Friendly Humanist

I'm moving

2010-01-10T00:00:00.001Z

I am moving this blog to "http://www.friendlyhumanist.net". This is partly to improve the blog (WordPress has better features), and partly to appease my own ego (I wanted my own domain name).

The new blog has already been populated with all the old posts and comments. I even think I can set things up so this old address will automatically redirect to the new one.

But, for those of you using feed readers, you'll need to subscribe to the new feed (and unsubscribe from the old one). This will be the last post I put up on Blogger.

Feel free to take this opportunity to let me know (on the new blog, preferably) what works, and what doesn't. On a technical level, what would you like me to change on the blog? On a content level, is there anything you'd like to hear more about? Less?

On moral obligation

2010-01-05T00:00:00.001Z

One complaint levelled against entirely naturalistic worldviews is this:

What is the basis of morality? By what right can you expect anyone to follow moral rules, if there is no transcendent reality to ground them in?

I have had a very engaging discussion of this (and related issues) with Ken Brown and other commenters on his blog, and have posted some of my own thoughts here. Ken and colleagues are coming specifically from a Christian perspective. (I have yet to see them give a satisfactory justification for how a "transcendent reality" solves the problem - but that's a topic for another time. As is the whole burden of actually demonstrating that such a reality exists - which would seem to be a prerequisite if one is to pin one's entire moral philosophy on it.)

I thought I might pick out the key points of my answer here.

First, I come back to a very pragmatic position: most of the key elements of morality (love, fairness, honesty, nonviolence, etc) are built into most humans. (This fact has very interesting naturalistic explanations in the context of evolution as a social species, but that too, is a topic for another time.) So we have a useful basis for discussing moral issues without either an esoteric knowledge of the philosophical underpinnings of morality or a belief in a transcendent basis for moral claims. This is the basis of secular government: we build our society on the foundations we all share.

Second and more important, how I can derive another's obligation from my "relativist" moral stance? Very cautiously and humbly. For most cases where someone says "there ought to be a law", there probably oughtn't. Law - the formal, coercive expression of our shared moral principles - is a blunt instrument that should not be used to solve all problems.

But even aside from the law, I do expect people to act morally, and I reserve the right to hold them accountable when they don't. How do I do this? What gives me, a relativist with no ultimate explanation for right and wrong, the right to project my moral judgments on others? Why should someone else do the right thing rather than some other thing? The most honest answer I can give is very simple:

People should do the right thing, because it's the right thing to do.

I know that's not very philosophical or subtle. But, so long as we all share a basic sense of right and wrong, it's sufficient for the vast majority of life's decisions.

And for those issues where we don't instinctively agree on the right answer - abortion, euthanasia, drug control, etc - pretending that a hypothetical transcendent realm holds the answer does not seem to solve things. It may give some people a sense of self-righteousness to bolster their support of one position, but it is useless in seeking a practical solution or persuading people who believe in a different hypothetical set of transcendent moral truths (or folks like me who doubt such a set exists at all). In these cases, we have to fall back on the nasty, brutish, fallible strategy of using rhetoric and reason to pursue the best solution and persuade each other of it.

Photo credits:

Justice statue on Old Bailey, London: from Wikipedia, shared by user Erasoft24 under Creative Commons Attribution licence 2.5.

Foundation Beyond Belief

2010-01-01T01:30:00.000Z

I am delighted to announce the launch of a new humanist-driven charity initiative, the Foundation Beyond Belief. Go to the site itself for full details, and to sign up.

I'm just going to point out some of the things about the Foundation that I find particularly awesome:

Though it is explicitly modelled on humanist values, religious individuals are explicitly invited to participate.
Social networking will be a key part of the Foundation's interaction with members - this is not just a conduit for money, but a place to build community around shared values and actions.
Members can choose where their donations are spent, among ten categories (education, peace, health care, environment, and others).
Charities will be selected not just on the values they profess, but on efficiency and effectiveness as well.
Religious charities are not explicitly ruled out, but charities that use their funds for proselytizing are (regardless of the worldview they promote).
Though based in the US, the Foundation explicitly looks to support charities with an international reach.
Two of the key people involved in the Foundation - Dale McGowan and Hemant Mehta - were instrumental in my decision to become a blogger (though I have yet to meet either of them in person).

I look forward to seeing the Foundation help people around the world, and I'm excited to participate in it. I'll close with words from the Foundation itself: a mission statement, a launch blurb, and a video:

Mission statement:

To demonstrate humanism at its best by supporting efforts to improve this world and this life; to challenge humanists to embody the highest principles of humanism, including mutual care and responsibility; and to help and encourage humanist parents to raise confident children with open minds and compassionate hearts.

Launch blurb:

Beginning on January 1, 2010, Foundation Beyond Belief will highlight ten charitable organizations per quarter -- one in each of ten categories. Among other considerations, beneficiaries will be chosen for efficiency, effectiveness, moderate size (annual budget <$10M), compatibility with humanist focus on mutual care of this world and this life, no direct promotion or proselytizing of a particular worldview, and geographical diversity.

Video:

In the company of woo

2009-12-29T00:00:00.003Z

I find myself in the company of woo, and as a skeptic it is bringing me some grief.

It's all about homebirth - planning to deliver a baby at home, attended by a midwife, rather than in a hospital.

Deena and I came to homebirth through an examination of the evidence. (Here's a discussion I participated in on the Bad Science forums before Kaia's birth.) We were convinced, by scientific studies and analyses, that planning a home birth here in the UK was at least as safe as planning a hospital birth, given a competent attendant and a handy hospital in the event of complications. So we went for it.

However, many people choose homebirth for less evidence-based reasons. They cite personal intuition, or the "naturalness" of it. Not just as reasons to prefer homebirth, but as evidence of its safety.

At Edinburgh's Pregnancy and Parents Centre (a haven for various types of woo, as well as useful support groups and great toddler activities), when we went to the "home birth support group" to relate our experiences and our evidence-based approach, it was alongside others promoting woo of various flavours as part of their support of homebirth.

A recent post on homebirth at Science-Based Medicine has stirred up an epic-length discussion, with passionate defenders on both sides. I've participated, but fear that just being on the homebirth side has made me, in some people's eyes, an advocate of woo.

This is the problem: I agree with the woo-birthers that homebirth can be safe, but I disagree (passionately, vigorously) about why this is a legitimate position. And the disagreement isn't immaterial. At the homebirth meeting, someone recommended homeopathy to treat post-partem haemorrhage. One of the most serious and potentially life-threatening complications of pregnancy, and she advised drinking high-priced water. That is dangerous advice, and I wish I'd been quick-thinking enough to respond persuasively (rather than sitting like a lump and grinding my teeth).

What is a skeptic to do? On the one hand, having someone agree with me in one breath, and back me up with an appeal to intuition in the next, makes me want to revisit and question my beliefs that much more carefully. (That's something a skeptic should be doing anyway, for all their beliefs, but who has the time?) On the other hand, to adapt Niven's 16th law, "There is no belief so true that one cannot find a fool believing it." Just because someone agrees with you for bad reasons doesn't mean you're wrong. I came to my belief about homebirth on the basis of the science, and I'm determined that only science will dissuade me.

But there's also the whole social side. Just as many of my fellow atheists wrinkle their brows at me when I say I go to church, many skeptics seem to do the same when I talk about homebirth. Atheists often assume that the word "church" is synonymous with supernatural beliefs and submission to a holy text, things that would feel alien in our Unitarian church. Similarly, many skeptics assume that, because it's associated with modern medicine, hospital-based birth is inherently safer.

I'm tempted to close by declaring, evangelist-style, that skeptics must beware of this tendency to take association as evidence. Its association with woo-birthers says nothing about the safety of homebirth; nor does its association with high-tech hospitals demonstrate the superiority of hospital birth.

But perhaps a more humble conclusion is in order. Here goes:

I promise to keep vigilant for evidence that might contradict my current beliefs.
I promise to honestly communicate any changes of position that such evidence might lead me to.
I promise to avoid being swayed by other people's assumptions (whether or not they are skeptics).
I promise to make every effort to pin my beliefs to the evidence, and nothing else.

More on Free Will

2009-12-24T00:00:00.001Z

Since my March article about free will, I've learned that my position - that having free will is consistent with a mechanistic model of the universe (with or without quantum uncertainty thrown in) - is known as compatibilism.

I recently read Thomas Pink's book, Free Will: A Very Short Introduction (from the excellent Very Short Introduction series put out by OUP) - and so I now fancy myself knowledgeable enough to connect my own casual ponderings with the great web of philosophy.

The position Mike took in his article is known as scepticism (in the context of free will, a combination of incompatibilism and a belief in causal determinism - not to be confused with other, more general forms of scepticism).

Guess who Pink identifies as the first compatibilist? Here's a quote:

A FREE-MAN, is he, that ... is not hindred to doe what he has a will to ... from the use of the word Free-will, no Liberty can be inferred of the will, desire or inclination, but the Liberty of the man; which consisteth in this, that he finds no stop, in doing what he has the will, desire, or inclination to doe.

The quote is from p65 of Pink's book, and it's by 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes.

I wouldn't go so far as to call myself a Hobbesian - he wrote about more than just this, and I don't know if the whole of his philosophy would appeal to me. But I tend to agree with this quote.

Note that this passage makes no claims about what it means for someone to "have a will to do" something. One thing I like about compatibilism is that it does not rely on a particular model (deterministic, non-deterministic, etc) of the universe.

See also:

Wikipedia article on Free Will.

Image credit:

Image of Hobbes via this collection. (On the topic of this post, check out this fan comic, inspired by the Calvin and Hobbes scene shown here.)

Is Saint Andrew's Day controversial?

2009-12-20T00:00:00.000Z

A few weeks late, I have come across this exchange on the merits of celebrating Saint Andrew's Day on the 30th of November as a national day for Scotland. Saint Andrew was said to have been crucified on an 'X'-shaped cross, which gives us the saltire in the modern Scottish flag (pictured above). His apparent connection with Scotland is that some of his relics were brought here after his death, and so he is considered the patron saint of Scotland.

In the article from the Herald, Gordon Ross (treasurer for the Humanist Society of Scotland) argues that (a) Andrew has no demonstrable connection to Scotland (he's patron saint of many other places as well), (b) it is primarily a religious tradition, which implicitly excludes the many non-Christian people in Scotland, and (c) we have plenty of other days with more genuine merit, to celebrate Scotland as a nation.

Opposing him is Azeem Ibrahim, who argues that religion isn't a serious part of Scottish Saint Andrews Day celebrations, and that the inclusive celebration of Scottish awesomeness is what the day is about.

This seems to me like a microcosm of the perennial Christmas debates in the atheist community. Is it a problem to celebrate on a day that has been connected to beliefs or values that you reject? As someone who grew up with essentially religion-free Christmases, I just can't get worried about it. (For us, it was about family, food, gifts, and games.) I've never seen evidence that celebrating a secular Christmas somehow lends credence to the non-secular version of it.*

I tend to agree with Ibrahim - the same goes for Saint Andrew's Day. While I am aware of the legend behind it, I've never felt that the religious side was particularly important. It's about celebrating this wonderful little nation of (currently) five million people, who have produced so much.** (Including, I should point out, many of the central historical figures and cultural traditions celebrated in my homeland, Canada.)

Humanists and atheists often chastise religious people for being too sensitive about their beliefs. I think this is a great opportunity to show that we mean it. Saint Andrew's Day does not exclude us; it does not demean us. So let's set aside the historical religious basis of the day and enjoy it for what it is now.***

Lang may your lum reek!

Footnotes:

* I feel I should point out this post by Cath, in which I learned that even very conservative Christians don't necessarily observe Christmas. This doesn't change the fact that it's historically a religiously-motivated festival, but it does somewhat derail the assumption that Christianity and Christmas necessarily go together.

** I should also acknowledge that Saint Andrew's Day is not a huge thing, even in Scotland. In fact, my main experience of it is the free admission to the castle, and perhaps token acknowledgement in the media. So it's a very different issue in many ways from Christmas. But the parallels are intriguing.

*** Also, I should acknowledge a certain personal bias: Saint Andrew's Day is also my birthday. It's quite nice to be offered free admission to national monuments on your birthday.

Image credit:

Saltire from Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Why should humanists be in chaplaincy?

2009-12-18T00:00:00.001Z

Humanitie, the quarterly magazine of the Humanist Society of Scotland, has a new issue out. Once again, Mike and I present our rather different perspectives - this time, on the relationship between humanists and chaplaincy. Don't forget to read Mike's column over at his blog.

I was recently asked a question about the place of humanists in chaplaincy life. In a chaplaincy, even an inclusive multi-faith chaplaincy, most people are religious. To what extent is it worthwhile and appropriate for humanists and other non-religious people to seek a place in chaplaincy?

The answer is obvious to me. Clearly, though, some religious people and even many humanists don't see things as I do. So here is my take on it.

First, some background. Our university chaplaincy is very deliberately open to students and staff of "all faiths and none".

My earliest experience with the chaplaincy was when I was first learning and reading about humanism, and coming to realize that it reflected a deep part of my identity. I started looking for like-minded people, for a community to connect with. I had heard of the chaplaincy and its openness to people of no religion. I visited the chaplain and asked if she knew of any humanist groups at the university. She didn't, but she thought it would be wonderful if there were a group. She also pointed me to the Humanist Society of Scotland (HSS), which has an Edinburgh group.

There is a whole story following on from that - of attending an HSS philosophy book group, of meeting another humanist student, of forming a student group with him that has become far more active and successful than I expected - but for now let's look at that first move on my part. Why did I go to the chaplaincy in search of humanists?

First, there was my awareness that the chaplaincy branded itself as inclusive - they reach out not only to religious folks, but to folks like me. Second, for all that some humanists like to distance themselves from religious believers, there is a crucial feature that we share. Humanism is a framework for seeking meaning, for defining an ethical stance, and for sharing inspiration and expressing awe. For most religious people I've talked to, their religion does just the same: it provides meaning, defines ethics, and it is the lens through which inspiration and awe are experienced and shared. Also, perhaps even more importantly, both humanism and religions are identities around which human communities gather. So humanism is to me as religion is to religious folks. Even then, new as I was to humanism, I could see that.

So it seemed obvious that the chaplaincy - a place for religious folks to meet like-minded people, a place for people to go for spiritual counselling, and a place that explicitly included non-religious people in its remit - was the right place to look for humanist groups at the university.

And of course, that answers the question I opened with too. If chaplaincy is an obvious place for a lone humanist to go in search of kindred spirits, then chaplaincy is an obvious place for a humanist group to be connected with so that those lone humanists can find us.

Yes, there is the Internet. Yes, there are other avenues for us to find one another. But that's no reason to shut such an obvious means of connection. Besides, the sort of personal bond that people visiting the chaplaincy tend to seek is not something that can be transmitted through a computer screen.

Of course, there is more to the chaplaincy than just finding folks like yourself. There is also the inter-faith element*. The idea of people of different backgrounds coming together to discover common ground. And I think that's incredibly valuable. It's something that's lacking from a lot of the "culture war" discussions that get headlines. It's important that humanists are involved in that as well.

True, I may think that the other guy's god is imaginary. True, he may think that I'm destined for hell if I don't come to believe as he does. But equally true is the fact that we both value compassion. We both try to buy products whose production doesn't exploit the vulnerable. We both try to act in ways that will preserve the planet for the next generation. We both strongly believe in each other's right to believe as we will.

In my experience, there is no place like a multi-faith chaplaincy for bringing people of different backgrounds together and helping us to realize how much we share. Not just superficial stuff. Deep stuff. Important stuff.**

Stuff we can draw on to make the world a better place, together.

That's why humanists should be involved in chaplaincy, and in other inter-faith endeavours.

Footnotes (not included in the print version):

* Yes, I know, the term inter-faith is problematic for people like us, who consciously set ourselves apart from religious faith. It is also often used in a manner that really does exclude us. But until you can come up with a better term for a meeting of religious and non-religious worldviews, and show that other people will use and understand it, it's better than nothing.

** A Unitarian church may do the same, but I don't have enough experience at one yet to say for sure.

Cosmic Advent

2009-12-17T13:49:00.003Z

It's that time of year again, when the Cosmic Calendar brings almost daily events to reflect on. Today we see the Cambrian Explosion (about 540 million years ago), and the first vertebrates (around 534 million years ago). See the list of upcoming events in the sidebar on the right for the next 5, or go to the Google Calendar for the whole schedule.

I'm still working out, for myself and my family, how to integrate the Cosmic Calendar into personal holiday traditions. I like the idea of building some sort of advent calendar around these last couple of weeks. How would you go about that? Would you used biologically-themed sweets? Toys? Snappy passages from The Ancestor's Tale?

I'd also like to fill in the blank days - the 20th, 24th, 25th, and 29th. I'm sure things were happening during these periods - every day represents about 37.5 million years of time, after all. But the big-ticket events like the first amphibians, the first birds, etc just haven't happened to fall on those days.

Would you like to participate? Do you have any thoughts for things to include in the Cosmic Calendar? Corrections on the dates I'm using? Other ideas? Please let me know!

Confession of a born essentialist

2009-12-15T00:00:00.005Z

We have an innate tendency to psychological essentialism. Bruce Hood articulates this tendency well (see his book Supersense). His most vivid example is the serial-killer's shirt. If you are given a nice shirt - one that fits well and suits your style and wardrobe - and told that it once belonged to a serial killer, how will you react? Most people will avoid the shirt - even avoid touching it. Of course, the shirt contains no "serial-killer essence", but the association sparks something deep our psychology: we want to avoid objects that are associated with bad things.

This was probably hugely adaptive in our evolutionary history: if you avoid touching things that have been handled by, say, a seriously ill person, you are less likely to become infected yourself. It doesn't matter if the reason you avoid them is rooted in an accurate knowledge of the germ theory of disease or an improbable metaphysical notion of guilt-by-association - if it saves your life and is affected by your genes, it will give you a selective advantage over people without the trait, or with a weaker version of the same trait.

Essentialist psychology provides a compelling explanation for why people would believe in certain immaterial properties of matter even if the universe is completely material. Which leads some philosophical naturalists (humanists, atheists, etc) to smugly think that we've risen above the illusion: we see through the illusory sense that our instincts push us into. We aren't tricked into god-belief or imagining a life after death.

Well, it's not that easy.

I was playing with Kaia (my 2-year-old daughter), and she told me that her doll needed a nappy change*. As an expert, I was invited to conduct the procedure. I used a nose tissue to wipe the doll's bottom.

When I went to put the tissue back in my pocket (for future use), I was momentarily overcome by my inner essentialist. I had a strong sense that the tissue was unclean. All simply because of an act of imagination!

I quickly realized what was happening, and put the tissue in my pocket anyway. In fact, once I became conscious of the illusion, it quickly dissipated. Thank goodness for skepticism. I wonder if I would have recovered as quickly if I had not, a few years ago, attended a talk here in Edinburgh given by Bruce Hood.

Have you ever had a "silly essentialist" moment like this? How did you react? How did you feel once you realized what was going on?

* I feel I should point out that this wasn't one of those modern imagination-free dolls that actually produce wet nappies.

DIY spirituality

2009-12-12T00:00:00.000Z

I think I've mentioned once or twice about humanist spirituality. And I know I've talked about Unitarians a few times. Well, I just read an interesting article, The DIY Spiritual Practice, by Doug Muder, in the UU World magazine. In it, he describes a spiritual practice that he and his wife have evolved over the years. (It was linked from his blog here, so go there to drop him a comment if you like - or dislike - what he says.)

It's not that I don't have a discipline. I do, but it's like so much of what Unitarian Universalists do—my wife Deb and I have cobbled it together for ourselves over a couple of decades.

For those hard-nosed skeptics among you who think that "spiritual practice" is simply a euphemism for rituals reinforcing supernatural beliefs, with no real effect on anything, I strongly recommend you give his article a read. You may not decide to try out his solution, but at least you'll get an idea of a very humanist approach to spirituality and spiritual practice.

So what is this do-it-yourself discipline my wife and I have been practicing for 21 years? The heart of it is very mundane: We talk to each other.

I don't know if Doug and his wife are "religious" (in the sense of believing in some supernatural reality). But the practice that he describes sounds to me like a well-grounded, practical, and enjoyable way to deal with the emotional (and other) issues that arise in daily life, and to appreciate life's events as they come.

What do you think?

To what must we aspire, and why?

2009-12-08T00:00:00.007Z

Well, Marc has done it again. Talking along, making all sort of sense - even wisdom (but don't tell him I said so) - and then completely losing me as he finishes:

Expressions that were once current have gone out of use nowadays. Names, too, that were formerly household words are virtually archaisms today; Camillus, Caeso, Volesus, Dentatus; or a little later, Scipio and Cato; Augustus too, and even Hadrian and Antoninus. All things fade into the storied past, and in a little while are shrouded in oblivion. Even to men whose lives were a blaze of glory this comes to pass; as for the rest, the breath is hardly out of them before, in Homer's words, they are 'lost to sight alike and hearsay'. What, after all, is immortal fame? An empty, hollow thing. To what, then, must we aspire? This, and this alone: the just thought, the unselfish act, the tongue that utters no falsehood, the temper that greets each passing event as something predestined, expected, and emanating from the One source and origin. (Meditations, book 4, paragraph 33)

Okay, I understand that the whole "One source" bit is consistent with the rest - he's not doing a U-turn at the end. But it's unnecessary. Yes, fame and recognition are fleeting. Yes, living for eternal glory is a futile pursuit. Yes, it is enough to aspire to think clearly, do good, and speak truth. And an even temper is certainly something worth cultivating.

But my even temper is not based on a belief in predestiny, in all things coming from a common source. It is simply based on the observation that level-headedness is the most powerful frame of mind from which to advance my understanding and improve my lot and that of my fellow humans.

Anyway, I continue to enjoy my discourse with Marc. We usually agree, and even when we don't we have some fun exploring why not. (I don't think that I've ever changed his mind, but that's not the point.)

Postscript: I have discussed this with Darren, the mutual acquaintance who introduced me to Marc. Darren has spent more time with Marc and his crowd, and was able to cast the "one source" stuff in a light that I find easier to get on board with. I hope to discuss this (or perhaps invite Darren to tell you himself) in the not-too-distant future.

Defending Dawkins (2)

2009-12-04T00:00:00.003Z

This is a further entry in a back-and-forth between me and bettynoirbettyblanc (henceforth "Betty"), on evolution and Richard Dawkins. It began in this post of hers, to which I responded here. She followed up with a response here. The following will make more sense if you have read those posts first.

Betty, I can certainly understand your dislike of Richard Dawkins. He often neglects to soften his critique of religious ideas (individually and collectively), and it is natural that many religious people feel that he misrepresents them. Some of their complaints - your complaints - are justified.

However, I feel that your response ignores or misses many of the key points I was trying to convey, and exaggerates Dawkins' faults beyond reason.

