Dennett's Tools for Thinking

I find it very interesting and informative and in fact generally pleasurable to listen to philosopher, 'horseman of the apocalypse', and grand-fatherly gentleman Daniel C Dennett. 

He has a new book to sell, Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking, so we might have the enjoyment of hearing a lot of interviews.  This week I heard a good one, on the podacst Point of Inquiry.

It is a wide ranging discussion with host, Indre Viskontas, (direct link here) they mull over a wide range of interesting topics, including consciousness, the 'intentional stance' (which others call 'theory of mind'), the role of philosophy in today's world, and that old favourite, free-will.  The book gets a few mentions, but not in any sense is the interview a hard-sell.

If you have 45 minutes to spare, or can load it onto your MP3 to enjoy while you are doing something that doesn't need concentration, I recommend it highly.

Will I buy the book?  That is a different question entirely.  I would love to have time to understand Dennett's writings and have read a couple of his earlier books.  However, I have also failed to reach the end of a couple of others due to my own ability to concentrate and my preference for being active.  

Maybe I should wait for the paperback - or maybe that is where I went wrong previously as the writing gets too small.

Peter Boghossian links

One of the most interesting up-and-coming philosophers in the field of professional atheism is Peter Boghossian.  He speaks in a direct but generally non-confrontational way but there is no doubt what his views are on the subject of religion.  He says "I'm unwilling to apologise for how I interact with religious people."  And why should he need to apologise?  Generally he is polite to them and he is as entitled to express his views as they are to express theirs.  I've collected a few snippets from his talks and some links for you to follow when you have some time spare to learn.

I might be paraphrasing a little, as I took these notes a while ago.

• Arguments, hate, strife, war, crime, discrimination and bigotry revolve around belief in a deity.  It is amazing that we are still debating whether God exists, and that the creation vs evolution debate continues.
• The concept of hell is a psychological black hole.
• Religion is a slave to contradictions, inaccuracies, inconsistencies, horrible science, poor maths, moral comments, erroneous geography, false prophecies, false heroes and human sacrifice.
• Christians cannot understand what it is like not to believe in god.
• We should replace belief with reason.  Beliefs are based on circumstances and things that have happened to us in the past.  We cannot use the word outside the supernatural or spiritual.
• The idea of God existing goes against every fibre of my being.  We can't unlearn anything we have learnt about science.  How can it be good for anyone to believe in something that insists on enslaving the mind, that convicts people of thought-crimes, rapes our senses and regulates everything we do.

Here are links to some of his talks:

Faith is a Cognitive Sickness Nov 2011

"A lot of people are sick and tired of being held hostage to the delusions of others.  I'm one of those people."


Practical Strategies to Combat Faith a NEPA Freethought Society Podcast

You should always be open to the possibility that others know something that you don't know.  By being open to learning from them you are modelling a behaviour that you would like them to try too.  That is a fantastic strategy in small discussions.

The Good Atheist Podcast: Episode 169  About the need to redefine “Faith”.

Interview on the Malcontent's Gambit podcast

Another Youtube video

Interviewed on Freethought Radio episode 12th November 2012, starting at 21 minutes 25 seconds.  Listen, or download the episode.

And finally a previous post on Something Surprising.

Enjoy!

Unlinking the world's woes from atheism

I have been reading Michel Onfray's Atheist Manifesto, published 2005.  He has been described as "The French Richard Dawkins" but I think that description does justice to neither of the men.  Dawkins may be intolerant of religion, but Onfray attacks it head-on with the rhetoric of a priest giving a sermon. 

I came across this short passage (page 42) which addresses a topic that I covered recently in my series Things Christians Say.  It was a post called Atheists are responsible for all the world's ills,where I argued from the point of view that we atheists don't have time for such a daunting task.

"If the existence of God, independently of its Jewish, Christian, or Muslim form, had given us at least a little forewarning against hatred, lies, murder, rape, pillage, immorality, embezzlement, perjury, violence, contempt, swindling, false witness, depravity, pedophilia, infanticide, drunkenness, and perversion, we might not have seen atheists (since they are intrinsically creatures of vice) but rabbis, priests, imams, and with them their faithful, all their faithful (which amounts to a great many) doing good, excelling in virtue, setting an example, and proving to the godless and perverse that morality is on their side. Let their flocks scrupulously respect the Commandments and obey the dictates of the relevant suras, and thus neither lie nor pillage, neither rob nor rape, neither bear false witness nor murder—and still less plot terrorist attacks in Manhattan, launch punitive raids into the Gaza strip, or cover up the deeds of their pedophile priests. Then we would see the faithful converting their neighbours right, left, and centre through the example of their shining conduct. But instead . . .

