Website eclipse meet-up on May 20

May 9, 2012 • 7:51 am

Ben Goren, who doesn’t believe in Jesus, sent me this email about an annular eclipse next Sunday, May 20, and the possibility that some readers in the area could meet up.  I won’t be able to attend (I need to work and recover from my latest travels), but perhaps you can post below if you’re interested, and I’ll furnish you with Ben’s email.  An annular eclipse occurs when the Moon passes between the Earth and the Sun, blotting out the Sun except for a ring of fire around the Moon’s edge.

You might be aware that there’s going to be an annular eclipse a week from this Sunday, on the 20th. The partial phase of the eclipse will be visible from most of the western half of the country, but the path of annularity will pass over Mt. Shasta, through Nevada, into the Four Corners region, and end (for the most part) in Albuquerque.

The Grand Canyon is not far from the centerline, and will be in the region of annularity. The sun and moon will be low in the horizon near sunset, and still in partial eclipse at sunset. I haven’t checked, but I’m pretty sure this is the only time in the entire history of the hominin family, past or future, that one will be able to see a ring of fire hovering over the Canyon.

I’ll be there to photograph the event. When I mentioned that to David Richards, he decided that this is something worth seeing for himself, so he’ll be joining me. We then realized that there’re a bunch of other WEIT regulars and readers in the Southwest, and figured the right thing to do is to invite them all.

Would you be so kind as to post something to that effect? Preferably sooner rather than later so people can make plans.

The National Park Service will be be hosting an event at the Grand Canyon Village. The view from there should be spectacular, and there will be amateur astronomers there with telescopes and viewing stations and all the rest. Details are here.

I’m pretty sure there’re other spots even better for photographing the eclipse; Dave and I will be scouting those out on Friday and Saturday. We likely won’t be at the Village for the NPS viewing, but we’ll probably make the post-eclipse party the NPS is hosting. We’d also be up for meeting up with WEIT folks in Flagstaff on Friday or Saturday.

Wikipedia has a special article on this eclipse, with an animation of what it will look like from Albequerque—spectacular! There’s also an animation of the path of the shadow. I hope that the weather is good.

For those who go, I expect that the best pictures will be sent to me for posting here.

Here are the kinds of photos that you can get, though I think palms are a bit thin on the ground at the Canyon.  This is from Astronomy Picture of the Day, and shows an annular eclipse of Jan. 25, 2009 photographed behind trees:

I have a look at Ehrman’s new book on Jesus

May 9, 2012 • 6:10 am

As anyone who reads this site should know, Bart Ehrman has published a new book on the historicity of Jesus: Did Jesus Exist? The historical argument for Jesus of Nazareth.  You’ll also know that that the book doesn’t assert the divinity of Jesus, claiming, as Ehrman has consistently, that the man was a fully human apocalyptic preacher. It does, however, assert that there’s no doubt about a historical figure on which the Jesus myth is based.

The book has inspired a fracas, with several scholars—including Richard Carrier—claiming that Ehrman’s scholarship is dreadful, giving little evidence for his thesis (see Carrier’s website for many posts on this issue). Others, including the irascible R. Joseph Hoffmann, have defended Ehrman and attacked Carrier.

Disgusted with the book (you’ll know this if you’ve been reading this site), intrepid poster Ben Goren discarded it by sending it to me. Last night I looked through it, trying to see if I wanted to read it.  I don’t think I do, but I want to give a few reactions, based on a reading of some parts and a skimming of others.  Take these comments, then, with that in mind.

My look-through does support the assertion that the scholarship is thin.  The non-Biblical sources quoted by Ehrman often seem dubious, and he appears to rely largely on the Scriptures themselves, and on the supposedly “independent” sources of the Scriptures that we simply don’t have, like “Q” and “M” sources of the Gospels, whose existence is purely hypothetical.  The book has no index, an unforgivable omission, even in a popular book.  The notes at the end are not thorough, and very often refer only to Ehrman’s previous writings. Finally, much of the book comprises an attack on mythicists rather than a popular documentation of the proof for Jesus’s existence.  Perhaps Ehrman needed to do that, but the attack seems defensive and overly long. It is a peculiar book.