First, I did not accuse you of denying evolution. You will notice, if you look again at my post, that I direct my criticisms on that point at creationists.The language of your original post leaves plenty of room for people to assume that you are more sympathetic to the creationist perspective than the scientific perspective, but I was (and continue to be) careful not to pigeonhole you unjustly.

You say "I would guard against listening to anyone who claims they are an expert on something just because they have a few ladybird guides on their shelf." You certainly shouldn't believe me, just because I've read some popular science books on evolution. Nor should you even take an expert's opinion as incontrovertible fact. As I said:

These outreach biologists (Dawkins, Gould, Wilson, etc) don't make arguments of the form "I believe this, and I'm and expert so just take my word for it." They make arguments of the form "Here's some evidence. Here's why it supports evolution." With plenty of references to original research so that you can independently verify their claims if you don't trust them.

As for Dawkins' "obsession" with religion - you make a valid point. Much of his online presence seems to be centred around religion. I offered a possible explanation, which is supported by an excerpt from Dawkins' new book - an explanation which you seem to have ignored. I'll reiterate it here, as I think it is important. Dawkins is a biologist, and studies evolution. One of the greatest forces opposing science education is the creationist movement, which undermines the teaching of evolution in schools. By far the most common motivation for this opposition is a particular literal take on the Abramic creation story. Thus, Dawkins is well-motivated to oppose this particular version of religion. He recognizes that it is not the whole of religion. Here are his own words (talking about his new book):

The Archbishop of Canterbury has no problem with evolution, nor does the Pope (give or take the odd wobble over the precise palaeontological juncture when the human soul was injected), nor do educated priests and professors of theology. The Greatest Show on Earth is a book about the positive evidence that evolution is a fact. It is not intended as an anti-religious book. I’ve done that, it’s another T-shirt, this is not the place to wear it again. Bishops and theologians who have attended to the evidence for evolution have given up the struggle against it. Some may do so reluctantly, some, like Richard Harries, enthusiastically, but all except the woefully uninformed are forced to accept the fact of evolution.

Note that he's explicitly stepping out of his role as a critic of religion in this book.

In that same article (I encourage you to read it, so that you can see the context for yourself), Dawkins explains his use of the Holocaust-denier comparison - a comparison that you, Betty, seem particularly offended by. You ask, in your response post, "The Friendly Humanist says this [is] accurate, but says he would not use this analogy himself. Why not? Could it be that comparing creationists to Holocaust deniers is grossly offensive?"

First, you are right: the reason I would not use the analogy is because it is offensive. Holocaust-denial is associated with more than just a denial of historical facts; it is associated (rightly) with an evil political and social ideology. Here is what I said in defense of his analogy:

First, it is accurate inasmuch as both holocaust-deniers and evolution-deniers reject the overwhelming preponderance of evidence in favour of a position that is based entirely on ideology.

A better analogy, which shares this important characteristic while not being so offensive, might be to moon-hoaxers - people who believe that humans have never stepped on the Moon, and that the Apollo landings were an elaborate deceit.

You also suggest that supporters of evolution harbour "smug assumptions which lurk not too far from the surface: ‘we are smart, they are not’ followed by ‘we are European and sophisticated, they are American and primitive’ or ‘we are Western and progressive, they are Middle Eastern or Oriental, and barbaric’."

I can only respond that I have never come across this attitude, either explicitly or implicitly. As I said in my post, the biologists I've read point to the evidence, explain how it was interpreted, and draw their conclusions. The claim, then, is "we have followed the evidence, they have not". Is this smug? Perhaps, but only to the extent that anyone is smug who defends one position based on the evidence, in the knowledge that some people sincerely hold another.

I realize that you are not interested in getting into a debate over evolution, and I don't intend to engage you in one. I am not a biologist, after all, just a fan of science.

For all that I sometimes disagree with the tone (and occasionally the content) of his writings, I feel that you have misrepresented Dawkins in your posts, Betty. He is not a diplomat, but he is not the mean, attention-mongering anti-theist that you make him out to be. He works together with religious people on causes of common interest (as noted in the aforementioned excerpt from his new book). He acknowledges the literary value of the Bible (in The God Delusion). He objected to the title of his BBC documentary, The Root of all Evil, because he recognizes that religion is not the root of all evil.

Of course, he remains an atheist. He has reasons for his position, and he shares them in books and articles. He makes money from his writing. You are free to continue to dislike him for this or any reason. You are even free to be skeptical of evolution if you are so inclined. But I implore you, if you do read anything he writes, to do so with a more sympathetic eye. Give him the benefit of the doubt. He may disappoint you in places, but I think it will be far less frequently than you expect.

Homeopathy at Boots: an open letter

2009-12-02T00:00:00.003Z

In a move reminiscent of the very successful Australian Skeptics open letter to pharmacists, the Merseyside Skeptics Society has issued an open letter to Boots pharmacies.

This is in the wake of a parliamentary subcommittee meeting on the status and labelling of homeopathic remedies sold in pharmacies ("chemists" in this country). If you have time, check out the transcript here - a long but interesting read. (Thanks to Mike for the heads-up.) Here's Ben Goldacre's summary, as one of the people who gave evidence at the meeting.
Boots sells homeopathic products. By association, it lends medical authority to these products - which have been demonstrated, so far as good research is able to demonstrate, to be medically indistinguishable from placebos. That is, they are not real medicine, and do not replace real medicine. The will not protect you from malaria; they will not protect you from H1N1. They won't even cure your headache. If your headache does get better after homeopathy, there are three much more likely explanations: (1) it was a random coincidence (unsatisfying, but sometimes the world works that way), (2) it was going to get better anyway (you can't tell this from a single case, but a large study of many people could), or (3) your belief in the treatment had a real effect on your malady (a very cool possibility - see Ben Goldacre's book Bad Science for more, or go read his blog).

Though they sell them, the Boots representative who spoke to the committee admitted that homeopathic treatments have no good evidence supporting their effectiveness in dealing with any health complaint. His best argument for selling homeopathy comes out in this excerpt from the start of the transcript:

Mr Bennett: We do indeed sell them and there is certainly a consumer demand for those products.

Q4 Chairman: I did not ask you that question. I said do they work beyond the placebo effect?

Mr Bennett: I have no evidence before me to suggest that they are efficacious, and we look very much for the evidence to support that, and so I am unable to give you a yes or no answer to that question.

Q5 Chairman: You sell them but you do not believe they are efficacious?

Mr Bennett: It is about consumer choice for us. A large number of our consumers actually do believe they are efficacious, but they are licensed medicinal products and, therefore, we believe it is right to make them available.

Q6 Chairman: But as a company you do not believe that they necessarily are?

Mr Bennett: We do not disbelieve either. It is an evidence issue.

They don't have good evidence that they work, but people want to spend money on them. This is a disgustingly cynical attitude toward the public, and toward Boots pharmacists' own responsibility as front-line dispensers of medicine.

I include the open letter below. I will also be contacting Boots. If you are interested in this issue, I encourage you to do the same.

An Open Letter to Alliance Boots

The Boots brand is synonymous with health care in the United Kingdom. Your website speaks proudly about your role as a health care provider and your commitment to deliver exceptional patient care. For many people, you are their first resource for medical advice; and their chosen dispensary for prescription and non-prescription medicines. The British public trusts Boots.

However, in evidence given recently to the Commons Science and Technology Committee, you admitted that you do not believe homeopathy to be efficacious. Despite this, homeopathic products are offered for sale in Boots pharmacies – many of them bearing the trusted Boots brand.

Not only is this two-hundred-year-old pseudo-therapy implausible, it is scientifically absurd. The purported mechanisms of action fly in the face of our understanding of chemistry, physics, pharmacology and physiology. As you are aware, the best and most rigorous scientific research concludes that homeopathy offers no therapeutic effect beyond placebo, but you continue to sell these products regardless because “customers believe they work”. Is this the standard you set for yourselves?

The majority of people do not have the time or inclination to check whether the scientific literature supports the claims of efficacy made by products such as homeopathy. We trust brands such as Boots to check the facts for us, to provide sound medical advice that is in our interest and supply only those products with a demonstrable medical benefit.

We don’t expect to find products on the shelf at our local pharmacy which do not work.

Not only are these products ineffective, they can also be dangerous. Patients may delay seeking proper medical assistance because they believe homeopathy can treat their condition. Until recently, the Boots website even went so far as to tell patients that “after taking a homeopathic medicine your symptoms may become slightly worse,” and that this is “a sign that the body’s natural energies have started to counteract the illness”. Advice such as this directly encourages patients to wait before seeking real medical attention, even when their condition deteriorates.

We call upon Boots to withdraw all homeopathic products from your shelves. You should not be involved in the sale of ineffective products, because your customers trust you to do what is right for their health. Surely you agree that your commitment to excellent patient care is better served by supplying only those products whose claims can be substantiated by rigorous scientific research? Or do you really believe that Boots should be in the business of selling placebos to the sick and the injured?

The support lent by Boots to this quack therapy contributes directly to its acceptance as a valid medical treatment by the British public, acceptance it does not warrant and support it does not deserve. Please do the right thing, and remove this bogus therapy from your shelves.

Yours sincerely,
Merseyside Skeptics Society

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Other blogs and websites have noted this, including Skepchick, The Not Quite So Friendly Humanist, Bruce Hood, Bad Science, A Glasgow Skeptic, RichardDawkins.net, Bad Homeopathy, and New Humanist.

Also, various newspapers have picked up on Boots' strange position: The Telegraph, Daily Express, Daily Mail, Guardian (and Ben Goldacre again, and their liveblog of the meeting), Times, and Mirror.

Feel free to comment and link to any I've missed.

Secular double entendre

2009-12-01T00:00:00.001Z

(Note to my religious readers: The following is not intended as an attack on religious belief, but I can foresee some sensitivities being nettled nevertheless. If you'd rather avoid being offended, feel free to stop reading now.)

I was just watching a video at the Friendly Atheist, promoting the Secular Student Alliance (SSA). It's the American version of our National Federation of Atheist, Humanist and Secular Student Societies (AHS) - a nationwide organization aimed at building communities of secular students (atheists, agnostics, etc) at universities, colleges, and schools. Here's the video:

Now, I know this will reveal my linguistic geekiness in its fullest degree, but the line that stuck out most to me was this:

[We believe] that science and reason lead to more reliable knowledge than faith.

Why, you ask? Syntacticians in the audience will already see where I'm going. There are, in fact, two high-probability, grammatical ways to parse this sentence in English.

The one that was intended could be paraphrased as so:

We believe that science and reason lead to more reliable knowledge than faith does.

Here's the alternative reading:

We believe that science and reason lead to more reliable knowledge than to faith.

Okay, so the second reading doesn't works quite so well. But, both readings are consistent with the general outlook of atheists and humanists. We trust science and reason above faith* as paths to reliable knowledge, and we think that science and reason lead us to knowledge rather than leading us to faith.

Oh, and hooray for SSA and AHS - go check them out if you're a student!

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* It is worth noting that this all uses the meaning of "faith" used by most humanists, which could most succinctly be expressed as "belief that does not rely on evidence". Many religious people use different definitions. I think I may need to add another post to my series on definitions.

Miscellaneous

2009-11-29T00:00:00.002Z

Several things have come through my blog reader that I want to comment on, but none require a post of their own. So here you are:

Celebrating Darwin. Still? Again? It doesn't really matter. Here's a well-produced video giving the history of life in brief, narrated by David Attenborough. Delightful to watch.

(Thanks to Mike, the Not Quite So Friendly Humanist, for sharing this video.)

Solar System on one page. Also along the lines of enjoying the natural world. Or, in this case, worlds: a webpage where you can see all the planets (plus Pluto). They are to scale for size, but also for mean distance from the Sun. Try it out.

If you're having difficulty finding the planets in all the black, here's a little trick: after the "/" at the end of the URL, add "#mars", or "#neptune", and it'll zoom to that planet. But that does kind of defeat the purpose: you're supposed to become aware of the vast, vast spaces between the planets.

(Thanks to Phil, the Bad Astronomer, for the link.)

Abolish the Canadian monarch? Here's Canadian humanist and activist Justin Trottier with his take on the fact that the nominal Canadian head of state is not Canadian, and is also the head of one particular religious sect. I tend to agree with him - there is no good reason to retain the monarchy, though perhaps not yet sufficient reason against it to go to the trouble of writing them out of our laws.

Beautiful impermanence. I close this grab-bag with a delightful "sermon" from Daylight Atheism, in which we are encouraged to reflect upon impermanence as autumn surrounds us*. He contrasts the humanist acceptance of our impermanence with the inborn yearning we all have - reflected so frequently in religious beliefs - to deny our own deaths. While I'm not generally interested in contrasting humanism with religious beliefs, I think the contrast here is poignant. Particularly as the humanist position, in following the evidence of the world around us, draws us away from our primitive desires for immortality. It encourages us, in a real sense, to grow up.

Okay, this one could have used its own post. For now, I refer you to this pair of posts (in that order) by Dale McGowan, about discussing mortality with his kids. And this more recent one, about the problem of awesome people being mortal too.

[Edit to add link to the Daylight Atheism post, which I unaccountably forgot to do at first.]

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* Excluding Canada and other northern regions, where winter has already firmly displaced fall, and the whole southern hemisphere, being on the other side of the seasonal see-saw.

Hero

2009-11-26T00:00:00.000Z

I would like to introduce you to a hero of mine. His name is Robert Lang.

Robert Lang folds paper. He folds paper into birds. He folds paper into insects. He folds paper into insanely complex and improbably forms.

And that is enough to earn him my admiration (as an amateur folder myself).

But what really rockets him into the ranks of hero is his polymath tendencies. What he has done with his origami outside the traditional world of paper folding.

He has developed mathematical models of origami. His scientific approach has advanced the art to the point that most of the new forms created today would have been impossible half a century ago. But more than that, he has consulted on scientific and engineering projects, bringing the art of folding into space telescopes, car safety, and other areas.

He has given a TED talk; he has been featured in National Geographic.

Robert Lang inspires me. Not only is he an excellent origami artist - something I aspire to in a vague and occasional way. He has also managed to combine various interests of his into a unified and revolutionary whole - something I yearn for in an definite, persistent way.

As someone with a variety of disparate interests (experimental phonetics, computer programming, writing, parenting, humanist spirituality), I would love to bring some of them together, so that I am not always forced to choose to spend time on one at the expense of others.

So much for why I admire Robert Lang. But what does it mean for someone to be a hero?

Robert Lang has at least two attributes that make him a hero for me: he does something I would like to be able to do myself, and he inspires me to actually try to achieve it.

It's not necessarily origami - as I said, origami is an interest of mine, but not necessarily a passion. (Though I do have Lang's book, Origami Design Secrets, from which I hope to learn how to design my own origami figures.) I don't mean to emulate him completely. But he inspires me to try my own brand of originality, my own synthesis of disparate interests. For the moment, it's an attempt to bring my programming interest into my academic phonetic research. I also have a project on the go bringing programming and humanist spirituality together (stay tuned).

Related to this, being my hero does not mean Lang seems infallible, or even super-human, to me. Of course he is just another person. But that's part of the inspiration: there is no great divide between the kind of person I am and the kind of person he is. I can do amazing things, just like he does.

I suppose that I might more accurately call Lang a role-model. But that has a slightly antiseptic ring to me. A role model sounds like someone your parents expose you to in an attempt to influence you.

A hero - that's someone you choose for yourself.

Photo credits:

Portrait of Lang with life-sized origami people from Lang's website.

Image of origami unicorns by Timothy Mills. Models folded by me, from a design in Origami Step by Step, by Robert Hardin, who credits it to Patricia Crawford.

On Friendliness and Humanism

2009-11-24T00:00:00.001Z

I am very self-conscious. When I read an atheist talking about "accommodationists" (for example, here), I get the feeling they would include me in that group, because I'm the Friendly Humanist - that is, I make some effort to get along with folks whose worldview diverges from my own. And when I read a theist talking about atheist dogmatism (for example, here), I feel that they're attacking my position, because I'm an atheist too.

Of course, most such passages are written by people who have never heard of me personally, so I know it's not personal. And it's possible that if the authors read my blog they would assert that I clearly don't fall into the category of weak-willed accommodationist on the one hand and dogmatic atheist on the other. Nevertheless, I often feel a bit like a mule - neither horses nor donkeys feel that I'm quite one of them. Ah well, I can live with that.

I brand myself as the Friendly Humanist for several reasons. It's an effort to counterbalance a tendency among some humanists to take cheap potshots at easy targets, often with no good purpose in mind and with very counterproductive effects. It's a reminder to myself not to use this blog simply as a platform for rants.

And it's an olive branch to those who are often placed in opposition to humanists: committed believers in a god or gods, or in some undefined "other" beyond the physical world, or in non-scientific, "alternative" medicine. I want to tell them, through the blog name and also through my writing, that I will listen to them and try to understand their position.

But the blog is called the Friendly Humanist, and so I also strive to uphold humanist values in my writing. I do not shy away from criticizing harmful actions - whether they are motivated by harmful intent or not, and whether they are based in religious belief or not. There is often a right answer and a wrong answer to questions about how the world is, and finding the right answer is a valuable endeavour.

I don't think these two goals - being friendly and being a humanist - are incompatible. But there are times when, in order to act with integrity, I must risk being perceived as unfriendly.

I suspect that my recent series on John Blanchard's book Does God Believe in Atheists? (beginning here) was such a case (on the basis of the only comment anyone posted to it). I stand by my review, but I invite anyone's thoughts if they think there's a way I could have put the case without being as dismissive of Blanchard.

There have been other times, and I'm sure there will be more in the future.

I am curious: do you, faithful readers, feel that I live up to my self-chosen title? Am I really all that friendly? Am I true to the principles of Humanism?

Christians against sectarianism

2009-11-20T07:43:00.001Z

I wrote just the other day about the new humanist ad campaign - this time directed at combating sectarianism.

I'm delighted to report that the campaign is drawing support not only from other humanists, but also from religious people. The Evangelical Alliance has put out a press release in support of the ads' message:

Justin Thacker, Head of Theology at the Evangelical Alliance said: "It is great to see that the Humanists are now agreeing that children have to make their own decisions about faith.

"Evangelicals do not believe that God has any grandchildren, only children. You are not a Christian simply because your parents are. Every child or adult has to make up their own minds about the reality of God.

Thanks to Dale for pointing out this welcome source of agreement with the humanist campaign. Like him, I was unable to find any mainstream media noting this support - only religious publications like Christianity Today and Ekklesia. Not to demean those publications - I simply mean to point out that, in the interest of controversy, the mainstream media has once again missed an important part of the story: they seem to have latched onto the frothing and uninformed reaction of a fundamentalist Irish minister, who doesn't seem to have read the ads, and certainly hasn't read the background information.

Why don't we all help spread the word? Let's make it clear that this is an issue that can and does resonate with many segments of society, not just with the nonreligious.

Some science news

2009-11-20T00:00:00.001Z

In a recent issue of Psychological Science (to which I am subscribed), three of the five research articles were on topics that I thought would be interesting to a general audience.

(I'm afraid the links are only to abstracts - you need to be an APS member or browse from a university which has a subscription in order to see the full article. If you think this is unfair, or contrary to the scientific spirit of open inquiry, I agree. See here or here for some discussion of the issue of open-access academic publishing.)

I should open with a warning: none of these articles is in my field of expertise, so my interpretation of the results and their applicability to life in general may be inaccurate. But I think some extrapolation is warranted.

Passersby

First, there's an article examining how we decide which side we'll go on when we approach an oncoming pedestrian on the sidewalk. Apparently, we use the direction their looking in as a cue to which side they'll go on, and we choose the other side. Not life-changing, I know, but interesting.

Now for the caveat: this is a single scientific study, and as such was very limited scope. Gaze direction was the only cue they looked at. Body language, social conventions (such as "always pass on the left"), and other factors may also influence how such encounters are resolved.

Nevertheless, next time I'm unsure which side to pass someone on, I'll consciously fix my gaze on one side and go that way, to see if that helps avoid that awkward mambo of mutual indecision.

Affirmation and persuasion

Second, there's one about how self-affirmation affects our attention to persuasive messages. Moderate drinkers who participated in a self-affirmation exercise (in this case, writing about one of their best traits) were more likely than the control group to attend to threatening aspects of an article about the dangers of moderate to heavy drinking.

They did not find the same effect in heavy drinkers. Also, they just measured attention. That is, they did not follow up to see if the affirmation group changed their behaviour as a result of their increased attention.

However, I can remember several times when I've tuned out a message because it seemed mainly to be trying to persuade me out of some belief or activity I was attached to. Perhaps if I were to engage in some sort of affirmation, I would be more able and willing to hear such messages through. If the message contains a good reason to change, then my increased attention might enable me to take that reason on board. If not, then I'll still be free to reject the message - but I'll do it because of the content and not because it's threatening to me.

Self-restraint and Impulsive Behaviour

Third, there's an article examining the connection between perceived self-restraint and actual impulsive behaviour. Briefly, if we think that we have great self-restraint, then we are more likely to put ourselves in situations which will test us, and ultimately we are more likely to engage in impulsive behaviour.

I'm not sure how broadly this can be extrapolated, but the "moral" that I draw from this study is that I should try to avoid overconfidence when it comes to my vices. The most pernicious of these, for me, is a desire to remain connected to the Internet. If I need to pay attention to something else (parenting, say, or dealing with bills), then an open laptop on the table is a bad idea.

----

I love science. I love cosmology, biology, physics, chemistry - the whole bunch. Every science I've come across has something to inspire awe, wonder, and delight. But nothing beats psychology for churning out knowledge with direct relevance to the way we live our lives.

Deena and I recently bought Richard Wiseman's new book, 59 Seconds, which promises to be a delicious exploration of just this sort of thing. A science-based self-help book. Awesome.

Campaign against sectarianism

2009-11-18T15:00:00.000Z

I recently shared some brief thoughts about sectarian education ("faith schools") in the UK. I've now learned of a follow-up to the hugely popular atheist bus campaign.

The British Humanist Association is launching the "Atheist Billboard Campaign". An interesting twist is that (contrary to what many kneejerk commentators are likely to declare), the billboards do not promote atheism at all.

Accompanying a picture of two unbearably cute kids jumping joyfully (left) is the text:

"Please don't label me. Let me grow up and choose for myself."

Another version (right) says:

"No faith schools. Yes you can donate today."

Yes, I suppose "No faith schools" may sound, to some ears, like a promotion of atheism, or at least an attack on religion. It's not - and the campaign is clear in that it's against sectarianism, not against religion in general. However you feel about it, the idea appears to enjoy popular support. A poll by Accord reports that 57% of people in the UK feel that faith schools undermine community cohesion. A four-year-old poll reported in the Guardian reports '64% agreeing that "the government should not be funding faith schools of any kind".'

