Progress for secularism

I was just enjoying a phone call with my mother who is a practising Anglican who lives in (fairly) rural Yorkshire. 

She told me how the vicar of her church is retiring in a month or two, and how his curate is off work with 'stress' and that he would not be applying to take over as vicar.

In my opinion you can't blame either of them for that. 

Meanwhile most of the neighbouring benefices are bereft of clergy.  Those who are there are not 'real' clergy but 'lay readers' and therefore they are not able to take communion services.

A few years ago I would have agreed that this was a tragedy.  English traditions are being swiftly eroded and the church is one of those traditions.

However, these days I'm covertly rejoicing about the idea of the impending demise of England's 'established church'.  I see this as good progress towards a secularist state.  That is to say that I don't begrudge anyone their religion but I have no desire to contribute towards it as a UK tax-payer.

Noah, Abraham and morality

An anonymous but interesting friend left a comment yesterday on my post "Things Christians Say, Part 5: Just go out and kill!".

They said:

It is also funny to note that both Noah and Abraham were mentioned as righteous before "god" revealed himself to them...so this righteousness preceded god visiting them and making himself known...that destroys the argument that knowing right and wrong are impossible without god, also god himself did not want Adam and Eve to know what right and wrong were, so he is clearly anti morality..

I like that way of thinking (even if not the punctuation). 

God doesn't seem entirely consistent in his approach.

I expect that there will be religious apologists who disagree.

Bridge of the immortals

Don't fall off!

This is another amazing thing from China.  Less scary than some other photos but you have to admire the surprisingly good engineering.

Narrowboat lawn

One of the many pleasures of living on a narrowboat on England's waterways is that the garden is provided free of charge.  Leafy rural England is all around you and although boats are not exactly maintenance-free, at least there is no need to mow the lawn.

Or is there?

I spotted this boat on the Kennet and Avon Canal recently.  The whole roof has been covered with turf.

A narrowboat with a lawn - best of both worlds?

One good thing about it is that there is no problem finding the water to keep it green.  If water is that short, then the lawn must be the least of your worries.  Another is that it keeps the heat of the summer sun at bay, maybe making life aboard a bit more comfortable.

But in the small space available in the boat you now have to keep a lawn-mower, or else spend a lot of time with a pair of scissors every week.  And I would be a little worried about corrosion of the roof, but I suppose that is a minor issue.

My boat will remain free of lawns!

More fun from Jesus and Mo

This made me laugh today - not bad for a Friday.

From Jesus and Mo

Libel Reform happening in UK! At last!

Today the UK's new Defamation Bill passed into law, subject to the anachronism of Royal Assent, which hopefully will happen within hours.

That's great news.  Politicians of all parties will no doubt line up to take credit for beginning the reform of our preposterous libel legislation, but in doing that they would be lying to us.

I believe that this is solely the result of concentrated people-power.

LibelReform.org has led the way and they are rightly proud of themselves for what they have achieved.  They mustered the votes of so many people that the (barely elected) Government just had to take notice of them.

You can read Libel Reform's  latest news here and their initial summary assessment here.

A big Well Done to Síle and Mike!  And a general Well Done to all of us who have signed petitions and stood up for justice and free speech!

It's a great start!

Just deport him!

Abu Qatada has managed another feat of hypocrisy.

This is a radical Islamist who took refuge in liberal Britain and then started to preach his hate speech on our streets.  Then he used human-rights legislation to protect himself.  This means the same human rights that he denies to half the human race - namely women.  Is it a matter of lying for Islam - or lying to protect himself using Islam as an excuse?

And liberal Britain has tolerated him for much too long.  Whatever legal niceties the higher courts may have used to save this 'poor victim' from deportation, if the barely-elected government had any metal it would just go ahead and hand him over to Jordan where he would stand trial.

This barely-elected government would gain the respect of a huge majority of the UK population.

Of course he would appeal.

He might posthumously win his case, but still justice would have been done.

Clarke's First Law

Today I was reminded of Arthur C Clarke's 'first law'.  Clarke was one of my favorite sci-fi authors as I grew up, and he is famous for having invented the idea of the geo-synchronous orbit.  We all rely on these satellites for communications these days.