"So let's have an end to this linkage of the world's woes to atheism."

Well said Michel Onfray!

Only an opinion about nothing . . .

Oxford Skeptics in the Pub had an unusually 'empty' talk this week, entitled "Why nothing matters".  An I'm not saying that the talk didn't happen but that it was full of nothing.

An audience of only about 30 heard Ronald Green speaking about "Why Nothing Matters", hawking his book and clearly expecting to be heckled.  Indeed his style was more-or-less confrontational while he told us that he had spent 5 years studying 'nothing' very seriously.  It is not quite clear where he was when he did that study, nor indeed which universities he has taught at in various continents, or exactly what post-graduate studies he participated in at Oxford University (or indeed which university in Oxford).  But maybe I am too skeptical in wondering about those questions.

Was it obvious that it is true that nothing matters?  You have to ask yourself how deep the following comments are.

"There has to be something around nothing, and there has to be nothing around something."

"Luke says 'nothing is impossible with God' ".

"Zero apples is not the same as zero oranges" and "there are different kinds of nothing".

"Really, nothing is the absence of everything, including ourselves"

Apparently 'silence' might be one kind of nothing [but I don't think the absence of sound is enough to count a real 'nothing']. But he claims that you can never actually have complete silence.  I venture to disagree with this particular claim on grounds of some physics.  If you were in a vacuum there definitely would be silence.  His claim that you hear yourself when it gets quiet enough and that there there is never silence is surely philosophically flawed, because the role of the observer is irrelevant.  If you were not alive and were in a vacuum there definitely would be silence and it doesn't matter a jot that you therefore don't know about it.

More interesting was the tale of the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911. Apparently far more people queued to see where it had been stolen from than had wanted to see the painting itself. 

But my final point is that I prefer the approach taken by Peter Atkins in his recent talk and Lawrence Krauss in his "A Universe from Nothing".  Green claims that "even Krauss gets terribly mixed up about it".  I think I would ask whether it is overwhelmingly probable that that is true.  Ask who is more mixed up, and I think the answer seems obvious.

On the other hand I saw a review of his book . . .

[Unlike the talk] This is not a book to be dipped into or skimmed over a coffee break. Green writes very clearly and with a great deal of humour, but he is dealing with ideas that perhaps go to the very core of what it means to be human. That he can do so without the nihilistic melancholy of so many of the people he quotes is a tribute to his writing skills. Would I recommend this book? Yes, with the proviso that if you choose to read it you give the time and thought it deserves.

So maybe I misjudge him. 

Original Sin and the sins of the fathers!

A C Grayling said:

Compare: a pharmaceutical company tells us that we are all born with a disease that requires that we buy their product all our lives long, and that if we do it will cure us after death.

Christopher Hitchens paraphrased or supplemented this by saying:

God creates us sick and then offers a cure under penalty of eternal torture.

Does anyone have a good counter-argument?  By 'good', I mean something that actually makes sense, and not a silly quotation from C S Lewis or some other patronising preacher.

I would be genuinely interested in hearing a real, well-reasoned explanation about what is good in Christianity's guilt-ridden philosophy of 'original sin'. 

As both of those fine men have pointed out, Christian teaching seems not to be the nice friendly teaching of Jesus that many people expect - love thy neighbour and all that - but a set of stories that are cunningly crafted to terrify believers into submission.  Where is the objective morality that we should all aspire to follow in that message?

It seems to me that the concept of original sin is simply a doctrine of cruelty, thinly disguised as a 'truth', based on obvious mythology and mysteriously inherited by each new generation.  This is in spite of the bible's other teachings that the sins of the fathers shall (only) be visited on the next four or five generations.

Its obvious!  It has been carefully tailored with the aim of subjugation.

The sad thing is that it works on so many innocent people.