Now look at the text in the background of the ad (it's clearest in the big version, which I've included at the bottom of this post). Clearly among the labels that we should avoid (according to the ad) are "agnostic child", "atheist child", and "humanist child".

If you agree with this message - that children should not be labelled according to the beliefs of their parents, and that faith schools should not be publicly funded, go donate to the campaign here or here. If you disagree, or aren't sure, go learn more.

And, as always, please let me know what you think.

Marc on temperance

2009-11-17T00:00:00.002Z

I quite like this stoic advice from my good friend Marc (Meditations, book 4, paragraph 22):

Never allow yourself to be swept off your feet; when an impulse stirs, see first that it will meet the claims of justice; when an impression forms, assure yourself first of its certainty.

This sounds like fine and noble advice. But I also get the impression that, to many of the more fiery folks I know, Marc's words might seem to limit the human experience. Am I simply getting old, or are these words truly as wise as they seem?

Photo credit:

Image of Marc from the movie Gladiator, via this site. (Actually, this is of an actor playing Marc. My friend has never had his photograph taken; he's kind of old-fashioned that way.)

The Power of a Great Story

2009-11-12T00:00:00.003Z

Thanks to Ken at C. Orthodoxy for this amazing video:

Persuasion without communication?

2009-11-10T00:00:00.005Z

Dale McGowan has an excellent series of posts underway at his Meming of Life blog. In particular, these two on "siloing" have caught my attention: "Silos" and "Unsilos". In them, he discusses our tendency as humans to build communities of like-thinking people around ourselves so much that we cut ourselves off from people who disagree, becoming unable to communicate and empathise with them.

I do it as much as anyone else, and I'm quite conscious of it.

Which is why (among other things) I read several blogs written from well outside my own particular silo.

Which is why I came across this very interesting idea - almost a blog-meme - from Jim at Quodlibeta:

What three books would you recommend to people who disagree with your religious beliefs, whatever they are, and why?

(Note that Jim got the idea from a political blog - clearly the concept applies to any kind of silo.)

Now, my recent experience of trying out a book recommended by a thoughtful religious friend was somewhat disappointing. (I discuss it in a series of posts starting here.) But the idea of trying to reach across communities of thought appeals to me, so I clicked through from my reader to check out the comments.

The first comment jumped out at me for two reasons.

One, it recommends "John Earman's Hume's Abject Failure: The Argument Against Miracles - To finally blast Hume's argument to oblivion." Hume's thoughts on miracles have seemed like pretty basic common sense to me, ever since I first read them (here):

"... no testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous, than the fact, which it endeavours to establish ... When anyone tells me, that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself, whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened."

I think this is a common element in many skeptics' rejection of religious claims. So it's probably worth my time to check out Earman's book - just in case Hume's argument does have a fatal hole that only an 'outsider' might notice.

And the other thing that jumped out at me from this comment was the following recommendation:

Anything from Nietzsche - To show the only viable alternative.

In the context of the post, this probably means either the only viable alternative to Christianity or to belief in some god more generally. My immediate reaction was to turn off. Nietzsche as the only alternative to theism? Obviously, this person isn't interested in understanding me, so why should I try to understand him.

But, remembering Dale's thoughts about siloing, I realized that someone else's insensitivity is not an excuse for me to shut down discussion. So I think I will have a look at Nietzsche. I also (gently, I hope) pointed out how that comment sounded from my perspective.

Also, with care (given my rebuke of the Nietzsche idea), I offered my choices of books. I reproduce my comments here for your consideration:

-----

A fascinating challenge. I don't tend to try to persuade people, but I am very interested in helping people to understand my position.

To that end, I would include a good book on humanism, such as Richard Norman's On Humanism.

If my interlocutor didn't accept evolution, I would be tempted to include Dawkins' The Ancestor's Tale. (I recommend it even to people who accept evolution, because it's an awesome pilgrimage through the details of our biological history.) However, I suspect that just the author's name would be a roadblock to persuasion. So I'd probably try something by Carl Sagan (Demon-Haunted World) instead.

And I'd recommend a practical book on skeptical thinking, which is more important to me in terms of persuading others than religious belief or non-belief, though the two are of course related. Probably Ben Goldacre's Bad Science.

-----

Okay, now you give it a try. What three books would you recommend to someone in a different silo, and why? Have you read the books I mention? Did they persuade you of anything? Why or why not?

Sectarian education in UK

2009-11-06T00:00:00.002Z

Here's one from the vaults - a post I composed, then set aside and forgot about. [Edit: As originally posted, the following text implies that Accord was launched in September 2009. It was September 2008.]

Living in the UK, I am often lulled by the generally sensible nature of the people into thinking that the whole country is run sensibly.

One thing that occasionally snaps me out of that is the thoroughly non-secular nature of government here. One of the two legislative houses, the House of Lords, is not elected. It's not even appointed by elected officials. And in that house, 26 of the 746 seats are reserved for officials from the state religion. Not a large proportion - about 3%. But still, how can even this be considered reasonable in a modern democracy? (I'll leave aside the fact that the nominal head of state - the monarch - is also the nominal head of the church. If she were to try to exercise any real power in either capacity, I expect she'd be in real trouble.)

In addition to this, the government seems to be encouraging more and more sectarian division by allowing religions to set up separate schools for their own sets of believers. Remember, this is a nation that only a couple of decades ago was embroiled in the quaintly-named "Troubles" - a violent sectarian strife involving terrorists and police actions and lasting inter-religious frictions.

Fortunately, it is not just non-religious Canadian residents here who think this is foolish. My friend This Humanist has pointed me to a coalition of various religious and non-religious individuals and groups campaigning for British children to be educated in an inclusive rather than divisive way.

Check out the Accord Coalition, launched on September 1st [2008]. This should be an important issue for all parents, and for anyone who expects to be affected by the generation being educated now. Will they be taught alongside children from different faith backgrounds, learning to cooperate despite differences? Or will they learn that the appropriate way to deal with differences is to stay well away from anyone unlike themselves? What lessons do you want tomorrow's decision-makers to learn?

Healthy newsreading

2009-11-03T00:00:00.002Z

Very closely connected with humanism is scientific skepticism. I doubt there are many (secular) humanists who wouldn't also identify with the skeptical movement, exemplified in popular science blogs like Bad Science, podcasts like the Skeptics Guide to the Universe, and books by folks like Simon Singh.

Keep in mind, I'm not talking skepticism as in "kneejerk doubt". I'm talking skepticism as in "I'll believe it if you show me good evidence" - the definition most self-described skeptics would give. Much of skepticism involves learning how to tell good evidence from bad evidence.

One of the greatest day-to-day benefits of being a skeptic is having the skills to filter the claims we're exposed to. Particularly those that get uncritically spread by journalists (and by friends and family). To that end, in addition to recommending the above sources, I'd like to pass on an article that was passed on by Ben Goldacre at Bad Science:

How to read articles about health, by Dr Alicia White

The most important rule to remember: “Don’t automatically believe the headline”.

Of course, there's much more - read the full article to see what else she has to say. Skeptics will already be familiar with her points, but other people may find them useful. Pass on the link, or download and print off the PDF and pass that out.

I'll take this opportunity to point out that it is simple little strategies like the ones Dr White outlines that make up most of scientific literacy. People often tell me that they would never be able to understand things like quantum physics, evolution, or acoustics, because they're not scientifically trained.

Rubbish. The only barrier to most people understanding the key points of any science is lack of interest.*

And, when it comes to health, that's a rather strange barrier to erect around yourself. What possible excuse could anyone have for cultivating disinterest in their own well-being? (I know, I know - whole psychological schools of thought are devoted to answering this question.)

Anyway, enjoy the article.

Footnote:

* Okay, that was a very strong claim. But I stand by it, with one caveat: one must have a teacher (or book) with some competence to communicate the science.

Not about gun licensing

2009-10-27T00:00:00.001Z

The following is the near-verbatim contents of a letter I recently received. It has been redacted for the privacy of the individuals involved, and cunningly revised. Can you tell what the letter was actually about? (Note: this is an issue that affects British people, and those in some other countries. It will be unfamiliar to Canadians and Americans.) Can you tell what bothers me about it?

WARNING: THIS PROPERTY IS UNLICENSED

To the Legal Occupier,

We're writing to inform you that we have authorised Enforcement Officers to visit your home. If they find evidence that you own a firearm illegally, they can take your statement under caution in accordance with the relevant criminal law.

We are taking this step because:

According to our records, there is no Firearm Licence for this address
You must have a Firearm Licence to own a firearm
We have tried to contact you about this, but have received no reply

An enforcement visit is the first step in our action to seek prosecution. Please be aware that should your case go to court, your statement can be used as evidence. The maximum penalty is a fine of £XXXX. We take this offence extremely seriously, and catch around 1,000 evaders every day.

We strongly advise that you act to stop our investigation by buying a Firearm Licence. You can do this in minutes by visiting www.firearmlicensing.co.uk or by calling 08XX XXX XXXX. A licence costs £XXX.XX for a rifle and £XXX.XX for a pistol.

Yours faithfully,

XXXXXX XXXXXX
Regional Manager
Scotland East Enforcement Team

If you have recently moved home, please transfer your old Firearm Licence to your new address. You can do this at www.firearmlicensing.co.uk/moving or by calling 08XX XXX XXXX. Please have your Firearm Licence number to hand.

If you don't have a firearm, please let us know by calling 08XX XXX XXXX.

How to Pay:

Visit www.firearmlicensing.co.uk to pay by Direct Debit, debit card or credit card.
Call 08XX XXX XXXX to pay by Direct Debit, debit card or credit card
Go to any PayPoint outlet to pay by cash or debit card.
More ways to pay are listed overleaf.

Overleaf, it is finally mentioned that if you, in fact, don't have a firearm, you can let them know. They will then verify the situation. People who are deemed unable to use a firearm because of infirmity can get a reduced rate or a free licence, depending on circumstances. Payment details and a change of address form take up most of the back side.

A new descendent

2009-10-23T00:23:00.001+01:00

Just a quick note to point you to this announcement of the birth of our son a week ago.

We are animals

2009-10-20T00:00:00.000+01:00

Erich Vieth at Dangerous Intersection tells us "Why it matters that humans are animals". An interesting and clear expression of the consequences of our biological and medical understanding of humanity's place in the pageant of life. The only point I'd strongly quibble with is where he echoes Johnson's claim that there are no absolute truths. I think most of science, and indeed of human pursuit of understanding, presupposes the existence of absolute truths. It's probably true that we can never be sure that we have apprehended those truths perfectly, but I think it's important to act as if they exist nevertheless.

My definition: fundamentalist

2009-10-14T00:00:00.001+01:00

[In an effort to make my posts more readable, I'm experimenting here with footnote references in place of in-text links. Please let me know whether this makes things easier or harder to read.]

So far I have defined atheist and Christian. Today, I'd like to tackle another word that gets used by many but whose definition is elusive: fundamentalist.

First, I'd like to explore how the word seems to be used by people. I'll then get to how I try to use it, and why.

There are three meanings that I have seen the word "fundamentalist" used for.

First, there is the historical origin of the term, to refer to those people who accept the doctrines outlined in the series of essays titled The Fundamentals: A testimony to the truth, published between 1910 and 1915 [1,2,3,4]. This definition would mean that only those Christians who accept these doctrines (creationism, virgin birth of Jesus, the atonement, and others) are true "fundamentalists" - only they hold to those particular fundamentals [3,5,6].

Second, there is the obvious extension to other dogmatic positions. Perhaps anyone who dogmatically accepts a particular set of doctrines as true is a fundamentalist [3,6,7]. This could include some (but not all) members of most major world religions. I think some religions have more of a tendency to this sort of fundamentalism than others. It is also not unreasonable to apply this definition to other beliefs - for example atheism (though I don't think you'll find many fundamentalist atheists by this definition) or political ideologies [6,7].

Third, I feel that people are increasingly using the term fundamentalist as a slur - to mean little more than "somebody who passionately believes something that I disagree with" [4,7]. I've seen this meaning used by humanists (including myself) to refer quite broadly to a range of conservative Christians; I've also seen the term used in this sense by Christians to describe a wide range of atheist writers.

So those are three definitions that are used for the term fundamentalist. I suspect that they represent points on a continuum of meanings, and that some mix of these three definitions is often in people's minds when using the term. But let's consider these three definitions in particular.

The first definition, while historically well-motivated, is so narrow that it's not very useful for general discussion. Very few discussions need to refer specifically and exclusively to the original Fundamentalists, and these could be distinguished by capitalization (as I've done in this sentence) or by explicitly referring to The Fundamentals as their statement of belief.

The third definition is neither historically well-motivated nor particularly informative: we have plenty of words to use when we find someone's position distasteful, and adding one more is unlikely to help us communicate any better. (Yes, I am assuming that the purpose of language is to help people communicate. Call me an optimist.)

So, as the more astute of you may already have guessed, I'm opting for the second definition:

A fundamentalist is someone who dogmatically holds to a set of beliefs as true. (As opposed to tentatively holding to beliefs and being willing to revise those beliefs in the face of opposing evidence.)

This definition covers a wide enough range of beliefs to be relevant in general conversation, while remaining specific enough to be informative. For example, I know some Christians who are fundamentalists under this definition, and others who are not. I don't know any atheist whose position could be called fundamentalist in this way, but I'm fairly sure that some must exist. I know some very woo-oriented people whose positions are fundamentalist (the conspiracy-theory approach to anti-vax, for example), but I've also known people who seem to be honestly willing to follow the evidence. (These latter are generally now non-woo, simply because the evidence always points in another direction.)

Can you think of people with fundamentalist attitudes in other areas of life? With non-fundamentalist attitudes who might be branded fundamentalist? Is there a belief, community, or identity that you think is inherently fundamentalist? Inherently non-fundamentalist? Let us know in the comments.

Now, I've said it before, and I'll keep on saying it: I'm not trying to impose a definition on others. I am a linguist (and so an expert of sorts), but language (like science, and like truth itself) does not get handed down from authorities. Nor are the meanings of words decided by some noble democratic process. Meaning in language emerges by a sort of quasi-Darwinian selection, in which people participate only semi-consciously - a sort of mob-consciousness. Meanings that fit the speaker's and the listener's purposes are propagated; meanings that do not fit are not propagated.

References:
[1] Online text of The Fundamentals
[2] Wikipedia entry on The Fundamentals
[3] Wiktionary definition of fundamentalist
[4] Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance essay on the term fundamentalism
[5] Dictionary.com definition of fundamentalist
[6] Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary definition of fundamentalist
[7] Wikipedia entry on fundamentalism
[8] Oxford English Dictionary definition of fundamentalist (access not free)

Logic puzzles

2009-10-12T00:00:00.001+01:00

My online gaming world just got much more interesting.

And much more geeky.

I've learned about The Hardest Logic Puzzle Ever. Awesome.

And, in the same vein (but less superlative), here's a site full of Knights and Knaves puzzles (Knights can only tell the truth, Knaves can only lie, and you can only ask yes-no questions. Can you tell which is which?)

Here's another logic puzzle site I frequent. It doesn't have story-based puzzles, but it does have plenty of sudokus and other interesting grid-based logic puzzles.

(Thanks to commenter Berenike for pointing me to Agent Intellect, who links to the above games here. Agent Intellect's blog is intriguing in its own right too.)

A transitory Yes

2009-10-10T00:00:00.001+01:00

From A Room With a View, via my friend Gareth, comes this quote:

Then make my boy think like us. Make him realise that by the side of the everlasting Why there is a Yes—a transitory Yes, if you like, but a Yes.

Go and read Gareth's thoughts on this. I would provide my own commentary, but it would amount to something similar. Better to read it in his own well-crafted prose.

(I also encourage you to browse around his blog. Gareth is in full force at the moment, with frequent tasty morsels showing up these past couple of weeks.)

I have an idea ...

2009-10-08T00:00:00.007+01:00

At work, I recently came across an amazing resource: CiteULike. It's a free website where you can build up a list of citations. I use it to manage the long list of papers and books I read and cite as a researcher. I can label citations, like I label blog entries on this site, according to common themes.

It also has social features: sharing citations between users, getting automated recommendations based on common research interests. And there are Groups.

Which gives me an idea.

There are loads of skeptical blogs out there. There are the science-based parenting folks (such as SBP themselves, Rational Moms), the science-based medicine gang (SBM, Ben Goldacre, etc), and of course the general skeptics (Bruce Hood, Massimo Pigliucci, Richard Wiseman, and loads more).

These blogs often bring up new or interesting research that bears on our lives - as parents, as users (and taxpaying supporters) of health care, and just as people trying to navigate the modern world. But finding a particular study that I remember reading about on some skeptical blog can be a real pain.

So it occurs to me - why not set up a group, or a set of groups, on CiteULike, where skeptics could post scientific articles of interest to the community? You can put notes on each article - for example, pointing to reviews on skeptical blogs. You can talk about the articles (and the body of evidence around given topics, like acupuncture or spanking) in forums. You can associate informative tags with articles. Or you can simply hang out and see what other people have dug up. The resource could be used by bloggers who like to check original research, and also by skeptical consumers of new and traditional media claims.

It's not something I can do on my own. I don't have the time or the expertise to dig up all the relevant papers.

So this is a call to all you skeptics out there who have a little bit of time or expertise. Are you willing to help get things started?

I've taken the first step: I've created a CiteULike group, Skeptical Parenting, to pilot this idea. I chose parenting partly because that's where I am closest to having some substantive expertise, and partly because my second child is due to arrive any day now.

The next step is up to you. Here is what I ask of anyone who is interested:

Join me as a member of the group, or start another group. "Paranormal Research", "Science-Based Medicine Users" - whatever you're most into as a skeptic. If you start another group, let us know in the comments here. (Do a search on CiteULike before starting the group to make sure someone hasn't already started one.)
Blog about this yourself - not many people read my blog, but some of you have very widely-read blogs. The more people read about this idea, the sooner we'll reach a sustainable number of participants.
Tell your friends. We don't all have blogs, but we all have skeptical acquaintances on- and off-line that we can share cool new ideas with.
Comment here, so I know that I'm not just talking to myself.

I think we could build this into a really valuable resource. What do you think?

Entitled to our own opinions

2009-10-06T00:00:00.004+01:00

From his book Looking in the Distance (pages 101-102), here is Richard Holloway on the intersection of religion and science (emphasis mine):

It is embarrassing when theologians try to conflate the Christian story with the current scientific narrative; and it is a mistake, however understandable, when scientists try to disprove the Christian story as though it were just another set of outdated scientific claims. The scientific attack on Christianity is excusable, however, because fundamentalist groups insist on marketing Christianity as a science rather than as myth. While we are all entitled to our own opinions, we are not entitled to our own facts, which is why scientists cannot avoid getting drawn into the quagmire of the science versus religion debate.

That last sentence contains the real money quote for me here:

While we are all entitled to our own opinions, we are not entitled to our own facts.

This is why scientists and fans of science get so het up when people deny things like the well-established and exhaustively-tested effectiveness and safety of vaccines, or the copious and consistent evidence for evolution.

Ten random beliefs meme

2009-10-05T10:11:00.000+01:00

I love a good meme, and once again Ken of C. Orthodoxy has passed on a zinger. Here are the rules, from the meme's originator, Clayboy:

Post a collection of 10 things you believe, ethical, philosophical or theological. You choose how much to connect them or make them coherent: do you want people to know where you belong, or do you want to mix and match to keep them guessing? I encourage you not to aim for a totally coherent credal statement of faith, and I also encourage you to put one or two in about controversial topics.

Let's see...

I believe that ultimate truths may be within our reach as a species, but absolute certainty is not.
I believe there is a lot of potential value in symbols and stories, and that religions make better use of this value than humanist communities and individuals tend to. (I also believe that their power can make symbols and stories dangerous if used irresponsibly.)
I believe that claims about what is physically true are of a different sort to claims about what is good or moral. The former are simple facts, independent of perspective, existing with or without observers. The latter are at least relative to (and so dependent on) our nature as a social species. They are not, however, relative to our personal whims and desires.
I believe that scientific skepticism is a healthy and appropriate attitude to any belief that people want to persuade me of.
I believe that a person's actions are more important than their beliefs. Beliefs are mainly important to the extent that they inform and motivate actions. (I also believe that a shocking number of people spend more time rationalizing actions that clash with their beliefs than they spend trying to tailor their actions to their beliefs.)
I believe that powdered cheese is one of the most pernicious evils of modern society, followed closely by processed cheese slices and liquid cheese.
I believe that questions of good and evil are properly independent of questions of the existence of any god. (I believe that the ethical framework I try to follow would be equally valid whether or not a god exists.)
I believe that consciousness is a product of physical processes in my brain and body.
I believe that consciousness is the most important thing in the universe.
I believe we must always accept the possibility that we might be wrong, but that we should not live in fear of it happening. (This one is cribbed shamelessly from Ken, because it suits me so well.)
I believe that every cell in my body is a direct descendent of some primordial replicator that appeared on Earth around 3.5 billion years ago.
I believe that free software (and Linux in particular) is a woefully under-experienced joy in the world.
I believe that my wife is beautiful and my daughter is smart (and vice versa).
I believe that, like James McGrath, I need to learn about counting to ten.

I'm reluctant to tag people, but if you choose to pick up this meme, please post a link in the comments.

Language rant by proxy

2009-10-04T00:00:00.001+01:00

There is a rant that I used to share with any willing audience when I was an undergraduate student in Calgary, inspired by my burgeoning knowledge of how language works, and how different that is from the opinions spouted by language mavens.

I learned, through the brave confidence of a few close friends, that it was becoming a bit tedious to hear this rant over and over again - despite the inherent and unquestionable validity of its content, of course.

So I am delighted to point you to Gareth's blog, where he has essentially channelled my rant from past years and a continent away. (Though, I confess, I never did come up with as clever and apt an analogy as he does with the clothing thing.)

The basic thesis: issues of right and wrong in language use are, pretty much always, relative.

I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that most linguists would accept Gareth's position as pretty obvious. But there are vast swathes of people (even intelligent people who think about language a lot) who think very differently. Let's hope his lucid prose will sway some of them.

Atheists and Unitarians

2009-10-02T00:00:00.004+01:00

I am an atheist.

I am also a member of a Unitarian congregation.*

So when this news item showed up in my blog reader (courtesy of Friendly Atheist), I immediately felt torn in two directions.

Briefly, the denominational magazine of the international Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), Unitarian Universalist World, ran an ad for the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). The ad was meant to encourage UUA members - many of whom are atheists and most of whom would likely support the FFRF's main purpose of separation of church and state - to join FFRF and support its work.

However, the content of the ad (reproduced at left courtesy of Daylight Atheism or here in PDF) contained several quotes hostile to religion from famous atheists.

Some UUA members complained that this was an inappropriate ad to run in a publication for people who overwhelmingly consider themselves to be religious. The editor issued an apology, saying that he probably should have run an ad more tailored to this particular audience. (Note, however, as Hemant pointed out in a follow-up post here, that there were in fact only 8 complaints from UUA members, and several comments of support. Also, the FFRF has gained some supporters through the ad.)

