All entries by this author

Rushdie on Today

Sep 1st, 2005 7:55 pm | By

I’ve transcribed some of that chat with Salman Rushdie on ‘Today’ last Monday, because he said several excellent things, worth preserving.

First he was asked his opinion of Muslim ‘leaders’…

Well for a start I’m not sure how much of a ‘leader’ these people are – it’s interesting – sort of a moot point about how many people actually follow them. But I think the mistake is to see these people as being somehow the voice of moderation. Sacranie and his deputy Banglawala have been very very vociferously hard-line on a range of issues for a long long time, and I think the Panorama programme kind of exposed that.

Then he said he wasn’t very confident that people like … Read the rest



Haack v Ruse

Sep 1st, 2005 7:17 pm | By

Another passage from Haack’s book that is relevant to Ruse’s argument.

The commitment to naturalism is not merely the expression of a kind of scientific imperialism; for supernatural explanations are as alien to detective work and history or to our everyday explanations of spoiled food or delayed buses as they are to physics or biology. And the reason is not that supernatural explanations are alien to science; not that they appeal to the intentions of an agent; not that they rely on unobservable causes. The fundamental difficulty (familiar from the central mystery of Cartesian dualism, how mental substance could interact with physical substance) is rather that by appealing to the intentions of an agent which, being immaterial, cannot put

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A Knife-edge

Sep 1st, 2005 6:16 pm | By

And here it is.

We take it for granted, you know, the comfortable safe manageable world we live in – those of us who do live in a world like that. That seems (to us) like the natural way of things, the normal state of affairs. In many parts of the world, normal life is more like the inside of the New Orleans Superdome, but we think normal life is less hot and crowded and smelly and unsafe and miserable than that. We think it’s normal to be able to get drinkable water and eatable food whenever we want them, to be able to take a shower and use a toilet whenever we need to, to have clean clothes, lights, … Read the rest



Eighteenth Century is a Portal to Postmodernism *

Sep 1st, 2005 | Filed by

No, really, it is.… Read the rest



FDA Official Quits Over Plan B Ruling *

Sep 1st, 2005 | Filed by

Said decision to delay approval of morning after pill not scientifically based.… Read the rest



FDA Official Quits Over Morning-after Pill Delay *

Sep 1st, 2005 | Filed by

Scientific and clinical evidence has been overruled by politics.… Read the rest



Teach the Right Controversy *

Sep 1st, 2005 | Filed by

ID a waste of time: evolutionary science is bountifully endowed with genuine controversy.… Read the rest



Updates from New Orleans Times-Picayune *

Sep 1st, 2005 | Filed by

On the scene.… Read the rest



Deeper Levels

Sep 1st, 2005 3:36 am | By

Susan Haack takes issue with Paul Davies in Defending Science – Within Reason.

In The Mind of God, Paul Davies, also a physicist, but a believer (and winner of the million-dollar Templeton prize ‘for progress in religion’) concludes that ‘belief in God is largely a matter of taste, to be judged by its explanatory value rather than logical compulsion. Personally I feel more comfortable with a deeper level of explanation than the laws of physics. Whether the use of “God” for that deeper level is appropriate is, of course, a matter of debate.’ This, from the idea that explanatoriness is just a matter of taste, through the play on ‘deeper,’ to the insouciance about the meaning of ‘God,’

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Telling the Truth About Polio

Sep 1st, 2005 1:40 am | By

More on the return of polio and why it has returned. Allen Esterson did some research and found this article at News-Medical.

