It occurs to me that Sam Harris could have helped his case if he had stated his core claim more fully from the outset. His core claim omits the very thing that makes morality non-obvious and disputatious*.

His core claim is

For those unfamiliar with my book, here is my argument in brief:

Morality and values depend on the existence of conscious minds – and specifically on the fact that such minds can experience various forms of well-being and suffering in this universe. Conscious minds and their states are natural phenomena, of course, fully constrained by the laws of Nature (whatever these turn out to be in the end).

Therefore, there must be right and wrong answers to questions of

Poor Ireland, it must be so disconcerting.

The phenomenal economic boom over the past two decades, and the secularization that came along with it, allowed Ireland to think it was no longer what it once was: a backward land dominated and shaped by the Roman Catholic Church. But as the economy has crashed, the Irish have come face to face with their earlier selves, and with a church-state relationship that was and in many ways still is, as quite a few people in the country see it, perversely antimodern.

It’s perhaps similar to being suddenly transported from a cosmopolitan liberal coastal city to a parochial conservative religious town in the hinterland.

Only worse.

As secularism advanced in other parts

Alex Davenport went to the Science Museum (the one in South Kensington, you know), and found the 5th floor devoted to quackery.

It matters because the SM is supposed to promote science and understanding, not fuel an ever increasingly tiresome debate between those that painstakingly research and collect data and those that appear to pick any old idea then try to convince people it works.

That’s what I would have thought.

The homeopathy stand tells the case study of a girl who had allergies from the age of 3-5 (what are these allergies?) and they say that she was cured by homeopaths.  That’s right, they categorically state that homeopathy helped her.

Yikes.

A museum staffer did a blog … Read the rest

Does Mary Midgley give Richard Dawkins a percentage? She certainly should. She’s making a full-time career of telling him to stop doing things he doesn’t do.

Midgley’s new book continues her many years of taking neo-Darwinists to task because, she says, they distort the legacy of the great English naturalist who inspired them.

Yes, many years. Many, many years. More than thirty of the bastards. She was told she had it all wrong the same number of years ago, but her new book continues the same old bullshit she was told was all wrong all those years ago. I’d say she owes Richard a cut.

And what’s this crap about “distorting” Darwin’s “legacy,” anyway? Does she think Darwin wrote … Read the rest