Why is it taking so long? There are relief supplies there, we’re told. Why can’t they get them to the convention center? I can see why it would be slow to take them to widely scattered areas – but they can’t even take them to the convention center?

Which has quite a few dead bodies in it now. Well – it will have a lot more in the morning. After four days with no water…

A reporter on ‘The World Tonight’ told us about an elderly man with diabetes who asked if he could buy some water from the reporter – and that there were a lot of requests like that. It’s just a nightmare.

Bush explained this morning that … Read the rest

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

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

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

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,’

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

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,