Cat on the pitch!

February 6, 2012 • 2:59 pm

This is better than any Superbowl entertainment, for it’s real, it happened only a few hours ago, and it’s already over the internet. (Thanks to Matthew Cobb for spotting it.)

Liverpool versus Spurs at Anfield, game began at 8 pm UK time.

From the Guardian live feed:

11 mins: There’s a cat on the pitch. It’s currently settled in Tottenham’s penalty area. Not a fox in the box, but not too far off. “After the Manchester United game Carroll said that Kuyt had shouted at him to knock the ball down for him to run on to it. Which he did. To great success,” writes Phil Sawyer. “And then carried on doing during the Wolves match. Had it not occured to Dalglish to mention this tactic in the previous 12 months, or have Carroll’s travails at Liverpool been because he’s really really hard of hearing?”

13 mins: The cat has now been removed, quite gently, by a burly steward. Carroll celebrates this with a couple of tasty touches.

As Matthew reports, “Turned out to be the most interesting part of the game, which finished 0-0 and seems to have been rather dull.”

And here it is, already on YouTube:

From Dirty Tackle:

What is it with unusual pitch invaders on Merseyside lately? Last week, a protestor cuffed himself to the posts at Goodison Park to register his disgust with a budget airlines, and tonight a cat found its way onto the pitch during Tottenham’s bout with Liverpool at Anfield.

Brad Friedel was visibly freaked out by the impromptu appearance of the misplaced moggy — perhaps he thought Harry Redknapp had sent one of his pets in his absence from the match — and Liverpool fans responded with the inventive chant “a cat, a cat, a cat, a cat, cat.” Spurs fans rebutted by directing a chorus of “You’re Spurs and you know you are,” at the feline intruder.

Naturally, the cat already has its own Twitter account, @Anfieldcat:

Superbowl commercial avec chat

February 6, 2012 • 9:53 am

I didn’t watch the Superbowl, and also missed the Puppybowl (though I would have liked to have seen the Kitten Halftime), but there were apparently some cat-related commercials. One of them, involving a cat killed by a dog, with the dog offering his owner Doritos to keep the murder quiet, was vile and disgusting.  But here’s another Superbowl Doritos commercial that’s mildly amusing, albeit still a bit violent.  Someone at Doritos doesn’t like cats.

Texas kids don’t know enough about fat

February 6, 2012 • 8:14 am

This picture was sent by alert reader Stan, who attests to its veracity:

Attached is a picture I thought you might find interesting – if that is really the right word to use.  Other more appropriate descriptive adjectives might be – geographically unsurprising or deplorable, maybe.  I’ll let you decide.  The picture was taken by a good friends’ mother who lives in Tyler, TX.  I sent it to a another friend who also lives in Tyler, primarily to see if he had seen it and if it was in fact accurate as presented – i.e., not photo-shopped, etc.  Here is his response:  “I am sorry to say, but this is about a half mile from my subdivision. Saw it and just shook my head. Nothing here surprises me.”  I have to ask myself, “Who would allow their children to attend this place after such an open display of ignorance (on so many levels)?”

The Guardian touts Sheldrake again: pigeons find their way home, ergo Jesus

February 6, 2012 • 5:34 am

It’s one thing for the Guardian to get two muddleheaded critics of materialism to review Rupert Sheldrake’s new book on woo, The Science Delusion, but it’s another when the paper’s science section writes a laudatory piece about him.  Have a look at Saturday’s piece by Tim Adams, “Rupert Sheldrake: the ‘heretic’ at odds with scientific dogma.” The whole tenor of the article seems to be that the world is hungry for a palliative to science—exemplified by the Demon Dawkins—and Sheldrake’s book is that nostrum:

Sheldrake is a brilliant polemicist if nothing else and he skilfully marshals all the current thinking that undermines these tenets – from apparent telepathy in animals, to crystals having to “learn” how to grow, to some of the more fantastical notions of theoretical physics. On the morning I meet him, his book is sitting near the top of the science bestseller list on Amazon. It has also, unlike most of his previous work – Seven Experiments That Could Change the World, Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home – been generally reviewed respectfully. Perhaps it is something in the air.

