Burnee links for Thursday

The Blog : Being Mr. Nobody : Sam Harris

There are an uncountable number of erroneous and unfounded doctrines that we all reject. Why must we name their absence from our lives?

I know Sam Harris doesn't like to identify as an atheist, but the reason we name the absence of erroneous and unfounded doctrines that we reject is that the majority doesn't reject them. The majority thinks these erroneous and unfounded doctrines are true.

Why Are There Atheists? | Godless Girl
Could it be that theists are actually getting the message? By conceding that theists are generally not theists because of reason and evidence, but because of revelation, maybe that means they'll give up debating the evidence with atheists. When theists offer an evidential basis for theism, however, atheists should nevertheless respond in similar terms until the aforementioned concession is acknowledged — at which point the debate is over.

The Daily Mash - 'Atheist bible' an impossible fairy story, say Christians
There, what did I tell you?

The unpalatable truth is that the anti-nuclear lobby has misled us all | George Monbiot | Comment is free | The Guardian

"...we owe it to ourselves not to squander our lives on fairytales."

George Monbiot looks at the facts.

Guardian Readers 'Fix' the Fukushima Power Plant | Science | guardian.co.uk
Huh, experts. What do they know?

Eating the abiogenesis cake

It seems Joe W. Francis can't make up his mind. In "Oxygen, Water, and Light, Oh My! — The Toxicity of Life's Basic Necessities", which forms chapter 10 of Dembski & Licona's Evidence for God, he appears to be claiming that the world is fine-tuned for life. And that it's a wonder life got started at all, given the world is so hostile to it. Well, which is it Joe?

This chapter appears to be an example of what might be called the argument from abiogenesis — the complexity of present-day biology is expounded in some detail (detail that I'm not competent to assess, not being a biologist), but it appears to miss one significant factor that's typically (or deliberately) missed in all such arguments. Sure, modern multicellular life is extremely complex, but abiogenesis isn't the wholesale springing-into-existence of complex multicellular life. It's not even the emergence of complex unicellular life. Abiogenesis is the first event — the appearance of the first self-replicating molecule. This molecule and its descendants might not even merit the description organic, even though they would lead to organic life. Whatever they were — and we can only speculate here as we don't really know — they would likely be relatively simple. Certainly relative to the intricate biological machinery evident within cells we examine today, they would probably appear absurdly simple. We have no archeological evidence — such early organisms, being soft-bodied, would not have fossilized.

To give Joe Francis his due, he doesn't explicitly present anything in this chapter as evidence for God (though I wonder, therefore, why the editors included it). But the implication is clear: cellular organisms contain highly complex mechanisms to protect them from the hostile toxicity of their environment — an environment that is fine-tuned for the existence of such cellular organisms. (No, I don't get it either.)

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4truth.net:
http://www.4truth.net/fourtruthpbscience.aspx?pageid=8589952959

D. J. Grothe at TAM London 2010

JREF president D. J. Grothe's talk at TAM London 2010 was a bit like a State of the Union address, focussing on the moral imperatives of skepticism (briefly referencing Sam Harris's new book just published) and on how he sees the skeptical movement in general, both globally and locally. As for locally, he announced that the fund-raising of TAM London would be channelled to JREF projects in the UK, and mentioned the grass-roots, loosely affiliated Skeptics in the Pub gatherings that seem to be burgeoning nationwide. Some of these appear to be a direct result of unofficial arrangements made at TAM London itself.



I was looking forward to hearing the new JREF president, and DJ's rallying cry to "the troops" didn't disappoint.

A Secular Bible — and barely disguised disdain

The Today Programme this morning featured a discussion between "famous atheist" A. C. Grayling and Thought for the Day regular the Rev Canon Dr Giles Fraser. Grayling was on to plug his latest book, The Good Book: A Secular Bible — characterized as an atheist version of the Christian Bible. He's an accomplished philosopher with a knack for plain speaking without rancour, and so this is one I'll be checking out.

