New roolz

January 25, 2013 • 9:42 am

UPDATE: I have clarified the first rule.

Just a note about some modified rules I’ve concocted in view of things that have occurred lately:

1.  Please try not to use this website to gratuitously tout your own website, your own articles, your own books, or anything else you want to promote. If you have a post on your website (or another one) that you think engages constructively with the topic under discussion or with something that a commenter says, then by all means call attention to it. What I am objecting to here, and didn’t do such a good job explaining in the first version of this comment, is the use of my website solely to promote your own, a cause you like, or a book you’ve written. If you are interested in promoting the latter, email me privately to call it to my attention. I have responded to such emails asking me to take a look at books or websites, and sometimes I’ll call attention to them.

2. Re the above: I have become aware that some commentors here have written very critical analyses of my posts on their own websites.  That’s perfectly fine with me: the internet is for criticism and discussion. However, if you’re going to go after me on your own site, you will have to have the guts to reveal your own name—after all, I do.  Most of those sites don’t say who is behind them. Such discussion should not take place behind the protection of pseudonyms, and I consider this kind of criticism pure cowardice.

Therefore, if I become aware of a poster eviscerating me on his/her own website, that person will be allowed to post here only if they reveal their real name.  That seems reasonable to me.

Oh, and if you’re a new reader, acquaint yourself with the posting rules here, which you can do by simply putting “roolz” in the search box.

Here, have a cat:

new-facial-scar-in-3..2..1.

Heartening debate about atheism in the New York Times

January 25, 2013 • 7:55 am

I think this is a sign that atheism is becoming more accepted, for I can’t imagine a piece like the one I’m about to describe being published fifteen years ago.

Three days ago, the “Room for debate” section of the New York Times published a series of six short pieces under the title “Is atheism a religion?” (Actually, the accompanying notes said that the question was also “Can atheism replace religion?”) And while three of the six commenters groused a bit about atheism (we’re too strident, we can’t replace religion, etc.), all of them said something positive about it. Further, the other three were what religious people call “militant atheists.”

In other words, the piece takes serious note of the growing prevalance of nonbelief in the U.S.  Those who say that nonbelief won’t spread until we propose a replacement for religion are wrong; it is spreading.  And I think the internet is largely responsible for it, as it gives isolated atheists an online community and a sense that they aren’t alone.

Here are snippets of the six pieces, but they’re short, so go read them yourself.

Religion cannot and should not be replaced by atheism. Religion needs to go away and not be replaced by anything. Atheism is not a religion. It’s the absence of religion, and that’s a wonderful thing. . . . Religion is faith. Faith is belief without evidence. Belief without evidence cannot be shared. Faith is a feeling. Love is also a feeling, but love makes no universal claims. Love is pure. The lover reports on his or her feelings and needs nothing more. Faith claims knowledge of a world we share but without evidence we can share. Feeling love is beautiful. Feeling the earth is 6,000 years old is stupid.

  • Phyllis Tickle (founding editor of the religion section of Publishers Weekly and author of Emergence Christianity: What It Is, Where It Is Going, and Why It Matters:”What atheism lacks is mystery“:

What atheism does not have is the architecture of mysteries. One might even argue that, to the extent that atheism lacks sacred story and narrative thrust, it also lacks transcendence and beauty, both of which are hallmarks of religion. Likewise, the perspective of atheism is caught within the created order, while that of religion, by definition, exceeds it.

It follows, then, that atheism cannot replace religion. . .

Will atheism replace religion? That is not our goal (obviously), but neither is it our concern. We started The Sunday Assembly – think of it as part foot-stomping show, part atheist church – because the idea of meeting once a month to sing songs, hear great speakers and celebrate the incredible gift of life seems like a fun, and useful, thing to do.

What’s more, church has got so many awesome things going for it (which we’ve shamelessly nicked). Singing together in a group? Super. Hearing interesting things? Rad. (Our first reading was Theodore Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena bit.) A moment to think quietly about your life? Wizard. Getting to know your neighbors? Ace.

Somehow that church just doesn’t do it for me.