Clarke maintained that three laws were enough for anyone - so he limited himself to this many.

His first law has often seemed right to me:

When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.

See Clarke's three laws here

I feel like resigning . . .

I feel like resigning . . .

. . .  from public service because of what the UK Government is doing to the (already pitiful) pensions that we agreed - contractually

(but who said that you could trust the government?)

. . . and from the internet in general

following the revelations that Brian Dunning of skeptoid.com has pleaded (or plead) guilty of something called Wire Fraud.

Skeptoid has been one of my favourite podcasts for several years (even though I don't really like the tone of voice that he uses), and it is widely respected in the skeptical community.  Dunning's explanation is here and it sounds plausible.  Maybe he is now plea-bargaining, or maybe he's guilty.  Even using the tools of skepticism I can't decide what to think.

Now I'm being told to be skeptical about Skeptoid.  Should I detect a conspiracy here?

I think I will continue to listen to it until it ends.

St George's day cometh

In a local competition the villagers are invited to compete.  Who can build the best dragon?

Thank goodness for St George!  Dragon in West Hagbourne, Oxon.

This one is quite spectacular!  I  wonder how many traffic accidents have been caused by this brilliant edifice.

Douglas Murray - who is he?

Recently I came across a character called Douglas Murray, who seems to speak in a style similar to that of the late Christopher Hitchins.

Has anyone encountered him before?  What are your opinions of him.  His views seem controversial with his audiences, but he is certainly a powerful and rational speaker in the few videos that I've found so far.

His credentials are enhanced by this Intelligence Squared debate where he works with Ayaan Hirsi Ali to debate "Islam is a religion of peace". 

(Ayaan and Douglas won decisively by the way.)

We might have a new Hitch in the making.

The Baghdad Batteries

When do you think batteries were invented?  200 years ago or 2000?

I tend to believe in the former, but some claim that some Sumerian artifacts were used as batteries for gold plating of other artifacts, and that they were made about 250 BCE.

These are known as the Baghdad Batteries, or Parthian Batteries and you can see the Wikipedia article here.

I'm feeling skeptical!

This article seems to me to have a much better explanation of the findings.  Electricity then becomes a modern invention again.

The ancient 'Sweet Track'

No doubt there are many who make claims for other ancient structures, but I was surprised to find out recently that a scheduled monument in Somerset, southern England, might be the most ancient engineered road in the world.  It is called 'The Sweet Track'.  It seems that it was built over an even more ancient structure called 'The Post Track' (which must therefore have been more ancient, but let's not be too pedantic).

Of course it is only the most ancient until an earlier one is found, but it is still interesting to hear that an artefact in England can make this kind of claim.  I would have expected that there were more ancient structures in Mesopotamia or that region.

The Sweet Track is named after its discoverer, Ray Sweet who found it while digging peat in 1970.  It was built across the marshy Somerset Levels to make it easier to travel between settlements.  It has also been dated with surprising precision to one of two years, namely 3807 or 3806 BCE (presumably therefore by dendrochronology, although that is not clear).  200 tonnes of timber went into its 2000m length and it was probably prefabricated.

Discovery Institute's latest 'divine comedy'

It is not unusual for The Discovery Institute's podcast, ID the Future to be filled with pseudo-scientific nonsense (in the style that I mentioned a couple of days ago).  I loyally listen to laugh and to learn the arguments that the  neo-Creationists like to use (and what creative pejorative terms they propagate to describe real scientists).  The latest episode doesn't feature the always-offended voice of Casey Luskin who is the regular host, but it takes the form of an audio adaptation of a short novel called I, Charles Darwin by Nickell John Romjue.  You can read more about it here.

Judging by what we have heard in the first episode (which you can find here) it will be surprising if many people actually bother to listen to the whole of it, unless like me they do it to giggle at it!

In this risible novel Darwin finds himself resurrected and returned to present day London, where he has a wallet filled (and constantly re-filled) with magical pound notes!  Yes, notes!  And these notes are not mentioned just once but several times, so it isn't an error.  See the comment at the end if this doesn't seem strange to you!