One thing that struck me toward the end is how often Ehrman presents as fact a seemingly fictional scenario drawn completely from the Gospels.  There is no doubt that these scenarios will be taken as established fact by naive or by some religious readers.  Take Jesus’s betrayal, trial and execution, for instance.  They are simply glosses on Scripture, with no independent documentation, and include a lot of speculation.  Have a look at these:

Judas’s betrayal (p. 328):

There are solid reasons for thinking that Jesus really was betrayed by one of his own followers, Judas Iscariot.  It is, of course, recorded in multiple independent traditions: Mark, M, John, and the book of Acts (Thus Mark 14:10-11; 43-50; Matthew 27:3-10; John 18:1-11; Acts I:15-20). Moreover the tradition seems to pass the criterion of dissimilarity, as it does not seem to be the sort of thing that a later Christian would make up. Jesus had no more authority over his closest followers than that?

We are completely handicapped in knowing why Judas would have done such a thing, though there have been a plethora of suggestions over the years [here Ehrman has a footnote referring to his previous work.

Now this evidence of betrayal by a man called Judas comes completely from within the Gospels; there are no independent sources for Judas’s existence beyond the “independent” ones Ehrman cites above.  Yet the betrayal is portrayed as a pretty solid fact. Note as well the “criterion of dissimilarity” used as evidence: it must be true because it doesn’t seem to be the thing that people would fabricate.

What’s more distressing is how Ehrman simply takes the Gospels as gospel when writing about the crucial issues Jesus’s trial and demise.  I reproduce the last few paragraphs of his treatment (pp. 330-331):

It makes sense that Jesus would have been arrested by the Jewish authorities, as they had control over all local civic affairs. Accounts of Jesus’s trial before the Sanhedrin appear in the Gospels, but little there can be trusted as historically reliable.  The onlly ones present there were the Jewish leaders and Jesus, none of his followers and no one taking notes.  It seems unlikely that the leaders themselves would tell later Christians what happened at the time (if they remembered). And Jesus himself could not have told, since he was jailed and then executed the next morning. What is clear is that the Jewish authorities did not try Jesus according to Jewish law but instead handed him over to Pilate.

We also do not know exactly what happened at the trial with Pilate. Again, there are no reliable sources.  What we do know, as I indicated, is that Jesus was charged with calling himself the king of the Jews. That was a political charge, and of course Pilate was interested only in the political issues.  He could not have cared less about disputes among the Jews about their own religious traditions.  Since this is the charge that lead to Jesus’s execution, it is not difficult to imagine what may have happened at the trial. Pilate had been informed that Jesus considered himself a king.  This was a treasonous offense. Only the Romans could appoint a king, and Jesus was certainly not chosen to rule over Israel. He was claiming an office that was not his to claim, and for him to assume the role of king he would first need to overthrow the Romans themselves.

Jesus, of course, did not understand his kingship in this way.  He was an apocalypticist who believed that God would soon intervene in the course of human affairs to destroy the Romans, and everyone else opposed to him, before setting up his kingdom on earth. And then Jesus would be the one awarded the throne.  Still, it may simply be that Pilate interrogated him briefly, asking him what he had to say to the charge. Jesus could hardly deny that he was king of the Jews. He thought he was. So he either refused to answer the charge or answered it in the affirmative.

In either case, that was all Pilate needed. He had other things on his hands and other demands on his time. As governor, he had the power of life and death—no need to appeal to Roman federal law, which for the most part did not exist. If there were troublemakers, the easiest thing to do was simply to dispose of them. And so he did.  He ordered Jesus to be crucified.  The whole trial may have lasted no more than a couple of minutes. And the order was carried out immediately.  The soldiers reportedly flogged Jesus and led him off to be executed, presumably outside the city walls. Before anyone knew it, the apocalyptic preacher was on a cross. According to our earliest account, he was dead within six hours.

Now this may all be true, but it’s all from Scripture, and clearly Ehrman is interpolating things that he doesn’t know for sure.  This bit, and some of the other stuff, has an air of not history but of historical fiction.  Granted, Ehrman is often clear about where he’s speculating, but really, what happened above is drawn entirely from the Gospels.

