What was that we were saying about certainty, and religion, and the Vatican? There just keeps on being more to say. There is for instance this lovely story about a Calgary bishop who announced that the Canadian Prime Minister’s eternal salvation is in jeopardy and that he could burn in hell. Oh well I suppose I could look on the bright side, couldn’t I. He didn’t say ‘The Prime Minister is definitely without question going to burn in hell,’ he said that he could. He said his salvation is in jeopardy, not that it’s already lost. Quite admirably flexible and latitudinarian, really! Or perhaps he is just (as we vulgar Yanks like to put it) covering his ass. Hedging … Read the rest

We’ve been talking about certainty…haven’t we? Oh yes, I remember, it was in the comments on Comments (Notes and) last week, the ones that got tragically swept away in the server mishap. But then in some sense B and W is always talking about things like certainty; about skepticism and doubt, relativism and foundations, truth and truth claims, accuracy and error, and how to know the difference. So I always pay extra attention when people talk about certainty. Mind you, that’s been true for years, since long before B and W was even a half-formed idea in its founder’s mind.

A rather frightening Tory politician by the name of Ann Widdecombe was on Start the Week the other day talking … Read the rest

How B and W does keep rising in the world. A couple of weeks ago we had our first plagiarist, and now we have our first mole. I’m very chuffed. A mole in the Open University, this is, who has discovered a little vein of woolly thinking there.

Students of the Open University current undergraduate course on Renaissance studies have to learn of “the occult sciences, and … their very great contribution to scientific developments in this period” – something which might raise the eyebrows of one or two scientist historians of science. But I think most scientists, and many philosophers, might question the assertion “natural magic is best thought of as an esoteric form of physics”. I did physics

There is a highly interesting article in the July Prospect on a subject that, not surprisingly, keeps recurring on B and W: the quarrelsome relationship between journalism and truth. We examined the issue via the tale of Jayson Blair and the New York Times, for example, and also the self-contradictions and one-eyed views of the Guardian.

It is, after all, an important matter, isn’t it. Journalism is of necessity where most of us get our knowledge of what’s going on in the world. Even the movers and shakers, even the people who make things go on in the world, get some of their knowledge from journalism, and the rest of us naturally get most or all of it there. What … Read the rest