We get all the usual time-travel nonsense about how surprised Darwin is to see the way we dress and travel, mixed in with a load of pseudo-scientific propaganda.   We have been told that he can make himself visible and invisible at will.  He has the memories of his previous life plus the instructions that he received from whoever sent him back to earth.  Presumably this was 'the intelligent designer' herself, but of course her identity is still being kept secret from us - just as it is in real life.

The unlikely and illogical tale is wrapped in a literary style that must be aimed at a pre-teenager.  The prose makes the Harry Potter novels (which I greatly enjoyed) seem to be written in quite advanced English.

Why would the Discoveroids lower their standards to this level, I wonder.  It must be another feeble attempt to corrupt the minds of the young!

Can't wait for the next exciting episode!

Small note: Pound notes have not been in use for nearly two decades and you would not be able to spend them in today's Britain, whether magical or not.  Since 1984, our lowest denomination in paper currency is the £5 note.

I've been endorsed

A couple of years ago I joined LinkedIn and since then I have passively collected  nearly 200 contacts.  Unlike my Facebook friends, my LinkedIn contacts are (I think) exclusively made up of people who I have known and worked with.

That means that they ought to know me reasonably well and I would have expected that my range of skills (or lack thereof) would influence their views about me.

So I'm constantly surprised at the things that they endorse me for!

I could understand that I've convinced people that I know something about science and experimental physics (even though I feel far from expert).  I feel flattered to have had some endorsements for Public Speaking too, but I'm progressively baffled that others consider that I know anything useful about the rest.  I know a little basic Optics, my Computational Physics experience is limited to being reasonably capable of using Excel.  Spectroscopy and Simulations are way outside my comfort zone.  I once wrote a programme in Fortran (but I was still at school at the time), and when it comes to LaTex and IDL I can only say that I know what they are for.

But I have been generously endorsed for all of them. 

I appreciate the compliments, but it must be said that they don't add value to my profile.  And where are my endorsements for Engineering, Vacuum or Cryogenics, for Atheism, Skepticism (not Cynicism) or Islamophobia, or indeed for Lateral Thinking or Sense of Humour?  I hardly recognise my own 'reflection' that comes from the opinions of my friends and colleagues.

That's life!

I can't imagine that I'm unique in this respect.  I'd just caution everyone to take no notice of the supposed endorsements in LinkedIn.

Now that Cher's alive and well

The demise of Mrs Thatcher last week has resulted in trending of a new hash tag on Twitter.

#nowthatchersdead has caused a small stir among music fans though, and we are relieved to hear that Cher is not dead but that she is still alive and well!

As @rickygervais tweeted:

Some people are in a frenzy over the hashtag #nowthatchersdead. It's "Now Thatcher's dead". Not, "Now that Cher's dead" JustSayin'

Creationist science . . . or is it?

Over lunch last week I found myself in an interesting debate with a gentle and progressive Muslim friend and a gentle and polite Christian friend.  I'm hoping both of them will continue to debate in such an open way, and that our full and frank debate did not offend them.

I must write about part of the discussion.

It was about the battle between supporters of Intelligent Design (ID) and the supporters of the Theory of Evolution.  My Christian friend put the point that both sides accuse each other of 'not being scientific' and that they should drop this argument and move to the evidence.  When I complained that this was a reasonable point of view from the point of view of evolution he asked me how I would define science.

In my own amateur way I said that science was the process whereby someone develops an idea into a hypothesis which can then be compared with the evidence from the world around us, and as confidence was developed that there was a good level of agreement the hypothesis might develop into the status of a Theory.  Ultimately when the evidence is overwhelming then the Theory might reach the coveted state of becoming a Law.  (I should have added the question of falsifiability.)

He agreed.

I added that ID specifically doesn't do this.  It looks for evidence and then tries to fit a hypothesis to it retrospectively.  He disagreed.

So I asked him where the hypothesis for ID might be, and I was amazed to hear that his answer was that the bible is the hypothesis.

I pointed out that the bible is not exactly self-consistent and offered the evidence of the two versions of the creation story in Genesis and was told that they were not very different in the grand scheme of things.   I disagree about that.  See for yourself that the whole thing is in a different order in the second version. The first is Genesis 1:1-2:3, and the second is Genesis 2:4-25.)