Now I don’t have a dog in this hunt, and think that it’s not logically impossible for a Jesus to have existed who was the basis of the Christian myths, and that perhaps he was crucified (though I have some doubts about the Judas part).  But the evidence for the stuff above is pretty thin (there are no independent sources cited).  Caveat again: I’m not trained in biblical scholarship, nor have read extensively about this issue, though I have read Carrier’s critiques.

I decry those atheists who issue a kneejerk denial of Jesus’s existence largely on the grounds that they don’t want Jesus to have existed.  But I also worry that the kind of thinly-supported speculation that I see in Ehrman’s book will give succor to Christians who automatically conflate the existence of a historical Jesus with that of a divine Jesus.  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and since so many people’s beliefs are intimately connected with the existence of Jesus, it would pay scholars to be very careful on this issue.  Jesus is not simply an anonymous carpenter in the Middle East: his existence is the basis of millions of people’s faith and hopes.  The most careful and impeccable scholarship is needed here, even in a popular book.  I don’t see that in this one.

Readers’ nature photos

May 9, 2012 • 4:56 am

Reader Jennifer sent several pictures of spiders and salamanders; here are two, with her one caption (click to enlarge).

Goldenrod crab spider [Misumena vatia] with bumblebee prey:


Wikipedia notes that this spider has chameonlike tendencies:

These spiders change color by secreting a liquid yellow pigment into the outer cell layer of the body. On a white base, this pigment is transported into lower layers, so that inner glands, filled with white guanine, become visible. If the spider dwells longer on a white plant, the yellow pigment is often excreted. It will then take the spider much longer to change to yellow, because it will have to produce the yellow pigment first. The color change is induced by visual feedback; spiders with painted eyes were found to have lost this ability.

The color change from white to yellow takes between 10 and 25 days, the reverse about six days. The yellow pigments have been identified as kynurenine and 3-hydroxykynurenine.

Wikipedia gives pictures of the color change.  Because of its dimpled abdomen, I suspect that a crab spider is the subject of Robert Frost’s sonnet “Design” (below).  It’s one of the Frost poems I like (“The Road Not Taken” has lost its force since I stopped believing in free will), and gives nice contrast between the horrors of natural selection and the natural beauty in which they’re embedded.  The last line is ambiguous, but I prefer to believe it’s anti-religious—perhaps the despairing nihilism that we atheists are supposed to assume when convinced there’s no God.

I found a dimpled spider, fat and white,
On a white heal-all, holding up a moth
Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth —
Assorted characters of death and blight
Mixed ready to begin the morning right,
Like the ingredients of a witches’ broth —
A snow-drop spider, a flower like a froth,
And dead wings carried like a paper kite.

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?–
If design govern in a thing so small.

Jennifer also sent a red eft (Notophthalmus viridescens).  The “red eft” is a juvenile stage of the red-spotted newt, common in the eastern U.S.  It has three life stages: the larval stage, which has gills, and which then transforms itself into the reddish “eft” stage, which is a terrestrial dispersal stage that can last several years. (Natural selection can favor wandering abilities if the chances of finding a better pond give you higher reproductive ability than staying in your own—and presumably crowded—pond.)  The eft then transforms into the final, adult stage, in which it finds a pond and becomes an olive-green, aquatic adult that is ready to reproduce.

Don’t forget to send your wildlife pictures to me (do make sure they’re good ones!) as well as cat pictures, with information enclosed about the animals and a paragraph or so about the cat.

Quote of the day: Mike Aus

May 8, 2012 • 12:11 pm

This is a long one, but it’s worth posting over here, I think.  The quote is taken from a nice piece written by Mike Aus on the Dawkins website:  “Conversion on Mount Improbable: How evolution challenges Christian dogma.” Aus used to be a Protestant minister, but revealed himself as a nonbeliever in a televised talk with Richard Dawkins (watch the videos here). Here’s an excerpt from his essay; you should read the whole. I love the last paragraph below, so I’ve put it in bold type.

. . . I eventually came to see how evolution challenges the basic doctrines at the heart of Christianity. I also came to understand why Darwin sat on the manuscript of “On the Origin of Species” for twenty-five years before publishing it. He knew it was cultural dynamite.