I just checked Amazon in the U.S. and U.K.: The Science Delusion is at 214,584 at the former and 56 at the latter. So yes, it is selling well over there.

Anyway, Dawkins, who apparently stands for scientism, is dragged in; he must be getting tired of this.

One of the habits in nature that Sheldrake is interested in is polarity, and if he has a natural nemesis then it is Richard Dawkins, arch materialist and former professor of public understanding of science at Oxford. The title of his book seems to take direct aim at Dawkins’s The God Delusion. Was that, I wonder, his express intention in writing it?

“Slightly,” he suggests. But the title was really his publisher’s idea. “It is dealing with a much bigger issue. But Richard Dawkins is a symptom of the dogmatism of science. He crystallises that approach in the public mind, so to that extent, yes, it is a pointed title.”

Although Dawkins is accused of dogmatism, Sheldrake’s thesis is far more ambitious, and far less evidenced:

What we have in common,” Sheldrake says, “is that we are both certain that evolution is the central feature of nature. But I would say his theory of evolution stops at biology. When it comes to cosmology, for example, he has little to say. I would take the evolutionary principle there, too. I think that the ‘laws of nature’ are also prone to evolve; I think they are more like habits than laws. Much of what we are beginning to understand is that they clearly have evolved differently in different parts of the universe.”

Sheldrake talks a good deal of the fact that, as all good Brian Cox viewers know, 83% of the universe is now thought to be “dark matter” and subject to “dark energy” forces that “nothing in our science can begin to explain”.

And he thinks it never will? Even to “begin” to explain? At any rate, the accusation of scientism—or materialism—is explicit.

Despite this, he suggests, scientists are prone to “the recurrent fantasy of omniscience”. The science delusion, in these terms, consists in the faith that we already understand the nature of reality, in principle, and that all that is left to do is to fill in the details. “In this book, I am just trying to blow the whistle on that attitude which I think is bad for science,” he says. In America, the book is called Science Set Free, which he thinks is probably a better title. “They were aware that if they called it The Science Delusion it would be seen as a rightwing tract that was anti-evolution and anti-climate change. And I want no part of that.”

I’m not sure where Sheldrake gets his idea that we already understand most of reality, and the rest is details. Who thinks that? The history of science tells us otherwise: new pardigms are opening up constantly.  Yes, we understand much of reality, but think of all the new things that have arisen just in my lifetime: plate tectonics, The Big Bang, the structure of DNA (not long before I was born, the “hereditary molecule” was thought to be proteins), black holes, string theory, and the possibility of multiple universes.  There are endless wonders, and endless forms most wonderful, still to be found, and that’s the fun of science. Nobody except for Sheldrake and his woo-laden audience thinks that all we’re doing is just “filling in the details.”  In this connection I always think of the statement by evolutionist J.B.S. Haldane:

“Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.”

But for Sheldrake, materialism is not the way to go here:

Over a period, he found the materialist view of the universe – that matter was all that life consisted of, that human beings were in Dawkins’s term “lumbering robots” – did not accord with his own experience of it. Sheldrake was a gifted musician and “electrical changes in the cortex didn’t seem able to fully explain Bach”. Likewise: “To describe the overwhelming life of a tropical forest just in terms of inert biochemistry and DNA didn’t seem to give a very full picture of the world.”

Well, of course you have to add natural selection to that mix. The missing ingredient for Sheldrake is, of course, God.  But if you add God (and psychedelic drugs) to the mix, your understanding of the universe doesn’t get any fuller—it just gets fuzzier, with some pretty colors around the edges.

“At around the same time,” he recalls, “I had some exposure to psychedelics, and that opened me up to the idea that consciousness was much richer than anything my physiology lecturers had ever described. Then I came across transcendental meditation, which seemed to give some access to that without drugs.” Alongside that, to his surprise, Sheldrake began to realise that there was “a lot more in my makeup that was ‘Christian’ than I cared to admit. I started praying and going to church.”