So, on the one side, we have some affronted UUA members. I sympathise. After all, despite what some thin-skinned atheists (including, to my surprise, Hemant himself) are claiming, the ads do attack religious belief. Here are a couple of the quotes:

As my ancestors are free from slavery, I am free from the slavery of religion. (Butterfly McQueen)

Faith is believing what you know ain't so. (Mark Twain)

So, religion is equated to slavery, and faith to willing self-deception. Whether you think it's true or not, that's insulting to religious people. It is not simply an assertion of the positive value of atheism.

On the other side, though, organized atheists often have a hard time getting their voice into the public sphere. Public ad campaigns on billboards and buses have often been rejected for being too controversial, even when carrying a very simple statement of non-belief. ("Don't believe in God? You're not alone.") Despite the success of recent books promoting atheism, it can still be an uphill battle to get people to even listen to us.

In the end, though, I have to side with Greta Christina. In this thoughtful and calm article dissenting from the kneejerk atheist position, she points out that no private organization is under a legal or moral obligation to give voice to opinions that they object to.

Don't forget: in his apology, the editor did not say "We should never have considered an ad from an organisation like the FFRF." He said (emphasis mine):

I have come to the conclusion that it was a mistake to run this particular ad. While the stated mission of the Freedom From Religion Foundation is entirely consistent with UU values, this ad seems hostile to all religion. To be more specific, I believe that I failed to help the advertiser match their message to our readers. An ad spotlighting FFRF’s purpose of “working for the separation of state and church” would have been more appropriate than one that for many appears to be condemning religion in general.

There seems to be a tendency among some atheists to equate "You should express your dissent from religion in a less antagonistic manner" with "You should shut up and leave religion alone." Sure, there are some people who think we should shut up. But the Unitarians are certainly not among them, and this incident does nothing to suggest they are. (Remember: they did run the ad!)

On a different tack, Ebonmuse at Daylight Atheism (who also has a Unitarian connection) discusses the problems that arise from the use of the term "religion" to describe Unitarians. They do not share either dogma or supernatural beliefs - two features that are pretty much universal among religions as we're used to thinking of them. So when FFRF and others make a comment about "religion", it's fairly likely that it isn't meant to apply to folks like the Unitarians.

I disagree with Ebonmuse's speculation that this was a "marketing decision". Unitarianism has developed from a clearly, specifically Christian denomination into what it is today without a clear break in the continuity of the community. There is no obvious time in their history where it makes sense to say, "before this, Unitarians were religious; ever since, they have been non-religious". In other words, it is a historical accident that an essentially non-religious community describes itself as "religious". Nevertheless, as Ebonmuse says, Unitarians stand out as exceptional among religious communities (alongside liberal Quakers, some western Buddhists, and secular Jews) in that they share few of the qualities that tend to identify a group as religious.

Having said that, it would be sensible for anyone advertising in a church publication to know something about how church members see themselves, and to adjust their ad accordingly, regardless of how unusual their definitions are. The purpose of an ad should be to attract interest, and offense rarely manifests as a willingness to support the offender.

I'll close by sharing Greta Christina's words. "We have to not be reflexive cheerleaders for people who are on our side. We have to judge these questions, not by choosing sides between atheists and non-atheists, but on the basis of the ethical principles involved. ... [T]he atheists aren't always going to be right."

Amen.

Footnotes:

* I will use "Unitarian" because that is how our congregation identifies itself. I know that many people who fall under the UUA umbrella prefer "Unitarian Universalist", but unless I'm talking specifically about such an individual I'll default to the shorter term.

Atheist blogroll

2009-10-01T09:38:00.003+01:00

This blog has now been added to the Atheist Blogroll!

I have added an Atheist Blogroll thingame in the sidebar - just scroll down a little. There are apparently over 1000 blogs on the list right now, but my sidebar thing just the 25 most-recently-updated ones.

The Atheist blogroll is a free community-building service for Atheist bloggers from around the world. If you would like to join, visit Mojoey at Deep Thoughts for more information.

Perhaps some of you would like to see what other flavours of atheism are out there. Perhaps you are an atheist blogger yourself and would like to sign up. For me, there are two main reasons for joining the blogroll.

First, I hope that it may increase my readership and bring in some more commenters.

Second, and more important, it's yet another way to stand up and be counted.

(Also, when I make claims about what atheists believe or say or support, I will be able to peruse a selection of those thousand blogs to see if I'm right. It's a slightly more focussed way of searching than Google.)

Saqib Ali - my new hero

2009-09-30T00:00:00.001+01:00

Saqib Ali, an American politician and a Muslim, supports gay marriage. Not personally - it goes against his faith. But he understands that his job as a legislator is to represent his constituents and to uphold democratic values.

In an editorial, Ali says "If I tried to enforce religion by law — as in a theocracy — I would be doing a disservice to my both constituents and to my religion." So, as a legislative policy, he supports extending marriage rights to same-sex couples. He is not subverting his values to those of the society he finds himself in. He is simply finding a path that allows him to stay true to his values, while upholding his responsibility to the people he represents. (There are many ways to oppose gay marriage without making it illegal; just as there are many ways to oppose abortions without making them illegal.)

Thanks to the Friendly Atheist for making me aware of this.

Meditation on the origin of life

2009-09-28T00:00:00.005+01:00

In the Cosmic Calendar, the Origin of Life falls somewhere around now.* About three and a half billion years ago, the great abundance of life on Earth began, probably with a single replicating molecule - a precursor to DNA. Every living organism today, from the tiniest bacterium to the largest whale, descends in an unbroken line from that tiny bundle of atoms.

Today, I invite you to consider this:

We still reproduce as single-celled organisms.

Every act of human reproduction involves one cell from each parent. A single cell. For all our wondrous complexity, our bountiful organs and tissues, our towering intellects and tender thoughts ... for all that, we still have to humble ourselves to the level of our distant, millions-of-generations-past ancestors in order to participate in that most ancient, most definitive act of life: reproduction.**

Footnotes:

* In fact, the details of this event, including its exact date, are difficult to pin down. The Wikipedia article on abiogenesis gives possible dates ranging from 4.2 billion years ago (bya) to 2.4 bya - that is, 11 September to 29 October. However, today falls somewhere in the middle of the range, just over 3.5 bya. The fact that 28 September is also my daughter's birthday makes me even more prone to contemplating life's origins today.

** Not all multi-cellular organisms are so constrained. Many plants do a significant part of their reproduction by sending out shoots or otherwise cloning themselves, rather than going through the whole one-cell business. Who's superior now, eh?

Defending Dawkins

2009-09-26T00:00:00.004+01:00

I recently came across Bettynoirbettyblanc's blog, and this post in particular, where she discusses her problem with Richard Dawkins. I was composing a response to post in the discussion, but it grew into something a little long for a comment. Here it is, with relevant excerpts from her post.

In the post, Betty discusses her take on Richard Dawkins - a man who, for good or ill, is the first person people think of when atheism is mentioned in Britain, especially in connection with evolution. I encourage you to read what she writes before continuing here, as I will not cover all of what she says, nor present her thoughts in the order she does.

Why do I find him interesting? I just wonder about his dogged obsession with religion and with those that practice it. He is a scientist and yet he seems to spend [much] of his time trying to argue that following a religion is at best ridiculous and at worst positively harmful. I just don’t understand why.

I've read several of Dawkins' books, and I think that this misrepresents him. While I think his tone regarding religion is not particularly helpful, it's worth noting that of the ten popular books he has written, only one is about religion (yes, it's The God Delusion).* Not exactly a dogged obsession. More of an unavoidable side-note for someone in his field who wishes to engage the public.

A whopping 40% of Americans are creationists and Dawkins compares them to holocaust deniers. This is highly offensive. A holocaust denier is someone who twists the facts of the historical record in order to bolster a racist agenda. These people are motivated by their hatred of Jews. The facts do not matter. For a creationist, evolution has not been proven beyond reasonable doubt. There are questions about the theory that they believe have not been adequately answered. They believe the story of creation not in order to further a hate campaign, but as part of a belief system.

While I wouldn't personally choose to compare evolution-deniers to Holocaust-deniers, I understand Dawkins' choice of such an analogy. First, it is accurate inasmuch as both holocaust-deniers and evolution-deniers reject the overwhelming preponderance of evidence in favour of a position that is based entirely on ideology. As Betty says, they "twist the facts of the historical record in order to bolster an agenda. ... The facts do not matter." At least that part applies equally well to both sorts of deniers.

For someone in Dawkins' position - someone who has spent his life working to learn more about our biological origins - it is certainly understandable that he will view creationists as the enemy. He feels passionately about his work. Every one of his books that I have read (even, at times, The God Delusion) bursts with enthusiasm about what we, as a species, have learned about our origins through dogged scientific effort. He has committed his life to this pursuit. He has submitted himself to the scientific community, which tends to be ruthless in its attempts to disprove new ideas, and which only accepts them after repeated failures to disprove them. (One prominent example is the idea introduced in the mid-19th-century that the diversity of species is due to the accumulation of small changes accumulated over time and channelled by natural selection.)

Not only that, but for much of Dawkins' career he has also engaged in the admirable task of sharing this wonder and these discoveries with the public, in his very readable and accessible books of science.

Creationists belittle not only Dawkins' work, but the careful work of hundreds (thousands?) of scientists leading back to Darwin. They belittle it without any good arguments, without any good evidence, and usually with a complete failure to grasp the evidence they're trying to refute.

They are not interested in submitting themselves to the rigours of science. They are not interested in letting the evidence rule on which answer is right. Their actions suggest that they are only interested in convincing everyone that the scientists are wrong (and/or evil) and that we should set science aside in favour of their ideological commitment to a disproven belief. (I'm referring there to young-earth creationism and ID, not religion in general.)

Either he wants people to know about evolution and to ‘convert’ the creationists or he just wants a nice argument to bolster his book sales. I think if it was the former then he would be wise to act in a more conciliatory manner, and watch his language (ie the use of the word ‘ignorant’, I would also like to point out at this point that some of the people I know who are most knowledgeable about evolution are in fact creationists).

While it may not be nice of him to call evolution-deniers "ignorant", it is difficult to see how the term is wrong. The only way to confidently proclaim evolution false is to set aside (deliberately or in ignorance) the entire geological, molecular, geographical, and experimental bodies of evidence that support evolution. Though I'm sure most creationists' motivation for this is simply to carry on believing what they wish to believe, not to promote hate (has Dawkins or anyone else ever claimed that?), that doesn't change the facts. One has to remain ignorant (ie, not knowing of or understanding the evidence) to honestly deny evolution. (I can't say much about the claim that "some of the people [Betty knows] who are most knowledgeable about evolution are in fact creationists". Would they seem knowledgeable to a biologist, or only to someone like Betty who confesses little understanding of or interest in the science behind this "debate"?)

I can’t verify much of what he says because I don’t have access to the research or fully understand the terms and the processes involved. It’s been a long time since I did higher biology and chemistry! I suspect that for most of his vociferous cheerleaders on websites and forums across the globe, this is also the case. Perhaps they don’t wish to seem stupid for questioning?

In this respect, I find his followers similar to those of religious faiths. They are taking what he says at face value because they believe in him. They may well be correct – I don’t know. The argument seems reasonable, but who knows?

Is that a rhetorical question, "who knows?" Because there's an obvious answer. The actual biologists (ie, people who dedicate their lives to understanding this stuff) know. And a good number of them have produced books that Betty and I and any of our readers can understand. These outreach biologists (Dawkins, Gould, Wilson, etc) don't make arguments of the form "I believe this, and I'm and expert so just take my word for it." They make arguments of the form "Here's some evidence. Here's why it supports evolution." With plenty of references to original research so that you can independently verify their claims if you don't trust them.

On the other side of the issue, I have read creationist apologists like Lee Strobel and John Blanchard argue for an evolution-denying ideology. They consistently fail to accurately represent the case for evolution, and then inexpertly demolish the straw men they have invented. (I've discussed Blanchard's attempt here. Strobel is being taken apart in exquisite detail by Ebonmuse here.)

So, the supporters of evolution rely on the evidence, occasionally spending some time pointing out the flaws in the deniers' arguments. The deniers of evolution paint caricatures of the evidence, attack the caricatures, and pretend that they're doing science too. They don't do real science: they don't make falsifiable predictions, and they certainly don't do experiments to test them.

When I read Dawkins, I can trust that most of what he says about science is based on the scientific method. He's reporting conclusions that have been carefully tested, which qualified people have tried and failed to disprove. I take what he says at face value because I trust the procedure that has been followed to arrive at those conclusions. When I look further, the people who are qualified to understand the evidence all tend to agree with him.

On the other hand, he clearly isn't speaking as a scientist in many of his comments about religion, and so I don't take them at face value. In fact, I often disagree with him, vocally, in settings where that sets me apart (ie, among other humanists). I'm not treated as stupid for questioning because my humanist acquaintances - like Dawkins, like most atheists and humanists - value questioning. We believe that any claim should be open to question, no matter how popular it is. If the question has nothing to back it up - no evidence to motivate a shift in our beliefs, then we set it aside. But if the questioner has a sound reason for dissenting from popular opinion and solid evidence to back up their dissent, then that dissent spreads.

It was that sort of questioning that led to Darwin's great breakthroughs. It is that sort of questioning that has led to every refinement and revision in the theory of evolution since then. It is that sort of questioning that has driven science for the past few centuries, with countless concrete benefits as proof of the process.

And, although religion is not uniformly anti-knowledge or anti-progress, the opponents of science have almost uniformly been religious.

Worse, I believe his words convert more people to fundamentalist ideas than anything else as they engender a sense of victimhood and persecution amongst those who don’t agree with what he says.

I would object to the use of the term "fundamentalist" here, as it seems completely divorced from any useful definition I've come across. But yes, to the extent that he overstates the religious antipathy to science, and exaggerates the incompatibility of science and religion, he does encourage an unhelpful us-versus-them mentality among atheists, and it's one that I try to combat where I can. There are many, many religious believers who have nothing wrong with atheists or with evolution. Many of them are acquaintances and friends of mine.

Recent centuries and decades have seen a dramatic reduction in institutional discrimination against the non-religious. Keep in mind, however, that "victimhood" is not always an inappropriate feeling. Sometimes you are a victim, and you need to be aware of it. Some laws favouring religious over non-religious belief still remain, even in the enlightened West (even in uber-secular Finland). Dawkins is a scientist, and as Betty says, 40% of Americans deny the evidence that is at the foundation of his field. To the extent that they try to challenge the teaching of that science in schools, and seek to warp people's perceptions of it in universities (for example, see this development), there is a concerted attack on precisely the field of knowledge Dawkins has devoted his life to. It's worth noticing and acknowledging that scientists (and everyone who benefits from their work) are victims of the creationists' campaign of science-denial. That way we can do something constructive to counter it.

I really don't like my first mention of such an apparently pleasant person as Betty to come off so negative and critical. (I enjoyed this post of hers, and this one.) I hope that I have made it clear that Dawkins has by no means a free pass to my credulity, particularly when he talks about religion. Whether that helps encourage her to look deeper into the whole evolution/creation thing is up to her.

I hope Betty will respond to what I've said, either in the comments here or on her own blog post (where I'll point her to this post). And of course, anyone else who agrees or disagrees with either of us is invited to comment too.

-----

* From the same list of publications, using just the titles as a guide, I count no more than 8 of 16 popular articles dealing with religion (at least 11 of the 16 have a scientific slant), and only 3 of 30 academic articles can plausibly be said to be about religion, the remainder being biological. So, out of 56 items listed, no more than 12, or about 21%, are about religion - most of these being popular articles. At least 48, or about 86%, deal primarily or exclusively with science. (Totals exceed 100% because some articles seem to deal with both science and religion. Also note that I think one or two articles appear both in the scientific and the popular list.) Readers can decide whether this amounts to a "dogged obsession with religion". Perhaps the dogged obsession belongs to those apologists who wish to diminish his influence, Dawkins being a well-known and widely-respected public figure.

Quote on love

2009-09-25T10:00:00.002+01:00

This quote appeared in a page-a-day calendar recently.

Love doesn't sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all of the time, made new.

I have been unable to verify who the original author is. The page-a-day calendar credits Ursula K. Le Guin, one of my favorite authors, whose style is certainly consistent with the quote. But in trying to find where she said it, I discovered competing attributions of the same quote to Og Mandino. (There's even this page, which attributes it to both, though it credits Le Guin with more variants of it.)

I don't know how to resolve the question. I really wish those sites that deal in quotations would provide more details - where they said it and when, or link to someone who does give those details. After all, I think writers should get appropriate credit for their words. In this case, I suspect one of these two writers quoted the other, and subsequent readers misattributed the words. For what it's worth, my guess is that Mandino is the original, and Le Guin quoted him because she loved the sentiment. That's only based on the fact that he was born earlier (1923 rather than 1929), and has already died (1996), so statistically he may have got around to saying it first.

But, at another level, it doesn't really matter. After all, I share quotes not because I want to connect myself to famous people, nor because I want to help increase their fame. I share them because I find the sentiments valuable - because they reflect or affect my own sentiments.

Anyway, take what lesson you like from this attribution dilemma - the quote itself is wonderful.

Defending Christians

2009-09-24T00:00:00.001+01:00

From the Friendly Atheist, I have learned that there is a couple in Liverpool facing criminal charges for saying things that hurt the feelings of a Muslim woman who was staying at their hotel.

According to the Telegraph,

Among the things Mr Vogelenzang, 53, is alleged to have said is that Mohammad was a warlord. His wife, 54, is said to have stated that Muslim dress is a form of bondage for women.

The couple now face fines up up to £2500 each and a criminal record under Section 5 of the Public Order Act (causing harassment, alarm or distress).

Now, I generally don't trust the press's ability (or inclination) to accurately portray events such as these. However, if we assume for the moment that the Telegraph isn't distorting the facts, then this is an abominable application of a (probably) bad law. Sure, statements like those reported above aren't particularly pleasant. But illegal?

According to the paper, the statements were made during a conversation the woman was participating in. She wasn't being harassed; she wasn't being bullied or proselytized. She was engaging in a conversation about her religious beliefs with people who didn't share them. Certainly she should have been prepared for challenging statements?

Anyway, we'll keep an eye on how this pans out. I'd really like to think that this country can learn to set aside or amend bad laws whose only function is to censor honest opinions which harm nobody.

My definition: Christian

2009-09-23T00:00:00.002+01:00

For the second in my running series of personal definitions, I define what I mean by the term "Christian".

Let me preface by reiterating that I'm not trying to produce an authoritative definition, or devalue others' definitions (particularly the definitions that Christians themselves hold). I'm simply letting you know what definition I am normally working with when I call someone "Christian".

So here it is:

I take to be a Christian anyone who uses the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as a guide to leading an ethical life.

In practice, this definition will catch pretty much everyone who self-identifies as Christian. Of course, many "Christians" under this definition will not be considered True Christians by many other "Christians" (if you follow me).

I can live with that.

It also means that "Christians", under my definition, are a varied bunch indeed - Gnostics, Catholics, Fundamentalists, Mormons, Quakers, some Unitarians, and others. So varied, in fact, that I should be very wary of making sweeping generalizations about "all Christians". You'll tell me if I slip up, won't you?

Here are some other definitions on offer for what a Christian is:

OED (access to dictionary not free): "Believing, professing, or belonging to the religion of Christ." (This is pretty vague - depending on how restrictively you define "the religion of Christ", this definition is almost circular.)

Wiktionary: "An individual who seeks to live his or her life according to the principles and values taught by Jesus Christ." (Basically what I said.)

Dictionary.com and Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary: They each give a range of definitions, including something close to mine.

And of course, I encourage you to explore the discussion of this issue at the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance.

Blasphemy law in Finland!

2009-09-21T10:10:00.000+01:00

Helsinki city councillor Jussi Halla-aho has been fined 330 Euros for a blog post [in Finnish, English translation here] in which he criticised the Muslim prophet Mohammed for being a paedophile. While I don't particularly like his tone, it worries me that his prosecution was under an anti-blasphemy law. As far as I can tell, blasphemy tends to mean "someone claims offense due to their religious beliefs". And hurt feelings - even really hurt feelings - are never a good excuse to limit free speech. To anyone who supports blasphemy laws, let me suggest that you look for alternative ways to deal with the matter. Ways that don't involve trampling other people's rights.

Thanks to Friendly Atheist for bringing this item to my attention.

WHO rejects homeopathy

2009-09-19T00:00:00.000+01:00

The WHO has publicly stated that homeopathy is not a good way to treat serious diseases such as tuberculosis, malaria, and HIV. This is excellent. Placebo and hydration are the only medically-measurable effects that homeopathic "remedies" exhibit, and these are not effective in combating serious diseases. It is encouraging that an international health body like WHO is willing to publicly side with the evidence on this.

Thanks to Steve Novella at Neurologica for this bit of news.

Positively unjust?

2009-09-18T15:00:00.001+01:00

The latest issue of Humanitie magazine just arrived in the mail. In this issue, Mike and I discuss our (somewhat different) thoughts on positive discrimination. Make sure to read his thoughts here.

I was all ready to deliver a column arguing against “positive discrimination”.

I was going to argue that the solution to discrimination is not counter-discrimination. Two wrongs don’t make a right. I would point out that even the people supposedly helped by it are, really, just being patronised: “You can’t get this job on merit, so we’ll give you a hand up because of your sex/race/etc.”

I’d have pointed out that the statistics you run across in the media about pay gaps and hiring biases are probably rife with holes. For example, the workers at my daughter’s nursery are almost all women. Does this imply discrimination against male nursery workers? More likely, it’s simply a consequence of free choice: more women than men choose to be nursery workers (for whatever reason). Trying to “equalize” this with quotas would devalue the choices those women and men are freely making.

I was even ready to loftily concede that there are situations of extreme, institutional discrimination where positive discrimination as a temporary counterbalance – as part of a wider program promoting education and social change – might be justifiable as a lesser evil.

And of course, I would have generously acknowledged my potential conflict of interest on this issue: I am a white man. I hate the idea of being passed over for a job in favour of a less-qualified candidate because of my sex or race (what “positive discrimination” means to many people).

But then, at Deena’s suggestion, I started looking into what programs actually exist here, and my righteous indignation vanished.

Because, you see, so-called “positive discrimination” is illegal in Britain. Existing human rights legislation, and the proposed new Equality Bill, specifically prohibit the hiring or promoting of one job candidate over another on the basis of sex or race – or any other protected category, such as sexual orientation, religion, and age.

What is promoted is “positive action”. An employer can encourage under-represented categories of people to apply for a job or promotion; an agency can target disadvantaged groups in promoting training courses. This means things like advertising in media that target these segments of the population, or using language in job adverts that encourages them to apply. (“Women and minorities welcome!”, for example.)

