What do the Creationists want with you?

Alun Life, Politics 2 Comments , , , , , , ,

Fundamentalist
’Chris­ti­ans’ show­ing the love. Photo (cc) Jordan Thevenow-Harrison

Ed Dar­rell has set a tough prob­lem. How do you solve the Texan edu­ca­tion crisis? If you haven’t been fol­low­ing this, the Texas Edu­ca­tion Author­ity has forced an employee to resign because she sent round details of a talk debunk­ing Intel­li­gent Design. The TEA has stated it’s neut­ral on whether or not chil­dren should have good edu­ca­tion. It’s the latest round of what, in the­ory, is the argu­ment between Sci­ence and Intel­li­gent Design. It isn’t really. Every­one knows that Intel­li­gent Design is second-rate Cre­ation­ism. How­ever I don’t think the argu­ment is between Sci­ence and Cre­ation­ism either. If it was then the debate would be as dead as phlogiston.

Even the pre­tence of a debate plays into the Cre­ation­ists’ hands. This allows them to frame the argu­ment as Sci­ence against Chris­tian­ity. Yet if you look at the argu­ments it’s clear that this isn’t about Sci­ence. It’s about power. It won’t be power over sci­ent­ists — they’re con­strained by real­ity. It’s power over Chris­ti­ans that’s the issue. Answers in Gen­esis is quite open about this. Cre­ation mat­ters because it’s about evangelism.

That has to be a prob­lem, because it’s not evan­gel­ism to gen­eric Chris­tian­ity. There are no gen­eric Chris­ti­ans. There are Ortho­dox Chris­ti­ans, Cath­ol­ics and vari­ous minor sects. In the case of AiG it’s evan­gel­ism for a very spe­cific fun­da­ment­al­ist form of Chris­tian­ity. They state:

The 66 books of the Bible are the writ­ten Word of God. The Bible is divinely inspired and inerr­ant through­out. Its asser­tions are fac­tu­ally true in all the ori­ginal auto­graphs. It is the supreme author­ity in everything it teaches.

Yes, accord­ing AiG, the Sun doesn’t cause day­light and could come out at night if God thought it would be use­ful. There’s a lot said about the inerr­ancy of the Bible. Sadly there’s noth­ing about the fal­lib­il­ity of those who read it. Now you may be infal­lible and know the mind of God. Con­grat­u­la­tions if this is the case, but it makes you part of a minor­ity. A few minutes con­ver­sa­tion will reveal that most other people don’t have the clar­ity of under­stand­ing that you do.

Indeed, a lot of Chris­ti­ans accept they don’t have all the answers. Most of the com­mit­ted Chris­ti­ans I’ve met are as hon­est, decent and char­it­able as any­one else. Their reac­tion to the uni­verse is one of awe and humil­ity rather than cer­tainty. I think they make a mis­take nam­ing that awe ‘God’, but they seem to con­sider the mind of God unknow­able. When Cre­ation­ists take the label ‘Chris­ti­ans’ for them­selves they pre­sume to speak on behalf of these people. That reveals amaz­ing arrog­ance, but they have it in good sup­ply.

So how do you debate these people? I strongly sus­pect you can’t debate them with sci­entific or his­tor­ical facts. You can’t debate them using basic logic. They’ve been immunised.

The way I would choose to debate this is to tackle what the cre­ation­ists plan to do if they win. See the place Sherri Shep­herd makes for people who think dates in BC refer to the time before Christ? That is the same space she has for people who don’t share her spe­cific off­shoot of Chris­tian­ity. Will tran­sub­stan­ti­ation be taught as fact in Chem­istry? It has exactly the same amount of evid­ence as Cre­ation­ism, so if not why not? It’s not a frivol­ous ques­tion. What Cath­ol­ics call Christ’s blood, the sec­u­lar law of Ire­land calls alco­hol, and it could lead to drink-driving. It’s not just a gen­eric God that’s being put into classes, exactly whose God is it? What role will this God have in the local gov­ern­ment and in the law?