Did he pray with a sense of its efficacy?

“Well,” he says, “I still say the Lord’s Prayer every day. It covers a lot of ground in our relation to the world. ‘Thy will be done’, that sense that we are part of a larger process that is unfolding that we do not comprehend.” By the time Sheldrake went to live at the ashram of the exiled Christian holy man, Father Bede Griffiths, he had been confirmed in the Church of South India and was the organist of St George’s, Hyderabad. It was at about that time, “living in a palm-fringed hut under a banyan tree”, that Sheldrake decided to set out his decade’s worth of thinking about memory being a function of time, not matter, shared by all living things, that he called “morphogenetics”.

That reminds me of the old Jim Ringer song with the lyric, “He used to take acid, and now he loves God, but he’s still got that look in his eye.”

What I think we can take from the Guardian article is that we, or at least the Brits, who are buying this book like hotcakes, shouldn’t be so complacent about the triumph of science. There’s a lot of anti-science pushback out there, a lot of hunger for things that science supposedly can’t explain—and that means God and religion.

Though he remains at best a contentious figure, and to some an irredeemable charlatan, Sheldrake sees some evidence that this old opposition is breaking down, that doubt and wonder might be returning to science.

“I think one of the reasons why my book has – so far – been well received is that times are changing,” he suggests. “A lot of our old certainties, not least neoliberal capitalism, have been turned on their head. The atheist revival movement of Dawkins and Hitchens and Dennett is for many people just too narrow and dogmatic. I think it is a uniquely open moment…”

His hope is that there will be a “coming out” moment in science. “It’s like gays in the 1950s,” he suggests. “I think if people in the realm of science and medicine came out and talked about the limitations of purely mechanistic and reductive approaches it would be much more fun…”

But what are those limitations? That we can’t understand why dogs know when their owners are coming home? Give me a break! One Big Mystery Sheldrake drags in this time is pigeon navigation (Darwin, a pigeon fancier, would be appalled).

The other thing that troubled him about scientific orthodoxy might be condensed into a single word: pigeons. As a boy in Newark-on-Trent, Sheldrake had kept animals – a dog, a jackdaw and some homing pigeons. He would place these pigeons in a cardboard box and cycle all morning with them and then release them to marvel how they would always beat him home. Newark happened to be a hub of pigeon racing. “Every weekend in the season, people would bring piles and piles of wicker baskets containing their birds; my father would take me there and the porters would let me help release the pigeons. Hundreds would fly up and circle round, then you would see them form into little groups and head off around Britain, back home. Pigeon fanciers were mostly plain working men, but they were fascinated by this mystery, which they did not understand.”

We still don’t know how pigeons navigate. There have been many suggestions, including using the Earth’s magnetic field, odors, landmarks, the Sun, or a combination of factors. But if we’re going to clear up this mystery, how would Sheldrake suggest we do it?  The only way I see is to do experiments using varying cues (these are hard with free-flying birds), and this of course is just pure materialistic science.  The alternative, which is apparently Sheldrake’s way, is to say “Baby Jesus guides the little birdies home.” That isn’t understanding at all: it’s simply an untestable assertion without an iota of evidence to back it up.

In the end, Sheldrake holds out the invidious possibility that there’s some sort of afterlife for believers in woo like himself, but not for atheists!

“I’ve always thought death would be like dreaming,” he says, “but without the possibility of waking up. And in those dreams, as in our dreams in life, everyone will get what they want to some degree. For the atheists convinced everything will go blank, maybe it will.” He trusts in a more colourful future for himself.

The only things that leaven this dire puff-piece are the readers’ comments, which seem pretty uniformly against Sheldrake’s thesis.  A sample of those comments:

“Sheldrake sees some evidence that this old opposition is breaking down, that doubt and wonder might be returning to science. What are we supposed to make of rubbish like this? Doubt and wonder are the wellspring of science and never left, thanks.