While people might argue about the effectiveness of such measures, it seems clear that positive action hardly constitutes inappropriate discrimination against “dispreferred groups” (such as white male columnists). In fact, it seems to be just the level at which opponents of “positive discrimination” (like me) suggest we should be channelling our efforts.

I think we probably do still have low-level discrimination (both conscious and unconscious) in our society, and it needs combating. Even accounting for self-selection and shortcomings of popular statistics, some unfairness does exist. I have plenty of loved ones in “disadvantaged” groups – women, older people, people with mental health problems, etc. So, in addition to my above-mentioned interest, I have a strong personal interest in trying to make our employment landscape fair.

So I say, keep positive discrimination illegal, and keep positive action around.

Talk Like a Pirate Day

2009-09-17T00:00:00.000+01:00

Talk Like a Pirate Day is almost upon us. Marrrk your calendar: September 19, this Saturrrday. Arrr you ready for it? Thanks to that old salty dog, the Fiendly Arrrtheist, for makin' me awarrre of this. Arrr.

(What do ya say, me mateys? Be I ready for Talk Like a Pirate Day?)

Guest thoughts

2009-09-15T00:00:00.002+01:00

Last week, I had a conversation at the university chaplaincy with a couple of the honorary chaplains. As always, I enjoyed learning about different people's backgrounds, and the beliefs that inspire and motivate them, and of course I also enjoyed sharing my own perspective.

One of them, Richard Frazer, showed us a "Practical Ballad" he had written. It was inspired by an event at the chaplaincy, which he describes below. I liked the ballad, and invited him to share it on this blog. Here are his thoughts, followed by the ballad itself.

I attach my practical ballad: it is not at all poetic, but as I said, the University Chaplaincy has arranged these multi faith public conversations and this one was about the state of the global economy following the global financial meltdown of 2008.

The speakers represented a range of world faiths and none and their perspectives were wide ranging, though all, it seemed to me, were saying similar things which had something to do with justice for the poor and justice for the earth. The only person who seemed out of step was the professor of economics!

What struck me most profoundly was that each faith tradition was contributing something very deep and special to the discourse. One tradition reminds us of the importance of knowing what it is you are spending money on, another asks us to consider whether an investment is pure self indulgence, or is there a social element? It leads me to the conclusion that our way into a viable future depends upon us laying aside dogma and replacing it with the pooling of the world’s great wisdom traditions, alongside our best science. None of this threatens our traditions unless we think that the well being of our particular faith tradition depends on holding on to power and the exclusive right to be right.

A Practical Ballad

Economy

Don’t buy a thing you know nothing about,

That applies to unknown debt bought by the banks

That turns out to be toxic and worthless,

And to the ill considered, impulse item you grab on the way out of Tesco,

A thing you invariably do not need.

Does the investment you plan to make have any social element?

Will it better the world, or better only you,

And maybe damage a child or two?

Reflect again before you buy.

The true cost

In lives and land blighted,

In animal misery and the earth’s scarring would break your heart.

Surely, your prosperity does not have to depend on endless growth,

For on this planet, growth cannot be endless.

If you just cherish more the things you have,

The people you have and hold,

The beauty and craftsmanship of delightful things,

You will be rich in a new kind of way.

Let’s have economies that mirror evolution,

Change and constant adaptation,

Not policies that declare “use it all up, over live and exhaust it all”.

Justifying your actions because,

“it’s within the rules” is just a way to abdicate personal moral responsibility –

Mr Member of Parliament.

If armaments and drugs are the world’s two biggest industries,

Doesn’t that tell us about humanity’s dis – ease?

Science is telling us the world is one organic whole – Gaia.

So let’s live and work and make one whole thing of this earth

And all its people, its places and its diversity.

Learn to disagree without being divisive,

To embrace difference without being threatened.

We will need all our human powers for good,

Not one brand of ideology, to fashion the wisdom of survival.

And let us not build a society based on debt.

Let’s rediscover productive work, because, right now,

We are stealing our children’s future,

Selling it in the present,

And calling it gross domestic product.

Gross, it certainly is.

You can learn more about Rev. Dr. Richard Frazer at the Chaplaincy website, or on his own website, where he has also posted this ballad.

Turing apology

2009-09-11T11:36:00.000+01:00

A few days ago, I pointed out a petition calling for a posthumous apology to Alan Turing for his disgraceful treatment by the British government when it became known that he was gay.

Well, Gordon Brown has delivered. He has issued what seems to me to be a very frank apology, acknowledging not only Turing's significant contributions to computing and to the outcome of the Second World War, but also the injustice of his treatment at the hands of the country he had served so well.

As of this moment, there are 31070 signatures on the online petition. (I assume the petition is closed, now that its aim is achieved, but cannot find a clear statement to that effect.)

Here is the full text of the Prime Minister's statement:

2009 has been a year of deep reflection – a chance for Britain, as a nation, to commemorate the profound debts we owe to those who came before. A unique combination of anniversaries and events have stirred in us that sense of pride and gratitude which characterise the British experience. Earlier this year I stood with Presidents Sarkozy and Obama to honour the service and the sacrifice of the heroes who stormed the beaches of Normandy 65 years ago. And just last week, we marked the 70 years which have passed since the British government declared its willingness to take up arms against Fascism and declared the outbreak of World War Two. So I am both pleased and proud that, thanks to a coalition of computer scientists, historians and LGBT activists, we have this year a chance to mark and celebrate another contribution to Britain’s fight against the darkness of dictatorship; that of code-breaker Alan Turing.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of ‘gross indecency’ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison - was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later.

Thousands of people have come together to demand justice for Alan Turing and recognition of the appalling way he was treated. While Turing was dealt with under the law of the time and we can't put the clock back, his treatment was of course utterly unfair and I am pleased to have the chance to say how deeply sorry I and we all are for what happened to him. Alan and the many thousands of other gay men who were convicted as he was convicted under homophobic laws were treated terribly. Over the years millions more lived in fear of conviction.

I am proud that those days are gone and that in the last 12 years this government has done so much to make life fairer and more equal for our LGBT community. This recognition of Alan’s status as one of Britain’s most famous victims of homophobia is another step towards equality and long overdue.

But even more than that, Alan deserves recognition for his contribution to humankind. For those of us born after 1945, into a Europe which is united, democratic and at peace, it is hard to imagine that our continent was once the theatre of mankind’s darkest hour. It is difficult to believe that in living memory, people could become so consumed by hate – by anti-Semitism, by homophobia, by xenophobia and other murderous prejudices – that the gas chambers and crematoria became a piece of the European landscape as surely as the galleries and universities and concert halls which had marked out the European civilisation for hundreds of years. It is thanks to men and women who were totally committed to fighting fascism, people like Alan Turing, that the horrors of the Holocaust and of total war are part of Europe’s history and not Europe’s present.

So on behalf of the British government, and all those who live freely thanks to Alan’s work I am very proud to say: we’re sorry, you deserved so much better.

Gordon Brown

Well done, Mr Brown.

Five influential female authors

2009-09-11T00:00:00.002+01:00

Here's an internet/blogging meme coming via Ken at C. Orthodoxy. It asks us, as the post title says, to name five female authors that have been influential to us.

As the father of a precocious almost-two-year-old girl, I make sure to celebrate female excellence as much as possible in order to counterbalance the undeniable tendency, here and now, for there to be more men than women in prominent positions - politically, socially, economically, and culturally.

So here goes: five awesome writers who happen to be women.*

Ursula K. Le Guin. Every book of hers that I've read has moved, delighted, and surprised me. She wrote The Dispossessed, the best argument for an egalitarian, property-free, anarchist society that I've come across (it's a novel). She wrote the Earthsea books, easily equal to Lord of the Rings or the Harry Potter series (both of which I love) for epic awesomeness and tender humanness. She wrote an excellent version of Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching. (Here's one of the verses from it, which I quoted from here.) There are more, but I think I'll let you discover them for yourself. Le Guin's influence has been to show me that bold ideas don't preclude humble values like compassion and human vulnerability. Most of the science fiction I read growing up (and there was a lot - I was that kind of kid) was written by men from a particular era. At the risk of sounding sexist, it shows. Action, adventure, sex, but not much quiet humanity. Le Guin taught me that, even in genres like science fiction and fantasy, even when your characters include hermaphroditic psychics living on a planet of snow and ice or powerful wizards who can command the elements with arcane words, there is space for a fully human narrative. (There are male authors who I would rank close to her in this regard, but none quite as good at it, and anyway this post isn't about them.)

Gloria Borden and Katherine Harris. I'm listing these two together, because they are co-authors (along with Lawrence Raphael) of the Speech Science Primer**, my first textbook in phonetics - the physical science of speech. I am now at the end of a PhD in phonetics, with a dissertation approved and bound (nice thick tome) that adds a little to the sum of human knowledge. Although the main credit for my education goes to all the in-person teachers I've had (several of whom were women), I have to acknowledge that this well-presented and understandable textbook gave me a level of understanding and confidence in the field that helped cement my choice, leading me into an exciting field of scientific discovery.

Marjorie Tew. We humanists pride ourselves on following the evidence. We make a big deal of the fact that modern medicine is generally evidence-based (as opposed to most types of alternative "medicine", which are either evidence-free or based on very fallible types of evidence, such as anecdote). Tew, a statistician, followed a line of evidence in a surprising direction, and relates the story and the evidence in her book Safer Childbirth? (the question mark is in the title). In it, she presents a compelling empirical case that, in modern industrialised nations, giving birth in a hospital is not safer than giving birth at home. (For anyone interested, I related some key details of her arguments a couple of years ago in this thread at the Bad Science forums.) Her book was a large part of what persuaded Deena and me to plan a homebirth with Kaia. We are planning the same for baby #2 (due in a few short weeks). Again, there were other influences, but Tew's approach and her arguments were an important factor in our decision.

Julia Sweeney (and here). Okay, so this may be stretching the definition of "author" a bit. I know Julie Sweeney through the audio version of two of her monologues: In the Family Way, and Letting Go of God. They are basically books, just in a different medium. Sort of. Anyway, it's my blog, so I can choose whoever I want. Julia Sweeney's main influence on me is through the religious monologue, Letting Go of God. In it, she recounts her journey from being a contented Catholic, through reading the Bible, encountering doubt, wrestling with it, trying out different ideas, and eventually coming out a contented atheist. It's a fun listen. It's also valuable because whenever she elicits laughs, they are primarily directed at her - or at ideas she entertained, or thoughts she had. Not at other people, not in a sneering "I'm better than you" way.

It is, I think, the gentlest way I have ever encountered for someone to outline why she doesn't believe in God. Let someone laugh with you, at you, and you cease to be a threatening figure, an enemy. You become simply human, and it's much easier to try to sympathise with someone who's simply human than someone who is speaking as a scientist, or as a philosopher (or, perhaps, as a blogger). Goodness knows I have nothing like Julia Sweeney's talent for humour, but whenever I think about engaging a religious believer in discussion about topics we differ on, I think of Julia Sweeney and her approach. I think she has helped me become a more friendly humanist.

So there you have it. Five women whose writing (or similar creative output) has influenced me. One author of fiction, three scientists, and a performer/autobiographer.

The five women I've talked about above have influenced me, but their influence pales next to that of the women I know and have known in person - family, friends, colleagues, teachers.

Also, though I celebrate these women and their influence on me, I do it because of what they have done, not just because they are women. I hope that, as she grows up, Kaia will find inspiration and perhaps role-models in women like these, but also in men who write influential, inspiring, interesting, or great things. Or even humble things that nevertheless make our world better.

* I couldn't find photos for all five, so I've decided to leave this post image-free. You can see some of them by following the links provided.

** I'm linking to Amazon's listing of the 3rd edition of the Speech Science Primer, which is the one I used. There are more recent editions that you should look at if you are considering buying the book: speech science is a dynamic field, and some of what they had to say in 1994 is out of date now.

Marc on opinion

2009-09-08T00:00:00.002+01:00

So I was hanging out with my friend Marc again, and he had this to say about opinion (Meditations, book 3, paragraph 9):

Treat with respect the power you have to form an opinion. By it alone can the helmsman within you avoid forming opinions that are at variance with nature and with the constitution of a reasonable being.

Now, this far, I was on board. I was nodding along with Marc. We can't help forming opinions; they are very useful in navigating the myriad choices around us. And yet, to paraphrase another pal of mine, Lao, "opinion is the barren flower of the Way" (from Tao Te Ching #38). Once we form an opinion, it's hard to unform or revise it, even in the face of good evidence. So we need to be careful in forming opinions in the first place.

So anyway, I'm nodding away, then Marc goes on like this:

From it you may look to attain circumspection, good relations with your fellow-men, and conformity with the will of heaven.

Good relations with fellow men - okay. (Marc has a very sexist bent to him, I'm afraid, but it's easy enough to add "and women" or to substitute "fellow people" when listening to him.) But what about this "conformity with the will of heaven" bit?

Well, okay, I understand that Marc believes in the existence of gods. He says so very explicitly now and then. But it's jarring to be listening to something that fits my own position so well, and then hear something about the "will of heaven" thrown in as part of the same thought.

I like Marc, so ultimately I'm not too bothered by the odd literal reference to "gods" or "heaven"; I can just focus on the valuable part of what he's saying, and set aside the stuff I don't accept.

But what about when I'm talking to someone else, or reading someone else's writing, where I don't have that easy relationship with the person? This aesthetic aversion to casual god-talk could make it more difficult for me to hear the positive value in what they're saying.

Do you notice a similar tendency in yourself? Do you see it as a problem? How do you deal with it? Let me know.

Image credits:

Emblem of Stoicism created by DT Strain - see this blog post for an explanation of the elements in the symbol.

Yin and Yang symbol (associated with Taoism) from Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Call for apology to Turing

2009-09-01T15:00:00.000+01:00

This is a story of a national hero who was censured by his country and died alone on account of love.

Alan Turing was a key figure in the early years of computer development, before the Second World War. During the war, he was a key figure in the British team that decrypted the German Enigma cipher. Their contributions gave the Allies a pivotal advantage over their adversaries.

He was prosecuted for "gross indecency" because he'd had consensual sex with another man in the privacy of his own home. His work with the British intelligence service was over, and he was given the choice between chemical castration or prison. He chose the hormone treatment. Two years later, he committed suicide. He was 41 years old.

The last word the British government had to say about him was that his private actions, harming nobody, merited ruining his life.

Turing was a very prominent individual; I am sure that many other lives, both prominent and not, were needlessly ruined by this shameful law (happily repealed across Britain by the late 1970s).

There is now a call for the British government to apologise for its treatment of Turing. Given that an apology would be very easy to issue, would cost little and harm nobody, I think it is worth doing.

If you are a British resident and think this is worth two minutes of your time, please go sign the petition.

Also, let me know what you think of this sort of apology. Is it worthwhile? Is it a waste of time? Is is otherwise inappropriate? What consequences do you think such an apology would have, in terms of people's actions and their attitudes?

Photo credit:

Alan Turing photo, author unknown. Photo was found at Ally Action, among a list of prominent individuals and events in the history of gay rights.

Cosmic Calendar: Solar System forms

2009-08-31T17:30:00.000+01:00

That season is upon us again.

I'm talking, of course, of the busiest months in the Cosmic Calendar. For those who don't know what the Cosmic Calendar is, please see my earlier posts on the topic (starting here).

I've added a list of upcoming Cosmic Calendar events to the (increasingly busy) sidebar on the right.

Today (4.6 billion years ago), the Solar System begins to form. In a day or two, the Earth will have formed (4.5 billion years ago). I apologize for not having more to say right now - this kind of snuck up on me, and I still have limited Internet access outside of work. Check out last year's post for a little more background on today's anniversary.

(Also see last year's post on Earth's birthday. If anyone has any insight into the bizarre claim made in the comments, please let me know. It still baffles me. I don't know if I could have responded more constructively.)

Religious rights: free speech and hate speech

2009-08-28T00:00:00.003+01:00

A couple of news items flagged up by Hemant, the Friendly Atheist, the other day have me thinking about "religious freedom". What should the relationship be between laws protecting freedom of religion and the rest of the laws in a society?

One is this report of a bus driver in Iowa refusing to drive a bus with an ad on it promoting a local atheist group. The message on the ad is: "Don't believe in God? You are not alone.", and includes the group's name (Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers) and their URL (iowaatheists.org). The bus driver was suspended for refusing to do her job. She's now back at work, but the issue is probably not over. Her employers said she can keep her job so long as she doesn't do it again; she says that if she's given another bus with the ad, she will again refuse to drive it.

The other is this story (which I could only find reported at the Telegraph) of street preachers John and Miguel Hayworth being told off by police for allegedly reading homophobic and racist passages from the Bible to passersby. They feel that their right to religious practice is being infringed. Others feel that their actions amount to hate speech.

In the case of the bus driver, I really don't think there's much room for reasonable dissent. The ad is in no way inflammatory. It doesn't say anything that could reasonably be considered offensive. It is even milder than the surprisingly controversial UK bus ads, which go so far as to say that "There's probably no god". I can't see how the driver could argue that driving the bus would violate any sensible ethic. Her reaction reflects a general tendency among humans to exaggerate the offensiveness of statements they disagree with.

The case of the street preachers raises a more interesting and difficult issue to resolve. On the one hand, free speech is a fundamentally important right. It supersedes people's desire not to be offended (for example, by inflammatory passages of scripture). On the other hand, incitement to violence is dangerous and should be prevented - if someone is actively promoting hatred and violence against a group, then society (through the police and the courts) is right to stop them.

So the question is, where is the line between protected free speech and prohibited hate speech? As Hemant points out, there are several passages in the Bible that simply and straightforwardly promote death for certain acts. Here are a couple of examples:

Exodus 22:18 "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live."
Leviticus 20:13 "If a man lies with a man as one lies with a woman, both of them have done what is detestable. They must be put to death; their blood will be on their own heads."

(For more examples, see this essay at Religious Tolerance.)

I'm not saying these verses in particular were used by the Hayworths - they are not among those mentioned in the Telegraph article. But they are from the Bible, and thus might be claimed as protected by religious evangelists.

If someone were to stand on the Royal Mile in the centre of Edinburgh and start saying we should kill all the Wiccans, or all the practicing homosexual men, that person would (I hope) be arrested. Nobody has a right to encourage violence like that.

And yet, the passages I mention above say exactly that: kill witches; kill men who have sex with men.

So here are the crucial questions:

Would it ameliorate the crime at all if the exhortation to violence is based on (or directly read from) a religious text? Should religious expression trump hate speech laws?

On both counts, my answer is a firm no. No idea deserves any special protection just because someone claims it as a religious idea, no matter how old or widespread the idea is.

Despite occasional cries to the contrary, applying the same rules to everyone regardless of their religious beliefs is not discrimination. It is the opposite. Discrimination would be applying different rules (extending either privilege or persecution) based solely on religious belief (or lack of it).

So, if the Hayworths were reciting passages that promote hatred and violence against others, then police interference was justified. If they were just reciting passages that are offensive to others' feelings (and there are plenty to choose from), then they should have been allowed to continue.

(A point of curiosity: I wonder if the Hayworths would defend the atheist bus ads? After all, they are at least as innocuous a form of expression as reciting scripture to passersby. Conservative religious people seem often to be not only the ones crying foul when they don't have all the religious privileges they would like; they also seem to be the most vocal critics of atheists who try to share their worldview with others.)

For Deena

2009-08-26T11:11:00.000+01:00

I have no pretty words to mark this occasion. I have no fanfare to set this day apart from all the other days of our life together.

I have only the same words I share with you every day. I love you.

I have only the same choice I make anew each day. I choose you.

Happy ninth anniversary.

- your everyday Tim

What does Blanchard teach us? (5 of 5)

2009-08-25T00:00:00.007+01:00

This is the fifth and final part in a series discussing John Blanchard's book, Does God Believe in Atheists? In this post, I wrap up the discussion and try to derive a positive lesson from it all. The previous posts can be found here, here, here, and here.

Blanchard's complete disregard for the other side of the story has completely turned me off. He doesn't really try to understand evolution before attacking it. He doesn't really try to understand humanism before attacking it. He gives only a cursory pass at each of the religions he dismisses as deeply flawed.

And so I have no interest in reading on to see why he thinks his own beliefs are so much better.

Blanchard uses his impressively extensive reading as a way to gather quotes around which to build straw men. I suspect that he generally doesn't realize he's doing this. He probably believes that folks like me really do hold the mickey-mouse philosophy he labels "humanism". But that's no excuse: it's his job, as an author aiming to engage me, to actually know where I'm coming from. He doesn't have to agree with me; I enjoy a couple of blogs by committed Christians who I often disagree with. But he does have to show some effort to understand where I'm coming from.

I (along with most atheists) am not certain there is no god. I have come across credible humanist approaches to the idea of "truth" in a largely material model of consciousness. I invite Blanchard to try reading any of the accessible introductions to Humanism that have appeared recently. Try On Humanism by Richard Norman (my own first exposure to the philosophy of Humanism). Try What's it all about? by Julian Baggini. Heck, even try reading (really reading) The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins - even that has a more plausible and nuanced atheist perspective than the one Blanchard conjures up to attack.

What Blanchard teaches me is not that Christians, or religious people, are lazy thinkers. It's not that humanists are superior to folks like him. We're not.

The lesson is that humans are lazy thinkers. I have fallen prey to the same types of errors that I have criticized in Blanchard's book, and I am bound to do so again. (See here for a recent example on this very blog.)

We (humans) like to give the benefit of the doubt to arguments whose conclusions we already agree with, and we like to see the worst in arguments that lead where we don't want to follow. I'm more likely to double-check sources when I disagree with someone than when I agree with them. Hopefully, the knowledge that our critics are watching, combined with the conviction that we are fallible, will teach us all to be more careful in avoiding these errors.

Another reason for these posts is that, sometimes, I simply need to vent. Although I want to present as positive a face to the world as possible - to exhibit "exemplary behaviour", as my parents always exhorted me growing up - I also want to present an honest face. I want you, my faithful reader, to know that I sometimes get pissed off. I get angry when someone trashes my beliefs.

But please also note that, when I get angry, I try to respond with reason and compassion. I have tried to give Blanchard the benefit of the doubt - though sometimes that means assuming he's lazy rather than malicious. I have tried to produce coherent, logical arguments for my position, with pointers to good-quality references where relevant.

For some non-partisan discussion of some of the issues raised here - such as the nature of humanism, the religious implications of the evidence for our biological history (evolution), and details on other religions, I heartily recommend www.religioustolerance.org. It is run by the Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, a team of individuals with different religious beliefs, who seek to promote tolerance through understanding. Have a poke around there for more details.

And, as always, the comments are open. If I'm wrong in what I say above, tell me.

Right or obligation?

