The claims of religious faith are not exempt

The HOTS Bath advertising nonsense seems to have shaken out those wedded to religious privilege. Hayley Stevens has done us all a favour in highlighting it with her ASA complaint.

Brendan O'Neill at the Telegraph seems to be one of the more belligerent fulminators against the ASA's ruling:

This is an outrageous attack on freedom of religion, on the basic right of people to express central tenets of their faith.

Central tenets such as, for instance, homosexuality is an abomination? Or those who don't believe in Jesus/God are destined for "eternal conscious torment"? Or that contraception is an evil worse than AIDS? Granted, these aren't exactly touted around as attractive propositions you might want to try out on the streets around Bath Abbey, but they are as without factual basis as anything promoted by snake-oil salesmen.

You have a recently deceased relative? A central tenet of some religious faith is that God can bring a dead person back to life. Should we allow a religious group to make such a specific claim on the streets of Bath, or anywhere else for that matter? We should not. But by law we must. The ASA covers published advertising only, so any oral claims of resurrection made on the streets are beyond its remit. But apparently HOTS Bath did claim, in their leaflets and on their website, that serious illness can be alleviated by prayer. This is a medical claim, and they provide no acceptable evidence to support it. The ASA was right, therefore, to put a stop to it.

O'Neill is simply illustrating the undeserved privilege religious faith has enjoyed for so long — a privilege built into UK political culture — and which religion in general will try to hang on to for as long as it can.

Elsewhere in the Telegraph Tom Chivers gives the side of sanity:

This isn't an outrageous attack on religion. People are still allowed to believe, and state that they believe, in obvious nonsense like faith healing. But advertising laws can't be redrawn just because someone decides their product is religious; if they make actual empirical medical claims, then they need to be able to provide actual empirical medical evidence.

Personally I'd like to see some actual empirical evidence for religious faith's other claims too.

(Via HumanistLife.)

Apologists' own-goal in Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God

Chapter 9 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God is "The Pale Blue Dot Revisited" by Jay W. Richards & Guillermo Gonzalez; it appears to be an indictment of a modern — apparently revisionist — view of Copernicanism. Richards and Gonzalez quote Carl Sagan's famous musings on the scale of the universe and our place in it:

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark.

Those of a religious bent generally don't like such nihilistic stuff. How dare anyone suggest that humanity is unimportant in the grand scheme of things? Recently we had Brendan O'Neill in the Telegraph making exactly this point. But Richards & Gonzales are making a different point, that Copernicus did not overturn an essentially geocentric view of the universe. They are claiming that Ptolemy's view was that the Earth is at the bottom of the universe (where — I imagine — all the rubbish tends to collect), and that therefore Copernicus was not such an iconoclast after all.

One might well ask, so what? This is in the section titled The Question of Science, but nowhere do the authors make a case, propose an argument or provide evidence for the existence of God. Strangely, it seems that Richards & Gonzales are claiming that Copernicus didn't originate the view that humanity is insignificant in the cosmic vastness — humanity has always been so. Maybe they're right — but if so, that's evidence against God.

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4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbscience.aspx?pageid=8589952951

The universe is so vast, let's all just kill ourselves

Over at Telegraph Blogs Brendan O'Neill has got himself into a tizzy about how important he may or may not be in the grand scheme of things. Not that he says such in so many words, but his misapprehension of one of TV's current popular science hits betrays his discomfiture with reality:

I think I have solved one of the great mysteries of the universe: the question of why mop-topped stargazer Professor Brian Cox is so popular. It isn’t because of his looks, or his soft Mancunian voice, or his pop past in Blair-boosting band D:Ream. No, it’s because his wide-eyed cosmology is based on a view of mankind as insignificant, as a mere speck of dust in the post-Big Bang scheme of things, and that chimes brilliantly with today’s rather downbeat view of humanity. The floppy-fringed professor massages the fashionable prejudice that humanity isn’t all that special; no, we’re just a cosmological accident, which will exist only fleetingly before being wiped out by the explosion of our Sun or some other cataclysmic event.

Sorry Brendan but that's just how it is. Get used to it.

The point is, Brendan, that we are special — just not in the way you think we are. The universe was not designed with us in mind (actually it wasn't designed at all, as far as we can tell — but that's probably another blogpost or two ... or a thousand). Nevertheless we are here, and that is one awesome fact.

And what have you got against Carl Sagan?

Like Sagan, Cox and his rationalistic acolytes in the media are attracted to the cosmos primarily because they believe its vastness reveals our smallness, that its 14 billion-year history puts our pathetic 250,000 years of inventing fire and skyscrapers and iPads into perspective. They see in the never-ending chasm of space, not worlds we should aspire to know and possibly conquer and colonise, but a big black challenge to the idea of human historic purpose.

There you go again: purpose. Imputing teleology is for those who can't cope with the way things actually are. As for conquering, that's a bit presumptuous isn't it? Maybe that's the human historic purpose you're talking about — humanity's cosmic crusade: to seek out new life and new civilizations; to boldly go where no crusader has gone before, and subjugate the alien masses.

Copernicus’s challenge to the idea that the Earth was the centre of the universe was frequently cited by Sagan and his fans as a challenge to the idea that human beings are the centre of the universe – but it was no such thing. Rather, Copernicus wanted to increase human authority over the unknowns of the universe, not teach mankind a lesson about our “insignificance in the great loneliness of space”. In contrast, today’s cod-Copernicans in the Cox lobby are drawn to the cosmos because its weirdness and bigness feeds their drab, down-to-earth belief that there isn’t much point to life.

You've got it upside-down and backwards. As for "their drab, down-to-earth belief that there isn’t much point to life" — I'll let you into a little secret: life is what you make it. The point of life is life itself.