Giles Fraser — he of woolly theology — was apparently on as "balance". Despite his remarkable claim that very few Christians hold to the idea that belief in God is a necessary precondition for morality¹, he could not restrain the typical disdain theists reserve for anyone of a godless persuasion who dares to imagine that a fully engaged life can be lived in the absence of a god. It was all jolly banter in the studio, but with a noticeably condescending subtext.

I doubt, however, that any of this will have put off Grayling from his book-promotion — nor should it. Compared to him, Fraser comes across as an intellectual midget whose jovial ripostes may make for a mildly entertaining end to the BBC's flagship morning news radio programme, but beyond that they are of little consequence.

Incidentally the Guardian has an extensive interview with A. C. Grayling that may serve as an antidote to the foregoing Fraser-frustration:
AC Grayling: 'How can you be a militant atheist? It's like sleeping furiously' | Books | The Guardian

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1. So few Christians hold to this belief, and yet atheists debating theists encounter it all the time.

Burnee links for Sunday

Religion scrapped from school admissions - East Hampshire - The News

"Religion is currently the third priority for accepting children in oversubscribed schools."

I'm amazed that this is the current situation for state schools, but pleased that it's being scrapped.
(Via @cherryblack)

BHA gives evidence to Commission on Assisted Dying
A summary of Andrew Copson's evidence to the Commission. It seems profoundly odd that the BHA has to spell this stuff out. To me, it's the obvious, moral standpoint.

Edge: THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER 2011
This looks like a good idea, but there's a lot to get through (specifically, 115,000 words).

Matthew Adams - Space for laughs | New Humanist
A piece about Helen Keen's Radio 4 show, It Is Rocket Science! (now finished). It was a good show, about an hour long in total (in four weekly parts). Based on her stand-up routine, which incidentally she performed on very short notice at Manchester's QED in February, including shadow-puppets. Weird but wonderful.

New Humanist (Rationalist Association) - Scientology to be taught in Religious Education lessons
Whatever next, for FSM's sake? Pastafarianism? (Actually, that's not a bad idea....)

Everything and Nothing — Professor Jim Al-Khalili

We've had Professor Brian Cox's latest wondrous TV series ogling different aspects of the universe — and very splendid it was too. But I'd like to recommend a shorter and perhaps more focussed series recently broadcast on BBC Four. This was Professor Jim Al-Khalili's two-parter Everything and Nothing.

Two-part documentary which deals with two of the deepest questions there are - what is everything, and what is nothing?

In two epic, surreal and mind-expanding films, Professor Jim Al-Khalili searches for an answer to these questions as he explores the true size and shape of the universe and delves into the amazing science behind apparent nothingness.

The first part, Everything, sees Professor Al-Khalili set out to discover what the universe might actually look like. The journey takes him from the distant past to the boundaries of the known universe. Along the way he charts the remarkable stories of the men and women who discovered the truth about the cosmos and investigates how our understanding of space has been shaped by both mathematics and astronomy.

The second part, Nothing, explores science at the very limits of human perception, where we now understand the deepest mysteries of the universe lie. Jim sets out to answer one very simple question - what is nothing? His journey ends with perhaps the most profound insight about reality that humanity has ever made. Everything came from nothing. The quantum world of the super-small shaped the vast universe we inhabit today, and Jim can prove it.

Available on iPlayer for a limited time:

Everything:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00yb59m/Everything_and_Nothing_Everything/

Nothing:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00zwndy/Everything_and_Nothing_Nothing/

For those beyond the reach of iPlayer, both programmes are available on YouTube (but expect them to be pulled soon):

Everything — Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=psHPx4YezdE

Everything — Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQEHOuokWV8
Everything — Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4biSl7Fu04
Everything — Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDGxRrSkdNU

Nothing — Part 1: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DiIaJ0hacwc

Nothing — Part 2: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45-XOBzoO-Y
Nothing — Part 3: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CiWpb_v26dc
Nothing — Part 4: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWPzhQFL17w

In the words of Sir Arthur Eddington, "Not only is the universe stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine."

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