The Cre­ation­ists know exactly what role their God will have in Texas. They know how they plan to deal with any­one who doesn’t share their view of God. The real debate is about who will be allowed to ques­tion Author­ity in Texas. There’s noth­ing spe­cial about sci­ent­ists, it just hap­pens that they’re at the top of the list as their jobs are based on ques­tion­ing Author­ity. The best response for sci­ent­ists to cre­ation­ists is to make clear that sci­entific debate is impossible because cre­ation­ists have noth­ing to debate with.

Des­pite the claims of cre­ation­ists and the wishes of some athe­ists, Dar­win didn’t prove that God didn’t exist, but what he did do was show that God was not neces­sary to explain the vari­ety of life. That opens up a lot of ques­tions. Dar­win showed that everything could be ques­tioned, includ­ing the reas­ons for the exist­ence of everything liv­ing. He showed that the world was not static and there was no neces­sity to believe in a world where the places of rich and poor were divinely ordained. Des­pite the recent attempts of an actor front­ing a titanic ‘exposé’ of evol­u­tion to smear him, he opposed slavery. His work has polit­ical implic­a­tions. It requires a ques­tion­ing atti­tude, and that’s not accept­able to people who don’t want to be ques­tioned. That’s why they offer noth­ing to ques­tion and that’s why they want to encour­age chil­dren to know when to stop ask­ing awk­ward questions.

If you know what the Cre­ation­ists want with you, you’ll know why Dar­win matters.

The mother of all Dodos

Alun Politics, Science 1 Comment , , ,

WS: I think one of the things that inspired me to write Great Apes was the immin­ent extinc­tion of the chim­pan­zee in the wild, which I think will be one of the most philo­soph­ic­ally queasy moments. But I don’t think people have reckoned on it at all.

SW: Any extinc­tion, but par­tic­u­larly chimpanzees.

WS: Par­tic­u­larly the chimp, surely.

SW: It’s the final­ity of it and the notion that, “These are our cous­ins, and we’re the ones who caused their demise.”

I think I should pay more atten­tion to the SEED salon. There’s a few con­ver­sa­tions in there I’ve missed, and from the high­lights, it looks like the full ver­sion of the Will Self / Spen­cer Wells con­ver­sa­tion could be fun if it’s put online. They were talk­ing about what it means to be human.

Will Self was being Will Self, which he does very well. He was talk­ing of the interest in see­ing a Chimpanzee-Human hybrid. Spen­cer Wells in con­trast would like to talk to a chim­pan­zee, but not cre­ate a hybrid. It’s inter­est­ing because Self sees human­ity as a con­struc­ted idea. It’s inter­est­ing, because it raises the ques­tion “Is what makes you human a hard­ware or soft­ware issue?” Self also raises the ques­tion of self-cloning. If he could, would it be accept­able to have a brain­less clone to act as a source of body parts. Is a brain­less clone human?

The extinc­tion of the chim­pan­zees is a prob­lem which isn’t in the high­lights video, but it’s a power­ful point. Humans have exterm­in­ated other human cul­tures. The people who built Easter Island are effect­ively extinct, killed by the effects of west­ern con­tact. Homo Sapiens have prob­ably killed their closest rel­at­ives Homo Neander­thalen­sis. Was that gen­o­cide or spe­cicide? We’re also close to push­ing the other great apes off the planet. Yet it may in the future be pos­sible to mate with Chim­pan­zees. Suc­cess would require genetic engin­eer­ing to cope with the dif­fer­ent num­ber of chro­mo­somes, and invent­ing a banana-shaped Valentine’s card, but it may be pos­sible. We’re so close that a few bio­lo­gists have sug­ges­ted we are a form of Chim­pan­zee ourselves.

When we elim­in­ate them will we dis­cover that we are still as thought­lessly human as we were at the end of the Middle Palaeo­lithic when the last Neander­thal died? And that’s where we came in.

