Burnee links for Thursday

Alister McGrath loves him some Deep Rifts : Pharyngula
Doesn't McGrath have a new book out? Get ready for some circumlocutory proliferation.

Pod Delusion Live in Southampton on 26th February » The Pod Delusion - A Podcast about Interesting Things
I might go to this, seeing as it's local, and as I missed the Winchester one ... and as I'm not sure if I'll see the QEDcon one (depends what's on at the same time).

Four Dollars, Almost Five: The cosmological argument refuted in a nutshell
This is almost exactly the same as the very first argument in that book I decided to review.

Message from the stars: astrology is “rubbish” and “nonsense” | HumanistLife
Prime time TV pronouncements on the reality of astrology are welcome. Stargazing LIVE was an excellent series, and I particularly appreciated the expressed sentiment that it's all very well looking at pictures on a screen (from, say, Hubble), but there's no substitute for letting the actual photons from celestial objects enter your own eyes.

Tim Minchin on a roll | The Australian
A revealing and comprehensive piece on the current king of subversive musical humour.

QEDcon is this coming weekend — reports may or may not be erratic

On Friday I'll be heading up to Manchester for QEDcon:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AwypRRZ-548


I'll be travelling by train, and unlike previous excursions (which have mostly been shorter than the 4+ hours of the Manchester trip) I hope to be connected while on the move. I'll have my netbook with me, and it's now equipped with a mobile broadband USB dongle. I've no idea how effective this will be out in the real world (as opposed to trying it out in two or three places locally), or what coverage will be like. It could be an interesting experiment. On the other hand it could be intensely frustrating. Expect reports (or not, depending...).

"Consensus" about complex science, global warming and God

This BBC Horizon programme was listed in Burnee links on Sunday:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V89AeCLCtJQ

I embed it above because the problem of climate change skepticism (indeed skepticism of any generally accepted science) raises important issues about how non-experts can be expected to approach the consensus.

In next week's Radio Times (published today) the correspondence pages contain the two letters I've scanned and shown at left (click to bignify and legibilificate). We have two opposite opinions on the Horizon programme, just as we have opposing views on climate change itself. But as Paul Nurse put to James Delingpole, if one is not competent to assess the science itself, it makes sense to go with the consensus — and that's what I do. Climate science is extremely complex, such that even the computer models are only approximations of what is — and will be — going on.

It occurs to me, however, that though I'm willing to accept the scientific consensus on global warming, I'm not willing to accept the consensus on some other matters — the existence of God, for instance. The majority of the world's population believes in some kind of deity. I don't. But unlike with climate science, I consider the arguments for and against the existence of God to be accessible to anyone with some general education and a willingness to think. Some of the arguments for God are philosophical arguments, and I understand that the majority of professional philosophers are atheists. I realise that in this sense I'm agreeing with a consensus, but I'm not doing so blindly. In another sense one can consider theology as part of philosophy and the consensus weakens. But who bases their beliefs on what theologians say?

This week there was another BBC Storyville documentary specifically about climate skepticism, by Rupert Murray. From the BBC website:

Filmmaker Rupert Murray takes us on a journey into the heart of climate scepticism to examine the key arguments against man-made global warming and to try to understand the people who are making them

Do they have the evidence that we are heating up the atmosphere or are they taking a grave risk with our future by dabbling in highly complicated science they don't fully understand? Where does the truth lie and how are we, the people, supposed to decide?

The film features Britain's pre-eminent sceptic Lord Christopher Monckton as he tours the world broadcasting his message to the public and politicians alike. Can he convince them and Murray that there is nothing to worry about?

What is genuinely worrying about this film is that Lord Monckton seemed to be getting plenty of traction while talking a lot about the science, when as far as I know he's not a scientist. Murray filmed him in Australia doing some field "experiments" with a bottle of acid. While I'm not a scientist myself, I did chemistry, physics and biology at school, and even I know that there's more to understanding how to do science than being able to recite the periodic table.

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.