Author: Ophelia Benson

  • The modes of inquiry are, to be sure, very different

    The World Science Festival is offering a “Faith and Science” panel, funded by the Templeton Foundation, of course. Chad Orzel disagrees with Jerry Coyne and Sean Carroll on the wrong-headedness of this. Sean points out

    there is a somewhat obvious omission of a certain viewpoint: those of us who think that science and religion are not compatible. And there are a lot of us! Also, we’re right. A panel like this does a true disservice to people who are curious about these questions and could benefit from a rigorous airing of the issues, rather than a whitewash where everyone mumbles pleasantly about how we should all just get along.

    To which Orzel responds

    I’m not convinced you need anyone on the panel to make the case that science and religion are fundamentally incompatible…The interesting subject of conversation is not so much the absolute compatibility or not of science and religion– given that neither side is really going to budge on that– but rather how it is that religious scientists reconcile the supposedly incompatible sides of the issue.

    He doesn’t know that “neither side is really going to budge on that” and therefore he doesn’t really know that a discussion of it would be immovable and uninteresting. It’s true that it’s unlikely that either side will budge as a side and as a result of being on the panel, but what individuals including those attending the panel will do is much less obvious. His dismissal is, as so often with accommodationists, flippant and dogmatic at once.

    Josh Rosenau thinks it’s good stuff though – in fact better than that: he says Orzel is absolutely right.

    Someone like Dawkins would stop the World Science Festival panel cold. The whole point Affirmative Atheists are making is that there is no dialogue to be had. Which means that the panel would descend into a metaconversation about whether there should even be conversations like the one they were supposed to be having. And that wouldn’t inform anyone.

    Why wouldn’t that inform anyone? Rosenau doesn’t say. Why should there be conversations like the one they were supposed to be having at a science fest? It’s certainly not obvious to me, given that science and “faith” operate in rather different ways. It’s also not obvious to me that, or why, an explanation of that fact would not be interesting.

    Larry Moran comments on Orzel and Rosenau.

  • Look out! Another slippery slope!

    Privacy and health concerns, moral or religious convictions, sensitivity training, indoctrinate, myths of the homosexual movement.

  • Saudi woman bravely resists reform

    Started campaign “My Guardian Knows What’s Best for Me.”

  • Slippery slope! Watch out!

    Disability campaigner wants to impose her unreasonable fears on everyone.

  • ASA rules against church miracle cure claims

    We noted that the ad stated “… I have seen the dead raised and I have witnessed nearly all types of healing miracles.”

  • An extended chat with Hitchens

    ‘There are all kinds of stupid people that annoy me but what annoys me most is a lazy argument.’

  • Nazia Quazi is free at last

    Canadian was held in Saudi Arabia for three years by her father under ‘guardian laws.’

  • Brazil proposes ‘fetal rights’ bill

    Next up: bill of rights for ovaries.

  • Taliban attacks peace jirga

    Burka-clad suicide-bomb attackers, rocket grenade launchers, no peace please we’re jihadists.

  • Don’t mess with the Vatican

    Okay, I give up – why is the Obama administration siding with the Vatican against people who think it should be accountable for its many crimes?

    Faced with a number of court cases in the United States that have named the pope himself as a defendant in the enabling and covering up of many rapes, the Vatican has evolved the strategy of claiming that the Holy See is in effect a sovereign state and thus possessed of immunity from prosecution. It has now been announced that the Obama administration will be advising the Supreme Court to adopt this view of the matter.

    Why? What’s the thinking? Why should a church be declared a sovereign state? Why especially should the Obama admin be taking that view at the very time when there is a push to prosecute that church for protecting child-rapists for decades?

    [T]he State Department is required by Congress to make an annual report on the human rights record of every government with which we have relations. Yet there is no annual human rights report on the Vatican—or Vatican City or the Holy See, if you prefer. When questioned on this rather glaring lacuna, officials at Foggy Bottom say that for human rights purposes, the Vatican is not a state.

    So it gets to be a state when that is convenient for it, and it gets to be not a state when that is convenient for it. Why? Why is the catholic church alone among religious outfits given such special privileges? Why is the rule of law not more important than the Vatican’s desire to escape any form of accountability for its cowardly self-regarding cruelty-perpetuating actions?