Almost two years after radical Islamic preachers in Nigeria influenced parents against having their children vaccinated against polio for fear it was part of a U.S. plot against Muslims, a Nigerian strain of the virus that causes the crippling disease has occurred as far away as Indonesia. Many residents in Kano, northern Nigeria’s largest city still refuse to have their children vaccinated, not just against polio but against other childhood diseases such as measles. Mustafa Balarabe a 37-year-old father of four said his children wouldn’t be vaccinated, citing “the general Western plot against Muslims worldwide” as the

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Dodgy Ruse

Sep 1st, 2005 1:39 am | By

Michael Ruse is another. Funny, strange, puzzling; something like that. There’s this interview in Salon – which means you have to page through an irritating pictorial (therefore slow to load) ad to read it, which is why I hardly ever link to Salon, but there it is in case you want to read the whole thing. It’s about his latest book and the usual subject – ‘evolutionism’ is religion blah blah.

But he thinks evolutionists must purge themselves of reflexive anti-religious fervor, and acknowledge at least the potential validity of the classic Augustinian position that science and theology can never directly contradict one another, since science can only consider nature and God, by definition, is outside nature. Without this consciousness,

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UN Envoy Says US Harming Ugandan Aids Fight *

Aug 31st, 2005 | Filed by

Says Washington pressures Uganda to emphasize abstinence more than condoms.… Read the rest



Michael Ignatieff as Canadian PM? *

Aug 31st, 2005 | Filed by

Ignatieff returns to Toronto from Harvard to teach human rights.… Read the rest



Roger Scruton on Maurice Cowling *

Aug 31st, 2005 | Filed by

Irony as moral seriousness that would not allow itself the luxury of illusions.… Read the rest



Cass Sunstein on the Precautionary Principle *

Aug 31st, 2005 | Filed by

Status quo bias and the way emotion can overwhelm rational faculties.… Read the rest



Broken Levees Continue to Flood New Orleans *

Aug 31st, 2005 | Filed by

People stranded on roofs, shelters evacuated, roads closed, Biloxi devastated.… Read the rest



Nightmare in New Orleans *

Aug 31st, 2005 | Filed by

Waters rise, 80% of city underwater, break in levee on Lake Pontchartrain.… Read the rest



Polio and ‘Public Figures’

Aug 30th, 2005 8:12 pm | By

Here we have a media watch item. A rather strange one.

I noticed it late yesterday when I posted this item on the polio outbreak in Indonesia (dated today but I saw and posted it yesterday my time – today UK time). I noticed something missing that I was pretty sure I had seen in previous BBC articles on the subject – a paragraph on how the outbreak was thought to have started. Previous articles had, I thought, mentioned the fact that Muslim clerics in norther Nigeria had urged people not to get vaccinated (and not to vaccinate their children – with horrible results) because the vaccine was contaminated in a US plot. That item wasn’t in this latest article. … Read the rest



Can You Say ‘Average’?

Aug 30th, 2005 7:10 pm | By

Oh, come on, Beeb – can’t you write headlines better than that? “‘Men cleverer than women’ claim”? “Academics in the UK claim their research shows that men are more intelligent than women.”? Come on – pull your socks up, or get on your bike, or something.

A study to be published later this year in the British Journal of Psychology says that men are on average five points ahead on IQ tests.

Hello? That’s not the same thing as saying ‘men are more intelligent than women’? At all? Surely, surely, you know that, if you think about it for five seconds. Think of the stupidest man you know. Now think of the cleverest woman you know. Is he more … Read the rest



Enlightenment or Submission

Aug 30th, 2005 | By

Many people and groups have called (especially, for obvious reasons, recently) for the secularization of Islamic societies, for reform of Islam and Koranic laws, and for less attention and publicity for fundamentalist groups and putative ‘leaders’ and ‘representatives’ like the Muslim Council of Britain, and more for secular and rationalist groups and individuals.

Salman Rushdie for example:

However, this is the same [Iqbal] Sacranie who, in 1989, said that “Death is perhaps too easy” for the author of “The Satanic Verses.” Tony Blair’s decision to knight him and treat him as the acceptable face of “moderate,” “traditional” Islam is either a sign of his government’s penchant for religious appeasement or a demonstration of how limited Blair’s options really are…The

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