2009-08-21T00:00:00.001+01:00

I was hanging out with my friend Marc the other day, when he said something that I only half-noticed at the time:

In all you do or say or think, recollect that at any time the power of withdrawal from life is in your own hands. (Meditations, book 2, paragraph 11)

It came back to me, however, when I read of the death of Edward and Joan Downes.

I feel that they have done nothing evil; nor have those at Dignitas who helped them. From what statements are available, it sounds like the couple's children agree with their decision.

I could spend post after post discussing and weighing the arguments presented by people who think that assisted suicide should be legal, and those who think it should not. But I honestly don't think I'd come up with anything that hasn't been said before.

I do have a question, though. Is life a right? Or is it an obligation? Should people be allowed to take their own lives? To help others do so? Should doctors expend their efforts on the possibility of extending someone's pain-ridden life by a few days? Or is that simply a cowardly form of torture, accepted because of the fear we healthy people have of unwanted death?

As with so many real-world problems, the answer is not easy. But the story of Edward and Joan Downes forces us to wonder if the current state of affairs is appropriate.

As I understand it, British law criminalizes those who participate in assisted suicide overseas; but nobody gets prosecuted for it, possibly because such people always seem to be loving family members, as far from criminal as one can get, morally speaking.

[I have to apologize to my readers - somehow, I managed to post this without actually writing the last paragraph. Here it is.]

It is inexcusable for a legal system to prohibit an act but to systematically refrain from executing the prescribed sanctions. The law is an ass - but when carried out appropriately, it is at least a consistent ass. Those involved in this law (legislators, police, etc) should either repeal the law or enforce it as it stands. I think they should repeal it, but either solution would be better than the current state of affairs.

Does Blanchard understand other religions? (4 of 5)

2009-08-18T00:00:00.008+01:00

This is the fourth part in a series discussing John Blanchard's book, Does God Believe in Atheists? In this post, I discuss his presentation of religious beliefs which differ from his own. The previous posts are here, here, and here.

This entry in the series is very short. There are two reasons for this. One is that Blanchard himself doesn't spend much time on the topic. The other is that not much needs to be said in response (from the humanist perspective at least - I imagine the Mormons or the Muslims might have more to say).

Blanchard spends very little time outlining the beliefs and practices of a number of non-Christian religions, as well as some Christian sects that he considers "atheistic" (remember his "everyone else" definition of atheism).

On the one hand, I tend to agree with him that there is very little reason to accept any of these religious beliefs as true. On the other hand, from what little I know of Mormonism and Islam (two of the groups on his list that I've had some contact with), he's not terribly careful about presenting the beliefs as the believers understand them. (Sound familiar?)

It is illuminating to see other religions through Blanchard's eyes. To him, their faults can be summed up as "not like what I believe".

Which may illuminate why he defined atheists as "everyone else" to begin with. He's not interested in how I, or my Mormon neighbours, or my Muslim neighbours, see the world. He's interested in reinforcing his us-versus-them idea of Christianity.

Next up: What does Blanchard teach us?

AFK

2009-08-17T12:34:00.002+01:00

This is just a quick note to say that I have just moved house, and will be without Internet at home for the better part of a month as we get everything set up. Until then, I'll keep an eye on comments during breaks at work.

I have already lined up several posts to carry the blog through my absence. After the final post on Blanchard's book, I'll return to a one-post-a-week schedule (plus tidbits).

On a more personal note, I've been feeling a little lonely here lately.

I'm happy to keep posting things into the ether. It's a good exercise in refining my thoughts and meditating on interesting issues. But it would be nice to get some feedback - I know there are several people who read but never say anything.

Consider this post a general invitation (plea?) for input. What do people like or dislike about this blog and its content? Is there anything you'd like to see more of? Less of?

What sort of people read this blog? Who is out there watching, examining (even enjoying?) the offerings here? Parents? Students? Professionals? Bored data crunchers? Cosmopolitan-drinking socialites?

I look forward to getting to know you all.

Radiolab

2009-08-14T00:00:00.002+01:00

I just want to thank Dale McGowan for pointing me to the Radiolab podcast.

Deena and I are slowly working our way through the archived episodes - this is the most acoustically delicious learning experience I can remember having. I recommend it to anyone with a mote of curiosity about stuff in general.

So far we've learned about randomness, race, sperm, the placebo effect, zoos, mortality, and time; and we've also been treated to a fascinating investigation of the 1938 "War of the Worlds" panic.

Does Blanchard understand humanism? (3 of 5)

2009-08-11T00:00:00.010+01:00

This is the third part in a series discussing John Blanchard's book, Does God Believe in Atheists? In this post, I discuss his presentation of humanist thought. The previous posts are here and here.

I hoped that Blanchard's knowledge of philosophy would be better than his understanding of biology. And why not? Many people who are experts in one are completely uninterested in the other.

But then, many people can't be bothered with either good science or good philosophy - both of which require them to be open to the possibility that their preconceptions are wrong.

As early as the introduction, we get strong indications that Blanchard might not be speaking to atheists after all. In a bid to pin down terminology right from the start, he decides to define atheism in a way that would be unrecognizable to most people who call themselves atheists. First, he defines theism with a list of fourteen characteristics that add up to Christianity (p21). Fair enough.

Then he defines atheism as everything else.

What???

I challenge Blanchard to produce a Muslim, a Hindu, or a Mormon who is willing to self-identify as an atheist. I challenge him to produce a self-identified atheist who group their beliefs in common with Muslims, Hindus, and Mormons, but not with Christians.

If we define God in the way I have suggested, our second proposition, which says that most people in the world are atheists, comes into play. (p23)

So Blanchard is consciously setting up a Christians-against-the-world picture of religion and atheism.

Let's set aside this staggering redefinition of terms, and look at what he says about humanism in particular.

Blanchard relates the tale of Galileo being forced by the Roman Catholic church to recant on the Copernican heliocentric model of the solar system. He correctly notes that it's commonly repeated in atheist circles. Why do we rehearse this story so often?

This story is worth telling because it is sometimes used by humanists to argue that science gets rid of God. (p157)

No. Its most common (and entirely appropriate) use in humanist contexts is to demonstrate how belief in God has been used as an excuse to impede science and to deny or ignore the physical evidence. Another point of the Galilean drama is that science offers natural explanations for things that had previously been attributed to God. That is, it makes unbelief more plausible. It does not make unbelief necessary.

On to modern secular humanism ...

In John Gerstner's words, 'secularism in simpler language is merely worldliness; or "this-worldliness" in contrast to "other-worldliness". This one-world-at-a-time philosophy sees the future as an irrelevance, if not an impertinence. (p161)

Yes, secularism focuses on the world we experience rather than the world some imagine might come later. How does that bit about the future come in? I can only imagine that he's referring to the afterlife. Well, the afterlife may be the most important part of the future to a theist, but to atheists there is still plenty of future that we are concerned about in this world, in this life.

It gets worse.

He goes through some of the articles from the 1973 Humanist Manifesto II. Now, as a humanist, I don't necessarily agree with all of its statements (though I support the main themes). Blanchard seems to neglect the fact that, as a non-dogmatic worldview, humanism fosters a great variety among its adherents. The Manifesto is not a statement of faith - it is entirely unlike the 1910 statement of Five Fundamentals of Christian doctrine after which fundamentalists were originally named.

But setting that aside, what does Blanchard have to say about the content of the Manifesto?

He quotes the first article of the Manifesto:

We find insufficient evidence for the existence of a supernatural; it is either meaningless or irrelevant to the question of the survival and fulfilment of the human race.

Okay, I agree with that, though a negative statement is not what I would put first. I am not, as a humanist, primarily concerned with any of the myriad things I don't believe; I'm more interested in testing and applying those things that I do believe and value. But god-belief is relevant in that many people do believe in the supernatural, so communicating our position invariably includes pointing out how and why we differ.

Note, also, that the first article of the Manifesto is four paragraphs long. His quote is picked from the middle of the second paragraph. How does this article begin, you might wonder?

In the best sense, religion may inspire dedication to the highest ethical ideals. The cultivation of moral devotion and creative imagination is an expression of genuine "spiritual" experience and aspiration.

Such an olive branch contradicts Blanchard's general theme of selfish and anti-religious humanists. Why might he ignore this important bit of text in one of his chosen sources on humanist attitudes?

Instead, he mentions Ludovic Kennedy, a humanist who, in 1997, was working on a book to "definitively disprove the existence of God", and then declares, "The non-existence of God is not being floated as a possibility, or as a theory which is open to discussion or examination; it is being asserted as an article of faith."

There are probably some humanists who, like Kennedy, are sure that there is no God. Not so many as Blanchard seems to assume, I think. Certainly, the Manifesto implies nothing of the sort. Even arch-atheist Richard Dawkins, in his most polemic book, The God Delusion, declares himself only about a 6 on a scale from 1 (strong theist) to 7 (strong atheist): "I'd be surprised to meet many people in category 7, but I include it for symmetry with category 1, which is well populated." (p51) Note also that, in that book, Dawkins does discuss and examine the hypothesis of a god's existence, as have many writers before him. Contra Blanchard, it is a theory being subjected, by humanists, to empirical enquiry, and not an article of faith.

(Blanchard's book came out several years before The God Delusion, so it would be unfair of me to criticize him for not noticing this particular comment of Dawkins. However, Dawkins' declaration makes one wonder to what extent even the most vocal atheists fit Blanchard's caricature of dogmatic unbelief. I mention Dawkins because he is a high-profile atheist, and thus the sort of person that even a haphazard researcher like Blanchard might come across when forming his opinions. Blanchard is clearly not talking about him. He is clearly not talking about me - I'm a 5 or 6 on Dawkins' scale, for what it's worth. I wonder what atheists he thinks he is talking about?)

What does Blanchard make of the second article in the Manifesto? Here is the bit he quotes:

As far as we know, the total personality is a function of the biological organism transacting in a social and cultural context.

Blanchard manages to reduce this statement to "humans are just machines", which is a good metaphor when used responsibly, but is a gross distortion of what the Manifesto is saying here. Then he raises the observation that we have not created a machine that is very much like a human, as if that refutes the idea presented in the Manifesto (or his distortion of it). If the irrelevance of his observation is not crashingly obvious to you, please let me know in the comments and we can address it.

I could go on, but I think the whole line of irksome misunderstandings Blanchard commits can be summed up in one line. In this passage, he has just asserted that the idea of "truth" becomes meaningless if the mind contemplating it is "just a machine".

No humanist has yet been able to produce a credible response to that." (p168)

He seems to feel roughly the same about every major tenet of humanism that he comes across.

Here's the problem: Blanchard hasn't been trying to find humanists' credible responses. Or at least, he's not reporting them. Throughout this section (and the one on evolution), what we see is Blanchard reading a text with an eye always on finding the flaw in the humanist's or the biologist's perspective, but always failing to see what people - the evolutionary biologists or the humanists - actually believe (or even say).

Next up: Does Blanchard understand other religions?

My definition: atheist

2009-08-08T00:00:00.001+01:00

I'm a linguist by training, so I've decided to start posting working definitions of words that bear on the topics I talk about here.

Today I will give my definition of the word "atheist".

I take to be an atheist anyone who lacks a belief in the existence of a god.

A religious friend once asked me, "Why are you not agnostic?" The implication was that one cannot be both an atheist and an agnostic. In fact, I consider myself both an atheist and an agnostic. I am an atheist because I do not have a belief in a god; I am an agnostic because I have no way to know for certain whether a god does or does not exist.

I decided to post this definition because many religious people seem to take atheist to mean one who is certain (or at least, positively believes) that no god exists. This doesn't coincide with how most atheists define their beliefs.

In my experience, the definition I use above is the one most atheists would use to describe themselves. This is supported by the entry at Wiktionary. However, the Cambridge Advanced Learners Dictionary only gives the more restricted definition of an atheist as "someone who believes that God or gods do not exist". Dictionary.com follows the Cambridge definition.

The Oxford English Dictionary, which I generally take as a gold standard in lexicography, also limits its definition of atheist to one who rejects belief in gods, rather than simply one who lacks such belief. However, the OED bases its definitions on examples in a corpus of English texts, and the most recent text in which they note the use of the word atheist is from 1876. I suspect if they had a sample of 20th- and 21st-century writing by atheists, they would include the definition I (and most atheists) use.

The excellent website, Ontario Consultants on Religious Tolerance, which aims to discuss in as unbiased a way as possible all of the religious beliefs of the world, has a good article on the question of what atheism is. They back up my assertion that most atheists will use the "lack of belief in gods" definition, rather than the "belief in lack of gods" definition.

Let me end this first "definition" post with a standard linguist's caveat. I am not trying to impose a meaning on people. I am not trying to authoritatively decree that this word means what I say it means, instead of what someone else might say it means. I am trying to describe the meaning of the word as I use it, and as most self-described atheists use it. (For further evidence, here are some atheists defining atheism: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5.)

Competing religious liberties

2009-08-06T00:00:00.000+01:00

This is further to a post from a few weeks back about a petition to expand religious freedom regarding civil partnerships.

Civil partnerships are the closest thing same-sex couples in the UK have to marriage. Religious organizations are not allowed to perform civil partnerships in the UK. Several religious communities, including the Unitarians that I heard it through, would like to perform these ceremonies, and feel that it is an arbitrary restriction on their freedom of conscience not to allow them to do so. I completely agree, and support them in their effort to reform the law.

Some weeks later, I was chatting with a conservative Christian friend of mine, and this topic came up. I thought this was a straightforward issue - nobody could reasonably oppose the petition, even if they didn't want to support it.

My friend put an interesting argument for the other side, though. She said that, if religious groups are allowed to perform these ceremonies, equality legislation regarding the provision of services to people regardless of sexual orientation might lead to churches being forced to perform civil partnership ceremonies. Otherwise, they'd be up for human-rights violations for unfairly discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. This, she said, would unfairly impose on their freedom of conscience.

I actually agree - such an eventuality would be unjust in much the same way that the current situation is unjust: it would prevent people from exercising their freedom of conscience.

Now, the obvious (not just to me) solution to the whole mess is to separate state marriage from church marriage entirely. If you want government recognition of your marriage, you would register it at a government office. No church ceremony would have any legal weight, and therefore churches could be put under no obligation to perform services that their consciences object to. Her church would be safe from discrimination. The Unitarians and other liberal churches would be free to treat same-sex unions the same as opposite-sex unions. Everybody would be happy.

But of course, the complete disentangling of church and state, especially in Britain, especially for marriage, would be a difficult task. (A worthy task, I think, but a difficult one.)

So we seem to be left with the choice about whose freedom of conscience to protect - the liberals' or the conservatives'? (Put more personally, is it my freedom of conscience, or my friend's, that gets violated?)

But that's not really the choice before us. It's a choice between a real and present restriction on the liberal churches' freedom on the one hand, and a hypothetical and avoidable restriction on the conservative churches' freedom on the other. The liberal churches are currently currently unable to treat same-sex couples as equal to opposite-sex couples, and this deeply offends their moral sensibilities. The conservative churches are not forced to do anything. The only way they would be is if legislators made the law more equal without including protection for freedom of conscience. I seriously doubt that they would overlook such a detail, given the undeniably strong political force wielded by the religious lobby. Not only that, but many others (such as me) would object to conservative churches being forced to marry couples they don't want to - be they of the same-sex, of different religions, of different races - whatever.

So again, I'm back to my original position. The ideal solution would be to keep church ceremonies completely separate from state-recognized marriage. This isn't a radical idea - even Mexico, with a largely religious population, does it. In Britain, the solution more likely to be worked out in the short term is to remove the prohibition on churches performing same-sex marriages, while maintaining the important freedom of conscience that would allow conservative churches to continue discriminating in this area.

Does Blanchard understand evolution? (2 of 5)

2009-08-04T00:00:00.008+01:00

This is the second part in a series discussing John Blanchard's book, Does God Believe in Atheists? In this post, I discuss his presentation of the theory of evolution. If you missed it, you may want to read the introductory post first.

In order to keep this post as short as possible, I provide links from this post to two of the most accessible and useful online sources of information on evolution: Wikipedia and the Talk Origins Archive. Links to the Talk Origins pages use a small (TO). All other links in this section are to Wikipedia articles. Please follow them for substantiation of my claims.

The scientific consensus on the basics of evolution is sound. It is based on mountains of empirical evidence, including molecular (genetic) evidence, comparative physiology and geographical distributions, and fossil evidence.

Even so, some people - particularly members of certain religious groups - remain unpersuaded. Blanchard is one of those people.

At one level, the existence of a god is a completely separate question from the manner in which life has developed over Earth's history. So for someone to raise the topic of evolution in an argument against atheism means one of two things: either they believe in a conception of a god that conflicts with the physical evidence on which evolutionary theory is based, or they have an impression of the theory of evolution as something other than what it actually is. Or both.

It's clear early on that Blanchard is guilty of at least the second error:

No longer limited to biology, evolution has become a total philosophy which claims to explain the origin and development of everything within a closed universe, and thereby to rule out the existence of God. (p83)

No, no, and no.

No, the theory of biological evolution that got its start with Darwin and Wallace has not become a philosophy, nor come to encompass other disciplines. It remains a theory about how species change over time. Other uses of the term evolution in science include chemical evolution (abiogenesis) (TO), stellar evolution, and galaxy formation and evolution. These are separate topics; the evidence supporting them is largely separate from the evidence supporting (biological) evolution.

No, none of these theories, either individually or taken together, explains the origin and development of everything. That is one of the goals of science, but no credible scientist claims to have achieved it yet.

And no, sciences do not rule out the existence of God (TO). They may, in their progress, disprove (or cast reasonable doubt on) certain claims made by humans on behalf of God - such as a geocentric universe, a young Earth, separate creation of similar species, and so forth. And of course, people can extrapolate beyond the science. Dawkins points out that "Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist," because it revealed an alternative to the argument from design.

Blanchard goes on to present misleading arguments that are tiresomely familiar to those who care to learn about evolution.

For example, he describes Piltdown Man (TO) and Nebraska Man (TO) - famous hoax fossils. He plays down the fact that it was scientists, judging the evidence in light of evolutionary theory, who established them as hoaxes. With these and other examples, Blanchard declares that the fossil evidence is not enough to establish common descent.

I suspect he's wrong, but whether he is or not, there's a far more obvious flaw in his reasoning.

He's implying that fossils are the crucial evidence for evolution. They aren't. They never have been. In the The Origin of Species, Darwin focused on morphological patterns of relatedness and geographical distribution in modern species and genera (see here and here) - patterns which remain unexplained except in the light of common descent. Modern biologists spend much of their time with molecules: the genetic code confirms patterns of descent predicted by Darwin's earlier methods.

Fossils are wonderful. They invariably support an evolutionary explanation of species development. And, in showing what animals (and occasionally plants) actually looked like, they satisfy human desires for a physical manifestation of the past. But organisms only fossilize under particular, rare conditions (TO). So we expect "gaps". Even Darwin was aware of them, and (correctly) didn't feel they undermined his argument. Fossils neither make nor break evolutionary theory; they simply support it.

In summary, Blanchard colossally fails to demonstrate a basic knowledge of why evolution is accepted by biologists. Without that knowledge, he has no hope of persuading a moderately-informed audience that there are deep flaws in evolutionary theory.

So far, he's failing to engage this atheist; he's just making me seriously doubt the rigour of his research.

Next up: Does Blanchard understand humanism?

Roleplay to a cleaner house

2009-08-03T00:00:00.003+01:00

If everyone in your household already enjoys cleaning, this post isn't for you. If you never have problems getting the chores done, then feel free to stop reading now.

Deena and I have just discovered a new way to keep track of chores and have fun doing them. It's called Chore Wars, and it's awesome. You register (for free) on the site, start up an adventuring party (your team), and decide what chores will merit rewards. When you complete a task, you claim it on the site. According to the FAQ,

Experience points are tracked both as weekly high-score charts, and as ongoing character sheets - every time you rack up 200XP of chores, your character gains a "level", and their class changes to match the type of chores that they've been doing.

Think of it as a kind of Mary Poppins "spoonful of sugar" for people who are mostly grown up and enjoy roleplaying.

We've only just started, and we're already having a blast. Deena's almost ready to level up already. I'm only halfway there, but I have some dirty dishes waiting to help me catch up as soon as I post this.

I don't expect we'll end up like this, though I know some who might use it this way:
There are some promising testimonials on the site. We'll have to wait and see how well it works out for us. But it has all the right elements. It's fun (we love roleplaying); it's practical (it doesn't take much effort to do); it's free.

So, if you like games, and if you'd like to try motivating yourself to do more housework, give Chore Wars a try.

[Edit: Just figured out how to do this - here's an image of my character (updated regularly).]

New blogger

2009-08-02T00:00:00.000+01:00

Anyone remember the last count of blogs that have come out of our little Edinburgh student humanist group?

Well, there's (at least) one new one now, so here's my previous list, presented yet again for your reading pleasure:

Friendly Humanist (that's me, of course)
The Not Quite So Friendly Humanist (my co-columnist for the quarterly magazine, Humanitie)
This Humanist (who tipped me to the new blog - thanks Clare!)
That Humanist (who hasn't posted anything in a year now, sadly)

Also, in my last roundup I had missed this one:

The hairy nipple of the angry walrus (a linguist friend of mine)

And now, presenting

Time Out Of Mind (by our previous president, Stuart)

This promises to be yet another active and interesting take on the world from a humanist perspective. From what I know of the author, we are bound to see things there that I don't touch.

If anyone knows of any others, please let me know in the comments and I'll augment this post accordingly.

Spinal Trap rebroadcast

2009-08-01T00:00:00.001+01:00

On Wednesday, a large number of online and print sources showed solidarity with Simon Singh by reprinting his critique of the British Chiropractic Association. They have removed the allegedly libellous portions - I invite you to read them, then the original, and decide whether the substance is different.

Here is a list of blogs that have reproduced the article, as compiled at Sense About Science.

Although I'm late joining in, I hereby offer the same service: a reproduction of the original article. Like most others, I'm omitting the allegedly libellous lines.

Let me be clear: I do not think they are libellous. I think the BCA's case is a cowardly attack meant to silence a critic, not a legitimate attempt to protect itself from malicious falsehoods. But I do not have the means to mount a defense should the BCA come after me. In my case, their cowardly tactics work. (That is one reason why the law must change.)

But, as I said, I think the substance of the article is unchanged by the omission (further evidence of the ridiculousness of their accusation). So here it is, as presented on the Sense About Science site:

Beware the spinal trap

Some practitioners claim it is a cure-all, but the research suggests chiropractic therapy has mixed results - and can even be lethal, says Simon Singh.

You might be surprised to know that the founder of chiropractic therapy, Daniel David Palmer, wrote that '99% of all diseases are caused by displaced vertebrae'. In the 1860s, Palmer began to develop his theory that the spine was involved in almost every illness because the spinal cord connects the brain to the rest of the body. Therefore any misalignment could cause a problem in distant parts of the body.