***

Christ not Ruper “Morphnance” Sheldrake again.

Is he paying you to push his profile in your paper or something?

Could we not have some opinions from some scientists instead – y’know people who might have at least some idea what they’re on about and who might provide a mildly more interesting insight into the world and its workings than gazing at goat’s entrails?

***

You really shouldn’t let anyone but your science bloggers write science articles, otherwise you just get mess like this.

A transparent attempt to provoke a bunfight, very little substance or depth. [JAC: I’m not familiar with the British term “bunfight.” Is it like a food fight?]

***

Sounds thicker the more you read about him. I wish they were made to define science before banging on about it so much. So much dislike what is ultimately the realm of researching, testing and understanding.

The most likely people to admit they’re wrong as scientists. That’s the job, that’s the study. You test everything, there’s not a preferred answer, just a quest for knowledge. So where does ‘delusion’ come in? Testing, following evidence and being open to changing opinion based on new evidence and so on. Delusional???? It just seems a contradiction when talking about science.

Purely aimed to market himself as some anti-Dawkins and sell some books, but it’s instantly set itself up as a poorly thought out argument merely from the title.

Never ceases to amaze me how many go with ‘science thinks it knows everything’ or science is arrogant, when the very notion of science is going into areas we don’t understand, researching what we don’t know. Science = curiosity. Science isn’t a person, it’s a process, it’s education. The only arrogance comes from those claiming knowledge based on no evidence and refusing to alter their opinion regardless of research etc. Not all religious people, not at all, but many, are particularly those attacking this ‘science’ creature they’ve created, are just depressingly narrow-minded, incurious contradictory morons. No offence.

Baggini reports on atheism in America

February 5, 2012 • 11:15 am

Julian Baggini, who as you know has been studying atheism, has a new piece in Financial Times, “Atheism in America” (reprinted in Slate as “In God we must: Why won’t the U.S. accept its atheists?”

It’s largely written for Brits, it seems, who may not realize how deeply religious America is, so it’s full of anecdotes similar to many we’ve heard before.  And you’re familiar with the Pew and Gallup statistics showing that atheists are the most reviled “minority group” in America.  Still, Baggini’s piece is a good remedy for those who don’t know religious America.

There is one part that might be controversial: the idea that atheists shouldn’t self-identify as such a reviled group.

Data backs up anecdote. A now famous University of Minnesota study concluded that Americans ranked atheists lower than Muslims, recent immigrants, gays and lesbians and other minority groups in “sharing their vision of American society”. Nearly 48 per cent said they “would disapprove if my child wanted to marry a member of this group” (many more than the next most unpopular category, Muslims, at 33.5 per cent). No wonder atheist groups talk of modelling their campaigns on the civil rights, gay and women’s liberation movements. It is not that they claim their persecution is on the same level but that they suggest the way forward requires a combination of organising and consciousness-raising. “We want people to realise that some of their best friends are atheists, some of their doctors, and lawyers and fire chiefs and all the rest of them are atheists,” says Dennett.

Not everyone agrees that this is the way to go. The neuroscientist Sam Harris is one of America’s best-known atheists; his 2004 book, The End of Faith, sold over half a million copies. He agrees that the situation for atheists is “analogous to being gay and in the closet for many people”, and it is striking that virtually every atheist I spoke to talked the language of being “out” or “in the closet”. Nevertheless, Harris argues “it’s a losing game to trumpet the cause of atheism and try to rally around this variable politically. I’ve supported that in the past, I support those organisations, I understand why they do that. But, in the end, the victim group identity around atheism is the wrong strategy. It’s like calling yourself a non-astrologer. We simply don’t need the term.”