Francesca Stravrakopoulou - Think Week

Of the events that I attended in Oxford Think Week, Saturday afternoon's talk by Professor Francesca Stravrakopoulou was the most interesting, comprehensible and entertaining.  (Peter Atkins was a close contender though!)

She explained how much she loved studying the bible.  As an atheist she claimed that anyone suggesting that the bible should only be studied by religious scholars was doing a disservice to it.

She started with an amusing tale about a conversation with her grandmother who told her that the classical demi-gods, the Greek heroes, were the offspring of a god and a human.  She said "Oh, like Jesus then?"  Apparently though, the suggestion that Jesus is a demi-god doesn't go down well with Christians, and this was the beginning of her rejection of Christianity and fascination with the bible as a human-written book.  After some years of study in Oxford in the minority position of being an atheist in a community of theologians she has risen to the position of Professor of Biblical Studies in Exeter.

From this position she was asked to host a short BBC series called The Bible's Buried Secrets, (e.g. here) which I remember enjoying.  The seemingly controversial claims of the series led to something of a furore.  The BBC was inundated with complaints that it was not appropriate for a series about the bible to be presented by an atheist.  She received a lot of personal hate mail which was rather disturbing, but on balance the 'love mail' was even more disturbing!  She has also been accused of being anti-semitic, anti Israeli, and more amusingly, 'really stupid' because she has read the bible and knows it well but apparently hasn't understood it.  I think she has understood it very well!

Worse still, some have said that she was 'too young-looking', complained about what she was wearing, that she was a woman and worst of all an atheist!  One fellow scholar claimed that she had 'betrayed the guild' and another said that she had 'discussed things on TV that should only be examined in the safety of the lecture theatre'.

She likes to show her students the core and difficult stuff in the bible, like the partly hidden presence of a wife of Yahweh, namely the goddess Asherah.  In particular she is interested in the tension between biblical views and historical realities.

For the remainder of the talk she moved on to the subject of Think Week's theme - namely 'Death'.

The concept of hell has only become so widely believed because of Christianity.  Before that time it was believed that you would go to the underworld and you would be united with the ancestors or 'gathered to the ancestors'.  The way that material remains were treated was important.  The very idea that the dead are unclean is a modern one.  In ancient times the period of decomposition was an important part of confirming your place in the underworld, and your bones would have been gathered into an ossuary some time after your death.

Furthermore, death was not regarded as breaking the bond with the living, and rituals were important to maintain this link.  Now we are increasingly segregating the living and dead and she teaches that this is completely different from the ways of ancient people.

In one special case, namely that of Jesus, his resurrection and the lack of a verifiable tomb to venerate diminishes the value of what it is to be human.

Summarising, she emphasised again that biblical texts are incredibly alien to modern eyes, but that, on the other hand, the bible and religions that gave rise to the bible are incredibly important to human society.

I suppose that last claim is a matter of opinion, but it is one that I can respect and not reject out of hand. 

All told, this was the best Think Week event that I attended.  How sad that the audience was only 29 people.  I for one am looking forward to any new TV series involving Francesca's fascinating insights into the bible.

BBC might resist controversy . . . 

Go to Channel 4!

Sex and Death

Another Oxford Think Week activity, on Saturday 16th February included a talk by Professor Beverly Clack about Sex and Death.  Before the talk started I wondered what the title might mean, and I was only there to be sociable while I was waiting for the event that I really wanted to attend later in the afternoon.  (It did not disappoint - see my next blog post.)  By the end of the talk I was left in the same state of confusion, but then again I'm only a sort of scientist.

She talked a lot about the Marquis de Sade and feminism, but for me it was not clear what her message might have been.

We had been invited to 'Pre-Read: “Sex and Death – Reappraisal of Human Mortality”, Polity Press, ISBN-13: 978-0745622798.'  I must admit that I hadn't felt compelled to do so.

From the back cover: For centuries people have debated the nature of the human self. Running beneath these various arguments lie three certainties – we are born, reproduce sexually [is this a certainty?], and die. The models of spirituality which dominate the Western tradition have claimed that it is possible to transcend these aspects of human physicality by ascribing to human beings alternative traits, such as consciousness, mind and reason. By locating the essence of human life outside its basic physical features, mortality itself has come to be viewed as a problem, for it appears to render human life both meaningless and absurd. Complex connections have then been made between the key features of life: sex is linked with death, and birth becomes the event that introduces the child to the world of decay – and ultimately to death itself.

