Posthumous pardon for Alan Turing?

http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1184614595?bctid=34677379001



As Richard Dawkins indicates towards the end of this Channel 4 News clip, a posthumous pardon for Alan Turing would declare that we now live in more enlightened times.

Arguments for Fred* #1: Why is there something rather than nothing?

Kicking off a new series of posts today, inspired by recent discussions at Skeptico, I bring you the first of several ramblings on the arguments I've come across for the existence of God. This one is more of an oblique question than a direct argument: why is there something rather than nothing? The implication is that for there to be something (that is, for the universe to exist, rather than not to exist) there needs to be a prime mover - a cause. And that cause has to be God.

Just Googling the question will reap a rich harvest of links to extensive discussions on the subject, but the main thrust of most of the refutations of this argument appears to be that the state of "there being something" is more stable than the state of "there being nothing". In other words, there has to be something. But I'd like to offer a simpler, more direct refutation. Instead of asking the question, "why is there something rather than nothing?" perform this little experiment:

Flip a coin. It comes up heads (or tails). Why did it come up heads (or tails) rather than tails (or heads)?

The answer to the question posed by the above experiment is also the answer to why there is something rather than nothing.

*Fred is A. C. Grayling's term for "any suppositious supernatural agency defined ad hoc for some purpose religionists have in mind."

UPDATE 2009-08-21: Click here for AfF #2

Burnee links for Saturday

Catholic Control in Irish Primary Schools (part 1) « _Paddy K_

Why dowsing makes perfect sense - opinion - 29 July 2009 - New Scientist

Skepticblog » Podcast People

The Day 285 Atheists/Agnostics Visited the Creation Museum | Around the World with AiG’s Ken Ham

The wantonly amoral, theologically correct worldview of George Sodini | Factonista

Organic food is just a tax on the gullible | Dominic Lawson - Times Online

BBC NEWS | Programmes | Newsnight | What have the noughties done for God?

Mooney and Kirshenbaum self-destruct at last « Why Evolution Is True:

The “new atheists” are against religion because it is inimical to rational thought.

Accommodationism be damned. This is the problem, and we should not shy away from saying so.

Reports of the SSA's visit to Kentucky's Creation Museum are rolling in. Jen ("Blag Hag") gives us a particularly detailed account:
Blag Hag: Creation Museum Part 1
...finishing off her final (9th) instalment with this great quote: "The Creation Museum was literally mind numbingly stupid: it took nearly two hours of philosophical and scientific discussion in the car ride to Columbus until I could form grammatically correct sentences again."

BHA reasserts support for Simon Singh's appeal against libel case

Why degrees in Chinese medicine are a danger to patients - DC's Improbable Science
Alternative medicine advocates "seem to believe that medicine and science are part of an enormous conspiracy to kill everyone."

Objective substantiation

I'm happy, time permitting, to listen to any point of view. I accept that many people have deeply held beliefs, upon which they base their way of life and their moral choices. I may even agree with some of those moral choices.

But if anyone wants to persuade me that a particular moral choice is most appropriate in a given situation, I expect a reasoned argument, based on premises capable of objective substantiation. I'm unlikely to be swayed by appeals to doctrine, scripture, authority or dogma.

Emotional appeals sometimes work with me - I'm a creature of habit and moods, susceptible to "going with the flow" or "doing what feels right", though I hope in those cases I'm aware that I'm letting emotion take precedence over reason. I would not, however, expect a choice based on emotions alone to be sufficiently persuasive for anyone else to agree with me, other than on whim.

Likewise, if anyone else tries to use an emotional appeal to persuade me of the rightness of their position, they need to be aware that my acceptance - or otherwise - of it will also be on whim, and unless the appeal is backed up with verifiable evidence, my whim wins every time.

If you want to make serious headway with a critical thinker, start with something capable of objective substantiation.

There's probably no God, so learn to dance like a zombie

http://www.oneandother.co.uk/participants/krypto



As part of Antony Gormley's living art "One & Other" on the empty fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square, lots of people are getting their chance to become a piece of artwork for 60 minutes. One such is Andrew West, a "plinther" who used his hour on Sunday afternoon to teach onlookers the dance moves to Michael Jackson's "Thriller", while displaying the BHA's atheist bus advertisement. If you watch the video (click on the image above) you'll see that Ariane Sherine, creator of the Atheist Bus Campaign, is amongst those on the ground learning the dance.