I’m not sure I agree with Sam here, first because I don’t think many atheist organizations (or atheists) portray themselves as victims. Yes, we’re despised, but I think we have the same type of self-empowerment, the sense that we’re right, that infused the civil-rights and gay-rights movements.  Also, Baggini belies this view himself when he reports why atheism is on the increase in America:

When it comes to identifying the main cause of atheism’s recent growth, most people agree. “It’s all about the internet,” says Silverman. “The reason that atheism is on the rise is because there is no way that a person who is an atheist can think they’re alone any more. When I was growing up, I was the only atheist I knew. I had to get on my bike, ride to the public library and take out the one atheist book that they had in the whole library: The Case Against God by George Smith. Now any atheist can go on Facebook or Myspace and find literally millions of friends.”
Johnson can testify to the power of the web. “I found the East Texas atheist website, and through that the Fellowship of Freethought, the Dallas atheists, the Plano atheists and all these different other groups and I’m like, ‘oh, I’m not alone’ … Just knowing that there are 400-plus people at least, maybe thousands, an hour and a half from here that have similar beliefs is enough that I don’t feel isolated.”

And what is that but trumpeting the cause and rallying around the variable?

In the end, perhaps the diminution of hatred for atheism will have to await a further expansion of Peter Singer’s “expanding circle.”  Or, as Baggini puts it:

Meanwhile, the best hope for America’s atheists is that more people come to understand the message that one man posted on a sign outside his Florida home after he came out as an atheist and all his formerly friendly neighbours, apart from a Muslim family, stopped talking to him: “I’ve been an atheist all my life. Last year I was a nice guy.”

Sunday free will: “pseudo-dualism”

February 5, 2012 • 7:36 am

I can’t help but write about this again.

Reader Jeff Johnson was one of the participants on the lively “free will” thread that started with my response to a defense of “compatibilism” (the idea that free will is compatible with physical determinism) by Ian Pollock at Rationally Speaking. On that thread Johnson made a comment that I liked a lot (because I agree with it, of course).  He was responding to a comment by “tushcloots” claiming the immense complexity of human behavior as part of “free will,” and went on to say this:

We are not dualists, no one here is. That is what I don’t understand, it seems to me we are saying the same thing, except you say we don’t have free will, and those of us that do are somehow dualists and incompatabilists.

Jeff responded:

Okay, but perhaps pseudo-dualists…let me explain.

Why do compatibilists want to redefine the term “free will”? This has long been a basis of theological speculation and used as a foundation of moral reasoning. The traditional view of “free will” is that some non-physical “I” decides freely of any constraint or limitation. What’s more, this traditional view of  “free will” has always been considered to be a unique attribute of humans, it has long been advertised as an invitation to choose and accept God, and it has long been presented as a gift from God. It is that thing that makes us special and raises us above the level of mere animals.

It should be clear why incompatibilists want to abandon it: because it truly does not exist, it stems from an illusion in our minds, and it confuses people into thinking that maybe God does exist after all.

Why not just admit that “free will” is an illusion? We can will, want, and decide, but not freely in this traditional sense.

It seems that compatibilists squirm uncomfortably when faced with the reality of a material deterministic world because they fear that if our choices and our will is not “free” in this traditional way that somehow we lose some or even all of our humanity.

They don’t seem to grasp that our choice at any moment can be algorithmic and determined by the state of our brain and body, and that we could not have chosen otherwise, yet we still have all the human things like loving and feeling and the seemingly non-deterministic things like reasoning and intending and sincerity and honesty. It seems that compatibilists fret over the worry that these human qualities are somehow impossible in a fully material and deterministic world.

The compatibilist position feels like a fearful straddle of God world and real world because they just aren’t quite able to grasp that how we observe people to be actually is the product of an entirely materialist deterministic world.

Perhaps that we can not (at least for now) build a conscious machine worries them. Or even scarier, the possibility that someday we really may build a conscious machine worries them more. And these worries cause them to waffle about in the middle hoping some third way will appear to save their cherished notion of humans somehow elevated above the level of being products of pure biochemistry.

Just like the optical illusions created by our mental processing of the perception of color values on boundaries between contrasting colors, the feeling that our will is “free” and unconstrained by the physical computational structure of our brain at any moment is an illusion.