Personally I see no link between sex and death but perhaps that just shows how I am depraved in some obscure way.  In fact, the suggestion that human life might be meaningless and absurd is far more believable to me.

One good thing that I can say is that she stuck to the theme of Think Week quite well.  The theme was 'Death'.  The talk was suitably morbid.

I had almost lost the will to live.

Small note:  I should have stayed in the kitchen to help with drying the cups and plates!  Sorry, but that was more fun!

Richard Dawkins and Stephen Law - Think Week

On Friday 15th February as part of Oxford Think Week, Richard Dawkins and Stephen Law met on stage in the Sheldonian Theatre.

The discussion was generally an interesting revision of the sorts of things that I hear on scientific and skeptical podcasts, week in and week out, and I write about here.  A few of the audience were a little disappointed that there was nothing very new in it.

However, I can listen to these two men for a very long time without getting bored, and you have to admire their dedication to their cause.  They give up their time (and indeed money by sponsoring the event) in order to be visible to another audience - predominately of young people. 

Getting the message of rationalism and science out to the public takes a lot of effort and they show little sign of tiring.

As usual, the questions asked by the audience varied in quality.  Some were thinly veiled angry responses from a religious world-view that had clearly found itself on the back foot.  Others were more statements than questions in spite of the chair imploring people to keep their questions short.  Also as usual there were questions which were politely answered, but could have be met with simple advice to go and read a book.

Asked about objective morality and how one should address the competing requirements of different moral values we learned that RD claims to be a consequentialist.  SL agreed that he had got the description correct.  I doubt that the questioner felt satisfied with the answer that he got as he was clearly under the impression that he had deal the knock-out blow.

I for one thought it was the best answer available.

When the video of the event is posted I will link to it here.

Monopoly provides the answer to the question "What does a retired pope do next?"

In general terms this is a virtually meaningless question because most popes do not abdicate and retire.  No doubt it will be a while before we hear the real reason for the retirement of Pope Benedict, even if we ever find it out.  The Roman Catholic Church could hardly be say to be famous for its openness.

Like his brother, Pope Benedict has been accused of quite a number of misdemeanours during his professional life.  It is asserted that he has personally been responsible for covering up the nefarious child abuse activities of many Catholic priests.  Although it is not implied that he was actually involved in the rape of children, it would be regarded as a very serious crime in any civilised jurisdiction to take actions intended to impede the police in their investigation of crime.  And yet this is exactly what he has been accused of.  Aiding and abetting one criminal would be serious enough, but it if is true that Ratzinger's Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith activities have been systematically confounding law enforcement then someone should take personal responsibility for it.  That someone should clearly be the head of the organisation.

Now that Ratzinger will no longer be acting as 'The Pope', and therefore no longer the head of state of that 'non-country' called 'The Vatican', one might hope that he is getting rather worried.

Please think about that and feel some satisfaction at my optimism.

His immunity to prosecution must surely have been rescinded along with the other responsibilities of the position.

Surely, just like that other notorious European tyrant Mladic, Ratzinger should be arrested and denied bail while his alleged crimes are thoroughly investigated and he is ultimately brought to trial. 

Therefore the answer to the question of his retirement plans should come directly from the Monopoly board!

Ratzinger - 1st March - Go to Jail. Go Directly.

Go to jail.  Go directly to jail. Do not pass go. Do not collect £200 (or whatever currency or culture you prefer).

After all this is a man who should know more about morality than anyone else on Earth if the claims of his church are true.  If God really set the standards of objective morality, then the Vicar of Christ (and his older brother) should have been able to tell that it is immoral to shelter his fellow priests from justice (or whatever his older brother is accused of).

There is little evidence that they have grasped that concept yet.

Go to jail.


Update: 22:30.  This evening I attended an event in Oxford, where Stephen Law and Richard Dawkins were in discussion as part of 'Think Week'.  One of the questions from the audience was on exactly this topic.  RD has been involved in a previous discussion about an attempt to prosecute the pope and together with Christopher Hitchens had paid a top lawyer to look into the idea.  Sitting in the audience this evening and knowing that this post was scheduled I felt quite amused.

No rational person . . .