Which core doctrines of Christianity does evolution challenge? Well, basically all of them. The doctrine of original sin is a prime example. If my rudimentary grasp of the science is accurate, then Darwin’s theory tells us that because new species only emerge extremely gradually, there really is no “first” prototype or model of any species at all—no “first” dog or “first” giraffe and certainly no “first” homo sapiens created instantaneously. The transition from predecessor hominid species was almost imperceptible. So, if there was no “first” human, there was clearly no original couple through whom the contagion of “sin” could be transmitted to the entire human race. The history of our species does not contain a “fall” into sin from a mythical, pristine sinless paradise that never existed. (I realize, of course, that none of this makes sense from the point of science; this is the world of theology. Please bear with me and enter into the willing suspension of disbelief for a bit.)

The role of Christ as the Second Adam who came to save and perfect our fallen species is at the heart of the New Testament’s argument for Christ’s salvific significance. St. Paul wrote, “Therefore, just as one man’s trespass led to the condemnation of all, so one man’s act of righteousness leads to salvation and life for all.” (Romans 5:18) Over the centuries this typology of Christ as the Second Adam has been a central theme of Christian homiletics, hymnody and art. More liberal Christians might counter that, of course there was no Adam or Eve; when Paul described Christ as another Adam he was speaking metaphorically. But metaphorically of what? And Jesus died to become a metaphor? If so, how can a metaphor save humanity? Really, without a doctrine of original sin there is not much left for the Christian program. If there is no original ancestor who transmitted hereditary sin to the whole species, then there is no Fall, no need for redemption, and Jesus’ death as a sacrifice efficacious for the salvation of humanity is pointless. The whole raison d’etre for the Christian plan of salvation disappears. . .

When I was working as a pastor I would often gloss over the clash between the scientific world view and the perspective of religion. I would say that the insights of science were no threat to faith because science and religion are “different ways of knowing” and are not in conflict because they are trying to answer different questions. Science focuses on “how” the world came to be, and religion addresses the question of “why” we are here. I was dead wrong. There are not different ways of knowing. There is knowing and not knowing, and those are the only two options in this world. Religion, even “enlightened” liberal religion, is generally not interested in the facts on the ground. Religion is really not about “knowing” anything; it is about speculation not based on reality.

Kitteh contest: Esqui and Gattito Lynus de Gatto

May 8, 2012 • 10:08 am

I’m not sure about the etymology of the longer cat name here, but reader Douglas entered two cats into the contest on Nov. 24, 2010. That’s how long ago that began, and there is still a queue of felids to present.  Here’s the latest:

Attached is the official publicity photo of Esqui and Gattito Lynus de Gatto (lynus).  Esqui the Elder is a quiet, reserved, planning and scheming type.  If he wants his morning food, he will sit on a sleeping human’s face to the point of suffocation, which effectively causes the food bowl to be filled.  He cannot be bothered with the swearing and toe stubbing that precedes this action.  Lynus the Younger has discovered the joys that can be found in a full set of sharpened claws and canine teeth.  He allows himself to be petted for exactly 28.5 seconds before suddenly sinking the full arsenal into the petter’s hand and forearm.  His goal is to master the art of dogback riding, which involves taking a running leap from the couch on to the hapless pooch.

More from Jason Rosenhouse on Sober and God-guided mutations

May 8, 2012 • 6:21 am

The estimable Jason Rosenhouse doesn’t post terribly often, but when he does, it’s worth reading. Over at EvolutionBlog last February, Jason tackled Elliott Sober’s idea (floated in an interview in The Philosopher’s Magazine) that God-guided mutations are not philosophically incompatible with evolution, a topic I wrote about yesterday. I was chuffed that my post seemed to get a lot of attention (over 140 comments) for one that dealt largely with evolution.

Yesterday Jason put up another post on God-guided mutations—actually, a dual post that also dealt with both the recent backlash against philosophy instantiated by Larry Krauss’s ill-advised comments in The Atlantic. (Jason’s title is in fact “The reason for the ambivalence toward the philosophy of science”). He agrees with me that Krauss was uncharitable in his remarks:

Now, I can understand why Krauss was feeling a bit vexed on this subject, since his book had just received an unkind review from a philosopher in The New York Times. Still, his sentiments were so exaggerated and over the top that the criticism directed at him is largely deserved. For example, his charge that only philosophers of science read work in the philosophy of science could be leveled (appropriately revised) at virtually any academic discipline. Moreover, I would think the philosophers could argue that it reflects badly on other people that they don’t take a greater interest in philosophy, just as Krauss would no doubt lament the unwillingness of so many nonscientists to read more about science. Krauss ought to have calmed down a bit before taking such broad swipes at his fellow academics.