And there is no need to fear that these facts diminish our ability to voluntarily engage in action or resist external coercion. Those are natural human behaviors that are products of our deterministic brain, and their existence is abundantly evidenced by everyday humanbehavior.

So what is the need to nervously cling to insistence on some special reduced concept of “free will” out of fear that without it we somehow lose our humanity? I’m calling this pseudo-dualism. Instead, by clearly understanding this distinction between libertarian free choice and algorithmically determined choice we truly discover our actual humanity, and it is every bit as beautiful and satisfying as any vague dualist or compatibilist pseudo-dualist conception of humanity ever was.

***

I like the term “pseudo-dualism,” which seems to me pretty accurate. Now I don’t agree that every attempt to redefine “free will” in the “nonreligious” sense is meant to preserve some sense of autonomy in humans, but I don’t think that characterization is far off.  Not many compatibilists are dualists anymore, but “pseudo-dualism” often takes the form of criticizing our scientific understanding of the brain, trying to find the elusive free will in the gaps of our understanding about neuropsychology.  In that respect it’s similar to creationists trying to find God in the gaps of our understanding about biology.

Here, for example, are a couple of defenses of compatibilism raised by Massimo Pigliucci in his recent post on Rationally Speaking, “On free will, response to readers” and in his earlier post, “Jerry Coyne on free will”:

  • The concept of causality is unclear:

. . . there is a free use of the concept of causality which, as I pointed out in my original post, is far from being clear at all, and of course is most definitely extra-scientific, meaning that science can only help itself to it, not investigate it empirically.

  • There is an important difference between living creatures and nonliving matter:

. . . it is interesting to see that Matthew cannot conceive of a significant difference between filled polymers and brains, despite the obvious fact that brains, and not filled polymers, are alive, thinking, feeling, etc. Please do not take this as an argument for vitalism, it most definitely isn’t what I mean. But I find that that line of argument is somewhat question-begging: we are trying to figure out how chunks of matter can behave in such drastically different ways from other chunks of matter, so to point out the obvious (that they are all chunks of matter) hardly helps moving the debate forward. And of course, as someone commented in response to Matthew, it is no surprise that postmortem brains are just as inert as polymers. What interests us is what happens before they become postmortem.

But if anything is true, it’s that there’s no important material difference between nonlife and life.  After all, the latter evolved from the former.

  • The claim that we cannot choose freely is untestable and hence unscientific:

. . . my beef with Coyne is that he is the one making the strong claim that free will denial is a scientific proposition. I am not at all making the symmetrical claim that affirmation of free will is demonstrated by science, only the neutral one that science has precious little (okay, pretty much nothing) to say about free will.

I claim again that the onus is on critics of compatibilism to show that our brains are not subject to the same determinism as, say, a billiard ball.  I also claim that there is evidence that our will is “illusory” in the form of many experiments showing that our sense of volition can be completely disconnected (or more strongly connected than warranted) from our actions.

  • We’re not really sure that physical determinism is true, or operates throughout the universe.

And there are very decent philosophical arguments against determinism (and reductionism, which is also implied by this sort of claim). Moreover, what is at issue here is precisely whether “the same causes” are at work. Physics would have to have established causal closure in order to argue that, and it most definitely hasn’t. (Another way to put this is that everything in the universe behaves in a way that has to be compatible with the known laws of physics. This says nothing about whether those laws as we understand them comprise all there is to know about how the universe works.)

Parsimony suggests—and evidence supports the view—that the laws of physics apply throughout the universe, and certainly to our brains.

  • There are irregularities in human behavior.

Of course we do observe departures from regularities, it’s called human behavior! Yes, as I mentioned above, it is predictable to a point, but it is nothing like the movement of planets or the behavior of polymers.

Predictability is not the same thing as determinism.  We’ll likely never have the kind of knowledge we need to completely predict the future of the universe, much less how one person will behave.  But that doesn’t mean that that behavior is somehow subject to laws different from those that govern the movement of atoms and planets.