Unfortunately, a great number of atheists do seem to cling to heterodoxy the way the most toxic of believers cling to orthodoxy, turning their irreverence into a stubborn religion unto itself. These are the people you see in online forums calling churchgoers “morons” or “brainless,” displaying the same hubristic arrogance they claim to despise when it comes from the other side. Still, I think the lion’s share of the new era of atheists understand that atheism should be less about the degradation of religion and more about a celebration of the power and potential of the human being sans any omnipotent higher authority.

Nothing new here. “Celebrating the “power and potential of the human being sans any omnipotent higher authority” means the rejection (via “degradation,” if you will) of religion.

We should create a culture that affirms a secular world view, alongside religious world views. For example, the U.S. military suffers from daily suicides and a rising epidemic of post-traumatic stress. In response, the military has developed “spiritual fitness” solutions that emphasize gratitude to God, a supernatural connection with the living beings and a higher power, and reliance upon prayer and scripture. This approach leaves out a crucial element of fitness: approaches that apply to nontheists as well. Atheists, humanists and other nontheists struggling with the difficulties of military life feel ostracism rather than assistance when spiritual remedies are tailored to traditional religious belief.

As for atheism replacing religion, even Christopher Hitchens said that religious faith was “ineradicable” as long as human beings fear death and each other. Atheism is — and will continue to be — a lively alternative for those weary and wary of institutional religion, those who find transcendent explanations meaningless or intellectually unsatisfactory, and fret over the dangers of religious triumphalism. As there is no shortage of people in the United States who find religion worrisome in public life and tedious in private, there is an ever-larger audience willing to entertain the possibility of a post-religious life. Atheism might never replace religion, but it certainly is giving bad and boring religion a real run for the money.

Reading these pieces, you’ll find none of the condescension of people like Terry Eagleton and none of the specious arguments of people like Alvin Plantinga. What you’ll find are people struggling to come to grips with the tide of history.

h/t: Michael

God proven in one minute!

January 25, 2013 • 5:29 am

It’s the Cosmological Argument, but with a special personal touch.  I love the bit where they “prove” that whatever created the universe had to be something like a person.

I hereby define the Universe as that which did not need a cause (our present universe might well be only one of an eternal multiverse), therefore it’s the Final Cause. (If theologians can do it, so can I).

h/t: Watson

Turkish Muslims butthurt about Lego’s Jabba the Hut castle; file suit for defamation

January 24, 2013 • 1:14 pm

Never underestimate the ability of offended Muslims to make trouble. My friend Florian called my attention to a piece in the Austrian press about, of all things, the Lego game “Jabba the Hutt’s castle” (below).

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Well, right off the bat you can see the problem here: the castle looks just like the Hagia Sofia mosque in Istanbul! OMG! So the Turkish community in Austria is threatening legal action for this obvious calumny against religion.

The photo below shows the clear resemblance as descried by the offended Turkish people (I am assuming from the news report that the offense is largely based on a perceived insult to Islam). Since I can read and speak German a bit, I’ve translated the words in the photo below (click to enlarge).

Top right: “OBJECTION.  What is going on with Lego parents regarding Christmas gifts for their kids? PEDAGOGICAL EXPLOSIVES?

First arrow from the minaret: “The muezzin as a criminal with and axe and machine gun.”

Arrow from the dome: “1:1: the same roof as the mosque.”

Arrow from circle in lower left corner: “Machine gun in the minaret?”

Bottom right: “Star Wars game for children 9-14 years.”

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I don’t have time for a full translation of the Austrian complaint, so I just put some of it through Google Translate and touched it up a bit. Here’s what’s going down:

On closer inspection, the fully assembled Lego house and the associated tower are seen to be a 1:1 imitation of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul or the Jami al-Kabir Mosque in Beirut and a minaret. The figure in the tower (Gamorreanische guard) resembles a prayer leader (as a criminal with an axe and machine gun!). In the tower there are several machine guns. Could the model also resemble not just a mosque, but also Carolingian Cathedral, the Pantheon in Rome, a Catholic Church, a Hindu or Buddhist temple, or a Tibetan palace?