I can recommend the following debate, This House Believes that Organised Religion has no place in the 21st Century, although not necessarily for the reasons that you might expect.  You might know that I am a fan of Richard Dawkins, and originally it was the main reason that I watched the following video.  I wish that the proposal was true but didn't believe that they would win, but I was pleasantly surprised by the performance of a number of the other speakers.

The order of speakers was interesting.

Andrew Copson speaks a lot of good sense.  He introduced the debate with what was later described as a presumptuous speech.  I think that might have been a little harsh.

Retiring Archbishop Rowan Williams then gave a very well polished, aspirational sermon.  He is, after all, a professional speaker and I respect his style, even if not his beliefs.  Of the archbishops of the last century he is one of the two stars in my opinion.  William Temple was the other.  Did Williams produce a convincing argument?  I think not.  But did he carry the audience?  Certainly yes.

In response, Professor Richard Dawkins spoke in predictably rational terms and explained why truth matters.  He spoke well, but something about the way that he read his notes was less impressive than his usual performance.  It was rather scripted and didn't really come from the heart on this occasion.  But it was worth listening to his words, and I couldn't disagree with any of them.


Then Tariq Ramadan gave an irrational, taqiyyah-laden, rebuttal.  His message seemed to me to include:

• You need me (is that a threat?)
• You're being dogmatic (so what?)
• We know more about humanity (how?)
• I reject your criticism of my religion's attitude to women (and I reject that!)
• You say religion is backwards looking (and would be right to do so)
• We are better at talking about morality and ethics :)
• And you should welcome me to the discussion.

Well - you should welcome ME to the discussion too, and I have as much right to claim that as you do - but it doesn't get me invited.

After some interesting questions from the audience - mostly non-theistic in their background - Dr Arif Ahmed delivered a crushing conclusion on behalf of the proposal.  (Starts at 1:10:30)  Responding to a question about what he would take as evidence he replied in two parts:

1. A valid argument with true premises, from which the consequences follow, or
2. Empirical evidence

Addressing another well spoken, although pompous heckler, who used the age old argument that correlation does not imply causation, he expertly quipped:

Nobody denies that correlation does not entail causation, but everybody who knows anything about it knows that correlation is evidence for causation, which is what I was claiming.

But in spite of being aspirationally righteous, the debate was always going to go to the opposition.  It might have been framed differently if it referred to the 22nd century instead of the 21st, but it is already too late to claim that religion has no place in the 21st century.  And the final speaker, Douglas Murray won the day.  Murray is an atheist and long-term opponent of the speakers on his own side, but still he joined with them to oppose the motion.

Having rightly dismissed Alain de Botton's ridiculous writings he went on to say about religion:

Is it true?  No!  But truth is like water.  It needs a vessel to carry it.

Like all analogies this it a little deceitful, but metaphorical presentations are always more convincing than things that are merely true.  As he said, no rational person can agree with the proposition - however much they may wish it were true.

And I will be loking out for interviews with Douglas Murray in future.

Stephen Law on The Malcontent's Gambit

One of my favourite philosophers was interviewed recently on one of my favourite podcasts.  I don't know how Alan Litchfield pulls it off to get such good guests on his podcast, 'The Malcontent's Gambit', but he seems consistent in that ability.

This podcast features Stephen Law, who is author of a number of books including 'Believing Bullshit' and a former speaker at Oxford Skeptics in the Pub.  Stephen will also be noticeable in the annual Oxford event called Think Week, where he will be in discussion with Richard Dawkins.  Tickets sold out quickly, as is common for these Dawkins events in Oxford!  (Yes - I have got one, thank you.)

Given his track record, being acknowledged as one of the few people who have significantly defeated William Lane Craig in a debate, I think the discussion with Dawkins will be interesting.

Without having to speculate about future events, I highly recommend The Malcontent's Gambit podcast.   In this interview, Law dismissed the Euthyphro Dilemna before going on to talk about the 'evil god hypothesis', which turns out to be difficult to contest.

Long live free will!

My friend Steve Zara has recently become involved in an online 'debate' with Jerry Coyne about free will.  As you might remember, I wrote a blog post about the role of Determinism and Chaos in free will, a few months ago.

