that knowing, for sure, that God exists would just plain force us to fall down on our knees and worship Him, every one of us. We’d all be part of the big sacred lovefest which we were created for and wouldn’t that be horrible?
Why? I’m not sure. Maybe even the Damned would be saved. Or rather, even those who ought to be damned, or need to be, or want to be — would end up in God’s presence and have no choice but to love Him. So, God plays a little trick, out of kindness and necessity.
He makes it look like He isn’t there … so that the people who are motivated to throw out their reason and integrity and think He’s there anyway can be rewarded. Or established. Or exposed in some kind of ritual kabuki dance. I don’t know.
It makes little sense. If our parent tells us very clearly what they want us to do, does that mean we have no ability to choose to do this task — or not do it — because we saw them, we knew it was them, and we understood what they said? The only choices that are “free” are those made after hearing garbled messages coming in by Extra Sensory Perception? Do the religious not realize how stupid this is?
Reblogged this on emmageraln.
” It is easy to ‘prove’ that nothing can be both a wave and a particle, or that Jesus couldn’t have risen from the dead. Yet deep reflection on physics shows that all sufficiently small objects can manifest both wave and particle properties, and even superficial reflection shows that if Jesus is the Son of God in anything like the sense that Christians claim, then the resurrection is not only possible but in a certain sense necessary.
How many things can you find wrong with that quote?”
Umm, everything?
My immediate reaction was ‘Duh?’
What have the two got to do with each other? The properties of electrons are seriously weird (in everyday terms), but their weirdness is well defined.
OTOH, if Jesus is the son of God then he inherits the ability to do anything he fricking likes.
What have the two categories of weirdness got to do with each other?
Polkinghorne is just saying ‘electrons are weird, therefore God’. I prefer to use them to prove the Loch Ness Monster. Nessie is much more fun 😉
Ack! That wasn’t a reply to Emmageraln. Meant to be a comment on its own. Damn WP. Or my incompetence. Or whatever.
You can damn them both, once it’s observed, the wave will break down….oh, nevermind. 😉
What is this—some kind of divine game?: “You can’t accept me freely unless you’ve done so without evidence.” And what about those finite Apostles? Were they overwhelmed and prevented from accepting God?
I always wondered about how this plays out. Either our God-given skepticism is a source of eternal amusement for the Almighty in a cosmic game of hide-and-seek or engaging in skepticism is a sin or both.
It is easy to ‘prove’ that nothing can be both a wave and a particle, or that Jesus couldn’t have risen from the dead. Yet deep reflection on physics shows that all sufficiently small objects can manifest both wave and particle properties
Polkinghorne, meet Richard Feynman. From QED, a book aimed at high school aged children. Page 15:
Does Polkinghorne even take himself seriously?
On the contrary, it would lead to perfect freedom and happiness as all people are empowered to their best selves, with no risk in failure.
(Hey, I can make shit up, too.)
So Jesus is a quantum state? Hmm… I guess that makes sense. After all, he died, then was alive again, but still with holes in him. So he was in a Schrodinger’s Cat state of being neither alive nor dead, and only after being observed by the 100 or so faithful, his quantum waveform collapsed into heaven.
Schrodinger’s Ceilingcat? 😉
+{0,1}
As Ernest Rutherford aptly stated a century ago: “All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”
Therefore, Polkinghorne as a physicist is far more likely to be in tune with the nature of science and how it operates than you, Myers, or Dawkins are.
And just to shed light on some conceptual blunders:
1) “There is evidence for the truth of proposition X” does not imply “X being true is far more plausible than implausible, to the point of demanding intellectual assent.” That latter claim is instead implied by “There is *sufficient* evidence for the truth of X.” You and your disciples are horribly confused about evidence as a concept, and have probably never thought seriously for a moment about what it means, in the abstract, to say “A is evidence for B.”
2) That God does not reveal himself openly on a frequent basis does not entail that his existence cannot be ascertained by human reason (i.e. that sufficient evidence cannot be cobbled together in support of the claim “God exists”). Is the existence of the p+ and n0 an open truth? What about the Pythagorean theorem? Of course not, but those facts were obviously discernible to human reason.
3) The idea of divine hiddenness does not necessitate that God never reveal himself to certain subsections of humanity at certain times. If it does, then of course the story of Christ would make no sense. Rather, it means that God’s existence is not like a bright light shining at all times into the eyes of all human beings, for if it was, then – in light of the empirical fact that many people strongly prefer a godless reality to a theistic one, even if God exists – that would amount to coercion, where people who do not want to believe in God will end up believing in him at the expense of their feelings and desires. Divine hiddenness, then, preserves autonomy and authenticity. Pascal outlined the idea best: “Willing to appear openly to those who seek him with all their heart, and to be hidden from those who flee from him with all their heart, God so regulates the knowledge of himself that he has given indications of himself which are visible to those who seek him and not to those who do not seek him. There is enough light for those to see who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.”
That said, although you are far better content-wise than Myers and Dawkins, the main thing your “service” is doing is revealing just how disingenuous, uncharitable, and susceptible to gross cognitive bias you are.