  • Obama administration sides with the Vatican

    In its claim to be a sovereign state and thus immune from prosecution.

  • Another bit of postmodernist irony from the Vatican

    You have to admire the Vatican for sheer effrontery. Which archbishops did it choose to send on an ‘apostolic visit’ to Ireland to look into the way Catholic priests and nuns have been tormenting Irish children for generations? Why, Cormac Murphy-O’Connor, who decided

    in 1985, when he was bishop of Arundel and Brighton, to move the priest Fr Michael Hill to a chaplaincy at Gatwick airport. Eighteen months previously the cardinal had removed Hill from ministry because of child abuse allegations but then allowed him back to work at the airport where Hill abused a child. Hill was jailed in 2002.

    And Seán O’Malley:

    in his diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, the district attorney in 2002 was so disturbed at Cardinal O’Malley’s failure to inform the public of sexual offenders that he himself went public with a list of names of accused priests.

    And Timothy Dolan, who

    let a priest sue his accuser in St Louis and fought against reforming Wisconsin child sex abuse laws.

    Dolan is also the fella who wrote that nauseating self-pitying “they do it too!” blog post last March, the one that showed with such piercing clarity that church officials are incapable of even perceiving the wrong they have done to other people, much less giving a shit about it.

    And these three mafiosi are the enforcers the Vatican has picked to go to Ireland and look into the matter. It simply boggles the mind.

  • Socialist Unity throws a ‘Stop Islamophobia’ bash

    The usual fun crowd – Moazzam Begg, Lindsey German, Robert Lambert, Seumas Milne, Salma Yaqoob…

  • Abuse groups not thrilled about ‘apostolic visitors’

    They believe the child protection records of Murphy-O’Connor, O’Malley and Dolan disqualify them.

  • What’s so bad about missionaries?

    My take on the Comment is Free belief question.

  • Nothing decisive to say

    Ayala does the NOMA dance.

    Outside the world of nature, however, science has no authority, no statements to make, no business whatsoever taking one position or another. Science has nothing decisive to say about values, whether economic, aesthetic or moral; nothing to say about the meaning of life or its purpose.

    Notice how quickly he moves from an emphatic absolute in the first sentence – no business whatsoever – to a qualified one in the second – nothing decisive to say. As Susan Haack says, there’s the bit where he says it and the bit where he takes it back. Science may have nothing decisive to say about values, but that’s not the same thing as having nothing to say at all, and of course science has a lot to contribute to inquiry into values economic, aesthetic and moral. (No, it’s not clear what he means by economic values, but never mind.)

    Science has nothing to say, either, about religious beliefs, except when these beliefs transcend the proper scope of religion and make assertions about the natural world that contradict scientific knowledge.

    But those beliefs nearly always do, of course. Ayala wants us to think that god-talk is not about the natural world, but of course it is unless the god is so Elsewhere that it makes no difference to anything (and nobody knows its name is god).

    People of faith need not be troubled that science is materialistic. The materialism of science asserts its limits, not its universality. The methods and scope of science remain within the world of matter. It cannot make assertions beyond that world.

    Whereas ‘people of faith’ can, because they have permission to just make stuff up? Okay…if that’s what you want.

    Religion concerns the meaning and purpose of the world and human life, the proper relation of people to their Creator and to each other, the moral values that inspire and govern their lives.

    See? There he goes – that’s an assertion about the natural world. If we have a ‘Creator’ then it created us, and that makes it part of the natural world. It can’t be radically separate from the natural world but still create something that is thoroughly embedded in the natural world. What would it do? Mail the blueprint from wherever it is to some agent in the natural world? But even then it would at some point come into contact with the natural world; if it didn’t the mail would never get picked up.

    But of course Ayala won the enormous bulging Templeton Prize, and I did not, so he must be right

  • Defining ‘badness’

    Robert Lambert and Jonathan Githens-Mazer tell worried Guardian readers about “Islamophobia and anti-Muslim violence” as if they’re roughly the same thing rather than being very different things. Dislike of a belief-system is a very different thing from violence against people.

