How does Jerry Coyne know, I don’t know, nobody knows, therefore God is just.
Author: Ophelia Benson
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Dawkins and Randi mourn Martin Gardner
He was immensely lively, and brimming with youthful intelligence and curiosity, right to the end.
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Phil Plait on Martin Gardner
‘Martin’s books showed me how to think around some problems, how to take that needed step to the side to see the solution.’
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Giberson to ‘new’ atheists: play nicely
Cites ‘the New Atheist Noise Machine,’ says ‘the New Atheists are behaving like a boorish bunch of intellectual bullies.’ Nice.
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David Colquhoun on the Integrated Health Trust
The advisory board of IHT consists almost entirely of supporters of various forms of alternative medicine.
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Those who can’t, give a “boot camp”
Hmm. I see where Chris Mooney says he is
giving a four hour “boot camp” on science communication to a group of graduate students and other interested parties. The session begins with an overview of the “theory” of science communication–why we must do it better, what the obstacles are, and how a changing media environment makes it much tougher…Then, the session goes into a media “how to”–rules for interacting with journalists, media do’s and don’ts, and an overview of various key communication “technologies,” such as framing.
Interesting, but one question that occurs to me right away is what makes anyone (including Mooney) think Mooney is the right person to teach anyone how to communicate? He’s strikingly bad at it himself. Really he is. Yes I know I’m not an impartial observer, but all the same – he is.
He could so easily have done a better job of “communicating” and “framing” last summer – he could have answered questions instead of ignoring them, he could have taken critics seriously instead of repeatedly trashing them, he could have admitted it when he absorbed other people’s arguments and began regurgitating them, he could have dropped the petulant whining about bloggers he dislikes in the national media. He could have said basically the same things (minus the trashing and whining) but done a better job of it – a less alienating job of it – a less piss everybody off job of it. But he didn’t. He just kept pouring more gasoline on the fire, instead. So in what sense is he an expert on “communication”? In what sense is he even good at it?
He does please the Templeton Foundation, of course, but then the Templeton Foundation is not what you’d call hard to please. They’ll lavish money on anybody who shouts that science and religion are best friends.
Update: link fixed! Sorry – was late in the day when I did this yesterday.
Update 2: Abbie has a very funny post on the subject, with a lot of very funny comments (which eventually become all-Pluto all the time, at which point I recommend ceasing to read).
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Timeless twoofs
Jerry Coyne points out this here Clergy Letter Project. It’s a thing where a bunch of clergy sign a letter saying science and religion can be compatible. Very useful in its way, no doubt, but it says some dubious things on the way there.
Many of the beloved stories found in the Bible – the Creation, Adam and Eve, Noah and the ark – convey timeless truths about God, human beings, and the proper relationship between Creator and creation expressed in the only form capable of transmitting these truths from generation to generation.
Oh really? What “timeless truths” does the beloved story about Noah and the ark convey? That there is a god watching human antics as if we were a bad movie? That we are so bad and disgusting that this god may decide to delete us all and start over, deleting all the other animals at the same time? And that then god will decide there is one righteous fella and decide to preserve him and his kids and a pair of each animal, and start over from them? What timeless truths does all that convey? That humans are horrible? That god is incompetent? That humans are horrible except for one righteous guy? Are those timeless truths? Are they truths at all? And is that story such a great way to convey them? Better than the Odyssey for instance? And as for Adam and Eve – we know what that teaches: that women are sly stupid disobedient bitches who ruin everything and drag men down with them.
And how can the bible or any other book convey any kind of truths about “the proper relationship between Creator and creation” when there is no “Creator” to have a proper relationship with? In other words that whole idea just begs the very question that is at issue, the compatibility of science and religion. The reason the two are not compatible is that science doesn’t assume the existence of a magical evidence-free “Creator” while religion does, so if you try to explain that the two are compatible by burbling about “timeless truths” about “the proper relationship between Creator and creation” then you’re arguing in a circle.
Religious truth is of a different order from scientific truth. Its purpose is not to convey scientific information but to transform hearts.
By starting from the assumption that there is a “Creator” and a “proper relationship” we should be having with it, which is a pair of claims about the real world that we live in, so it’s not as separate from science as the project wants to claim. Typical.