On the other hand, I also have moments when I understand the exasperation. These are the moments when I see the truth in the adage that a philosopher is someone who kicks up a lot of dust and then complains he cannot see. For example, when it comes to anti-creationist writing I have generally found the writings of scientists to be more lucid and convincing than the writings of philosophers. [JAC: one comment here: at least two philosophers have written excellent anti-creationist books: Philip Kitcher’s Abusing Science and Rob Pennock’s Tower of Babel.]

Jason’s example of philosophical writing that is unconvincing and less than lucid is Sober’s talk highlighted yesterday, as well as Sober’s  remarks on God-guided mutations in The Philosopher’s Magazine.

Both in that interview and [in the video] he presents his argument as a corrective to some pervasive logical error he thinks has been committed by someone or other. But who are these scientists that actually need his philosophical services on this point? Who ever claimed that science has shown that it is flat-out logically impossible that God could be directing the mutations in a manner that is invisible to science?

Indeed.  As I noted yesterday, it is logically possible that God has a hand in any natural process—just a hand that is so cryptic and infrequent that it’s undetectable.  I still fail to see the novelty in this argument, which has been made, even for mutations, by theologians like Alvin Plantinga and religious scientists like Ken Miller. So what? It’s also logically possible that God influences the coin-toss at the beginning of football games, giving an advantage to the team who has prayed harder. Why is that not equally fertile ground for Sober’s lucubrations?

Jason is rightly peeved about the claim that there’s no difference between the logical possibility of God’s existence and the probability of God’s existence.

I’m more interested in the second goal, since it illustrates another annoying tendency of certain philosophers. I am referring to the endless turf protection. The relentless nattering not about the arguments themselves, but about classifying the argument within the proper academic discipline. Obviously to go from the facts of science to nontrivial conclusions about God you are going to have to add to your argument some assumptions about God’s nature and abilities. If that transforms the argument from scientific to philosophical then so be it. Can we please now move on to the more important question of determining whether the arguments are any good?

I argue again that if there should be evidence for God, but there isn’t, then we have more confidence that God doesn’t exist.  And that existence is an empirical rather than a philosophical question. The existence of a supernatural being cannot be decided through philosophy or reason alone: it requires observation or experiment. (That’s why the ontological argument isn’t any good.) If there is indeed a beneficent and omnipotent God, there should be evidence for it (prayers should be answered, we should see miracles, innocent children shouldn’t die of leukemia). But there isn’t any—any more than there is evidence for Bigfoot.  Presumably Sober would be willing to accept the provisional non-existence of Bigfoot.  Why, then, does he try to keep God in the picture with just as little evidence (i.e., none)? Jason goes on:

Yes, there’s a gulf between scientific facts and theological conclusions. But it’s a very small gulf, readily bridged by assumptions about God that are very common. The millennia of suffering entailed by the evolutionary process does not by itself rule out God, but add the standard assumptions (among Christians at any rate) that God is all-loving, knowing and powerful, and suddenly the problem is obvious. Moreover, the conflict isn’t logical, but evidential. The numerous ways that evolution challenges Christianity (challenging the Bible on the age of the Earth and on Adam and Eve, refuting the argument form design, exacerbating the problem of evil, and diminishing human significance) amount to a strong cumulative case against the possibility of reconciling evolution and religion. They don’t logically disprove theism, but that is neither here not there.

Dealing with those evidential challenges is the tune that prompts the annoying tap-dance of modern theology.

Finally, Jason, like me, claims that Sober’s conclusions are completely trivial—and he adds that they’re likely to be ineffectual:

Truly, though, it is the height of ivory tower nonsense to think that Sober’s argument makes even the slightest contribution to allaying the concerns of religious folks with regard to evolution. They are not worried about logical possibilities. They are worried about plausibilities, and Sober is quite up front that he himself does not find it plausible to think that God is directing the mutations. He points out there is not a shred of evidence for believing any such thing. He could have added that there are grave theological problems with such a suggestion, some of which I discussed in my previous post.