“All science is either physics or stamp collecting.”
“Therefore, Polkinghorne as a physicist is far more likely to be in tune with the nature of science and how it operates than you, Myers, or Dawkins are.”
What a spectacularly stupid statement. (I mean Raonoc’s, not Rutherfurd’s).
For there to be any validity at all in it, there would need to be some grounds for assuming that a substantial percentage of other physicists agreed with Polkinghorne. I’ve seen no such indication.
Rutherfurd’s dictum, while it arguably had some validity when he made it, has surely been superseded by the advances in chemistry, biology, geology et al that have been made since. I doubt he would be so stupid as to repeat it today. Unlike Raonoc.
Raonoc. “Therefore, Polkinghorne as a physicist is far more likely to be in tune with the nature of science and how it operates than you —- are”.
Try applying this dictum to Sir Fred Hoyle, an internationally lauded astrophysicist and mathematician but holding a generally unaccepted position on the origin of the universe and beliefs devoid of scientific basis so far as the origin of life on earth is concerned.
Except Polkinhorne is speaking through his vicar hat, instead of his physicist one. Maybe Polkinhorne actually has two states that exists; one based on reality and the other on fantasy. By observing if his statement is sound or absurd you can know which hat he was wearing 🙂
Re: point #3
Exactly! I keep telling my therapist the same thing whenever he implies that my late night conversations with Napolean, Ghengis Khan, and Elvis might be products of my imagination. In light of the empirical fact that many people strongly prefer to believe that these dead fellows do not appear to me in visions, it would amount to coercion on the part of my visitors if they appeared so that other people might witness them and, ya know, take pictures of them and stuff.
Let’s see if I’ve got this straight:
1) There isn’t enough evidence to support completely natural explanations for various phenomena, like evolution, and your unwritten corollary would be there is enough evidence for some kind of supernatural god.
2) The Pythagorean Theorem is not a visible, tangible thing plainly observable only by our senses, ergo god.
3) God is a sneaky bastard.
Okay…
1) Someone is horribly confused about evidence, and it’s you. The issue really isn’t that complicated. Would you be content to allow the prosecution to present evidence of the type theologians regularly adduce if you were on trial for homicide? In Texas? And wrongly accused? Of course not. You’d never allow anything that wasn’t empirical and objective. Things like Plantinga’s/Calvin’s “sensus divinitatis”, or Lewis’ trilemma would never meet the standard for evidence you’d want in your own murder trial.
Also, there are MOUNTAINS of different kinds of objective (that is, available for observation by all – a feeling you have, your “sense of the divine”, is not available to others for inspection) empirical evidence for non-theistic evolution.
2) Every time you look at a right triangle you’re looking at “open”, objective, empirical evidence for the accuracy of the Pythagorean Theorem.
But surely you don’t want to give god the same ontological status as a ratio, or any other bit of mathematics. Ratios don’t exist the way real, physical objects do. They are expressions of relationships between real, physical objects. Does it make sense to you to say “god is like the difference in size between these two objects”? That difference is not an actual thing.
3) I agree, insofar as the fictional character god is sneaky and bastard-y.
You accuse JAC of “cognitive bias”. I wonder if you yourself are open to the idea that since all your arguments for the existence of a god apply equally well (or not so well) to all the other religions, they must all be at least as plausible as Christianity? If not, would you care to elucidate why that is not the case?
As others have pointed out, that statement has been made to look like a joke in the last hundred years (and was already suspect in Rutherford’s time).
Peter Pan, is that you? If we just believe hard enough, then we’ll see TinkerbellGod is real?
“Therefore, Polkinghorne as a physicist is far more likely to be in tune with the nature of science and how it operates than you, Myers, or Dawkins are.”
That made me laugh, and I almost stopped reading right there. I’m so glad I continued reading, or I would have missed it when you wrote “the idea of divine hiddenness”.
C’mon, you were just kidding us with that silliness, right?
If Jesus is the son of god, then he necessarily resurrected!
If that guy over there really is spiderman, he can jump off buildings!
Divinity would overwhelm us. Totally right. I think spiderman would overwhelm us too with his awesome superpowers. That’s why we don’t see him in real life.
It makes me sad someone probably paid money to have this stuff published.
Christianity is not the only religion to buy support from the Royal Society:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/03/24/royal-blatherfest/
Follow the links to learn just how generously the UK Government has rewarded the country’s most prominent scientific body for toeing the official AGW line.
Except AGW is real and supported by multiple lines of evidence, whereas religion is the following of imaginary things with no evidence.
Other than that… no, not even other than that.
Multiple lines of evidence…such a nitpicker.
The presence of God is veiled because, when you think about it, the naked presence of divinity would overwhelm finite creatures, depriving them of truly being themselves and freely accepting God.
God just loves gullible people. Not being gullible is the greatest sin.