In fact, Palmer's first chiropractic intervention supposedly cured a man who had been profoundly deaf for 17 years. His second treatment was equally strange, because he claimed that he treated a patient with heart trouble by correcting a displaced vertebra.

You might think that modern chiropractors restrict themselves to treating back problems, but in fact some still possess quite wacky ideas. The fundamentalists argue that they can cure anything, including helping treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying - even though there is not a jot of evidence.

I can confidently label these assertions as utter nonsense because I have co-authored a book about alternative medicine with the world's first professor of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst. He learned chiropractic techniques himself and used them as a doctor. This is when he began to see the need for some critical evaluation. Among other projects, he examined the evidence from 70 trials exploring the benefits of chiropractic therapy in conditions unrelated to the back. He found no evidence to suggest that chiropractors could treat any such conditions.

But what about chiropractic in the context of treating back problems? Manipulating the spine can cure some problems, but results are mixed. To be fair, conventional approaches, such as physiotherapy, also struggle to treat back problems with any consistency. Nevertheless, conventional therapy is still preferable because of the serious dangers associated with chiropractic.

In 2001, a systematic review of five studies revealed that roughly half of all chiropractic patients experience temporary adverse effects, such as pain, numbness, stiffness, dizziness and headaches. These are relatively minor effects, but the frequency is very high, and this has to be weighed against the limited benefit offered by chiropractors.

More worryingly, the hallmark technique of the chiropractor, known as high-velocity, low-amplitude thrust, carries much more significant risks. This involves pushing joints beyond their natural range of motion by applying a short, sharp force. Although this is a safe procedure for most patients, others can suffer dislocations and fractures.

Worse still, manipulation of the neck can damage the vertebral arteries, which supply blood to the brain. So-called vertebral dissection can ultimately cut off the blood supply, which in turn can lead to a stroke and even death. Because there is usually a delay between the vertebral dissection and the blockage of blood to the brain, the link between chiropractic and strokes went unnoticed for many years. Recently, however, it has been possible to identify cases where spinal manipulation has certainly been the cause of vertebral dissection.

Laurie Mathiason was a 20-year-old Canadian waitress who visited a chiropractor 21 times between 1997 and 1998 to relieve her low-back pain. On her penultimate visit she complained of stiffness in her neck. That evening she began dropping plates at the restaurant, so she returned to the chiropractor. As the chiropractor manipulated her neck, Mathiason began to cry, her eyes started to roll, she foamed at the mouth and her body began to convulse. She was rushed to hospital, slipped into a coma and died three days later. At the inquest, the coroner declared: 'Laurie died of a ruptured vertebral artery, which occurred in association with a chiropractic manipulation of the neck.'

This case is not unique. In Canada alone there have been several other women who have died after receiving chiropractic therapy, and Edzard Ernst has identified about 700 cases of serious complications among the medical literature. This should be a major concern for health officials, particularly as under-reporting will mean that the actual number of cases is much higher. If spinal manipulation were a drug with such serious adverse effects and so little demonstrable benefit, then it would almost certainly have been taken off the market.

Simon Singh is a science writer in London and the co-author, with Edzard Ernst, of Trick or Treatment? Alternative Medicine on Trial. This is an edited version of an article published in The Guardian for which Singh is being personally sued for libel by the British Chiropractic Association.

Signs

2009-07-31T00:00:00.002+01:00

Don't speak. Just watch it.

What do you think?

Thanks, Ken.

When ridicule is all an idea deserves

2009-07-29T08:50:00.005+01:00

Check out this awesome video of an Irish comedian, on alternative medicine and affiliated topics (thanks to Mike, The Not Quite So Friendly Humanist, for pointing it out):

Does God Believe in Atheists? (1 of 5)

2009-07-28T00:00:00.009+01:00

As a humanist, I am vividly aware that none of my knowledge is infallible. None of it. I must always be open to the possibility that any of my beliefs - from the most mundane to the most fundamental - could be wrong.

So, when a friend offered to lend me the book Does God Believe in Atheists? by Christian apologist John Blanchard, I was delighted to accept. The cover claims that the book "exposes the errors of secular humanism, materialism, relativism, determinism and existentialism", "traces the rise of Darwinian evolutionism and uncovers the weaknesses in claims made by its contemporary exponents", and "highlights the fundamental flaws in nine world religions and fourteen major cults."

What's more, a promotional blurb from Today proclaims that "John Blanchard masterfully engages both Christian and unbeliever alike." So I had every reason to expect a robust challenge to my ideas.

Well, not every reason.

Shouldn't a book that masterfully engages nonbelievers be able to muster at least one endorsement from an actual atheist for the cover? A quick web search throws up plenty of Christians' reviews of the book, but none by atheists (except some unimpressed reviews on Amazon).

And there's that quip about "Darwinian evolutionism". Something about people using non-standard terms for biology's grand unifying theory puts me on alert for misrepresentations of its substance.

Also, why bother talking about cults and other world religions when the thrust of the book is clearly to weigh the relative merits of atheism and Christianity?

Okay, simple solution. Before embarking on a cover-to-cover voyage through this good-sized tome (it's about the size of my hardcover copy of The God Delusion), I checked the three areas that I was worried about - areas where I would be able to judge from my own knowledge whether Blanchard was putting an honest effort into engaging my worldview.

In a series of weekly posts, I will address each of these areas.

I'll look at what Blanchard says about evolution; I'll look at how he characterizes humanism; and I'll look at why he's spending time on other religions.

I hope that, along the way, I can help my non-humanist readers understand humanism (and evolution) a little better. I also hope that we can get a better idea about how to actually engage people of opposing beliefs (or at least, how not to engage people).

First up: Does Blanchard understand evolution?

For readers who enjoy this sort of thing, I also recommend Ebonmuse's extensive and (currently) ongoing discussion of Lee Strobel's book The Case for a Creator, over at Daylight Atheism.

Science, skepticism, and chiropractors

2009-07-24T00:00:00.002+01:00

In an apparent response to the great indignation stirred up by their libel suit against Simon Singh (which I have blogged about already, here and here), the British Chiropractic Association has put forth another defense of their actions (and their profession). This time, it takes the form of a letter to the British Medical Journal written by BCA vice-president Richard Brown. It is freely available on the BMJ's website, alongside a thorough critique by Edzard Ernst (professor of complementary medicine in Exeter) and an editorial by Fiona Godlee of the BMJ.

Brown claims that the BCA didn't want to sue Singh, but he left them no choice when he refused to retract his original article. That's the one that claimed the BCA promoted chiropractic as a treatment for childhood conditions when there is no good evidence that it is effective. He lists several studies, claiming that they demonstrate the effectiveness of chiropractic for "various childhood conditions." In effect, his letter suggests that they have evidence to support their medical claims, but that it is appropriate to sue someone who criticizes those claims (rather than simply presenting the evidence, as they were invited to back when Singh's article first came out).

Ernst doesn't address the legal or political issues at all, instead producing a thorough and easy-to-follow demolition of the studies that Brown puts forth - each of which is either irrelevant to the claims being debated or is of insufficient quality to count as substantial evidence. He also points out that "Atleast three relevant randomised controlled trials and two systematicreviews are missing from [Brown's list]." That is, not only is the BCA's evidence base of poor quality - they rely on it while ignoring good evidence that the interventions don't work.

Godlee's editorial provides a good summary. Remember that this is comment from an editor of one of the most prestigious medical journals around. It's titled "Keep libel laws out of science." (Sound familiar?) It is a masterful piece of writing, so you ought to read the whole thing. But here are some of the more delightful bits:

I hope all readers of the BMJ are signed up to organised scepticism.It’s not a blog, but it could be. It’s one of thefour principles of good science as articulated by Robert Mertonnearly 70 years ago.

The Guardian offered the BCA an opportunity to lay out theirevidence rather than to sue him for libel. The BCA opted tosue.

Readers can decide for themselves whether ornot they are convinced [by the evidence presented by Brown]. Edzard Ernst is not.His demolition of the 18 references is, to my mind, complete.

Weak science sheltered from criticism by officious laws meansbad medicine.

And naturally, she echoes another medical journal editor who was faced with similar bullying recently:

And last year when chiropractorsthreatened to sue over an article in the New Zealand MedicalJournal, its editor Frank Frizelle spoke for all of us whenhe asked them to provide "your evidence not your legal muscle."

As Chris Kavanagh points out in his post on this (where I learned about this latest development), the BCA has yet again failed to vindicate themselves in any way. They have at last presented their evidence in a forum where its actual quality matters, rather than its superficial plausibility. Which is good - they should have done this in the first place, rather than stooping to the level of legal bullying. But the fact is that their evidence is poor. Very poor. The fact is that Simon Singh was right in his original article. This was bound to come out when the issue made it to a scientific journal.

I don't know if this will have any effect on Simon's case - after all, that is based on a fundamentally bad law, and does not (as far as I know) depend on the quality of the scientific evidence. But perhaps it will help people see through the veneer of medical respectability that chiropractors try to project.

Pagan police

2009-07-21T00:00:00.008+01:00

According to the BBC, "Pagan police officers in some areas are being allowed to take as many as eight days leave a year for events such as the summer solstice and Halloween."

At first blush, this seems obvious and uncontroversial. Pagan officers are being given similar rights to officers who profess other religious beliefs. Whatever one might think of the beliefs themselves, those who hold them deserve the same rights as anyone else.

But two very different sources have an alternative take on it.

On the one hand, National Secular Society president Terry Sanderson says, "The police should call a stop to this and dismantle all religious groups," according to the Metro. (I was unable to confirm this on the NSS's own website. All they seem to have is this rather neutral description of the news item.) [Edit: An anonymous commenter has given a link to the NSS page with this quote.]

Expressing his support for the NSS position is Christian blogger Cranmer:

Cranmer is all for freedom of religion: it is foundational to liberal democracy. But Her Majesty’s Police Service is not charged with the provision of religious services: it is not a theological college, a sexual health clinic or an identity counselling service.

Let me just respond to a couple of the key ideas here.

First, it does not seem to be the case that public money supports these sectarian groups within the police services. The BBC reports that "A Home Office spokesman said: the Pagan Police Association did not receive any funding from the Home Office." It sounds more like police officers spontaneously self-organizing groups that speak to their particular, independently-held identities. People may like or dislike the idea of police officers identifying with different parts of the community they come from, but I can't see any solid grounds for "dismantling" groups that celebrate the force's diverse background.

Second, Cranmer points out that everyone is a minority of one, if you add enough qualifiers. His example of this extreme his tongue-in-cheek proposal of a "Gay Black Jedi Police Association". So we need to be careful that any provisions we make for sub-groups within the community are compatible with such extremes.

After all, I could make the case for my family's birthdays being sacred to me. (I won't, but it is no more ridiculous than any more common religious observance.) Does this entitle me to take those days as holidays in lieu of Easter and Christmas?

The obvious answer (please tell me if I'm missing something) is yes. In a society that doesn't privilege one religion over others, any individual's declaration of faith, however idiosyncratic or apparently ridiculous it seems to others, deserves the same legal privileges as any other individual's. This should hold whether the belief is shared by nobody else or by everybody.

As a result, one is forced to be much more canny about what privileges the more popular beliefs get. Do religious dress codes trump professional uniform codes? Do people get to exempt themselves from tasks they find distasteful on account of their beliefs? How about cubicle decorations? (The line between okay and not-okay is always a vague and controversial one.)

So what is the lesson from the pagan holidays for police officers? Well, it seems to me that the employers in question have struck the right balance. They are not privileging pagans over others; they are not privileging others over pagans. They are not (so far as I can tell) diverting public resources to support sectarian beliefs of any kind.

Well done them.

Image credit:

The Pentacle, a common symbol of Pagan beliefs, is from Wikimedia Commons, posted by user Nyo. Public domain.

Vanishing head video

2009-07-14T10:29:00.000+01:00

Check out this amazing video from Quirkologist Richard Wiseman:

Here's a link to an earlier video of his, also cool. Actually, check out all of the Quirkology videos you can find. They're cool. I have to get his new book, 59 Seconds.

What loss is death?

2009-07-07T00:00:00.000+01:00

From Meditations by Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE), book 2, paragraph 14:

Were you to live three thousand years, or even thirty thousand, remember that the sole life which a man can lose is that which he is living at the moment; and furthermore, that he can have no other life except the one he loses. This means that the longest life and the shortest amount to the same thing. For the passing minute is every man's equal possession, but what has once gone by is not ours. Our loss, therefore, is limited to that one fleeting instant, since no one can lose what is already past, nor yet what is still to come - for how can he be deprived of what he does not possess? So two things should be borne in mind. First, that all the cycles of creation since the beginning of time exhibit the same recurring pattern, so that it can make no difference whether you watch the identical spectacle for a hundred years, or for two hundred, or for ever. Secondly, that when the longest- and the shortest-lived of us come to die, their loss is precisely equal. For the sole thing of which any man can be deprived is the present; since this is all he owns, and nobody can lose what is not his.

Photo credit:

Photo of a bust of Marcus Aurelius, from the Wikimedia commons. Taken by user Bibi Saint-Pol and released into the public domain.

What do you know about Canada?

2009-07-01T10:31:00.000+01:00

It's Canada Day again. Last year I was actually in Canada for this national day. Today, I am hard at work at my desk in Edinburgh, Scotland. (Well, except for this brief break to blog of course.)

In the interest of brevity, I will simply list a couple of neat facts about Canada.

Did you know that the name "Canada" comes from an aboriginal word meaning "village"? Wikipedia did.

Incidentally, I learned in that article that the American 'Articles of Confederation (1777) included a clause pre-authorizing the admission of "Canada" as a new state if it wished to join the U.S.'

Of course, we did not join the US. In fact, in the War of 1812*, we (as part of Britain) fought the States. One of the consequences was that the White House was burned down.

However, any ill-feelings from that incident have not survived. Canadians generally have a strong sense of national identity, often making a particular point of our differences from the Americans. But we also have a great big long (8891 km) border that has not needed military guarding (by either side) for yonks**.

On the other hand, we are perhaps more affected than any other country by the cultural exports of the US - particularly movies and television. Some of the effect is negative (Canadians sometimes knowing American geography and history better than Canadian geography and history). Some is positive (a lot of American television and movie production has been done at Canadian sites, largely because it's often cheaper).

Anyway, I hope this has been informative for my readers (Canadian and non-Canadian). If you have any other interesting Canadian facts, please share it in the comments.

* Note, this is the Anglo-American War of 1812, not Napoleon's invasion of Russia. Apparently, the Russian composer Tchaikovsky had the latter in mind, not the former, when he composed the 1812 Overture. It's a good bit of music nevertheless.

** many years (highly technical Canadian term)

Image credit:

Canada flag from Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

Ingersoll on doubt

2009-06-30T00:00:00.001+01:00

I offer for contemplation a quote by the great 19th-century orator, Robert Green Ingersoll:

Fear believes, courage doubts.

(from his Lecture on Ghosts - see this collection in Project Gutenberg for the full text.)

I know that this can be taken in different ways by different people, so I offer more commentary than I usually do with quotations.

For those of you whose first impulse is to be insulted, I encourage you to try to step back and see the sense in which it is a valuable sentiment. Note that it does not mean that all belief is born of fear, nor all doubt of courage; it just means that fear is a great motivator of ill-founded belief, and courage an important foundation for honest doubt.

For those of you whose first impulse is to feel smug - that this is a condemnation of someone else - I encourage you to think again. Do you apply doubt to all of your beliefs, or are some "special" in one way or another?

Ingersoll's quote - from a discussion of witch-hunts and superstitious hysteria - is a warning to us all. It is a statement about human nature, not just about one type of worldview.

What time is yours?

2009-06-23T00:00:00.000+01:00

Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE) has some blunt words to share about procrastination, which I cannot disagree with*:

Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realize the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of that controlling Power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again. (Meditations, book 2, paragraph 4)

* Okay, so unlike the good emperor, I do not literally believe in any gods, nor a "controlling Power whose offspring [I am]". But it's no problem to set aside those bits, or read them metaphorically, while agreeing with the rest.

More from this ancient Stoic to come.

Photo credit:

Photo of a bust of the young Marcus Aurelius, from the Wikimedia commons. Taken by Marie-Lan Nguyen and released into the public domain.

A perilous experiment?

2009-06-22T14:30:00.001+01:00

Here is my latest article in Humanitie. Mike (the Not Quite So Friendly Humanist) and I have both recently had experiences with religious evangelism. His is here.

Several months ago, some Mormon missionaries approached me on the street. I knew very little about their beliefs, most of it from comedians and atheist critics. So Deena and I invited them over.

I will blog later about what I learned of their particular beliefs. What I want to discuss right now is an experiment they asked us to try after our first meeting.

They asked us to pray.

I found myself facing a dilemma. On the one hand, praying feels like a betrayal of my values as a humanist. How could I sincerely ask for an answer from a god whose existence I believe to be improbable, undiscoverable, and irrelevant to living a good life? On the other hand, free thinking is at the heart of humanism. Prayer is an experience I had never tried before.

So I decided that, conducted carefully, praying would not betray my principles. I would try it - and perhaps learn something new about myself and my Mormon friends.

I had many questions heading into the experiment. Would I feel anything peculiar? How might I interpret it? Would I, in the limited but well-publicised tradition of sceptical converts, "see the light"? Would I have an unusual experience but shrug it off? Would I feel nothing at all?

I sat in a comfortable posture in a quiet room, closed my eyes, and asked aloud, "God, do you exist?"

I quieted my thoughts to make room for even the softest suggestion from an external deity. I sent my internal sceptic, who was clamouring to declare the whole exercise a farce, out to get tea.

Then I waited. I tried to be ready for any type of result - from a sudden Damascus-road conversion to quiet "promptings of the spirit".

I was so still that all I heard for several minutes was the beating of my heart and the ticking of the electric clock. There was nothing else. Nothing that could be interpreted as a message from a god - not even a little thrill of what-if.

Later, I related this experience to the Mormons. They were undeterred. They encouraged me to keep trying: "God is not always heard the first time."

Fair enough. No responsible scientist would draw a firm conclusion from just one data point.

So I continued the experiment, varying the format to get a sample of different styles of prayer: different postures, different forms of address, different questions. I prayed alone; I prayed with Deena; I even led the prayer at the end of our meetings with the Mormons once or twice. The result was the same each time: I was answered only by my own thoughts and feelings.

At a recent meeting, one of the Mormons promised, "If you keep trying, eventually you will get an answer." Well, I have tried the experiment. I have set aside my reservations and sought the truth, true to my humanist values. And I have an answer. There probably is no personal god.

Now it's time for me to move on to the next question, the next empirical adventure.

Photo credit:

Mormon temple image by user Ricardo630, accessed at Wikimedia Commons, released under Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 2.5 license.

Me and U

2009-06-21T23:30:00.004+01:00

Three interesting things happened to me today.

The summer solstice happened early this morning. At this northern latitude, that's a big deal. I'm actually looking forward to a bit more night. (I think the early dawn and late sunset may be why Kaia seems to sleep so little. I ask the more experienced parents out there not to disillusion me.)
It was my second Father's Day as a father. I got a delightful little card with a cute little red hand print on it from Kaia. I'll spare you my cheesy gushing. For now.
Deena and I officially became members of the Edinburgh Unitarian Church.

We have been attending for some months now. (Excessively-attentive readers may have noticed Unitarianism popping up occasionally - here, here, here, and here). What began (for me) as a little research into community-building - research I hope to apply to the humanist community - turned into an enriching experience of being part of a supportive community.

It is late, and I don't want to wax on at too great a length. Let me just say a couple of things to make sure my readers don't misunderstand.

I am not going to start blogging as the Friendly Unitarian now (and not just because of the unfortunate acronym). I still consider myself a humanist. (There's a sign on the outside of the Unitarian church that says something along the lines of "What do a Christian, an Agnostic, a Humanist, and a Buddhist have in common? They might all be Unitarians.")

I still consider myself a part of the humanist community in Scotland, and at my university. And online, of course.

I will blog another time about the natural connections between Unitarians and humanists. But for now, I recommend you read this address by Dale McGowan to a Unitarian congregation in the States.

I put it to all those humanists out there who identify with Harry (read Dale's full address to get the reference): we need to understand Sally better for humanism to grow into its full potential. Unitarians understand Sally very well indeed.

Homeopathy awareness

2009-06-17T00:00:00.003+01:00

Steve Novella at the Neurologica blog just pointed out that this is the British Homeopathic Association's "Homeopathy Awareness Week".

He is right - I think we all need to be more aware of just how homeopathy can affect our lives. I encourage you to read Steve's post, which gives a quick history and an overview of what homeopathy entails. (See also the Science-Based Medicine blog.)

I also encourage you to look at what the carefully-assembled evidence from multiple scientific studies has to say about homeopathy. I recommend Ben Goldacre at Bad Science for this - here's a list of his Bad Science blog posts about homeopathy, and here's a particularly good overview. Also, anyone who can't imagine that their experiences with homeopathy could be "just placebo effects" should really listen to his two-part programme on the BBC about the placebo effect. You don't need to look to homeopathy for some mind-blowing, magical-seeming effects. There's plenty in the real world of scientific medical research. And read his book, Bad Science.

Bottom line: Real medicine is about proving something is safe and effective, and abandoning it as soon as it is shown to be either unsafe or ineffective.

Alternative medicine is about believing something is safe and effective, and rejecting, ignoring, or suppressing any evidence to the contrary.

It hurts people. It hurts people because alternative practitioners encourage distrust of real medicine in general. It hurts people because they take homeopathic treatments instead of real medicine. See for example this tragic story about Gloria Thomas Sam, a nine-month-old girl who died horribly because she was given homeopathic treatment rather than real medicine for eczema. Eczema!

Real medicine isn't infallible. But its researchers abide by strict rules of evidence: something must be proven both safe and effective before it is used in medical practice. Real medicine is self-correcting.

Homeopathy, and most alternative "medicine" modalities, are not self-correcting.

I encourage everyone - adherent, opponent, and uninterested layperson - to become a little more aware of homeopathy this week.

Photo credits:

Bad Science cover art from Bad Science blog (assumed fair use).

Water memory poster from Hell's News Stand (adapted from a less politely-worded version; also available with a G rating). Published with invitation to redistribute.

Natural consolations

2009-06-16T00:00:00.003+01:00

Over at Daylight Atheism, Ebonmuse has shared yet another of his symphonically beautiful bits of writing. This one is in honour of his grandmother, who recently died. He calls it "Green Fields". Check it out. Here's a taster:

For those who are grieving, for those who mourn, and for all those who are burdened with the weary weight of sorrow, I have a prescription.

Find a quiet, peaceful place, a green field of grass where great trees grow and gift the world with their shade. Let it be just before sunset, at that golden hour when the heat of the afternoon is past, when the sky is blue as a pearl and the setting sun hues the world in its last, richest and most transitory light.

Sit against the trunk of an old and massive tree, one that's lived through summers and winters untold. Lean on its rough, moss-clad bark and feel the slow, patient pulse of the life in the green heart of the wood. Try to clear your mind of thought, and listen.

