A poll on whether skeptics should shut up about Christianity

May 4, 2012 • 3:15 pm

I can’t resist, though I think this puppy has already been Pharyngulated (I haven’t looked). But why not let your views be known on an issue important to all of us—accommodationism? This is the weekly poll at About.com: Agnosticism/Atheism:

It’s accompanied by give-no-ground editorial by secularist Austin Cline, which includes this:

Christianity isn’t an oppressed minority; Christianity is an ideology which has been behind every unjust tradition and power structure that this nation has ever experienced. Christianity doesn’t need to be pandered to, it needs to be challenged, questioned, stood up to, and even mocked at times. Christians who don’t get that are still part of the problem because they still think that their religion merits special deference and privileges.

As of 6:15 Boston time, here are the results, which make me think that the squidly minions have discovered the site. But why not add our voices:

 h/t: Ant

Star Wars day: religion and penguins

May 4, 2012 • 8:30 am

I’m not a fan of science fiction, so I must be the only living American who hasn’t seen any of the Star Wars movies (nor have I seen Planet of the Apes or others of that ilk). Nevertheless, pinch-blogger Matthew Cobb—apparently a fan, though I won’t hold it against him—has informed me that today is Star Wars day (“may the fourth be with you)”, so for the greater geekhood I’ll mention two items.

The first is that there is a Church of Jedism. Basing a religion on science fiction may sound dubious, but not really: have you seen the theology of Scientology? Check out the website above and this Guardian article which documents the church’s growth.  The tenor of the faith may be lighthearted now, but just wait. . . tax-exempt status is next.

And, we have a March of the Penguins in honor of Star Wars day two years ago:

Koch to fund renovation of Smithsonian’s dinosaur hall

May 4, 2012 • 6:11 am

by Greg Mayer

David Koch, billionaire industrialist and bankroller of right wing causes, has announced that he will donate $35 million to the National Museum of Natural History (aka the USNM) for an overhaul of its dinosaur hall. The New York Times’ Patricia Cohen writes:

In 2009 he gave the Smithsonian $15 million to create the museum’s Hall of Human Origins. And in 2006 he gave the Manhattan museum [i.e. the American Museum of Natural History in New York] $20 million to create the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing. This latest gift, the largest donation in the museum’s 102-year history, will result in the new dinosaur hall in Washington also being named for Mr. Koch. The total cost of the new hall, with 25,000 square feet of exhibition space, is estimated to be $45 million, a museum spokesman said.

According to this longer AP piece, it seems as if the renovation will extend to the other adjacent fossil halls, and not just the dinosaurs.

As noted by Cohen, Koch funded the Hall of Human Origins at the USNM, which Jerry (here and here) and  I reviewed here at WEIT. Koch’s funding also elicited some controversy, regarding whether his climate denialism would be included in the exhibit, which we also noted (here, here  and in the PS here) at WEIT.

Ebert’s ten greatest films of all time (and my top 13)

May 4, 2012 • 4:01 am

Well, movie critic Roger Ebert has spoken: in an essay on his Journal at The Chicago Sun-Times, he’s just compiled a list of his ten greatest films of all time, regardless of era, language, or anything else.  As he says when justifying his choices (do read the piece), “Once any film has ever appeared on my S&S list, I consider it canonized.”

Below are Ebert’s selections; this year he bumped “Dekalog” to keep the list at ten, and made the hideous mistake of replacing it with a film I consider dreadful: “The Tree of Life,” which I reviewed last November and found a pretentious, ponderous, and pointless waste of time.  I cannot reconcile how bad I consider this film with how highly it’s been rated by many critics, including Ebert.  This goes to show (take that, Nick Matzke) that there are no objectively great films. Anyway, here’s Ebert’s list:

Aguirre, Wrath of God (Herzog)
Apocalypse Now (Coppola)
Citizen Kane (Welles)
La Dolce Vita (Fellini)
The General (Keaton)
Raging Bull (Scorsese)
2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick)
Tokyo Story (Ozu)
The Tree of Life (Malick)
Vertigo (Hitchcock)

I haven’t seen “2001: A Space Odyssey” (I believe I’m the only living America who can say this), but in general his choices are good ones, although I’m not with him on “Apocalypse Now” (I’d replace it with the Coppola films I give below) or, of course, “The Tree of Life,”

Now I’ve previously published my own list of best movies in June of 2010, deliberately omitting “Citizen Kane”, which is such an obvious choice that I wanted to give other films a chance:

The Last Picture Show (Bogdanovich)

The Passion of Joan of Arc (Dreyer)

Chinatown (Polanski)

Wings of Desire (Wenders)

Ikiru (Kurosawa)

Tokyo Story (plus Late Spring, Early Spring, and Late Autumn, all directed by Ozu and counted as one)

Lawrence of Arabia (Lean)

Make Way for Tomorrow (McCarey)

Aguirre, the Wrath of God (Herzog)

On the Waterfront (Kazan)

The Wizard of Oz (Fleming)

The Godfather Parts 1 and 2 (Coppola, counted as one)

Y Tu Mama Tambien (Cuarón)

And of course I invite readers to submit their own list, or simply one or two choices of “best films,” or to praise or criticize any of the films listed above. But I still think “The Tree of Life” is dreadful.  n.b.: after endless discussion of this movie with my film-buff nephew, who agrees with Ebert, I’m unlikely to change my mind.

High-altitude studies of the Northern Lights

May 3, 2012 • 10:55 am

According to National Geographic, these unique high-altitude films (taken from HuffPo) of the aurora borealis were taken by GoPro cameras mounted on weather balloons:

About a dozen weather balloons carrying high-definition cameras and science experiments took to the skies this month as part of an unprecedented study of auroras.