There’s a con­ver­sa­tion tran­script and video high­lights.

If David Irving is an authority on freedom of speech then I’m an authority on childbirth

Alun Politics 1 Comment , , , , , ,

I thought Julian Bag­gini had made a rare slip recently. He’s asked whether or not he should debate David Irving on the sub­ject of free speech. The notori­ously liti­gi­ous Irving, who was described by a judge at a libel trial as “an act­ive Holo­caust den­ier” who “for his own ideo­lo­gical reas­ons per­sist­ently and delib­er­ately mis­rep­res­en­ted and manip­u­lated his­tor­ical evid­ence” has become a bizarre poster child for free speech fol­low­ing his arrest for holo­caust denial in Aus­tria. I can’t see how logic­ally you get from one state to the other.

As an example I was born. Because I’ve gone through this pro­cess, does that con­fer some spe­cial under­stand­ing which now makes me an expert on child­birth? What about a 14 year-old kid caught by the rozzers after spray­ing graf­fiti in a rail­way sid­ing? Is he an expert on the social con­di­tions of the inner cit­ies? If not, then why does being jailed auto­mat­ic­ally con­fer expert­ise on free speech to David Irving? Espe­cially when his actions after this have been to try and intim­id­ate those who dis­agree with polit­ics into silence. In Octo­ber Irving was threat­en­ing the Jew­ish Chron­icle with libel action. In Decem­ber he was rum­bling on about start­ing pro­ceed­ings against Deborah Lip­stadt again. David Irving is to free speech what McDonald’s is to Cor­don Bleu cuisine.

Irving isn’t really demand­ing free speech. He’s demand­ing to be taken ser­i­ously. That’s very dif­fer­ent. He can have his own opin­ions but he has no right to dic­tate to oth­ers what their opin­ion of him should be. My opin­ion is that David Irving is no more cred­ible than David Icke on the sub­ject of free­dom of speech. If you’re not famil­iar with his work, Icke believes human­ity is being manip­u­lated by a race of rep­tilian ali­ens from the lower fourth dimen­sion, like George Bush Sr. He gets into legal trouble for what he says, yet strangely David Icke is never invited to places like the Oxford Union to debate free­dom of speech.

As for Bag­gini, rather than tak­ing a glib pos­i­tion he was think­ing his response through. The com­ments on his archived post are help­ful in examin­ing the dif­fer­ence between free­dom of speech and giv­ing cre­dence to someone’s ideas.

See also: On reas­ons for not debat­ing at Normblog.

Barbara Brown Taylor explains why she’d be a bad choice for jury service

Alun Life, Politics No Comments , , ,

It is not that the facts don’t mat­ter. It is just that they don’t mat­ter as much as the stor­ies do, and stor­ies can be true whether they hap­pen or not.

From “Home By Another Way,” in Home By Another Way by Bar­bara Brown Taylor (Cow­ley, 1999).

(thanks to Epis­copal Café)

Postmodern scepticism

Alun Politics 5 Comments , , , , , ,

How do you get a hun­dred people in tin foil hats to queue out­side your door? Easy — you stick a sign like this one outside.

Ufology sign
Made with txt2pic

I men­tion this because Bing McGandhi has asked what a Skep­tical Human­it­ies Journal would look like. He ima­gines it as a journal against post­mod­ern­ism — except that wouldn’t work for a few reas­ons, three of them being attrib­utes three, four and five of a New The­ory. I’ll dig them out so you don’t have to traipse back to the ori­ginal post.