It seems to me that Jerry Coyne puts up a bit of a straw man when arguing against Jim Al-Khalli's view of free will.  Al-Khalli hardly touches on the question of dualism, at least in the sections quoted by Coyne, and anyway this is all a paper tiger.  (The word is never used in the whole of his article.)

The more serious part of the argument is about how chaos can come to the rescue and actually give us free will without falling into total anarchy.

As I explained in my earlier post, the detailed future state of the universe is not predictable, even in principal.  I gave three reasons to support that idea, namely chaos, Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, and quantum fluctuations.

Chaos appears to me to be the strongest factor in this.  The other two might not be significant in everyday life, but over a greater length of time they could build up to make a difference.  It might be possible to compute your way out of the chaos conundrum, but by increasing your computing power you only delay the moment of uncertainty.

However, it is important to note that this unpredictability comes in small doses.  Although we can't predict exactly what we might think or do tomorrow, as new uncertainties approach us, we can at least predict what are the more likely trends.  Without resorting to dualism, our minds have an emergent internal consistency which tends to make us act in a way that is consistent with the way we acted yesterday.

This means that chaos and unpredictability make the future uncertain, but without robbing us of our free will they ensure that future trends are likely to be consistent with what we expect.

Long live free will . . .  even if Christians do often use it as an excuse for the atrocities committed by their God!

Determinism and chaos

I have been listening to a talk recorded at Portsmouth Skeptics in the Pub, and published via the Skepticule podcast.  It was Jonathan Pearce talking about free will and determinism.  He counted how many of the audience might be convinced that we do not have free will at the beginning and the answer was around two thirds.  This had changed by the end.  I'm not going to recount his talk, but just talk about the things that have always bothered me about determinism.

Determinists argue that the whole of the future is determined - albeit not necessary pre-determined by a specific entity.  As such they try to convince us that we don't really have free will.  They often use masses of 'evidence' to convince us - and it doesn't convince me.

The evidence comes from the interpretation of results of experiments which seem to show that (for example) our muscles prepare for movement before our minds decide to make the movement.  At first sight these ideas seem compelling, but then you realise that the results are open to interpretation in more ways than one.

Seemingly 'unconscious' actions only suggest that there is no central 'me' who acts like a CPU in a computer.  However, when you consider that our inner awareness is clearly highly distributed through the brain, and that the brain functions fast enough for delays not to be noticeable in everyday life, you realise that evolution did rather a good job.

Worse still, I can't believe that determinists have such a naive view about the predictability of the future state of the universe.  I see this on several levels:

• Even on the basis of a truly complete knowledge of the state of every particle and of all the energy in the universe, they miss an important point - namely chaos.  Chaos theory acknowledges that even the tiniest deviations from what can (in principle) be measured, will lead to a fundamental unpredictability.  It is unavoidable.  Increasing the power of your computer only delays the moment of unpredictability.
• Moving into the quantum physics regime (and in this case I am not using the quantum physics metaphor to prove anything, but to question something) they neglect (or deliberately misunderstand and ignore) Heisenberg's uncertainty principle.  You just can't know everything about the universe as it is just now.  Whether we really understand quantum mechanics or not, it has shown itself to be much better in the predictions business than the philosophy of determinism.  I know where I would put my money on this argument.
• This is not even to mention quantum fluctuations . . . particles and their anti-particles being created spontaneously from a quantum vacuum.

So let's face it.  The future is not actually determined by the present state of the universe except that it is like weather forecasting.  We can fairly reasonably predict trends for the near future, and we can see a final end to the universe as a huge expanse of cold darkness.  But the details get more hazy as the future unfolds.

My free will to publish this post - or not - can't seriously be questioned.

. . . and Pearce's talk was very interesting, even if (Note: IF) his own views are entirely fallacious! For a philosopher that is not an insult but a challenge.

Small note:  Listen to the podcast to see how the opinions had changed by the end of his talk.  I suspect that he was not expecting the reaction of an audience of skeptics!

Nonsense from C S Lewis

These surprising things come not from a man who is alleged to be a poor thinker, as theists often say of Richard Dawkins - unfairly in my opinion.

No - these surprising words come from C S Lewis.

Life
“You will never know how much you believe something until it is a matter of life and death.” “If you think of this world as a place intended simply for our happiness, you find it quite intolerable: think of it as a place of training and correction and it’s not so bad.” – God in the Dock, page 52.