  • We feel that we make decisions, and that hasn’t been explained.

And there is, of course, the first person experience of making decisions after deliberation. That experience constitutes data (albeit not of the controlled fashion that would make them amenable to straightforward scientific investigation), and that data that needs to be explained, not explained away.

True, we don’t understand where our sense of agency comes from, or how it might have evolved—if it did.  But this is a free-will-of-the-gaps argument. Like consciousness, free will is an epiphenomenon of our complex brains, and a material product of those brains. Which brings me to the final point in Massimo’s second post:

  • Free will is an epiphenomenon, a subjective experience, that may not be reducible to the laws of physics.

My problem with Jerry’s position is that it is a form of eliminativism, a position in philosophy (not science!) of mind made popular by Paul and Patricia Churchland. When the Churchlands provocatively say that pain “just is” the firing of neuronal C-fibers they only begin to explain the subjective experience of pain. Yes, without the C-fibers we wouldn’t feel pain, but there is a huge difference between saying that the C-fibers are necessary for feeling pain (which we could express as: other conditions … > C-fibers >  pain) and saying that firing C-fibers are the same thing as pain (C-fibers = pain). So too with eliminativism about free will: yes, we need the laws of physics to be able to make decisions, nor can we make decisions that violate said laws. But this is not at all the same as saying that therefore decision making is an illusion brought about by physics, no more than pain is an illusion courtesy of C-fiber firing.

True, free will is “real” in the sense that, like consciousness, it’s a phenomenon that we feel we have, but that doesn’t mean that we can choose freely, or that ultimately our sense of agency cannot be understood by studies of the brain.  “Love” is a real phenomenon, too, but will, I think, ultimately be explained by the effects of chemicals on our brain. (Apropos, see Johnson’s comment, in the same thread, about his attempts at a software designer to produce a program that would produce different outputs from the same inputs.)

To me, the important question about whether free will is an “illusion” is not whether it’s an unexplained epiphenomenon, but whether we really can make alternative decisions at any point in time (that is, after all, why it’s called “free” will). Massimo more or less admits that we can’t when he says that “we neeed the laws of physics to be able to make decisions, nor can we make decisions that violate said laws.”  This is an admission that at any point in time we cannot choose freely: the laws of physics dictate that there’s only one decision to be made.  And that is an admission that while we appear to make choices, they aren’t free. The choice you made is the only one you could have made.  Where is the freedom in that?

Guest post: Irish Bishop produces hate speech?

February 5, 2012 • 3:56 am

Reader Sigmund has contributed a piece about an investigation of hate speech—by a Catholic Bishop, of all things!  The faithful, who have pushed for such laws about hate speech and blasphemy, are hoist with their own petard.

Irish authorities investigate papal encyclical as anti-secularist hate speech

by Sigmund

The recent imposition of restrictions on the limit of religious criticism by the student union of the London School of Economics highlights the increasing use of hate speech provisions in European law. While these laws are designed to prevent incitement to violence or discrimination against particular groups in society, a curious anomaly exists regarding religious teaching. The notion that mainstream religious instructions may incite bigotry, discrimination or even violence against members of other faiths or non-believers has thus far failed to register in legal thinking, underlying, perhaps, the customary deference given to religion.

So what happens when mainstream religious organizations begin to be treated like any other group and their pronouncements are subjected to the same scrutiny?

The Irish Independent newspaper recently reported on one such case:

“A HOMILY delivered at Knock shrine by the Bishop of Raphoe, Philip Boyce, is being investigated by the Director of Public Prosecutions following a formal complaint by a leading humanist who claims the sermon was an incitement to hatred.

The gardai have confirmed to former Fine Gael election candidate John Colgan that they have prepared and forwarded a file to the DPP after he made allegations that the address by Dr Boyce was in breach of the Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act, 1989.”