As a final point I would note that there is nothing new in Sober’s argument. The suggestion that God is subtly directing the mutations is commonplace in the literature of theistic evolution. Late in the session, Michael Ruse points out that physicist Robert John Russell has long argued for this general view. Ken Miller has made similar arguments. I am not aware of anyone who has responded to these gentlemen by saying their arguments are logically impossible.

In short, Sober’s presentation reminds me of John Hodgman’s “You’re Welcome” segments on The Daily Show. Sober struts in claiming he’s going to correct a logical fallacy absolutely no one has made, takes forty-five minutes to establish an utterly trivial point, is keen to remind us that we need philosophers to explain these things to us, and then coolly dismisses the idea that there is any necessary tension between non-fundamentalist Christianity and evolution. A bravura performance.

I am baffled why Sober spends so much time trying to argue for logical compatibility of God and evolution when he himself apparently thinks that God hasn’t played a role in evolution. One could argue that he’s just trying to demonstrate the power of philosophy, but  perhaps there are other reasons involving dislike of New Atheists, giving succor to worried theists, and so on.  That, after all, is what Michael Ruse did in his book Can a Darwinian Be a Christian?

Sober replies in the comments section that Jason misunderstands his thesis, arguing that “evolutionary biology is silent on this question [of God-guided mutations].”  It is not, for have looked for them and have not found them.  We cannot, of course, rule out that God creates such mutations very rarely and undetectably, but they’re not so frequent as to make mutations seem “nonrandom” in the scientific sense.

Finally, in the first comment on Jason’s post, Nick Matzke pops up to level a completely irrelevant slap at my criticism of theistic evolution as a form of creationism. Nick wants to validate God-guided evolution so that he (and the National Center for Science Education) can count more Americans as being pro-evolution (remember that more than twice as many Americans accept God-guided evolution as accept purely naturalistic evolution):

Apart from the massive logical and definitional problems with the above, Coyne also managed to change evolution from a majority view in the U.S. population, into a minority view outnumbered 5 to 1. Some people just like being disliked I think…

At any rate, I’ve received several private emails from people defending Sober’s views. Their main points are similar, and I’ll summarize them briefly:

1. Sober was not justifying or accepting God’s hand in evolution; he’s only saying that it’s logically possible.  I agree. Neither Jason nor I assert that Sober is arguing for theism; that’s very clear in my post.  What I claim is that Sober is enabling theism, and I’m not sure why.

2.  All the good arguments against God’s existence are not scientific, but philosophical.  I don’t agree.  You can’t argue against the existence of something that affects the world on philosophical grounds alone.  There has to be some appeal to evidence.  Even the argument from evil is not totally philosophical: it uses the empirical evidence of undeserved evil combined with the philosophical premise that such evil is incompatible with a loving and powerful God.

3.  Sober agrees that empirical evidence is relevant to establishing God’s existence.  This, of course, conflicts with point (2). Here is a quote from an email written by one of Sober’s defenders: “[Sober] thinks that mixed claims that involve both supernatural and natural elements—’God created the Earth 10,000 years ago’—can and have been falsified.”  Indeed.  But isn’t this an admission that some of the best arguments for God’s existence are empirically testable? One of them was Adam and Eve; another the creation of the world and its inhabitats ex nihilo; still another the failure of intercessory prayer.  And we know that God doesn’t generally elevate the mutation rate to make species more adapted to their environments.  Nor have we seen macromutations (which God could create) that would enable species to evolve around adaptive “valleys” and actually climb Mount Improbable.

When we see failure after failure of such claims for God’s existence, why continue to argue that God could act in the interstices of the DNA molecule? Why doesn’t Sober think that Bigfoot exists? Presumably because there’s no evidence, even though there could be  Well, think of God as an ethereal Bigfoot that can intercede in the workings of the universe.