Seems like a good time was had by all. You can see what's going on right now by watching the live feed.

Indoctrination, moi? - secular alternatives need more publicity

In much of the mainstream media coverage of Camp Quest UK one can detect barely concealed false puzzlement, if not actual contempt, expressed with the merest hint of a sneer: "Why on earth would you want to send your kids to an atheist summer camp?" - as if the very idea of a summer camp with some kind of agenda is totally new and distinctly weird.

This knee-jerk reaction is symptomatic of the blind-spot in media treatment of religious issues - like the water in which fish swim, religion is everywhere, so people don't perceive it as anything special (when in fact much of religion is profoundly disturbing). As for summer camps, Christians wouldn't dream of setting up anything remotely similar, expressly to inculcate children with religious beliefs, would they?

We know, of course, that this is exactly what they do. Case in point, click the link below to hear a four-minute audio clip from this morning's Today Programme on BBC Radio 4, about Christian Skaters:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8180000/8180962.stm

Such blatant indoctrination is endemic in the US. As a further example I commend to you the documentary film Jesus Camp, though it's advisable not to have any heavy objects within reach - unless you were already planning to buy a new TV.

Camp Quest UK has received plenty of media coverage, thanks to Samantha Stein (camp director) and Crispian Jago (whose children attended the camp this year), and despite media hostility the public support - as indicated by the majority of comments on one particularly egregious online article - seems to be favourable. All such efforts to provide secular and freethought alternatives - devoid of the taint of religious faith - need to be publicised to the maximum extent, simply to let people know that alternatives exist, and that their choices, contrary to what they might have believed, are not limited only to faith-based options.

If the BBC's flash player misbehaves, a 4'11" 1 Mb mp3 can be downloaded from RapidShare:

http://rapidshare.com/files/341823646/Today_ChristianSkaters_BBCR4i-20090803.mp3

Review: Godless, by Dan Barker

Dan Barker's Godless is part autobiography and part atheist polemic. It charts his gradual transition from fundamentalist evangelical Christian minister to co-president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). Barker's style is relaxed and honest, presenting what appears to be a realistic picture of what it was like to be a bible-literalist who sincerely believed that anyone unsaved is destined for eternal damnation in a lake of fire.

Some of us without faith wonder how such belief is possible. In Godless Dan Barker explains how one such believer – himself – came to doubt, and eventually to lose his faith. He tells us how he was initially ostracised by his family, and how the members of his religious community refused to believe his unbelief, convinced that he would soon return to the fold. He tells how those of faith who eventually accepted that he could not in all honesty continue to believe, maintained that he surely could not have been a "true Christian" because no true Christians would ever renounce their faith the way he did.

Being an evangelical Christian – who made it his business to preach the gospel to anyone who would listen – has inevitably led Barker to be something of an evangelical atheist, and he has found his natural niche in the FFRF. And so we have the other half of Godless, devoted to countering the arguments of Christian apologists. Barker has most of those arguments and counter-arguments at his fingertips (and where he didn't, he took advice from experts, be they physicists or philosophers). He's good on the cosmological, teleological and ontological arguments, but less so on the matter of God's omniscience, where his refutations struck me as lightweight (but the omni-whatever arguments are pretty lightweight in themselves, if not actually nonsensical, so I'll happily cut him some slack there).

Where he excels is in Bible study. Here is a man who knows the Bible back to front, upside down and sideways, in its various translations and in its original Greek and Hebrew. I've often heard criticisms of the Bible's more dubious and unsavoury passages dismissed by apologists as errors in translation and interpretation. Barker slaughters these arguments with thorough textual analysis and scholarship, quoting chapter and verse at length.

Godless is an easy read, despite the depth that Barker necessarily has to plummet plumb^* in exploration of his subject. He maintains a light literary style by keeping it personal, with plenty of amusing and enlightening anecdotes together with understated wry comedy. Anyone who has heard him on Freethought Radio (the weekly radio show and podcast he presents with his wife and FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor) will gain extra insight into the mind of someone who has thought long and hard about his subject – and then radically reversed his outlook.

Godless: How an Evangelical Preacher Became One of America's Leading Atheists BARKER, Dan; 2008 Ulysses Press, Berkeley, CA; Paperback 392pp ISBN13: 978-1-56975-677-5





(^*Minor edit 2009-08-09 for inadvertent malapropism.)