Indeed, Jabba’s Palace in Star Wars was also peopled by (pseudo-Buddhist) monks. In short, the model resembles several religious buildings, whether church, mosque, synagogue or temple. The terrorist Jabba the Hut likes to smoke a hookah and kill his victims. It is clear that the figure of the ugly villain Jabba and the whole scene exudes racial prejudice and vulgar insinuations against the Orientals and Asians, seeing them as sneaky and criminal personalities (slaveholders, leaders of criminal organizations, terrorists, criminals, murderers, human sacrifice).

Also frightening is the red and black devil grimacing on the top right of the box: an obvious signal that this game should not be under the tree on Christmas Eve. The Turkish cultural community of Austria reserves and legal action considered in Germany to DStGB § 300 sedition, in Austria by § 283 of the Criminal Code to constitute hate speech against Turkey and will file a complaint with the relevant prosecutor in the form of a statement of facts against LEGO. It constitutes an incitement in the Federal Republic of Germany, § 130 paragraph 1 of the Criminal Code defines as follows: Whoever acts in a manner that is likely to disturb the public peace by inciting hatred against a national, racial, religious or ethnic background of their group, against the population or against an individual because of his membership of a aforementioned group, or part of the population, or attacks or abuses the human dignity of others by attacking a subset of a population or an individual because of his membership of in that subset, or engages in malicious belittling and slandering of that group of individuals, can be punished with imprisonment from three months to five years.

OMG, they’re gonna send Lego to jail! Maybe he’ll occupy a cell next to the teddy bear named Mohamed.

Divers save entangled dolphin who seems to ask for help

January 24, 2013 • 11:22 am

This heartwarmng video, which has now gone viral (people love stories like this, especially in trouble times), was sent to me by several readers and mentioned by one commenter.

From The Raw Story:

Diving in waters near Hawaii recently, a group of photographers were surprised to see a Bottlenose dolphin swim right up to them seemingly in distress.

As they discovered on the night of Jan. 11, the dolphin had a hook embedded in its mouth and fishing line wrapped around one of its pectoral fins, and it was wound so tightly that it had cut into the creature’s tissue.

Diver and photographer Martina Wing made sure her cameras were rolling when an associate took out a pocket knife and began trying to cut the line away. Amazingly, it did not resist and appeared to be communicating its need for assistance.

Then the dolphin briefly vanished, returning to the surface for air before swimming back down to the divers for more help. It even rolled over to let its new friends get a better angle on the line.

Once they freed the creature from its snare, it sped off into the darkness, leaving behind eight minutes of absolutely incredible video.

 

At the Raw Story link above you can see television interviews with the divers and woman who made the video.

What do you think? Was the dolphin asking for help? Or was it only tolerating help from the divers? Or did it even know it was being helped? It certainly seemed friendly and gregarious for a while dolphin, but maybe they’re all like that.

The important thing, of course, is that it was saved, but the virulence of the video (is that the right word?) comes from anthropomorphizing: people would like to think that the creature actually knew that the divers could help it.

A Sophisticated Theologian explains why theology doesn’t progress

January 24, 2013 • 8:11 am

Thanks (I think) to John Loftus, I’ve become acquainted with a half-dozen books on science and religion that I didn’t know. All of them are written by Christians and either attack science or defend the proposition that science and Jesus are compatible.

I’ve just finished the first one, and it’s dire: J. P. Moreland’s Christianity and the Nature of Science (1989, Baker Book House, Grand Rapids, MI). Moreland, who has collaborated with the odious William Lane Craig, is a philosopher and theologian at that hotbed of LOLzy creationism and baraminism, Biola University in California. (“Biola” is a contraction of its previous name, The Bible Institute of Los Angeles.)

The book is dire. Its thesis is that science and theology are not only compatible methods of inquiry, but the same method of inquiry. They are said to use precisely the same methods to find truth.

