Is there life after death? Yes/No/Maybe

From BBC TV programme The Big Questions, broadcast yesterday:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6WD_l1Ud6g

Can you answer this question in 16 minutes? Indeed you can: the answer's "no."

Maybe you think that's too glib, and some effort ought to be expended assessing the evidence. But in this discussion the evidence is not in evidence — that is, no-one actually presents any. The person who gets first go (Mohammed Hatehit, from Didsbury Mosque) simply assumes the existence of the soul, and uses its separateness from the body as definite proof of life after death: you bury the body, but where does the soul go? It must go somewhere. However, if the soul doesn't exist then obviously it doesn't go anywhere as it wasn't there to begin with. (He doesn't suggest why the soul, if it exists, couldn't be buried with the body....)

Spiritualists such as Steven Upton like to cite anecdotal evidence of communication with "the other side" — but as Michael Marshall of Merseyside Skeptics ably points out, such parlour tricks can be convincingly replicated by stage magicians.

Anglican bishop Stephen Lowe demonstrated a shade of tentativeness — so typical of the Church of England — that threatens to subsume Anglicanism beneath a welter of uncertainty. At least Penny Mawdsley from Sea of Faith was prepared to concede that there are Christians who don't believe in God.

Jewish Chronicle columnist Angela Epstein's comment that she sees this world as "almost a waiting room for the world to come" is symptomatic of faith that casts reality as something inferior to unreality. This is the kind of thinking that leads to notions of the Rapture. Why bother doing anything at all, if we're simply enduring this life while waiting for eternal bliss?

Naturally this 16-minute discussion couldn't conclude without someone (it was Ajmal Masroor) proposing Pascal's Wager — an argument so bad that anyone using it should be automatically disqualified from participating.

Burnee links for Sunday (via Dawkins and Myers)

Substance over sweetness — another New Atheist critique gone askew : Pharyngula
PZ wants to ask the only question that really matters.

Stephen Asma responds : Pharyngula
But Asma doesn't think PZ's question is relevant.

The best is lost : Pharyngula
And in response to PZ's insistence on truth, a Pharyngula reader sends a godless poem.

Should employers be blind to private beliefs? - Boing Boing
Richard Dawkins says beliefs do matter.

Science Under Attack - Horizon - BBC - RichardDawkins.net
Sir Paul Nurse, Nobel Prize winner and new head of the Royal Society, urges scientists to engage in the public space.

Further reflections on discrimination - Richard Dawkins - Boing Boing and RichardDawkins.net - RichardDawkins.net
Richard Dawkins follows up his recent Boing Boing post.

An alternative argument from complexity

When considering whether natural organisms have been designed, or alternatively have come to be the way they are through natural processes, it's a good idea to consider some examples.

Take the mousetrap. This is a purposeful arrangement of parts, obviously designed to do a particular job. One can examine all the individual parts and see how each uniquely contributes to the purpose for which the mousetrap was designed.

Look at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota. One can recognise faces carved into the mountainside, three-dimensional images of not just generic people, but specific men who actually lived — and these are their likenesses. We know, however, that these examples are not naturally occurring phenomena; they came into existence by the action of designing minds.

When we look at the forms taken by living organisms we see similar arrangements of parts, but to a much greater degree. Life is extremely complex — so complex, in fact, that to imagine that a designing mind could accurately specify such complexity is stretching credulity beyond reasonable limits. We simply cannot imagine any mind being sufficiently intelligent to be capable of such vast complexity. Even if such a complex designing mind was responsible for the complexity of life, one would be remiss in omitting to enquire where the complexity of the designer originated.

In the absence of any other explanation, therefore, we must by default assume that such complexity has arisen by gradual stepwise refinement of regressively simpler organisms. Such small steps seem intuitively more likely than the sudden fait accompli of a grand design.

Extrapolating these small steps backwards in time it seems obvious, therefore, that life originally began very simply, probably by random emergence of self-replicating molecules. It seems likely that in the not too distant future this mechanism will be demonstrated in the laboratory.

Lying about time — relaunch of the Sci Phi Show

Recently I was pleased to discover that Jason Rennie has relaunched the Sci Phi Show — a podcast looking at philosophy and science fiction. The first of Jason's new episodes dealt with lying — what it is and whether it is always morally wrong to lie. He cited a couple of definitions from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:

1. To make a false statement with the intention to deceive.
2. To make an assertion that is believed to be false to some audience with the intention to deceive the audience about the content of that assertion.