“It is easy to ‘prove’ that nothing can be both a wave and a particle, or that Jesus couldn’t have risen from the dead. Yet deep reflection on physics shows that all sufficiently small objects can manifest both wave and particle properties, and even superficial reflection shows that if Jesus is the Son of God in anything like the sense that Christians claim, then the resurrection is not only possible but in a certain sense necessary”.
“How many things can you find wrong with that quote?”
1. False analogy.
2. Unsupported premise (“If Jesus is the Son of God”); therefore unproven conclusion. Also “God ” is assumed to exist,-why?
3. Also circular argument
4. Irrelevant conclusion. Why is the resurrection necessary?–for making ham sandwiches perhaps?
5. Wishful thinking
6. Special Pleading (There is wave/particle duality,-therefore there must be Jesus/resurrection duality. (Also false analogy)
Have I missed any?
Very nice!
I would perhaps add that in addition to begging the question (your (2)), the argument is tautological. It pretty much reduces to: “if supernatural stuff is true, then supernatural stuff must be true.
Okay…granted. If I were a multi-billionaire, then I’d necessarily be a multi-billionaire.
Would anyone care to guess whether or not I am, in fact, a multi-billionaire?
Oops. The petitio is your (3).
Polkinghorne and Beale seem to have forgotten Exodus 33, verses 21-23:
21 Then the Lord said, “There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock.
22 When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by.
23 Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.”
Their reference manual requires them to adjust their hypothesis.
(…)people who do not want to believe in God will end up believing(…)
Who are those people who don’t want to believe in god? Rational people will fail to believe because of a lack of evidence, not because they consider the existence of god undesirable. Does it even make sense to ‘want’ to believe something? Either you believe something or you don’t; one doesn’t have a choice in this.
In response to Raonoc @29
Yeah, I also noticed this expression a lot and wondered about its implications.
To me it means that you really want something to be true and at the same time do not really care if it is really true or not, just as long as you can convince yourself by hook and by crook (or any other method of fooling yourself) that it is indeed true, no matter what.
And to be honest, this isn’t a skill I’d really want to have.
In having a look at Grayling-letter, I learned that Polkinghorne’s minion has a blog and that he is very much fond of authorities (Is that something related to being religious?)
The following post might be of interest for the website of JAC. It is about the Nowak paper, a minion of a theologian and the Templeton foundation… so all you can eat (although it might be difficult to digest):
http://starcourse.blogspot.de/2012/05/evolution-of-cooperation.html
In that post one learns that the minion claims (he might be) to be a good pal of MA Nowak, who is (real surprise!) on the board of advisers of the Templeton Foundation and because Nowak has many (around 40! How do you do that ?!) Nature and Science Papers (am I jealous?!), all criticizers of the Nowak et. al paper are (at best) 2nd rated biologists (Names like West, West-Eberhard, Dawkins, Queller, JAC come into mind).
Yes, I read that and other posts on Beale’s blog yesterday. He also claims that the signatories of the critique in Nature are second-rate scientists, though they include nearly every luminary in social evolution! His bogus claims that Nowak has more papers in PNAS, Science, and Nature than all 120 authors combined is simply wrong: I have at least at least seven in those journals and I am only one of more than a hundred authors. Beale also dismisses the Hughes et al. paper on the connection between inclusive fitness and eusociality without the slightest understanding of how that analysis proceeded; he says it is circular but it is not.
Beale is obsessed with credentials, e.g.,
In another post, he dismisses critics of Nowak et al like this:
As if West and Grafen, excellent theoretical biologists, don’t know what they’re talking about because they don’t have formal degrees in math. Neither does Beale nor Ed Wilson, by the way.
I’m not so sure why a religious person is so keen to defend group selection, but Beale shows not the slightest understanding of the controversy. He’s way out of his depth here. Fortunately, nobody pays much attention to him, for there are NO comments on any of his blog pieces.
I don’t understand this paper-counting method of settling scientific disputes. A certain A. Einstein had only 12 or so Nature/Science publications: all but 3 (or perhaps 2) of them being either review articles, or replies to letters or reprints/summaries of previous publications. Does it inexorably follow that his opinion is to discounted against that of, say MA Nowak?
I should have perhaps written my last sentence in a clearer manner. It should have been: Does it inexorably follow that his opinion on matters concerning relativity is to discounted against that of, say, MA Nowak?
deep reflection on the state of practicing physicists shows that all sufficiently small-minded physicists can manifest both scientific and religious properties…depending on the way they are observed.
When such scientists try to practice physics and religion simultaneously as observed in the “double-hat” experiment, it was noticed their cognition unexpectedly displayed an “interference” pattern, suggesting that the scientists neurons were interfering with themselves, because the same neurons were apparently passing through the science-hat and the religion-hat simultaneously.
RE: Polkie’s `It is easy to ‘prove’ that nothing can be both a wave and a particle,…’ , like Stannard’s reference to the EPS `paradox’, are not honest physicists’ usage: they are language of 1990’s post-modernists scoring points against science …. or preachers. As a physicist, I’m embarrassed.
“This book is being launched at (not by) the Royal Society…”
It should be launched at them with great force.