  1. Whatever it is you’re study­ing will provide the per­fect example of the bold insights that New The­ory can bring to a topic.
  2. Any praise of another New Theorist’s work is also praise of your work as it recog­nises the import­ance of New The­ory.
  3. Any cri­ti­cism of another New Theorist’s work does not apply to your work as your work will be sig­ni­fic­antly dif­fer­ent in at least three import­ant aspects, and the cri­ti­cism does not recog­nise the vibrant diversity of New The­ory.
  4. Any fail­ure of New The­ory to solve any ques­tions people were ask­ing before its arrival simply illus­trates that people were ask­ing the wrong questions.
  5. Old The­ory is the product of the polit­ical pre­ju­dices of the time. Awk­ward ques­tions from Old The­or­ists can there­fore be dis­missed. The same would apply to New The­ory, were it not for the fact that New The­ory is far too new to be cri­tiqued in the same way.

I can sym­path­ise with Bing, a lot of self-consciously post­mod­ern writ­ing hits these fea­tures head-on. The prob­lem I have is that I’ve also read some awful wannabe-science papers which do exactly the same. In archae­ology there are some good papers on com­plex­ity, but at the same time there are some aston­ish­ingly bad papers too. A new cliché which is catch­ing on is that an indi­vidual is a fractal of soci­ety. It’s an appeal to homo­lo­gies from the math­em­at­ics of com­plex­ity and dis­cov­er­ies in phys­ics. It’s very pro-science and pro-modernity. It’s only flaw is that it’s utter rub­bish which actu­ally removes mean­ing from what it being said. If you dis­agree read the pre­vi­ous link, or give me the Haus­dorff dimen­sion of the Church of England.

The exist­ence of bad post­mod­ern­ists isn’t an argu­ment against post­mod­ern­ism any more than some awful meme paper­backs are argu­ments against social evol­u­tion. Post­mod­ern­ism, being the main­stream since the 1980s has been the safe choice for bad aca­dem­ics. As fash­ion changes and agency or memet­ics become pop­u­lar then these growth areas will attract light­weight schol­ars of their own and we’ll have some really atro­cious papers based on other ideas to look for­ward to.

I’m actu­ally quite com­fort­able with a lot of ideas which are post­mod­ern­ist. I simply have grave doubts about whether post­mod­ern­ism, as a philo­soph­ic­ally mean­ing­ful term, exists. It helps if you think about what post­mod­ern­ism is and Bing is spot on when he says a lot of self-proclaimed post­mod­ern­ists really don’t want to do that. Indeed if you hold to point 3 it’s impossible, or is it? I think post­mod­ern­ists are like lions.
More

The Power of Doubt

Alun Politics, Science 4 Comments ,

Petri Dish
Petri Dish. Photo by believekevin.

There’s an inter­est­ing story on the BBC News site about the woman who dis­covered AZT could help inhibit the devel­op­ment of AIDS. It’s inter­est­ing because it shows what is usu­ally the reac­tion to a dis­cov­ery. She was examin­ing petri dishes and found one sample where no cells had died after infec­tion.

“I rang my super­visor, then I said: ‘I won­der if I for­got to put the virus in these 16?’” she recalls.

That tends to be my reac­tion. “That’s inter­est­ing!” fol­lowed by “I won­der what I did wrong?” In my exper­i­ence that ques­tion is cru­cial because often the reason I’ve found some­thing inter­est­ing is because there’s a gap in my know­ledge rather than find­ing some­thing new. It seems to be the reac­tion of people I work with. It’s com­mon to ask a friend to look over what you’ve done and bounce ideas off people because it is pos­sible that a simple mis­take has been made.

It’s import­ant because it’s the dif­fer­ence between scep­ti­cism and cyn­icism. More

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast by Lewis Wolpert

Alun Politics 4 Comments , , , , , ,

Six Impossible Things Before Breakfast by Lewis Wolpert
This review has could have been writ­ten months ago, were it not for the fact that I’ve been read­ing it with other books like Wilson’s Darwin’s Cathed­ral and cur­rently Boyer’s Reli­gion Explained. I had though it had sur­pris­ingly little atten­tion because as Smiffy said, it is poten­tially a lot more dev­ast­at­ing to the status of reli­gion than the works of Dawkins. Non­ethe­less there are a few people who haven’t got round to read­ing it who have con­cluded it’s bunk. The reason I don’t think these people have read what they con­demn is that they seem to think it’s about reli­gion. This is the sub­ject of just one chapter of the thir­teen in the book. The book is, as the sub­title states, about belief, and it’s far more inter­est­ing because of it.
More

Does belief in a God give you personal infallibility?