My final appeal to Sober and is this:  Elliott, why do you limit your argument for the logical compatibility of God and science to the occurrence of mutations alone? Why not argue that God and genetic drift are logically compatible? Or that God and quantum mechanics are logically compatible? Or that God and plate tectonics are logically compatible? (After all, God could be the one causing the tectonic activity that pushes the continents around.)  Or that God could be subtly influencing the outcome of coin tosses?

Indeed, as one of my commenters (Dan L.) noted (and this is quoted by Jason), Sober could argue that “certain elements phone system would cease to work if it weren’t for the daily intervention of some benevolent deity. We can’t look for God in every relay every second of every day, so we can’t prove He’s not at work there.”

Indeed, and if this is what philosophers are going to spend their time doing, then my opinion of that enterprise is greatly lessened.

In which we co-opt a creationist caricature

May 8, 2012 • 3:55 am

Last week I posted about a contest at the Intelligent Design Creationism website Uncommon Descent, which asked readers to find a word for one of the themes of this website:

We need a new Coynage. What should we call Coyne’s battle for incivility toward – and distortion of facts about – traditional religion?

Some of the entries were funny, some lame, but the winner was “The Gnusades”.

In a comment on my post, reader Mandrellian urged us to claim that monicker for our own—a word to be proud of:

Time we claimed “Gnusade” as quickly as possible – let’s steal this bit of smart-arse thunder and make it a badge of pride.

Hell, sign me up for a GNUSADER t-shirt right now!

JAC – time you opened a shop :)

Well, unlike others who will remain unnamed, I don’t aim to profit from my site, nor purvey kitschy, self-promoting memorabilia, so there will be no shop. Nevertheless, reader Shuggy took up Mandrellian and suggested this image (which, he claims, has too many copyrighted elements to sell). Click to enlarge:

I particularly like the shield.

There’s a smaller online version here, and a locale-appropriate version here.  In the end, I deny that I’m uncivil in general (though I occasionally can’t restrain some mockery at the craziness of religious belief). The faithful’s definition of “incivility” when it comes to religion is this behavior: “You criticize religion, ask for evidence for God and the tenets of faith, and denigrate some of those tenets.” And I’m not sure which facts about “traditional religion” I distort. Whenever possible, I give polls documenting the large percentage of Americans who believe crazy things.

The TSA screws up again: makes mother fill up empty bottles of breast milk

May 7, 2012 • 8:21 am

This is absolutely unbelievable.  According to MSN’s Today Travel (and many other sources), the TSA (Transportation and Security Administration) detained Amy Strand, an American mother of four flying home to Maui from Kauai, for having EMPTY bottles that would normally contain breast milk that she pumps herself.  They wouldn’t let her through security unless the bottles contained liquid, and so humiliated her by making her go into a crowded women’s restroom and pump breast milk into the bottles:

“He said I couldn’t go through because there was no milk in the bottles,” Strand told TODAY.com. “But I was not going to leave a part of the breast pump behind — it cost over $200. He told me (however) that my option was to leave it behind or to put milk into it.”

When she asked where she could pump, the TSA officer took her to a restroom, where the only outlet to plug the pump into was by the sinks.

“There was a TSA agent in there using the restroom and I asked her if there was a private place to pump, and she said no,” Strand said. “I had to stand at the sink in my heels and dress pumping as travelers came and went. I was humiliated and fighting back tears. It confuses me why an ice pack and breast pump were a threat to national security.”

Right: empty bottles could be used to blow up a plane.

The TSA’s own website says that bringing breast pumps, breast milk, or empty bottles that would contain breast milk are all perfectly fine:

Breast milk is in the same category as liquid medication and mothers parents flying with, and without, their child are permitted to bring breast milk in quantities greater than three ounces as long as it is declared for inspection at the security checkpoint. Additionally, empty bottles and ice packs are permitted under these conditions.

The TSA has apologized to Strand, but that’s not good enough.  She should sue their butts off to make sure this doesn’t happen again.  However, I don’t think the TSA is sue-able. And they should get rid of that clueless TSA agent.  I can’t avoid the impression that not only are the TSA agents poorly trained, but enjoy exercising their power over travelers in arbitrary ways.

More ridiculous and humiliating security theater, and with not even a scintilla of a rationale.

Amy Strand and her child (photo from MSN site provided by Strand)

h/t: Neph