Burnee links for Thursday

Forty people have got a new group which encourages rational thinking off to a good start in Bath
They're popping up all over the place. And Portsmouth gets a mention — I wonder if this is because Hayley Stevens (who presented at Bath Skeptics' inaugural event) is booked to appear here.

Great reply from Defra's Somerset Animal Health team on the use of Homeopathy. - Simon's posterous
Simon Perry gets a good result.

YouTube - Experience the launch of Space Shuttle Discovery from the KSC press site
Karen James (of the Beagle Project) was present at the final launch of Discovery. This is her personal record.


Dermestid Skeletal Preparation Kit | WARD'S Natural Science
Kids would learn a lot from this — if it didn't give them nightmares.

Director of the Society of Homeopaths Threatens Libel Action Against Paul Offit | The Quackometer
Wakefield may be discredited, but it's not over yet.

Birmingham Skeptics: The Framing Effect and Bad Decision Making
Kash Farooq elucidates a talk by Dr Benedetto De Martino.

A tribute to Douglas Adams — the Pod Delusion

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy remains for me the cleverest and funniest thing I've ever heard on radio, and I heard the original series when it was originally broadcast. I've read most of the books, I've enjoyed the sequels, and I've appreciated Douglas Adams' other work. I thought Harry Enfield was an inspired choice for the radio version of Dirk Gently (so I'm a little less enthusiastic about Stephen Mangan in the TV pilot, but that might be because I encountered Harry Enfield in the part first).

I found Douglas Adams' unexpected early death a sobering jolt from reality, as I was (along with countless fans) expecting great things to come. He and I were approximately the same age, and his untimely death prompted me to write something on my website (what these days would be called a "blog").

Hearing the Pod Delusion's special Douglas Adams tribute podcast was a joy, especially as it seemed to be all new stuff. The show is available as a podcast, an mp3 download, direct from iTunes, or you can listen to it right here:



Enjoy.

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Apparently there are some hidden references in the tribute's theme music....

A detached view of scripture? BBC2's "Bible's Buried Secrets"

Next week's Radio Times has an article about a new BBC Two three-part TV series beginning on Tuesday 15th March at 9 pm entitled Bible's Buried Secrets, presented by Dr Francesca Stavrakopolou. The article is titled "The woman who says God was married", and quotes her as follows:

I'm an atheist with a huge respect for religion, not just ancient religions, but modern religions too. As a biblical scholar, I see what I do as an academic discipline, a branch of history, like any other. And as an academic, I think you leave faith at the door. I'm aware that there are some who find it hard to understand why an atheist could possibly be interested in the Bible, and I think that does a massive disservice to a fantastic collection of ancient texts. The Bible is a work of religious and social literature that has a huge impact on Western culture, and for that reason it's important that programmes like these are made.

My own reaction to the prospect of this series is that it might be a refreshingly detached view of the available facts, in contrast to — for instance — Anne Widdecombe's Channel 4 documentary on Mosaic Law (to which I added my own comment — follow that link and scroll down). The Mail Online takes a different view, judging by their first paragraph:

Looking for a presenter for a TV show about the Bible? The ideal candidate is an atheist who believes traditional interpretations of the book are sexist – according to BBC bosses, at least.

Or as Michael Marshall put it in the tweet that alerted me to the Mail article:

"It seems to me that another foreigner working for the BBC is spouting their anti christian dogma again."

— which is a valid characterisation of the slant used by Hannah Roberts and Paul Revoir in the Mail.

It's a bold move by the BBC, but I note it's not being broadcast on Sunday. (At least it's not suffering merely tentative exposure on BBC4.) 

Sam Harris — three UK appearances

Last night I eagerly followed a link on Twitter to discover that Sam Harris is coming to the UK next month, and will appear in London, Bristol and Cambridge. This is something for which I'd been on the look-out, as I'm a big fan of Sam Harris's writing. I have to admit that The Moral Landscape doesn't have quite the literary sparkle of The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, but I nevertheless consider it a highly important work.

Naturally I'd like an opportunity to hear Harris speak in person. My anticipation has been dampened, however, on discovering that his appearance nearest to me — 11th April in London — will be a discussion with the Rev Giles Fraser. Who on earth thought that would be a good idea? To me it seems like a complete mismatch. Giles Fraser is a woolly-thinking theologian whose utterances on BBC Radio 4's Thought for the Day range from the somnolently bland to the jaw-droppingly vacuous.

Sam Harris's appearance at the Cambridge Wordfest on 16th April will be a discussion with Ian McEwan. That's something I'd be keen to hear, though Cambridge is a bit far from Portsmouth for an evening event. The other date, 13th April at the Bristol Festival of Ideas, appears to be Harris on his own, and is even farther from me. Regrettably, therefore, I may just content myself with the Intelligence Squared live video stream from the 11th April London event.

