Author: Ophelia Benson

  • Pragna Patel on the Problem with Multifaithism

    At the heart of all fundamentalist movements is support for the patriarchal family.

  • The Mystical Fallacies of a Hero of the Right

    Hayek is not as rational and irrefutable as the right would have it. He is a romantic, a serious deficit in a social theorist.

  • Sleeper on Wieseltier on Amis

    Wieseltier’s review is preening and melodramatic, an opera bouffe of a literary attack.

  • Women’s Rights versus Religious Liberty

    They are in tension.

  • Parvin Ardalan Gets 2 Years Suspended Sentence

    For a demo demanding equal rights for women on divorce, inheritance and child custody.

  • Terry Sanderson on a Clash of Rights

    Those of gay people and those of religious people who want to discriminate against them.

  • Jesus and Mo Ponder the FLDS

    Mo is shocked, shocked.

  • How Forced Marriage Works

    She loved her parents, they didn’t beat her, but she gave in to the incessant pleadings.

  • Nussbaum on Philosophy and Shakespeare

    Also psychoanalysis and Shakespeare. Hmm.

  • Nick Bostrom Looks for the Great Filter

    Perhaps the Great Filter is a destructive tendency common to virtually all technological civilizations.

  • Carl Zimmer on Gene Networks

    The more scientists know about them, the more there is to find out.

  • Pretend Populists

    Bogus ‘anti-elitism’ is a weapon against liberal Democrats. How does that work?

  • NCSE’s ‘Expelled Exposed’

    Not a documentary; anti-science propaganda to create the appearance of controversy where there is none.

  • Oh the Horror: Obama is an Intellectual

    Well we can’t have that. Obviously the more ignorant a president is, the better.

  • God transcends, except when it doesn’t

    Our friend Chris Hedges was on Point of Inquiry last week, and his performance is being discussed at the CFI forum. I couldn’t resist joining in a couple of times – the latest time because of one of those ‘science has nothing to say about god because god transcends nature’ arguments, or pseudo-arguments. Those always annoy me. I thought I would share.

    I’m not seeing my error, I’m afraid. Christian dogma, at least, posits a god who exists outside of nature but who acts in time and space without inhabiting that time-space.

    Yup uh huh sure. A god who exists outside of nature but can meddle with it any old which way but it still exists outside of nature because that way believers always get to say (and say and say and say) that science can’t inquire into this god because this god (so conveniently) exists outside of nature. That’s called having it both ways. Or in the vernacular, cheating. God is magic and special and Outside so science can’t investigate it, no no, go away; but on the other hand god answers prayers, sends hurricanes to punish the wicked, loves us all, hates the sin (but not the sinner), etc etc etc.

    If (BIG if!) that’s true, then

    a. how is this god at direct odds with science?…and
    b. how would we ever use the tools for probing the physical world to investigate this mysterious god?

    Big if indeed. Why should anyone think that is true? And notice how very convenient ‘b’ is. Doesn’t that convenience make you a little suspicious? If not it ought to.

    Every time I hear one of the Big Atheists railing that God is antithetical to science, I scratch my head. I’m not arguing FOR a god—just that there can be no possibility of disproving something that exists outside of the only system we have. Not only can we neither prove nor disprove such a god’s existence, science itself has nothing to say on this subject.

    Well there’s no possibility of disproving anything; disproof is much too high a standard – and the ‘Big Atheists’ of course know that perfectly well. ‘Antithetical to science’ doesn’t mean ‘capable of being disproven.’ Of course we can neither prove nor disprove such a god’s existence (and, again, the ‘Big Atheists’ know that). But as for science having nothing to say on the subject – well that depends on your acceptance of the bizarre and (as I said) suspiciously convenient idea that god is outside nature but active inside it. I would say that that’s just plain impossible, frankly. Either you are outside nature or you’re not; you can’t be both. If god is outside nature we know absolutely nothing about ‘it’ – whatever it is. We certainly don’t know that it’s called ‘god’ or whether or not it created the universe. We know nothing, so there’s little point in talking about it. There’s especially little point in talking about it in a dogmatic way. Christian ‘dogma’ about an inside-outside god that disappears when science is in the room and comes back when it’s time to frighten sinners – is a pathetic evasive joke.

  • Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Irshad Manji

    One rejects Islam, the other wants to reform it.

  • Ben Goldacre on Manufacturing Doubt

    Note similarities between dissembling of food supplement industry and tobacco lobby’s war with epidemiology.

  • Ben Goldacre on ‘Pixie Dust’ Nonsense

    There is no missing finger, so pixie dust not needed.

  • The Miracle of the Finger

    ‘It looked to have been an ordinary fingertip injury with quite unremarkable healing. This is junk science.’

  • Charles Darwin Samples a Little Television

    It is clear what science is for: it is to help the police elucidate which American has killed which other American.