So which of us is correct?

• Can the bible be offered rationally as an hypothesis for Intelligent Design?
• Does ID truly follow the scientific method or does it just try to use convenient parts of scientific methods to pick selective holes in evolution without offering a complete counter-proposal?

Thinking about the topic further since our discussion I would also ask:

• Is ID falsifiable?  If the bible is its hypothesis then I would suggest that it is self-falsifying.
• Which point of view indulges in more ad hominem attacks?  Evolutionists rarely call their opponents names (although sometimes the word creotards has come up in discussion) whereas the ID lobby never fails to use terms like 'Darwinist' (which they consider pejorative), 'neo-Darwinist' (which is clearly more so) and worse?

I maintain that ID is not science in the real sense of the word.

Being fair to the Thatchers

The final demise of Margaret Thatcher has been a hot topic for discussion this week.  Opinions are divided and there is little doubt that some are taking their celebrations to a ridiculous extreme.

However, having admitted that she might have been right about a few things, I noticed some people telling me that they were appalled by the way that she is being pilloried by press and people alike.  It was gently pointed out to me that Margaret Thatcher has a family, and that people are not being respectful to them.

But didn't she once say of her son Mark "Mark could sell snow to the Eskimos and sand to the Arabs"?  Of course she neglected to mention his ability to sell arms to the Saudis (of which, naturally, he was innocent anyway) or his inability to find his way through sand while pretending to be a rally driver.  The latter resulted in a large bill for the British tax payer and the former to considerable embarrassment and frustration for the same people (even though it didn't officially happen).  And to make up for it he now has the title 'Sir Mark', thanks to the beneficence of his parents.

Even his twin sister, Carol Thatcher, publicly disapproved of Sir Mark and she aspired to make her own way in the world as a journalist - an honourable profession if ever there was one!   This is a woman who referred to the tennis player Jo-Wilfried Tsonga as a 'golliwog'.  What a nice lady.

I'm sure Mrs Thatcher has some perfectly pleasant relatives as well, but her children don't get much sympathy from me.

So while I felt a measure of disinterest for protests against a state funeral and for the rise of a song about the death of a witch in the charts this week, that one comment about her family might have made me feel more radical than I did before.

But who cares about a bill of over 10 million pounds for a funeral when living, breathing, public servants are being treated so well (!!) by their employer! 

I care!

Can the UK government afford niceties like this? If so, why can't it care for its employees properly?

Being fair to the Thatchers would include provision of a nice prison cell and the withdrawal of a title and the burial of a cardboard coffin in a privatised municipal dump!

Converted by C.S. Lewis . . . and a waterfall

Francis Collins (of Human Genome Project fame) wasn't always a committed Christian, but in his later years he was converted. What could have caused such an event?

First he had read C.S. Lewis.  Personally I never liked the material that Lewis wrote specifically for children, but the stuff that he wrote for 'adults' is quite astounding.  I have quoted him sometimes before, e.g. here and here, and found some of his writing entirely risible and facile.

The particular passage that precipitated the conversion of chemist Francis Collins appears to have been this one:

"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 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 a 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."

I do agree with Lewis in one way.  I also believe that he was not a great human teacher . . . but for the reason that I doubt that he ever lived as described in the New Testament.

However, what was the context where this had such an effect?  It was the sight of a frozen waterfall.

"Lewis was right. I had to make a choice. A full year had passed since I decided to believe in some sort of God, and now I was being called to account. On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains during my first trip west of the Mississippi, the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ. "

How surprising that a a rational scientist turned his view of life over for a reason such as this!  Why did a waterfall lead him to this specific God when there were so many others to choose from?

Cup of tea . . . and a hot-water bottle!

A couple of weeks ago I was showing some friends around Oxford.  It was a chilly day and we had no intention of sitting outside when we stopped at a well-known cafe for refreshments, but we all found this sign amusing.

Sit outdoors for tea in England - in winter!

Even with a hot water bottle and a blanket I don't think we would have enjoyed sitting for very long.  Anyway it was nice and warm indoors.

As the spring progresses things might change!