Alun Life, Politics No Comments , , ,

I’ve spent far too long try­ing to write a blog entry before delet­ing it. If you want to know what it was like, ima­gine a more poorly writ­ten ver­sion of Deny­ing Little While Affirm­ing Much at Abnor­mal Interests. Pro­fessor Mari­ot­tini seems to believe that per­sonal rev­el­a­tion has a part to play in aca­demic study of the Bible. Unfor­tu­nately his proofs of Chris­tian­ity work just as well with Islam or any other reli­gion. As Duane Smith makes clear the prob­lem isn’t what he knows, it his epi­stem­o­logy: How does he know that his rev­el­a­tions are reli­able and other people’s aren’t?

Spotting Design

Alun Life, Politics 4 Comments , , , , , ,

Experimental Archaeology
Exper­i­mental Archae­ology. Photo (cc) Wessex Archae­ology.

I wish I was as good an archae­olo­gist as Michael Egnor claims to be. Egnor has recently writ­ten on the Anti­kythera Mech­an­ism from a cre­ation­ist point of view. To be hon­est I dis­agree with some of it, the words mainly, but the spaces and punc­tu­ation on the other hand seem sound. Chris­topher O’Brien has given the words far more atten­tion than they deserve, so if you want a cri­tique of the pro­pos­i­tions ((It took me half an hour to choose that word. Facts as the blog entry makes clear wouldn’t have been the right choice)) then it’s a great read. What I find dif­fi­cult is the repeated claim by cre­ation­ists that you can simply see design.

It’s a com­mon claim. When fun­da­ment­al­ists Cameron and Com­fort are notexhort­ing people to stick banana-shaped objects into their mouths they make claims like: “If you stuck a group of sci­ent­ists in a room with a paint­ing then, with noth­ing from the out­side world, they would con­clude there was a painter.” Now I don’t think they would. I can­not simply see design in com­plex objects, so are the cre­ation­ists wrong or am I thick?
More

Is the Heart of the Universe is Satanic?

Alun Life, Politics No Comments , , ,

The Neuro­philo­sopher points to a web­log with a very spe­cial grip on reality.

Blogs4Brownback is a site ded­ic­ated to put­ting Sam Brown­back into the White­house. Brown­back seems to be an inter­est­ing can­did­ate adher­ing to the motto “A faith isn’t for life, it’s just for Christ­mas”. He’s moved from Meth­od­ism to Cath­oli­cism and now, if Blogs4Brownback is to be believed, he’s chas­ing the Satan­ist vote.

The clues are fairly blatant. He’s anti-abortion and pro-war clearly to curry favour with his new mas­ter who wants to see suf­fer­ing. The web­log shows him bar­ing his teeth in a satanic grin through a van­dal­ised Amer­ican flag charred with brim­stone. And now he’s arguing that chil­dren should be taught that the uni­verse revolves around Satan.

The logic is fairly simple. As Dante made clear Satan lives in the heart of Hades deep in the under­world. Blogs4Brownback add the innov­a­tion of per­vert­ing Bib­lical scrip­ture to pro­mote Satan. The Earth, they argue, is fixed and immov­able in the Bible, thus the uni­verse revolves around it. Except when it gets pudgy and goes for a run around the Sun. Brown­back is also an advoc­ate of intel­li­gent design which is a Satan-friendly form of Cre­ation­ism.

Ah no, it’s not linked from the Brown­back cam­paign site. Pre­sum­ably it’s a spoiler to blacken his name. Amus­ing though.

1 2 3 4 5 6