(Read the rest at Daylight Atheism.)

Photo credit:

Crepuscular ray sunset from Telstra tower, by Fir0002/Flagstaffotos. Released under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL).

Marriage equality

2009-06-15T12:39:00.005+01:00

There's a Downing Street petition to get the British government to allow religious groups to perform civil partnerships (the closest Britain has to same-sex marriages) in religious buildings.

Currently civil partnerships are not permissible in religious buildings or buildings used primarily for religious purposes. Some faith groups are open to civil partnerships but are unable to perform legal partnership ceremonies under the current restrictions. This provides the churches the freedom to decide for themselves.

I find it deeply encouraging that religious organizations are calling for an expansion of same-sex marriage rights as a matter of religious freedom. (Read more in this article.)

We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to Amend the Civil Partnership Act 2004 to allow faith groups to perform civil partnerships within their religious buildings.

If you are a British resident (religious or not), I encourage you to sign this petition.

As a side-note, I hadn't realized until recently how many bizarre and arbitrary rules surround weddings in this country. For example, did you know that

If you are having a Civil Ceremony your choice of reading must be a non-religious one, whose use must be authorised by the Superintendent Registrar before your wedding day. (source)

I strongly suspect that rules like this (as well as the fact that we have "civil partnerships" rather than simply marriage for same-sex couples) are connected with the fact that Britain has an established church. It is a fact that continues to irk me, in this otherwise fairly enlightened nation - though some people think it's fine and dandy. (Readers are invited to count the fallacies of reasoning in the article linked from the previous sentence.) But that's a rant for another time.

[Correction: Cath has rightfully called me out on a point of fact in the preceding paragraph: although England has an established church, Scotland does not. I apologize for my lapse in fact-checking. I maintain that it is the strong history and tradition of Christian privilege in this country that makes daft rules like the one quoted above possible.]

I'd like to thank Maud, the minister at the local Unitarian church, for bringing this petition to my attention.

Thanks, Maud.

My European representatives

2009-06-12T23:00:00.001+01:00

Last week, I voted for the first time in the European election. (For those not familiar with the EU electoral system, voting is granted on residency rather than nationality, so although I have only a Canadian passport, I am still able to vote.)

The results are out. I have yet to make heads or tails of the overall results. Since each of the 27 member countries fields its own parties, the resulting body is inevitably a jambalaya of different interests.

But at the national level, one can get a fair idea of what any given country has fielded. The UK results are troubling in two ways.

First - a topic I've complained about before - only about a third of the eligible electorate turned out. In a country with almost 50 million eligible voters, only 15 million of us bothered to participate. There are sometimes good reasons not to vote - medical emergencies, natural disasters, and the like - but a good many of those who don't vote had bad reasons. Couldn't be bothered to vote. Didn't think it would make a difference. Hadn't read up on the issues. Not interested in politics.

Though it may lose me the title of "friendly" humanist, I have to say that all of those are pathetic excuses. Democracy is not something that other people give us, as some kind of birthright. It's something we must continually exercise. It is all too easy to lose. Look at the Belgians and the Luxembourghers - they had a 91% turnout!

Second, I am frankly embarrassed at the representation that my fellow British voters chose.

A quarter of a million Britons supported the joint ticket Christian Party and Christian People's Alliance. I have nothing against people believing what they like, and living their own lives in accordance with their beliefs, but these parties' platforms are fully oriented toward establishing a theocracy. I guess the lessons of Britain's history of state-sponsored religion are lost on some people. (Catholic-Protestant violence both ways, the persecution of the Covenanters, and probably others I haven't yet learned of.)

Fortunately, the Christian parties fell short of enough votes to send a single candidate to the European Parliament.

More appalling is the fact that the British National Party 2 seats. This is an openly racist, xenophobic party. (Membership is open only to whites, for example.) And almost a million British voters thought they would make the best representatives in Europe. Scary.

I'm also disturbed that UK Independence Party got 13 seats. While they are not as scary as the BNP (they even make a point of saying they're not racist), their policies tend toward the unrealistically insular "Britain for British", "cut all immigration" sentiment, which sets off warning bells for me. And they got the 2nd most votes of all UK parties in this election, with 2.5 million.

I don't fully understand the EU, and I have strong reservations about some of its influence, but xenophobia is not a helpful reaction. (I need to acknowledge, though, that my opinions are those of a Canadian working in Britain. In addition, academia seems to have more international representation than almost any other employment sector.)

Having said all that, I do want to point out that, if my neighbours really want to vote for these people, then these people should be their representatives.

That's democracy for you.

Even when I hate how someone exercises their power, denying them that power is not an appropriate response. (You know the Belgians and Luxembourghians I praised earlier? Each country sent 3 representatives from its dominant Christian political party. I'm far more encouraged at the turnout than discouraged at the religious sentiment.)

Until they cross the line and start undermining the freedoms that democracy relies on - like freedom of expression and of conscience, and basic human rights. Which I suspect fringe groups like the BNP and the pro-theocracy crowd might do, given the chance.

Honestly: for the most part, this is a great country. But sometimes its people make my head spin.

Image credits:

EU flag image from Wikimedia Commons, multiple authors (see linked page). Public domain.

Jambalaya image from Wikimedia Commons, copyright Cliff Hutson. Licenced under the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license.

Rational parenting on Facebook

2009-06-12T09:43:00.004+01:00

There's a new group on Facebook for skeptics who are also parents. It's called Rational Moms and Skeptic Dads. Seems like a great place to share freethought parenting tips, resources, and gripes. Check it out.

(Thanks to the Rational Moms blog for pointing it out.)

21st century farming

2009-06-11T02:29:00.002+01:00

I've mentioned before that I grew up on a farm.

It was a fairly standard western-Canadian farm, as far as I could tell. We grew stuff; we shipped it out to customers by rail or truck; we grew more stuff. (And by "we", I mean my dad, his dad, and his dad before him - a real family farm. I helped out, but was never farmer material.)

And, from fairly early, it was clear that my little* brother was the most likely successor. Mom and Dad never put any expectations on us to become farmers - it's not the kind of business that anybody should be pressured into. But John was such a natural.

Four or five years ago, after studying various farming techniques at college, he returned to the farm to practice his trade. I remember hearing from Mom and Dad that John had some interesting ideas. I remember hearing that things were a little different on the farm.

But it wasn't until last year, when Deena, Kaia, and I were in Canada for several months over the summer, that I realized how much John had done.

He started growing flowers. And rather than bringing his product to the customers, like 99% of farmers do, he set up a U-pick business to bring customers to the product.

He created mazes to attract people out to the site. He started holding festivals - Lily Festivals and Pumpkin Festivals - to promote the farm.

Last summer, over the weekend of the Lily Festival, there were more people visited the farm than the entire population of Bowden, the nearest town. Several times over.

People hear John on the radio and see him in the paper - he's always promoting the farm.

He's joined local and regional farm tourism groups to further promote his operation and that of other local producers.

He's cranked up the farm's web presence with a major website, Google ads, and now a blog.

He's even getting his family in on the operation. I helped out at the Lily Festival last year. And here I am, giving him a big plug on my blog. I do this in full appreciation of the fact that he gets more people visiting him in person than I get visiting this blog in a whole year. I'm not going to swamp him with extra visitors.

But that's okay. I'm basically just doing this to brag about my brother. Farming these days isn't what it used to be, and isn't that grand!

Just in case it begins to sound like John is the only innovator on the farm, I'd like to point out that it was Dad who, not long ago, shifted the focus of the potato-growing operation from a more conventional bulk business to a mail-order, internet-driven operation catering to gardeners across Canada who want to grow specialty varieties of potatoes. John is an amazing entrepreneur, and he comes from a generations-long tradition of business-savvy and adaptable folks.

* Little as in younger. It has been several years since I, at 6'3" (191cm), was taller than either of my younger brothers.

Photo credits:

All photos from the Eagle Creek Farms website. I'm assuming I have permission to reproduce them for the purposes of bragging about the farm.

Meet my new friend, Marc

2009-06-09T00:00:00.004+01:00

I would like to introduce you all to my new friend, Marcus. I like to call him Marc, but posterity remembers him as Marcus Aurelius (121-180 CE), emperor of Rome and Stoic philosopher.

A mutual acquaintance introduced us - thankyou Darren!

Anyway, here's Marc to introduce himself:

A little flesh, a little breath, and a Reason to rule all - that is myself. (Forget your books; no more hankering for them; they were no part of your equipment.) As one already on the threshold of death, think nothing of the first - of its viscid blood, its bones, its web of nerves and veins and arteries. The breath too; what is that? A whiff of wind; and not even the same wind, but every moment puffed out and drawn in anew. But the third, the Reason, the master - on this you must concentrate. Now that your hairs are grey, let it play the part of a slave no more, twitching puppetwise at every pull of self-interest; and cease to fume at destiny by ever grumbling at today or lamenting over tomorrow.

(from Meditations, book 2, paragraph 2)

I'll be sharing more of Marc's thoughts with you in the coming weeks - he's full of pithy and though-provoking ideas.

Photo credit:

Photo of a bronze statue of Marcus Aurelius, from the Wikimedia commons. Taken by Ricardo André Frantz and released into the public domain.

Singh fights on

2009-06-05T16:40:00.001+01:00

The sceptical blogosphere is abuzz with delight at the news that Simon Singh, respected science writer, will be going forward with his legal defense against the British Chiropractic Association's accusation of libel.

For the basic story, see my earlier post or just do a web search for Simon Singh and BCA. Jack of Kent is keeping pretty detailed track of things from the legal perspective.

Also, check out the Sense About Science website. In support of Simon and to help prevent similar travesties in the future, they have begun a campaign to keep libel laws out of science.

They're calling it "Keep Libel Laws Out of Science". Nice title - it's quirky, but catchy. Here's a graphic that they're encouraging others on the web to put up:

If you have a website or blog, please help promote this appeal. Also, don't forget to sign the statement. (This is separate from the petition I linked to in my previous post.)

Photo credit:

Portrait of Simon Singh from the British Science Association website.

Humanism quote

2009-06-02T00:00:00.000+01:00

Here's an excellent encapsulation of the difference between being an atheist and a humanist (both of which labels I claim):

I’m an atheist and I try to live up to being a humanist.

Atheism is simply a lack of belief. Humanism is about actively living a good life.

From the Perpetual Dissident on the Humanity by Starlight blog. Thanks to Dale at The Meming of Life for the tip.

Science, Chiropractic, and libel laws

2009-05-27T08:00:00.005+01:00

Scientist and author Simon Singh is in a spot of trouble. His crime is writing a strongly-worded article on the lack of evidence for several claims made by the chiropractic profession. In it, he criticizes the British Chiropractic Association's (BCA) promotion of chiropractic treatments for certain conditions:

The British Chiropractic Association claims that their members can help treat children with colic, sleeping and feeding problems, frequent ear infections, asthma and prolonged crying, even though there is not a jot of evidence. This organisation is the respectable face of the chiropractic profession and yet it happily promotes bogus treatments.
I can confidently label these treatments as bogus because I have co-authored a book about alternative medicine with the world's first professor of complementary medicine, Edzard Ernst. He learned chiropractic techniques himself and used them as a doctor. This is when he began to see the need for some critical evaluation. Among other projects, he examined the evidence from 70 trials exploring the benefits of chiropractic therapy in conditions unrelated to the back. He found no evidence to suggest that chiropractors could treat any such conditions.

Note that he's not name-calling here. He's making a claim - that certain treatments promoted by the BCA have no good evidence behind them - and backing it up with data. (Here's an Amazon link for the book he mentions.)

So why is he in trouble then? Surely stronger (and less well-evidenced) claims are made in the media all the time.

Rather than try to refute his claims on scientific grounds - perhaps by submitting a counter-article - the BCA responded by crying libel. They have taken advantage of the ill-designed and internationally condemned libel laws in the UK, tying Singh up in expensive proceedings which are already going against him.

Specifically, the BCA is complaining about the word "bogus". The judge at the preliminary hearing agreed with the BCA that the word implied that the BCA knowingly promoted unproven treatments. I'll leave it to more savvy linguists to address the dramatic ridiculousness of this interpretation - or read Singh's article (linked and excerpted above) to see for yourself.

Basically, the BCA's original claims are factually wrong;, and Singh's critique was proportionate to the evidence, with no evident desire to exaggerate the facts in order to damage the BCA's reputation. Is he being sued only because the BCA doesn't like to be criticized? It looks like it. As a British taxpayer, I do not think that deserves my tax dollars. The case should be thrown out, and the BCA should pay expenses to Singh, plus a penalty for wasting the court's time.

But I'm not the judge. And even if I were, British law is skewed massively in favour of the accuser in libel cases - particularly if the accuser is rich.

Which is very worrying. Does British law value the tender feelings of professionals over free speech? Do we want honest, evidence-based criticism to be trampled on in favour of wealthy interest groups?

The judgement in the preliminary hearing feels like a blow against free speech, science-based journalism, and common sense, there is cause for hope. Check out these links for extensive roundups of the case and the coverage it has gained in the mainstream media and the blogosphere. Between the BCA's bullying behaviour, the bad law, and the ridiculous linguistic inclinations of the judge, they are likely to end up looking even worse (and Singh even more noble and valiant) than if they'd just let the article sink into yesterday's news.

If you live in the UK and are as disturbed as I am about how Britain's unjust libel laws can be and are used to silence important exercises of free speech, then sign this online petition. It will be seen by MPs. In conjunction with the increasing media coverage, a petition like this might actually motivate them to reform the libel law in this country.

And, since that won't change things in the short term, let's make some noise in support of Simon Singh. Here are some other bloggers that are keeping an eye on the situation:

Mike, the Not-Quite-So-Friendly Humanist
Ben Goldacre, the Bad Science dude (who recently had his own run-in with spurious libel accusations)
Hemant, the Friendly Atheist
P.Z. Myers, of Pharyngula
And again, check out the roundups at God Knows What [+ update] and Holford Watch for comments and links to dozens of other articles and discussions of this situation.

Here is a Facebook group for supporters of Simon.

I would also like to extend kudos to the Guardian newspaper, for supporting Singh in this fight (and Ben Goldacre before him). The little-guy-against-the-giant image may be inspiring, but in real life it's good to have slightly more even odds. Good for them.

Greater than ourselves

2009-05-26T00:00:00.003+01:00

How many times has someone has asked you, as a non-believer (whatever it happens to be that you don't believe in), "Don't you believe in anything greater than yourself?" For me, the question most often comes up when I declare a naturalistic worldview. No god? No afterlife? Then what do you look to for hope and inspiration?

Today, I'm just going to offer a couple of items on one source of inspiration and hope from something greater than myself: the cosmos.

Even as a simple empirical matter, there are worlds beyond count, many grander than our own in their different ways. The image to the right is one example - click on it, enlarge it, try to get your head around the vast grandeur of everything that lies outside our little planetary cocoon (a cocoon that is itself much vaster and more beautiful than anything I or any human can claim credit for).

Or try this simple image. Some of you will recognize it. Some will know the phrase often associated with it: the Pale Blue Dot.

This is the last image of Earth taken by the Voyager probe, as it passed Saturn on its journey out of the Solar System.

Do I believe in anything greater than myself? Yes. In my boldest moments, I try to go beyond simply accepting the facts of astronomy as told in numbers. I try to take into the very centre of my self the understanding given by astronomers and scientists. To grasp the enormity of everything that exists, and to accept my humble place in this reality.

It is a difficult task for my limited, pragmatic ape brain. But I have the help of some great poet-scientists of yesterday and today. Here's one of them, Carl Sagan - the man we can thank for the Pale Blue Dot image - contemplating its meaning for us who live on that dot:

Photo credits:

Scale of the stars - source unknown. Link given by a member of the Friendly Atheist forum.

Pale Blue Dot - public domain, created by NASA. Via Wikimedia.

Support at the speed of light

2009-05-21T09:55:00.002+01:00

If you're ever feeling down and in need of an uplifting thought, try this science-inspired contemplation. It occurred to me yesterday as I was seeking consolation after a rather acute disappointment.

The Earth's gravity pulls on us to the tune of almost 10 m/s/s. In other words, if it were unopposed, every second it would accelerate us downwards 10 metres per second faster. But fortunately, we have a very supportive ground to keep us up. Remember Newton's third law of motion? Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. So that 10 m/s/s downward pull is counteracted by a 10 m/s/s supportive force holding us up.*

Now, imagine we had that 10 m/s/s support out in space, where there was no gravity to counteract it. How fast would you go?

Well, the speed of light is just shy of 300 million metres per second, so after 30 million seconds, one gravity of acceleration would get you to the speed of light.

And how long is 30 million seconds, you ask?

Just shy of a year: 353 days.

Think about that. Every year, the ground under you supports you with enough force to get you to the speed of light.

----------------

* For the pedants in my audience, yes, I know that force and acceleration are two different things. But for the purpose of this contemplation, the differences are immaterial, and to pedantically point them out would distract from the point of the contemplation.

Photo credits:
Earth photo from the Great Expectations blog, probably public domain.

Millennium Falcon cockpit at light speed from the Common Defense blog, almost certainly copyright Lucasfilm, fair use.

Unitarian Jihad

2009-05-19T00:00:00.001+01:00

I just wanted to give you all a heads-up about an under-reported threat to the state of the world today. An acquaintance of mine just sent me a link to this declaration by a group calling itself Unitarian Jihad.

Here is a sample, to give you an idea of the sort of flagrant extremism we may be facing:

Greetings to the Imprisoned Citizens of the United States. We are Unitarian Jihad. There is only God, unless there is more than one God. The vote of our God subcommittee is 10-8 in favor of one God, with two abstentions. Brother Flaming Sword of Moderation noted the possibility of there being no God at all, and his objection was noted with love by the secretary.

Follow the link to the full article if you think you can stomach it. The article was written four years ago. I think we only need to look at the recent political upheaval in the small* North American country known as the "Union of American States" to see that these threats were not idle, but are already being carried out. Beware!

Also, although this group may appear to be a splinter from the larger and more (officially) peace-loving Unitarian Universalist Association, readers are reminded that the symbol of that wider group is a burning flame (image on the right) - clearly a symbol of extremist ideology in sync with the content of the Unitarian Jihad's declaration.

* Geographically small, that is. Relative to its northern neighbour anyway.

Story behind the stories

2009-05-15T00:30:00.003+01:00

Here's one from the vault - a post I began, set aside, and forgot about. I thought you might find it interesting.

The folks over at the Dangerous Intersection blog posted an uncomfortable series of news stories. Here are the titles:

Father of two charged in child poisoning case

Principal drowns hundreds of grade-school students in school basement

Bush administration destroyed cancer research center and scattered the researchers

I'll leave it to your curiosity to read them and form your own reactions.

This isn't the sort of thing I would normally post - the stories aren't exactly Friendly. Observant readers of those articles will notice that they're not friendly on a couple of levels. But they are thought-provoking, and so I think they're worth sharing.

If anyone wants to explore or discuss these stories, their message, and their tone any further, the comment thread is open.

Novella on science

2009-05-12T00:00:00.002+01:00

I am always looking for good, concise ways to define science and to explain why it is key to a realistic understanding of the world around us. This recent post by Steve Novella on his blog, Neurologica, opens with a pretty good summation of science and the skeptical outlook that underlies it:

There are numerous ways in which thought processes go astray, leading us to false conclusions, even persistent delusions. Skepticism, as an intellectual endeavor, is the study of these mental pitfalls, for a thorough understanding of them is the best way to avoid them.

Science itself is a set of methods for avoiding or minimizing errors in observation, memory, and analysis. Our instincts cannot be trusted, so we need to keep them in check with objective outcome measures, systematic observation, and rigid control of variables. In fact bias has a way of creeping into any observation and exerting powerful if subtle effects, leading to the need to completely blind scientific experiments. Good scientists have learned not to trust even themselves.

For more skepticism and science from Steve and company, I enthusiastically recommend you check out the Skeptics Guide to the Universe. It is a fun and informative podcast that covers all sorts of cool and unusual topics - from current science to skeptical thinking to evaluating paranormal claims.

Dangerous lunatic cyclist ... wow!

2009-05-05T00:00:00.001+01:00

I commute by bicycle to work here in Edinburgh. It's an okay city for cycling. One of my biggest peeves is other cyclists who ignore the traffic rules, encouraging motorists to think that all cyclists are dangerous lunatics.

Well, Erich at Dangerous Intersection has just introduced me to a dangerous lunatic cyclist in this fair city whose antics are simply inspiring. Take a look:

(But notice that he's wearing a helmet.)

Postscript: I queued this post up several days in advance. Since then, the video has become quite well-known, and been picked up by media outlets that get more circulation than this blog. So apologies if this is old news to you.

Friendly Humanist

I'm moving

On moral obligation

Foundation Beyond Belief

In the company of woo

More on Free Will

Is Saint Andrew's Day controversial?

Why should humanists be in chaplaincy?

Cosmic Advent

Confession of a born essentialist

DIY spirituality

To what must we aspire, and why?

Defending Dawkins (2)

Homeopathy at Boots: an open letter

An Open Letter to Alliance Boots

Secular double entendre

Miscellaneous

Hero

On Friendliness and Humanism

Christians against sectarianism

Some science news

Campaign against sectarianism

Marc on temperance

The Power of a Great Story

Persuasion without communication?

Sectarian education in UK

Healthy newsreading

Not about gun licensing

A new descendent

We are animals

My definition: fundamentalist

Logic puzzles

A transitory Yes

I have an idea ...

Entitled to our own opinions

Ten random beliefs meme

Language rant by proxy

Atheists and Unitarians

Atheist blogroll

Saqib Ali - my new hero

Meditation on the origin of life

Defending Dawkins

Quote on love

Defending Christians

My definition: Christian

Blasphemy law in Finland!

WHO rejects homeopathy

﻿Positively unjust?

Talk Like a Pirate Day

Guest thoughts

Turing apology

Five influential female authors

Marc on opinion

Call for apology to Turing

Cosmic Calendar: Solar System forms

Religious rights: free speech and hate speech

For Deena

What does Blanchard teach us? (5 of 5)

Right or obligation?

Does Blanchard understand other religions? (4 of 5)

AFK

Radiolab

Does Blanchard understand humanism? (3 of 5)

My definition: atheist

Competing religious liberties

Does Blanchard understand evolution? (2 of 5)

Roleplay to a cleaner house

New blogger

Spinal Trap rebroadcast

Beware the spinal trap

Some practitioners claim it is a cure-all, but the research suggests chiropractic therapy has mixed results - and can even be lethal, says Simon Singh.

Signs

When ridicule is all an idea deserves

Does God Believe in Atheists? (1 of 5)

Science, skepticism, and chiropractors

Pagan police

Vanishing head video

What loss is death?

What do you know about Canada?

Ingersoll on doubt

Positively unjust?