Launched from near Fairbanks,Alaska, the balloons were designed to be a cost-effective way to study the light shows, which are created when charged solar particles interact with Earth’s atmosphere.

“We’re trying to image the auroras from an altitude of about 100,000 feet [30 kilometers],” said project founder Benjamin Longmier, a physicist with the Ad Astra Rocket Company and an adjunct member of the physics department at the University of Houston in Texas.

“We knew going into this that this was going to be a very difficult feat, but we were attacking it from quite a few engineering and technology-development approaches.”

Dubbed Project Aether: Aurora, the expedition was a collaboration between Ad Astra, Texas A&M University, and GoPro, a maker of wearable HD cameras.

Over the span of about a week, project members attached sensors, science experiments, and modified GoPro cameras to latex weather balloons and released them in central Alaska, where auroras are visible nearly year-round. . .

At that height, the change in air pressure caused each balloon to expand to almost 30 feet (9 meters)—”about the size of a small house”—before popping, Longmier said.

Once the balloons burst, the payloads fell back to Earth on parachutes, and scientists found them using satellite and ground-radio GPS.

Read more about this project at the National Geographic site. For more video footage of this year’s spectacular displays of the Northern Lights, go here.

Why study fossils?

May 3, 2012 • 6:27 am

by Greg Mayer

Jerry gave a talk yesterday at the MCZ which most WEIT readers couldn’t attend (although you can get a general idea of it by watching this video of an earlier talk by Jerry), so I thought I’d give folks the opportunity see another evolution talk, “Why Study Fossils?” by Chris Noto. (The audio is a bit faint, so turn up the volume.)

Chris is a paleontologist specializing in Mesozoic reptiles who has recently joined my department. His talk was given last month as part of our Science Night series, which Jerry has also spoken in.

Chris Noto and friend

Science vs. religion: the outsider test for faith

May 3, 2012 • 4:04 am

According to Anders Jacobsen’s Blog, which republished them, these two maps originally appeared in the Faith Central section of the (London) Times, but they’re now gone.  They’re a bit exaggerated but the point is clear—and true (click to enlarge, and check the link above if you want them as a single figure):

The obvious point is that people’s religious beliefs are almost completely determined by where they happened to be born. This is a central pillar of John Loftus’s “Outsider test for faith” (OTF), which you can (and should) read about here.

The basis for the outsider test has been stated adequately by liberal Christian philosopher John Hick: “It is evident that in some ninety-nine percent of the cases the religion which an individual professes and to which he or she adheres depends upon the accidents of birth.” That is to say, if we were born in Saudi Arabia, we would be Sunni Muslims right now. If we were born in Iran, we’d be Shi’a Muslims. If we were born in India, we’d be a Hindus. If we were born in Japan, we’d be Shintoists. If we were born in Mongolia, we’d be Buddhists. If we were born in the first century BCE in Israel, we’d adhere to the Jewish faith at that time, and if we were born in Europe in 1000 CE, we’d be Roman Catholics. For the first nine hundred years we would’ve believed in the ransom theory of Jesus’ atonement. As Christians during the later Middle Ages, we wouldn’t have seen anything wrong with killing witches, torturing heretics, and conquering Jerusalem from the “infidels” in the Crusades. These things are as close to being undeniable facts as we can get in the sociological world.

Since one’s faith is almost completely an accident of birth, then, one should be highly skeptical about whether one’s faith is correct. The considerations above, and others, led Loftus to the OTF, which he describes as follows:

The outsider test is simply a challenge to test one’s own religious faith with the presumption of skepticism, as an outsider. It calls upon believers to “Test or examine your religious beliefs as if you were outsiders with the same presumption of skepticism you use to test or examine other religious beliefs.” Its presumption is that when examining any set of religious beliefs skepticism is warranted, since the odds are good that the particular set of religious beliefs you have adopted is wrong.

Various people have tried to find fault with this principle, a principle I find eminently sensible, but they’ve all failed.  If you want to see a real exercise in sophistry along these lines, read Alvin Plantinga’s “Pluralism: a defense of religious exclusivism.” And be prepared to get angry.

h/t: Grania Spingies

“The Scream” auctioned for $120 mil

May 3, 2012 • 2:29 am

This is the highest amount of money ever paid for a work of art at auction.  According to The Atlanta Journal Constitution, one of four versions of Edvard Munch’s famous pastel “The Scream” went for $119,922,500 yesterday at Sotheby’s.  (What’s with the last $22,500?). The paper adds:

Besides “The Scream” and Picasso’s “Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust” [JAC: that one went for $106,500,000 two years ago], only two other works have sold for more than $100 million at auction. Those are Picasso’s “Boy With a Pipe (The Young Apprentice)” for $104.1 million in 2004 and Alberto Giacometti’s “Walking Man I” for $104.3 million in 2010.

It was sold by a Norwegian businessman to an anonymous telephone bidder.  Imagine what a Leonardo or a Rembrandt would go for these days if it ever reached auction!

OMG!!!!!

Here, according to Wikipedia, is what Munch said about the genesis of this painting:

Munch wrote of how the painting came to be: “I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature.” He later described the personal anguish behind the painting, “for several years I was almost mad… You know my picture, ‘The Scream?’ I was stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood… After that I gave up hope ever of being able to love again.”

And the runner-up, Picasso’s “Nude, Green Leaves, and Bust”:

But these aren’t the most expensive paintings ever sold.  That honor goes to this one, whose artist you’ll recognize instantly:

It’s Cezanne’s “The Card Players,” which, according to Vanity Fair, was purchased by the nation of Qatar last year for more than—wait for it—$250 million.  That’s a quarter of a billion dollars, and over twice the price of “The Scream.”