    [M]embers of the EDL are echoing sentiments about Muslims they have adopted from sections of the mainstream media and the BNP. It is no coincidence that Nick Griffin has been peddling exactly the same hatred towards Muslims for the last decade. Similarly, a cursory examination of the records of Islamophobia Watch over the last five years provides a sense of the extent of Islamophobia in the mainstream media.

    Islamophobia Watch! As if that were a respectable and reliable source! Bob Pitt notoriously sees any kind of disagreement with or criticism of Islam or Islamism as hatred of Muslims, which he labels “Islamophobia” as if that word meant hatred of Muslims, thus helping the MCB and the other “leaders of the Muslim community” to treat Islam and Muslims as interchangeable – yet here are two academics citing Pitt’s vicious blog as if it were an impartial record.

    [W]e find a long list of politicians who have sought to define and embrace “good Muslims” while attacking “bad Muslims”. If these “bad Muslims” were limited to the al-Qaida inspired terrorists who bombed London on 7/7 and the extremist members of al-Muhajiroun it might at least be an accurate categorisation. Instead, the concept of “bad Muslim” has come to demonise thousands of ordinary Muslims who do not wish to compromise their religious or political principles.

    In other words, the only “badness” is bombing; anything short of bombing is not badness, it is “ordinary Muslims” (which should be understood to mean Muslim men, but of course they don’t say that) not wanting to compromise their religious or political principles. Not wanting to compromise their religious or political principles, of course, means not wanting to stop taking their daughters out of school and forcing them to marry older cousins; it means wanting to go on forcing women to wear hijab, to kill them if they go out with the “wrong” man or get a job or go to university or otherwise act like independent human beings. That kind of thing, because it is not bombing, must not be called badness, and Muslims (Muslim men) who go in for it must not be considered “bad.”

    In other words Lambert and Githens-Mazer are perfectly happy for Muslim women to have no rights, and they dress this up as generous protectiveness toward “Muslims.”

    We’ve encountered them before. Lambert is a former cop; he headed the Muslim Contact Unit in the Metropolitan Police; he did lots of reaching out to “the leaders” of “the Muslim community” via the MCB and similar all-male Islamist organizations. Then he went off to get a PhD.

    I did a comment on their post:

    It sounds grand and brave to talk of not wishing “to compromise their religious or political principles,” but in reality not all religious or political principles are good or desirable or fair to others. Some religious or political principles stink. Fascist principles stink, and so do Islamist principles.

    This sly evasive paltering with words is contemptible. Lambert and Githens-Mazer should at least have the decency to spell out what it is they’re defending. They cite, of all things, IslamophobiaWatch as evidence of hatred of Muslims; IslamophobiaWatch notoriously treats all criticism of Islam as “Islamophobia” as if there simply cannot be such a thing as reasoned criticism of Islam.

    Bad Guardian. Bad newspaper. No cookie.

  • Checking the compass

    Thomas Jones says in the Telegraph (reviewing Hitchens’s memoir):

    The drift from left to right is hardly unusual, and the causes for his disillusionment with socialism and attraction to liberalism – the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, visits to Cuba and Poland under Communism, the pleasures and freedoms of life in the United States – are made plain enough.

    I’m not sure that really is a move (or drift) from left to right. That would make displeasure and unfreedom left, and I don’t think that’s accurate. I know, the idea is more that some coercion is worth the price for the sake of more pleasure and freedom (or more something) for everyone, and that does describe part of the left. But still – the right is the party of tradition, and authority, and custom, and religion, and monarchy, and hierarchy. Let’s not forget that. The right is not necessarily or always the party of freedom. In some ways, and not trivial or obscure ones, liberalism is to the left of coercive brands of socialism. Let’s not be “framing” liberalism as right-wing or support for liberalism a move to the right.

  • The Telegraph reviews Hitch-22

    His opinions are deeply felt and fiercely expressed but only dimly thought through.

  • Did humans evolve to fill a ‘cognitive niche’?

    We need more evidence, of a kind we can’t ethically get.