I’ve said more than once that I don’t have a firm opinion about who is more right (or wrong) in the dispute between the Center for Inquiry and its founder and former director Paul Kurtz. I still don’t, but one thing I do think is that when the dispute gets into a major media outlet, the reporting is incomplete.

I have an opportunity to rectify that a little, because I saw something Barry Karr said on Facebook this morning that clarified or expanded a couple of points. I got his permission to quote him, and asked two questions of my own. Karr is the Chief Financial Officer of CFI and Executive Director of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

Here is … Read the rest

Anthony Appiah says something in his review of Sam Harris’s The Moral Landscape that I don’t get – it looks wrong to me, but Appiah’s a philosopher and I’m not, so help me out here. Maybe he spoke in haste, or maybe a sub changed his wording, or maybe I’m just wrong.

Harris means to deny a thought often ascribed to David Hume, according to which there is a clear conceptual distinction between facts and values. Facts are susceptible of rational investigation; values, supposedly, not. But according to Harris, values, too, can be uncovered by science…

I thought the point was that facts can’t, as a matter of logic, get you to values. That doesn’t make values not susceptible of … Read the rest

To re-cap: we have The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion, edited by Peter Harrison, director of  The Ian Ramsey Centre for science and religion in the University of Oxford, a Templeton-funded outfit whose previous director won the Templeton Prize. Harrison says in his introduction that this Companion gives short shrift to the view that science and religion are in fact incompatible.

We also have a BBC article by Thomas Dixon saying, in a roundabout sort of way, that science and religion are compatible. Dixon wrote the Oxford University Press Science and Religion: a very short introduction. Under “About the author” on that page we learn that

Thomas Dixon is Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University

I was at the bookstore browsing for nothing in particular, and I spotted The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion and took it down for a look. There were other Cambridge Companions listed in the front and back, and they were all religious – which is not surprising, since I now see on the CUP site that it is in the series Cambridge Companions to Religion. Not Cambridge Companions to Science, but Cambridge Companions to Religion. Not Cambridge Companions to both religion and science, but Cambridge Companions to Religion – despite the fact that Science gets top billing in the title.

Well that seems to confirm an impression I’m always getting from this Sci&Relig stuff, which is that it’s … Read the rest

From Joe Hoffmann’s Three fewer things to say about atheism:

Just as not all atheists are humanists (and vice versa), atheists will differ about the role of the arts, and they will usually do so by asking a “utility” question: what are the arts good for? Does painting get you to the moon? Does poetry or theater improve life-expectancy? The answer to both questions is that a basketball scholarship will get you into Purdue, but not into Phi Beta Kappa.

Heh.… Read the rest

I have one or two more quibbles with Matthew Reisz’s diatribe about atheism and science.

The notion that religion is perniciously simple-minded and locked in an eternal fight with science has been powerfully argued by a number of atheist thinkers, many of them based in the academy, with the charge led by Richard Dawkins in his 2006 best-seller The God Delusion. But what counts as evidence for such a claim?

It’s not really reasonable to give a simplistic version of a “notion” that you claim has been argued by “a number” of people, “many” of whom are academics, and then demand what is the evidence for your own simplistic version of a putative notion that belongs to no … Read the rest

The audio of the Humanisterna seminar in Stockholm has been posted. The first part is pretty cringe-worthy – I find that my way of playing for time is not a Caroline Kennedy level of “you know”s (though I do say it now and then), but the simpler expedient of repeating most of my words two or three times. That’s intelligent.

Well what the hell, you know? You have to figure out how the sentence is going to end and you need time to do that, so rather than just fall silent for a few seconds, obviously it’s much better to say this this this and then proceed. Right? Sure.

But I had just put in 19 hours of travel, after … Read the rest