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Martin Gardner 1914-2010
For 35 years, he wrote Scientific American’s Mathematical Games column, educating and entertaining minds.
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Helios Homeopathic Childbirth Kit
A set of homeopathic remedies to support you during pregnancy, birth and breastfeeding, just £29.95.
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Ben Goldacre on evidence-based social policy
Politicians can divine which policy works best by using their special magic politician beam.
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Julian Baggini interviews Ben Goldacre
Goldacre has an MA in philosophy from King’s College London, squeezed into the middle of his six-year medical training.
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Jason Rosenhouse reviews Elaine Howard Ecklund
Her data show that 23% of scientists are traditionally religious; her Templeton-funded book says nearly 50% are.
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Larry Niven on Harvey Mansfield and manly courage
And the Templeton Foundation, virtue ethics, In Character, and other risible subjects.
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Lunchtime O’Jokes
Decca Aitkenhead’s article on Hitchens is very snide, but one suspects there is a good deal of truth in it. In particular I can’t help being amused by her portrayal of his sense of humor.
The march of time certainly hasn’t altered one thing about Hitchens, which is, alas, his unaccountable pleasure in word games of the most puerile variety. Page after page is devoted to the infinite hilarity derived by Amis, Rushdie, McEwan and Hitchens from substituting in the titles of well-known books, films and songs the word “dick” for “heart”, or “fuck” for “love”, or “cunt” for “man”.
“Oh, I know,” he chortles, when I bring this up. “Shameful.” He surely can’t still find these jokes funny, can he? “Oh yeah, I do. I sometimes wake up laughing at them. Yup. Never get bored of it.” And this from a man who once wrote that women weren’t funny.
Now, I can imagine a few of those being funny (except for the cunt part, but we’ve already found out that the word has a somewhat modified meaning in British English), but an infinite stream of them? Not so much. Endless repetition really isn’t all that funny, yet I do know some people who really think it is, and tirelessly engage in it. They’re all men. And they are all peculiarly (indeed, conceitedly) blind to humor in women. One shouldn’t generalize from one’s own narrow experience, but all the same, I find Aikenhead’s weary incredulity quite funny. I too have spotted what looks like a correlation between unfunny jokes in the self and inability to recognize funny jokes in the other – something that is more than just ‘I am funny and you are not’; it’s a peculiar kind of humor coupled with a peculiar kind of tin ear.
Still. To be fair, it’s hard to believe that that really applies to any of the males Aikenhead mentions, since they can be genuinely funny as well as boringly pseudofunny.
Still again…there is that pub joke of Hitchens’s…
Why does he say to the barmaid, “Put a Xerox in that” when he wants another drink? He’s meant to be an international sophisticate, not a home counties golf club bore.
“I think it’s rather ingenious.” He beams. “You don’t want to say, ‘Same again’, like everyone else. It works like a sonnet. It gets them every time.”
Hmmmm…
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Nigeria: Yerima questioned about marriage to child
The senator said the Nigerian Child Rights Act of 2003 “must have been enacted in error.”
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Rude but amusing interview with Hitchens
He once wrote that women aren’t funny, yet he’s convulsed by infantile word jokes.
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There are no new ethical problems here
Humanity has been ‘playing God’ with animals and plants since the invention of agriculture.
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Globalization
I quite understand, except for one thing – why did they hire a psychic in Bangalore? Are there no psychics in Lincolnshire? That seems most unikely. It’s a mystical sort of place, Lincs – it must be crawling with psychics.
Now I know what you’re going to say – they’re psychics – they don’t have to be on the spot – der. It’s spiritual. It’s not all grubbily of the earth earthy; it’s immaterial, it’s floaty, it’s non-geographical. The psychic could be on Pluto; it wouldn’t matter. Thought travels through space and time, it does not need bodies or proximity. I know. I get all that. But what about the convenience of the people who are stuck in Lincolnshire? Surely it would be easier for them to chat with a psychic who was right there than with one who was in a completely different time zone.
On the other hand, I suppose the thinking is that if you’re going to use a psychic you might as well use the best, and obviously the best psychics are all in India. Fair enough. Forget I said anything.