Mr Colgan complained that two passages in the Bishop’s sermon were “an incitement to hatred of dissidents, outsiders, secularists, within the meaning of the [Incitement to Hatred] Act, who are perfectly good citizens within the meaning of the civil law. The statements exemplify the chronic antipathy towards secularists, humanists etc, which has manifested itself in the ostracising of otherwise perfectly good Irish citizens, who do not share the aims of the Vatican’s Irish Mission Church.”

The passages themselves are pretty standard Catholic anti-secularist fare. The first referred to the Catholic Church in Ireland being “attacked from outside by the arrows of a secular and godless culture”.

The second, however, is more interesting, not because it is more obviously inflammatory, but because it is a quotation from a previous Catholic encyclical “Spe Salvi”.

“Here too we see as a distinguishing mark of Christians the fact that they have a future: it is not that they know the details of what awaits them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness.”

I suspect that this fact has been missed by the Irish police, resulting in something previously unthinkable in Irish society – a religious passage written by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007 is being investigated by the Irish authorities as hate speech!

The passages in question are hardly the best examples of anti-atheist speech by the Catholic church. On the other hand if one reads the wording of the Irish anti hatred act – Prohibition of Incitement to Hatred Act – 1989, it is at least questionable whether the words of the Bishop do contravene the act – hence the referral of the matter by the police to the director of public prosecutions rather than simply dismissing it out of hand as the complaints of a crank.

It is unclear, however, whether the matter will go to trial. I suspect not, but if it does the guilty party may be liable “to a fine not exceeding £10,000 or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 2 years or to both”. 

Will they extradite the Pope?

de Botton backs off the atheist temple, and a flashback to his freakout

February 4, 2012 • 9:08 am

Remember, Alain de Botton’s grandiose plans to build an Atheist Temple in London?  Well, according to Richard Wiseman’s website, Botton claims he was “misinterpreted”.  Basically, Botton now claims that he was merely asking architects to build on the achievements of the past. In an emailed “correction” to Wiseman, Botton said this:

Evidently the term ‘temple for atheists’ has set up uncomfortable associations. People have imagined I might be interested in worshipping an absent deity, or perhaps setting up a cult. Nothing as dramatic or as insane is on the cards. I’m simply arguing that contemporary architecture analyse the high points of religious architecture throughout history – and that we should allow a new generation of architects to tread in the footsteps of great secular creatives indebted to the ecclesiastical, people like Kahn, Ando and Zumthor.”

Yes, yes, but who’s preventing architects from doing that? But frankly, there’s a lot of great modern architecture—much of it here in Chicago—that doesn’t have a lot of resonance with ecclesiastical buildings.  Take the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, or even the Sydney Opera House: both could be considered monuments to secularism.  We don’t always have to ape Notre Dame to create beautiful buildings in which wonderful things can be seen or heard.

Botton’s long mea culpa represents a failure of accommodationism: atheists don’t need the trappings of religion to have a fulfulling life.

The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain: one of my favorite modern buildings

Oh, and an alert reader reminded me of something I had forgotten, but speaks to de Botton’s self-styled comity.  In 2009 Caleb Crain gave a pretty negative review to de Botton’s book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, and then posted about it on his (Crain’s) website.  de Botton went ballistic (many of you might remember this):

Caleb, you make it sound on your blog that your review is somehow a sane and fair assessment. In my eyes, and all those who have read it with anything like impartiality, it is a review driven by an almost manic desire to bad-mouth and perversely depreciate anything of value. The accusations you level at me are simply extraordinary. I genuinely hope that you will find yourself on the receiving end of such a daft review some time very soon – so that you can grow up and start to take some responsibility for your work as a reviewer. You have now killed my book in the United States, nothing short of that. So that’s two years of work down the drain in one miserable 900 word review. You present yourself as ‘nice’ in this blog (so much talk about your boyfriend, the dog etc). It’s only fair for your readers (nice people like Joe Linker and trusting souls like PAB) to get a whiff that the truth may be more complex. I will hate you till the day I die and wish you nothing but ill will in every career move you make. I will be watching with interest and schadenfreude.