Burnee links for Thursday

LessWrong - RationalWiki
Do you read Less Wrong? If so (apart from other things one might conclude from this fact), you should probably also read this. (Via Paul Wright.)

Angry UBC condo owners to protest hospice
I thought Canadians were sensible. Wait... these are Asian Canadians — does that make a difference?
(Via Pharyngula.)

Questions about Noah's Ark that may bug creationists | John Hollier | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
It's disturbing that we are even considering this stuff. Noah and the Flood is a story. It never happened. Should we perhaps be concerned about the illogicality of a talking wolf who impersonated a grandmother? Does the story of Little Red Riding Hood contain any vestige of actual history? No.
(Via BCSE)

A Special Case of Double Effect « Choice in Dying
In the above post Eric MacDonald provides a perfect example of what he wrote about in a previous one:

"We can do much better than religious morality, almost every time, and that for a simple reason. Without God, we really do have to think about what would be best."

Journalism Warning Labels « Tom Scott
If you read actual printed (that is, on paper) journalism, rather than online (which is, as you know, not real...), you might find these labels useful.

Vatican letter told Ireland's Catholic bishops not to report child abuse | World news | The Guardian
Well that about wraps it up for the Vatican. Pope Benny will resign and the Catholic Church will be disbanded. (There is a minuscule possibility, however, that the Holy See will ignore this revelation and carry on pretty much as before.) The incriminating letter is available as a PDF.

What is Faith? « Choice in Dying
Eric MacDonald's critique of Alister McGrath.

Evidence for God: 50 Arguments and a challenge

Previously on this blog (and elsewhere) I've stated that I've refuted to my own satisfaction all the arguments for the existence of God that I've encountered, and that I'm happy to examine others. Some others have (possibly) turned up. In an uncanny echo of 50 Voices of Disbelief: Why We Are Atheists edited by Russell Blackford and Udo Schüklenk, along comes Evidence for God: 50 Arguments for Faith from the Bible, History, Philosophy, and Science edited by William Dembski and Michael Licona.

Recommended by Todd Pitner on the Premier Community Forum, it was thrown down placed before us as a challenge an invitation to examine up-to-date arguments for the existence of God. Some of us accepted that challenge invitation (some of us have also taken an age to get around to it).

The 272-page paperback comprises an Introduction and four sections:
Section One: The Question of Philosophy
Section Two: The Question of Science
Section Three: The Question of Jesus
Section Four: The Question of the Bible
followed by Notes and Contributors

The 50 arguments average less than five pages each, so most likely I'll be sampling them at odd intervals. But I intend to blog about them in order, so watch this space.

Gay couple's B&B victory and the value of civil partnerships

A gay couple who were refused a double room at a Bed & Breakfast establishment (because they were not married) won their legal action today against the B&B owners. The judge (according to the BBC report) found that the B&B owners' refusal was illegal discrimination.

The defendants, Peter and Hazelmary Bull, maintain that they have a "double bed" policy which excludes unmarried couples. Both they and the judge appear to have approached the case on this basis — that the refusal was not based on sexual orientation, but on marital status.

The couple, Martyn Hall and Steven Preddy who are in a civil partnership, appear along with their backers, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, to be spinning the judgement as a victory for gay rights. The BBC report quotes EHRC director John Wadham:

"The right of an individual to practise their religion and live out their beliefs is one of the most fundamental rights a person can have, but so is the right not to be turned away by a hotel just because you are gay."

Peter Tatchell is quoted saying:

"People of faith should not be permitted to use religion as an excuse to discriminate against other people."

Stonewall's chief executive Ben Summerskill is quoted saying:

"You can't turn away people from a hotel because they're black or Jewish and in 2011 you shouldn't be able to demean them by turning them away because they're gay either."

It seems from the report that the discrimination against which Judge Rutherford ruled was discrimination against unmarrieds rather than discrimination against gays. That said, the case does highlight something very wrong about the law regarding civil partnerships. Contrary to Steven Preddy's reported statement that the judgement showed civil partnerships were legally the same as marriages, it appears to have exposed civil partnerships as a sop to gays.

According to current UK law, only same-sex couples can enter into a civil partnership, and only opposite-sex couples can get married. The law needs to be changed, so that marriage and civil partnership truly are equal — and therefore non-discriminatory. This case shows why. Clearly Peter and Hazelmary Bull don't consider civil partnership and marriage to be equal. I can't help wondering if in the future they would happily allow a legally married gay couple to share a double room. I suspect not.

