Year: 2010

Michael Ruse is explaining about religion and morality now. It’s way deep.

Is there a place under the accommodationism canvas for the non-believer? I think there is for I aspire to be one such person. As…argued at length in my book Science and Spirituality: Making Room for Faith in the Age of Science, I believe that one can argue for all of modern science and yet agree that there are certain questions that science leaves unanswered: Why is there something rather than nothing? What is the ultimate ground of morality?

I believe that although one need not turn to religion — I am simply a skeptic on these sorts of questions — it is legitimate for the believer to offer answers.

What does he mean “legitimate”? It’s not a crime; the believer has a legal right to offer answers; but that doesn’t mean the answers are any good, or interesting, or well reasoned, or worth paying attention to.

“Legitimate” isn’t the right word, because it’s beside the point. Legitimacy is not the issue. The issue is why should anyone care what “the believer,” qua believer, “offers” on questions like why is there something rather than nothing and what is the ultimate ground of morality? The answers that religion “offers” to those questions are dogmatic and stupid and wrong, and thus they are worthless, so why does Ruse bother with this elaborate minuet of deference to them when he doesn’t buy them himself?

Who knows, and who cares, except that I have a heightened awareness of Ruse’s malice toward unapologetic atheists at the moment, so I feel like pointing out what pointless deepities he’s giving us here.

So let’s just make it a solipsism triple, and get it out of the way, shall we?

Michael Ruse, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, talking at first about the pressures on people who teach at religious colleges, but then, as usual, veering back to the real subject, which is the evilness of gnu atheists and their especial evilness toward him and his debonair indifference to that evilness toward him.

I hope very much that this will blow over.  I hope even more that if it does blow over it will not be with the understanding, implicit or explicit, that neither Schneider nor any other Calvin faculty member ever again try to reconcile science and religion.  These days it is not easy for those of us who argue that science and religion can live in harmony.  For my pains, I have been likened to Neville Chamberlain – the pusillanimous appeaser of Munich.

Aw. But don’t worry – he remains debonair.

Just last week, the editor of the British magazine the New Humanist, who argued for some modicum of accommodation, was called a quisling – after the Norwegian Nazi who supported the Germans in their Second World War occupation of his country.  But really, what does this matter to us?  I rather thrive on abuse.

Yeah yeah yeah, we know, but never mind you, this is about me.

No really, it is; I’m the perp! Amusing, don’t you think? Especially since that same editor of the New Humanist did not pause to boast of how he loves abuse, but instead simply asked me to write an article replying to his. Caspar is a good guy, and a lot less self-admiring than Michael Ruse (who no doubt loves to be told that he is self-admiring, and I’m always happy to oblige).

And while I’m in solipsistic vein, and besides I’m even later than usual, I will point out that B&W is another year older, and more. Last year I celebrated on the 16th of September, so I’m a whole entire calendar month late by that standard, and that standard was already late anyway, so I’m metaLate.

B&W is (more than) eight years old. That’s, like, 40 thousand years in butterfly time. B&W is older than the oldest Galápagos tortoise, older than the redwoods, older than the wingéd trilobites, older than bacteria, older than water, older than the sun.

But thanks to a healthy constitution, maintained by daily walks and a quart of wine every evening, and thanks to Josh Larios and Cam Larios, B&W survives and flourishes. Happy boitday.

Oh look, Radio Zamaneh has something about Does God Hate Women?

I’m not sure exactly what it has, because Google translate doesn’t seem to do Farsi very well, and I can’t make much of what it comes up with. But something is better than nothing, yeh?

Radio Zamaneh is based in Amsterdam and was (according to Wikipedia) set up by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs but operates independently. At any rate –

Radio Zamaneh was among a list of foreign organizations, including media outlets and human rights groups, which Iran’s Intelligence Ministry placed on a blacklist over their alleged role in fomenting the unrest that followed the disputed presidential election in June 2009.

Good on them.