The book also attacks scientism (on no good grounds), contains tedious philosophical disquisitions about whether there’s a real universe out there, and about whether it’s even possible to understand it if it does exist, and in the end touts creationism as not only a scientific view, but one that’s well supported. In other words, the book is replete with what comes out of the south end of a horse facing north.  When you open the book and see all the symbolic logic and equations, you know you’re in for a grueling and unrewarding read, for symbolic logic is what religious accommodationists use when they’ve run out of arguments.

But Moreland presented one argument that was new to me, despite my extensive incursions into theology and science. When lecturing on their incompatibility, I always mention that although science has progressed enormously in the past few hundred years, theology has not. That is, we know no more about the nature or existence of God than we did in, say, 800 C.E. Hell, theologians aren’t sure whether there’s one god or many gods (as Hindus believe), or a red-horned devil, not to mention more trivial issues like whether the wine and crackers at communion are wholly Jesus’s blood and body (“transubstantiation”) or only partly Jesus’s blood and body (“consubstantiation”).  The only “progress” theology has made has been forced upon it by science, which made it abandon time-honored tenets of belief like Adam and Eve, Noah’s Flood, and the Exodus.  Theology is like postmodern lit-crit: it wobbles from pole to pole but never arrives anywhere.  And of course it can’t, because there’s no way to test whether you’re getting closer to reality.

Well, Moreland contests that in his book.  In his last chapter, “The scientific status of creationism,” Moreland gives the first long discussion I’ve read about why theology doesn’t seem to progress. I say “seem” because he first admits that it doesn’t progress like science, but then asserts that it has progressed—to a near-complete understanding of God! He gives several reasons; here are a few of them from pages 238-239:

Second, theology and especially philosophy tend to operate a higher levels of generality than does science. So, in general, we should not expect theology or philosophy to progress as science does.  Progress is not an appropriate standard for rational comparisons between two theories or disciplines when they operate at different levels of generality.

. . . Fifth, if some philosophical or theological view is true, or some scientific one for that matter, we should not expect further progress in that area.  Thus progress can only be a sign of approximate truth at best, not of truth itself. . . . The slow progress in philosophy and theology may indicate not that they are less rational than science—that is, that they have progressed less toward truth—but that they are more rational. Why? Because the slow progress could be an effect of their already having eliminated proportionately more false options in their spheres of study than science has eliminated in its. If this is true, it means that they have already come closer to a full, well-rounded true world view than science has come.

In sum, philosophy and theology may not progress because they may have already arrived rationally at some truth concerning the world.  This means that a philosopher or theologian has the right to be sure about this conclusion, not in the sense of terminating inquiry or being closed to new arguments, but in the sense of requiring a good bit of evidence before abandoning the conclusion and not being able to use it to infer other conclusions.”

. . . Sixth, it is not true that philosophy and theology do not make progress.

As an example of philosophical progress, Moreland gives the increasing refinement of the ethical principle of utilitarianism. As an example of theological progress, he gives. . . nothing.

Now let me first agree that philosophy has progressed, at least in areas I’m familiar with, like ethical philosophy, where bad arguments have been weeded out and questions have become clearer.

But that doesn’t apply to theology. One need consider only this: if theology has arrived at “some truth concerning the world,” then that “truth” is flatly denied by adherents of other faiths. There is in fact no unanimity among religions about how many Gods there are, what God is like, what God’s commands are, whether there’s a hell or an after life of any sort, how you get saved, whether you’re reincarnated, and so on.  There are, for example, more than 34,000 denominations of Christianity alone, and that doesn’t include all those other religions.  And all of them differ not only in claims about the nature of God and how one is saved, but about things like divorce, sex, gay rights, and birth control.  If you think that religion has arrived at the truth, first have a look at this truncated phylogeny of Christianity (which of course leaves out the thousands of other religions).