Paula Kirby at TAM London 2010

Paula Kirby's articles at the Washington Post "On Faith" Panel have all been worth reading; she's clear and concise and doesn't pussyfoot around. Paula is a regular contributor and commenter at RichardDawkins.net, but for many she came to prominence through her comprehensive review (posted at RD.net) of four of what had become known as Dawkins' Fleas — the several books published in direct response to The God Delusion.

For her appearance at TAM London Paula gave a talk I'd heard previously online. It was the talk she delivered at the Atheist Alliance International Convention held last summer in Copenhagen:

Part 1/5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtoxhZ314OE

Part 2/5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwD23xL8bdw
Part 3/5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cSLhVj8Tbv8
Part 4/5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LGSPZ2k2TWE
Part 5/5: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVN62B8XeRI

Paula quoted at length from the political manifesto of the UK's Christian Party, exposing its assumptions and agenda. Now while it's not likely that such a party will gain significant power in the foreseeable future, it's only by our constant vigilance that its insidious influence (and that of similar religious lobby groups) will be kept at bay. Great Britain is not — yet — officially a secular society, but Paula Kirby's talk shows why it clearly ought to be.

Burnee links for Sunday

Science, Reason and Critical Thinking: The Turin Bicycle
Science? Pfft! I still believe it's the original artefact.

Faith and Science « Choice in Dying
Oh my, what a sorry mess of bedraggled shreds is the Biologos "statement of faith" once Eric MacDonald has ripped through it.

God was behind Big Bang, pope says - Technology & science - Science - msnbc.com

VATICAN CITY — God's mind was behind complex scientific theories such as the Big Bang, and Christians should reject the idea that the universe came into being by accident, Pope Benedict said Thursday

Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?

"The universe is not the result of chance, as some would want to make us believe," Benedict said on the day Christians mark the Epiphany, the day the Bible says the three kings reached the site where Jesus was born by following a star.

"Contemplating it (the universe) we are invited to read something profound into it: the wisdom of the creator, the inexhaustible creativity of God," he said in a sermon to some 10,000 people in St. Peter's Basilica on the feast day.

Just saying something doesn't make it true. Is unsubstantiated assertion all the religionists have left?

Much-loved millionaire in long-term stable relationship has child: cause for concern says Bishop Nazir-Ali | HumanistLife
The bish claims to be concerned for the child. Whatever you think of this particular family, you have to wonder if he isn't actually more concerned that the child's legal parents are a same-sex couple.

For the love of God – or good – support World Interfaith Harmony Week | Tony Blair and Prince Ghazi bin Muhammad | Comment is free | The Guardian
So some 2,000 years or so after a man was nailed to a tree for suggesting people should be nice to each other, Tony Blair says it's time to do just that. But it can't work. People of moderate faith may rally round his initiative, but it's not the moderates who are the problem. Those who take their faith seriously are the ones who stick to rigid dogma — precisely the ones who refuse to budge when their doctrine is found to be incompatible with other faiths.

Is “biblical Christianity” the only rational worldview? (And is atheism wicked?)
In the past I've railed in exasperation at some of the postings of Randal Rauser (The Tentative Apologist), but I must give him credit for his stand against a set of intransigent Christians at a site called Triablogue. (The link goes to the first of a series of posts about his encounter.)

The dangerous fight for the 'child witches' of Nigeria | Science | guardian.co.uk
Leo Igwe of the International Humanist and Ethical Union was arrested, beaten and imprisoned after rescuing one of these 'child witches', and his report is here:
My Arrest in Uyo - Butterflies and Wheels

Up Close and Personal « Choice in Dying
Here is the truth.

Confessions of a Catholic Atheist: The Antitheist
A demonstration of how one can clarify one's thoughts simply by explaining them.

Should atheists talk about evil?

That depends. "Evil" could be said to be an exclusively religious term. To talk about good and evil is to talk in the same realm as that occupied by "sin" — which seems a much more religious term.

Some might make the case that talk of "morality" is also exclusively religious. Indeed many religionists scoff at atheistic moral pronouncements, claiming that atheists have no business talking about morality because they have no grounding for it. But such a view is itself not so much grounded as perilously perched atop one horn of the Euthypro dilemma: that what is morally good is whatever God decrees — and however arbitrary such a decree may be, nothing else really counts as "moral".

It should also be recognised that some religionists make no distinction between morality and absolute morality. They seem unable to grasp that there can be any morality that isn't absolute. As an atheist who occasionally engages in online debate and discussion, I've come across this religious blind-spot more than once. After explaining at length how I see morality — what it is, where it comes from and so on — I'm still asked to justify it on metaphysical, transcendental grounds.