(I note from the Lecture Schedule on Sam Harris's website that he is this very day debating William Lane Craig — I wonder if a recording will be made available....)

Burnee links for Sunday

Ruling against Christian foster parents is evidence of “inquisition” | HumanistLife
What the pro-religious press isn't saying about the Johns case.

Htargcm Retsila : Pharyngula
PZ grants the circumlocutions of Alister McGrath one tiny point, then smacks down his utter wrongness on the scientific method.

Stephen Law: The case of the Christian would-be foster parents
A calm and collected view of the Johns fostering case.

Evolution Abroad: Creationism Evolves in Science Classrooms around the Globe: Scientific American
An assessment of ID/creationist teaching throughout the world, including some input from our own James Williams about the situation in the UK. No specific mention of the C4ID though, which might suggest that they are keeping a lower profile than was expected.
(Via BCSE.)

Patient and Persistent: A Problem for Creation Science and Geocentrists
Paul Baird wonders if a new discovery will be problematic for creationists. My money's on "No".

GCU Dancer on the Midway - "Bigots never foster, part deux" or "What the Court really said"
Paul Wright's take on the Johns fostering case principle.

Worship is immoral - Butterflies and Wheels
An interesting idea, further explored in the comments.

Is the suffering of Christians evidence for anything?

Bruce A. Little's "Suffering for What?" is the fifth chapter in Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God, but I have no idea why. This first section of the book is titled The Question of Philosophy, and I can see why the cosmological argument is in it, and the moral argument. Less so the argument from near-death experiences, though a valid critique of naturalism should fit right in.

But Little's chapter isn't even an attempt at "making philosophical excuses for God" — otherwise known as theodicy; it's about specifically Christian suffering and is stuffed full of New Testament quotes. In what way is this "evidence for God" — or even an "argument for faith"?

For what it's worth, however, here's Little's thesis (or sermon — which is definitely how it comes over): Christians suffer for three reasons, the first being when they are righteous (it says so in the Bible); the second is that they are in a "fallen" world (it says so in the Bible); and the third is that they will suffer when they are "evildoers" (it says so in the Bible).

So there you have it. No hint of an argument, nor any trace of evidence bar scripture. I assume that some effort will be made later in the book to establish provenance of scripture, in the section titled The Question of the Bible, but what's presented in this chapter seems irrelevant in the extreme.

Naturalism vs nihilism, brimstone and fire

In the fourth chapter of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God, titled "Naturalism — A Worldview", L. Russ Bush III begins by defining naturalism, and contrasting it with the pre-enlightenment view of origins, but couched in distinctly transcendent phrasing, such as:

"'Naturalism' is the belief that in the final analysis, nature is all that there is, and that 'nature' is essentially unmodified by anything other than itself. In other words, nature itself is thought to be the ultimate reality."

And:

"Naturalism affirms no God except the god of impersonal, nonliving, undesigned physical chemistry."

See what Bush does there? He characterises the naturalistic worldview as belief in a god of some kind. I've seen this tendency before* — it's as if the theistic mindset cannot conceive of a worldview that doesn't contain some ultimate thing, which even if it's not a god, is certainly god-like.

There's an unsophisticated creationist slant to this chapter. Bush asks how personalities can arise from something essentially impersonal, how life can arise from non-life. "Energy dissipates," he says. "Complexity changes by simplifying." He argues for the improbability of abiogenesis, and the improbability of the evolution of simple cellular life into complex multicellular life — using the word random rather more often than the phrase natural selection. He also diverts unnecessarily into an irrelevant concern about how — in the naturalistic view — reason was not present in the beginning, and yet it is present now. Next, of course, he gets tied up in an argument about intrinsic truth, illustrating once again the theistic obsession with absolutes.

Truth, however, is not something that exists in some transcendent realm, in and of itself. Truth is merely a description applied to facts and knowledge. Like reason and logic (and indeed morality), truth has no existence of its own.

Bush's argument against naturalism is basically that it's self-refuting, because in the naturalistic worldview, he says, nothing can be known as objectively true, and therefore that must include naturalism itself. Bush ends his piece in typical fire-and-brimstone fashion, quoting Genesis and decrying naturalistic nihilism.

But he's missed the boat. Naturalism doesn't have to be objectively true (in fact nothing does). It only needs to be true in practice. Notions of absolute truth, once discarded, leave open the possibility of determining what hypotheses about the natural world fit with what we already know, and testing them. This is how science progresses. So far, it seems to be working.

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A version of this chapter is available online:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbgod.aspx?pageid=8589952728

*The Alpha Male Monkey — Matt Arnold:
http://matt-arnold.livejournal.com/184102.html