800px-Christianity-Branches-2013update

There is, of course, no schism like this in science, which would be pretty much a straight line.  There is no Hindu science, no Muslim science, no Catholic science—there’s just science, which does apprehend real truths (albeit, of course, provisional ones), and ones agreed on by scientists of all stripes, faiths, and ethnicities. The speed of light, or the molecular formula of benzene, is the same to a Catholic or Jewish or atheist physicist or chemist.  But whether the cracker turns totally or only partially into Jesus’s body differs for a Lutheran and a Catholic.  To an evangelical Christian, you go to hell if you don’t accept Jesus as savior. To a devout Muslim, you go to hell if you accept that.  For many Jews there is no afterlife, and Hindus believe you can come back as another person, or as a cat (blessed existence!).  So what is the theological “truth”?

Theology is like postmodern lit-crit: it is a game that never progresses to any real understanding. It bounces around from fad to fad, blown by the winds of secular thought, but has no way within itself to arrive at a real understanding of the universe.

It takes real chutzpah for a person like Moreland to claim that theology has eliminated most of the false alternatives. When the faithful, as they are wont to do, urge scientists to show some humility, they might try looking in the mirror first!

Help save the Royal Institution

January 24, 2013 • 5:56 am

If you’re a Brit, you’ll know about The Royal Institution of Great Britain, which was founded in 1799 to disseminate scientific knowledge to the public. It’s now been doing that for 214 years, but, for the first time, it’s in danger of extinction. Financial difficulties are threatening the closure of this venerable and historic body by selling its headquarters.

The Royal has a distinguished past.  Thomas Henry Huxley, for instance, gave a series of public lectures there about Darwin’s theory. Their Christmas Lectures, intended for young people, began in 1825 and have featured a number of luminaries extending from Michael Faraday to Richard Dawkins and David Attenborough. Sir David and others who have lectured there wrote a letter to the Times which, though behind a paywall, is reported in the Telegraph:

The signatories of the letter, who have all given lectures at the Royal Institution, said the building had “nurtured some of science’s exciting and beneficial achievements”.

They wrote: “The Royal Institution has been home to some of the most important of Britain’s many contributions to science and engineering: the discovery of ten chemical elements, the first practical demonstrations of electricity, 14 Nobel Prizes and countless inventions.

“Since the start of its pioneering public lecture programme, through which science first entered popular culture, this building has not only nurtured some of science’s exciting and beneficial achievements, it has beamed them out to the world.”

It said that millions of families still watch the annual Christmas Lecture on television, more than 200 years after it was first given.

The letter went on: “If Britain loses the Royal Institution, it loses a part of its past. This institution, with its iconic lecture room where almost all the Christmas lectures have been delivered, is just as precious as any ancient palace or famous painting.

“This must not happen in a country that cares about culture, and least of all in one that pins its hopes for future prosperity on a new generation of scientists and engineers.”

Richard Dawkins, leading scientist and prominent atheist, and Colin Blakemore, Neuroscience Professor at Oxford, were among the 22 signatories of the letter.

Wikipedia adds that besides education, a lot of good science was done in the Mayfair building:

Notable scientists who have worked there include Sir Humphry Davy (who discovered sodium and potassium), Michael Faraday, James Dewar, Sir William Henry Bragg and Sir William Lawrence Bragg (who jointly won the Nobel prize for their work on x-ray diffraction), Max Perutz, John Kendrew, Antony Hewish and George Porter. In the 19th century, Faraday carried out much of the research which laid the groundwork for the practical exploitation of electricity at the Royal Institution. In total fifteen scientists attached to the Royal Institution have won Nobel Prizes. Ten chemical elements including sodium were discovered at the Institution, as well as the electric generator and the atomic structure of crystals.

What can you do about this?  Not much if you’re not a British citizen or UK resident. But if you are one, there’s a petition you can sign asking the British government to buy the Royal’s building and help save it.  You can sign the petition here (well, that link gives the info and a button to click), giving just your name, email address, and home address.

There are only 822 signatures so far, which is pathetic. We need to swell the ranks here, so please, if you’re a Brit or a resident of the UK, please consider signing. And send the link around to your friends, too (https://submissions.epetitions.direct.gov.uk/petitions/44790). The Royal must be saved.

This petition is on the up-and-up; you can read more about it here.

h/t:David