I'm currently reading The Moral Landscape by Sam Harris. I'm about halfway through, but so far Harris has fairly comprehensively laid the groundwork for a thesis that the distinction between facts and values is not as clear cut as the philosopher David Hume would have us believe. Hume's contention that you can't derive an ought from an is sounds on the face of it to be reasonable, leading to the kind of demand for moral grounding mentioned above.

Harris makes a good case for knowledge of moral facts about the world without resort to metaphysics. We know what the difference is between a state of everything being as lovely as it possibly could be, and the state of everything being as horrible as it possibly could be. And crucially we know that one of these is good and the other is bad. We do not need a transcendental moral law-giver to tell us which is which. Spread out between these two extremes are a myriad states of relative well-being, and while it may be difficult and in some cases impossible in practice to tell exactly where on a hypothetical scale of well-being these states lie, there can be no doubt that such a determination is possible in principle.

From what I've read so far it's too early to draw definitive conclusions from Harris's moral exposition, but I'm looking forward to the rest of the book.

Karen James at TAM London 2010

The Beagle Project is one of those enterprises that's quite hard to categorise. Is it really an educational project, or should it be classified as a glorified publicity stunt? Sailing a replica of Captain Fitzroy's square-rigged Beagle along the same route the original took when Charles Darwin was five years aboard could be considered a relatively pointless exercise, especially when the cost (apparently some £3.3 million at 2007 prices) is taken into account.

This is not the only prospective replica sea-vessel currently touting for funds. There are people in Kentucky who want to build a "replica" of Noah's Ark. I don't know if they intend to fill it two by two with animals, but they'll have difficulty finding dinos and dodos.

So what's the difference between these two enterprises? Well, HMS Beagle actually existed. Darwin wrote a book, The Voyage of the Beagle, in which he documented the five years he spent as a sea-fairing "natural philosopher". In contrast to the Old Testament story of the Ark, Darwin's record is not only an eye-witness account, it is autobiography. The notes he made on his travels are available for free on the web. This is something that actually happened.

The proposed Ark, of course, is based on carefully excavated and meticulously documented archeological artefacts, from which a reasonably accurate replica of the actual vessel is to be reconstructed. No it isn't — it's based entirely on a story in a book that also tells of a talking snake.

So the difference between the Beagle and the Ark is that we know for certain that HMS Beagle actually existed, and all we know about the Ark is what is written in an unreliable and contradictory scripture that's so full of metaphor and scientific nonsense that it has to be treated as literature rather than historical record.

Now that we've got that out of the way, let's consider the merits of the Beagle Project. The idea is to marry the historical facts of Darwin's voyage and the discoveries he made, with a global educational enterprise illustrating evolution.

Dr Karen James is the Director of Science for the Beagle Project, and at TAM London she outlined the project's aims and benefits. These are also available on the project's website:

The 21st century voyage of the Beagle will inspire global audiences through unique public engagement and learning programmes, and original scientific research in evolutionary biology, biodiversity and climate change.

She will cross the North and South Atlantic, the Pacific and Indian Oceans, round both Cape Horn and the Cape of Good Hope. She will sail in her ancestor's wake, with international crews of young scientists and sailors aboard applying the tools of modern science to the work started by Darwin and Captain Fitzroy 170 years before. International friendships and scientific alliances will form, and people the world over will follow the voyage, adventure and science aboard through the Beagle's interactive website.

The replica ship won't be quite the same as the original:

She will be built of larch and oak planking on oak frames. Unlike the 1831 Beagle, her 2009[*] descendent will have diesel auxiliary engines, radar, GPS navigation, satellite communications and modern safety equipment. Her design will be approved by Germanischer Lloyds and she will be certified for Category A - unrestricted ocean sailing. The build will be carried out in Milford Haven, Pembrokeshire under the supervision of master shipwright Detlev Loell.

(*It appears the website could do with some updating.)

Modern biology — including modern medicine — is so thoroughly underpinned by evolutionary theory that without the theory we would be back to the days of cupping and blood-letting, or even the four humours and demonic possession. And yet, in America at least, about 40 percent of the general population do not accept evolution as a true scientific account of living organisms. This is a shocking state of affairs, and while the Beagle Project risks being accused of Disneyfying science, a desperate situation calls for desperate measures. If the Beagle Project stands a good chance of educating people about evolution in spite of a pervading culture of denialism, it needs to go ahead. For the sake of the scientific literacy of future generations, the Beagle Project should receive wholehearted support.