“One of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. When that desire is completely quenched in anyone, I think he has become something less than human.” – God in the Dock, page 108.

Try to exclude the possibility of suffering which the order of nature and the existence of free-wills involve, and you find that you have excluded life itself. – The Problem of Pain
 
Atheism
"Atheism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never have found out that it has no meaning. . ." – Mere Christianity

"Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which the whole thing looks improbable: but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable." – Mere Christianity

"A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere -- 'Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,' as Herbert says, 'fine nets and stratagems.' God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous." – Surprised by Joy

God
My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust? - Mere Christianity

I am trying here to prevent anyone saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Him: 'I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept His claim to be God.' That is the one thing we must not say. A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic -- on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg -- or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool, you can spit at Him and kill Him as a demon; or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to. – Mere Christianity, pages 40-41.

"You must picture me alone in that room in Magdalen, night after night, feeling, whenever my mind lifted even for a second from my work, the steady, unrelenting approach of Him whom I so earnestly desired not to meet. That which I greatly feared had at last come upon me. In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God, and knelt and prayed: perhaps, that night, the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." – Surprised by Joy

I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else. – Is Theology Poetry?


Now who is the poor thinker?

Einstein the agnostic

Should we agree with Einstein's reported words?

"From the viewpoint of a Jesuit priest I am, of course, and have always been an atheist.... I have repeatedly said that in my opinion the idea of a personal God is a childlike one. You may call me an agnostic, but I do not share the crusading spirit of the professional atheist whose fervor is mostly due to a painful act of liberation from the fetters of religious indoctrination received in youth. I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our being." **

Clearly he had a view about religions but had much more important things on his mind, and I'm glad that he did.

But whether his opinions about the actions of others as outspoken atheists matter at all is another thing.

Personally I recognise his point of view but do not agree with all of it.  I think people should be more outspoken when faced with supernatural claims.  After all, the religious don't keep quite about their opinions, so why should we?

Christopher Hitchens' interjected cries of "Shame on you" in a debate (I think this one) with a rabbi were much more appropriate than Daniel Dennett's natural politeness.

Sometimes you should not tolerate nonsense!

Small note.  **The context of this fragment of a letter was a letter to Guy H. Raner Jr, July 2, 1945, responding to a rumor that a Jesuit priest had caused Einstein to convert from atheism; quoted by Michael R. Gilmore in Skeptic, Vol. 5, No. 2.

ID - not even a theory

Creationists dress up their wacky beliefs in a variety of ways.  'Intelligent Design' (ID) is one that has been quite popular in recent years, but in USA it was clearly recognised in the Kitzmiller vs Dover trial that is not a legitimate science.  In the findings of the court you can read:

After a searching review of the record and applicable caselaw, we find that while ID arguments may be true, a proposition on which the Court takes no position, ID is not science.

Nevertheless, ID is still heralded by supposedly 'respected' organisations like the Discovery Institute, (deliberately not linked from here as it might make them feel more important).  But even they are going to have to change terminology just as they changed the name of their Center for Science and Culture from its original name of Center for Renewal of Science and Culture (CRSC).  The word 'renewal' in that context must have give the game away!

Just listen to their podcast, 'ID The Future', a few times to hear what I mean.  You will find it a good way to exercise your skills at spotting logical fallacies in seemingly reasonable arguments and exorcise any credibility that you might lend to their point of view.

Intelligent Design. Not even a theory!

ID is not a theory.  It is not even worthy of the name hypothesis!  It is not science, but merely another form of religious dogma dressed up as some sort of science to confuse the gullible.  It is a blanket non-explanation which only leads to regression to the further question of 'who designed the designer?'

Watch out for the next incarnation of creationism and be ready to treat it in the same way.  There are already signs of the way it might go.   We hear whining about how ID is ignored by the scientific press, and claims of discrimination against their pet ideas. We hear them asking for the teaching of the (non-existent) controversy.  I think we can tell that they are developing a new approach to replace the tired idea of Intelligent Design - although they will continue to promote the ID smokescreen in parallel.

Another blog, The Sensuous Curmudgeon, seems to share my amusement and my desire to ridicule the work of the Discovery Institute.  Have a look at this entertaining article for the New Theory of Improvident Design.