Jason explained the four conditions that need to apply to the second definition in order to make it clear: the Statement condition, the Untruthfulness condition, the Addressee condition and the Intention to deceive addressee condition. This second definition is the more precise and therefore more useful one, but Jason demonstrated in his subsequent discussion that use of the term "lie" often implies a degree of wrongness. (The Stanford definition explores some of these issues.)

Whether you consider a lie to be more or less morally wrong depends on your basis for morality. If you base it on an inviolable precept such as, "Thou shalt not bear false witness," you might find little leeway to consider the philosophical niceties. As I see it, the general prohibition on lying is to do with notions of trust and the reliability of communications. It may be perfectly moral to lie in certain specific circumstances (Jason suggested several), but if lying became the norm the fabric of society would quickly unravel.

Jason's second show was about time travel, and began with a discussion of definitions of time. Defining time appears to be fraught with impossibilities; for instance, what's the answer to the question, "How long can a condition of no change persist?" It depends whether you think time is something that passes, irrespective of events that occur. Note that of all our many ways of measuring time — to astonishing accuracy — none of them is objectively measuring the passage of time, but merely counting the occurrence of extremely regular events (although that raises the question of how we know these events are "regular").

However, this is pretty simple stuff in comparison with Jason's overview of alternative theories of time and his explanation of time-travel paradoxes — highly recommended, if you don't mind your brain turning to spaghetti.

Burnee links for Thursday

A Clockwork Revolution in Philosophy - steve's posterous
Steve Zara ponders dualism (by way of Doctor Who).

Embrace the digital backlash - Take time to think - Documental.ly
In praise of quiet time.

"Examined Lives": The secret lives of philosophers - Philosophy - Salon.com
A. C. Grayling savours the parts while not swallowing the whole.

YouTube - Is it always right to uphold your religious convictions?
It depends what you mean by "uphold":
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e20tHZSUKys

Pompey Skeptics in the Pub — 2nd Thursday of every month

When the inaugural Winchester Skeptics in the Pub had to be relocated because the original venue wasn't likely to accommodate the enthusiastic hordes who came to see Simon Singh, Rebecca Watson and Sid Rodrigues, it seemed to me like SitP had arrived. That was over a year ago. SitP in Britain received a further boost from the networking at last year's TAM London, and shortly after that event I was pleased to hear that moves were afoot to start a SitP in Portsmouth (where I live).

And start it did, though perhaps not on quite the scale of Winchester SitP — but give it time. On Tuesday evening the first Pompey Skeptics in the Pub (at the Mermaid, 222 New Road, Portsmouth PO2 7RW) featured a reading by Pam Lee on the importance of critical thought even about those things we take for granted, a skeptical quiz by Trish Hänn, and a cosmology presentation (with mind-boggling slides and video) on dark matter and dark energy by Chaz Shapiro.

It was small gathering of local and not so local people who identify more or less as skeptics (including a more or less skeptical but definitely well-trained dog), who generally agreed that the evening had gone well and that it should be a regular event. So join us on the second Thursday each month, from 10th March onwards. (And check out the photographic evidence, courtesy of Malcolm Stein.)

The Atheist Experience — listen or watch, but don't miss it

Given the name* of this blog and the tenor of most of its posts, readers would not be surprised to learn that I listen to several atheistically themed podcasts. The atheist podcast that I look forward to most, however, and have done since I first encountered it a couple of years ago, is The Atheist Experience, a live call-in TV show from the Atheist Community of Austin. It's available via an audio podcast feed (on iTunes, for instance), and that's how I normally listen.

If a show is especially good one week, I'll make a point of watching the video version. This week's was one such, hosted by Jen Peeples and Tracie Harris. Even before substituted host Matt Dillahunty called in at the end, I had already decided it was worth a blogpost. The hosts of The Atheist Experience are the sharpest explicators and defenders of the atheist viewpoint I've come across. Their consistently high standards of debate, argument, explanation and critical thought make the show archive a treasured resource.

For your enjoyment and education I embed this week's show here — #693: Misconceptions About Atheists — and I particularly recommend the exchange with caller Mike starting around 21'40":
http://blip.tv/file/4674944


The ACA also sponsor audio-only podcast The Non Prophets (which will occasionally be referenced on the TV show), along with many local activities.

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*"Notes from an Evil Burnee" is a dead giveaway, considering the last two words are an anagram.