Sunday Selection 8

Continuing a new series where there is little additional content from me, but I simply share a few items, new and old, that have pleased me this week.  As almost every week, I see items on the web that I find interesting, amazing or  or amusing.  This disjointed ramble might be on any of my normal topics - or on other topics entirely.  My thanks go to the friends who helped me to find them.

First: An interview with Bertrand Russell.  It is not very long but it is his message to the people of the future.

Podcast of the week: Skeptics with a K, episode 78.  You might love or hate the style of this podcast, but I'm a keen listener.  The three presenters from the Merseyside Skeptics Society have a certain laddish charm and they have a knack for finding interesting topics.  Sometimes they start into a story that appears somewhat tangential (as in the surprisingly disgusting one about clearing out a cupboard in this episode), but don't give up too early!  They always conclude with an interesting learning point.  In this episode they also celebrate the legal difficulties that are being experienced by homeopaths in UK this year, and I was glad to hear that 2 of the 3 presenters were also not great fans of the Olympics.

Quote of the week: 
“When Muslim parents hate their host culture so much that they will kill a child who seems to embrace it, then they are guilty of intolerance – the kind that non-Muslims are wary of showing, lest they be branded racist, or bigoted.” 
Wow! Something sensible from Cristina Odone, in the Telegraph

Tweet of the week:
If the Bible was a good morality guide, we'd not need the Declaration of Human Rights. Humanity: Higher morals than God since 1948. #Atheism from @CrispySea

Atheist news of the week:  How Christopher Hitchens fell out with Gore Vidal

Exciting science of the week: The landing of Curiosity, the new rover on Mars was much more exciting than anything that the Olympics had to offer.  Amazingly, this picture was snapped by another satellite that was orbiting Mars.

Curiosity snapped on its chute, descending to Mars.

See the pictures that it is collecting every day at this link.  I'm sure that there is a lot of good stuff to come from this amazing project!

And finally . . .

Favourite places: Mars (Is this cheating?) 

This image, from here, shows how Curiosity landed there this week.

Curiosity's surprising landing on Mars (from here).

A double positive becomes . . .

Last weekend I heard a funny story about a linguistics professor who was lecturing to her class one day.

"In English," she said, "A double negative forms a positive. In some languages, though, such as Russian, a double negative is still a negative. However, there is no language wherein a double positive can form a negative."

A skeptical voice from the back of the room muttered "Yeah . . .right."

Very clever, and very subtle - it made me smile.  I decided to look up the history of the story and found a bit more about it.  As often happens, the story had been very slightly 'improved' in the telling but it led me to some other gems from the same source.

It seems that Oxford linguistic philosopher J L Austin made the claim that although a double negative in English implies a positive meaning, a double positive doesn't imply a negative. It was Sidney Morgenbesser who responded in a dismissive tone, "Yeah, yeah"  (amusingly transformed into "Yeah, right").

It turns out that Morgenbesser had quite a reputation for wit.

Interrogated by a student whether he agreed with Chairman Mao’s view that a statement can be both true and false at the same time, Morgenbesser replied “Well, I do and I don’t."

When asked his opinion of pragmatism, Morgenbesser replied "It's all very well in theory but it doesn't work in practice."

In response to Heidegger's ontological query "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Morgenbesser answered "If there were nothing you'd still be complaining!"

A few weeks before his death, he asked another Columbia philosopher, David Albert, about God. "Why is God making me suffer so much?" he asked. "Just because I don't believe in him?"

Asked to prove a questioner's existence, Morgenbesser shot back, "Who's asking?"

A student once interrupted him and said, "I just don't understand." "Why should you have the advantage over me?" he responded.

Classic!

George Bernard Shaw - on cynicism

"The power of accurate observation is commonly
called cynicism by those who have not got it"

Thought for the day!  I will adopt this as a motto for life and for this blog now.

Here be dragons

A year or two ago I came across this wonderful introduction to Critical Thinking.  It was produced by the great Brian Dunning, the host and creator of one of the very best skeptical podcasts, Skeptoid.com.

At 41 minutes in length, you might need to schedule a little quality time to concentrate on "Here be Dragons" which is available at that link in a variety of formats.  I very much doubt that you will be disappointed, however often you have seen it before.

And if you have never listened to the Skeptoid podcast then it is definitely time to start now.