It seems unlikely that there is anyone in the Seattle area who reads me but doesn’t read Pharyngula, but just in case there is, PZ is in town (in Auburn actually) and we’re going to meet up at the Pike Place Brewery so that Pharyngulites can buy us a beer. Cam and Josh will be there I think. Come along.

Jerry Coyne has done a post on “Tom Johnson” and “Exhibit A” and the mythical rudeness and savagery and tendency to spit and kick of the mythical “New Atheists.”

The upshot is, Exhibit A never happened. It was a story. The guy who played the part of “Tom Johnson” made it up. He has apologized to Jerry via email, and says he will apologize to other people soon.

So that’s that. The “new atheists are evil and Exhibit A may have happened” crowd are wrong, and we can stop arguing about it.

There’s another thing.

“Tom Johnson” (hereafter “TJ”) remains anonymous, though his identity is apparently known by Mooney, Jean Kazez, and others.  For a few weeks I have known it as well, as I am friends with some of the principals in this case.  In return for my promise not to reveal TJ’s real name, I have been party to some of the details of the situation presented as “Exhibit A.” I have also questioned the other person who was supposedly involved in that “conservation event.”  I have spoken to TJ’s advisor (Johnson is a graduate student at a university in the South), and have learned more of the details from that person.  TJ has apologized to me by email for his actions, and says he will be apologizing to others soon.  His advisor and his university are looking at his actions to see if any formal academic transgressions occurred. [emphasis added]

He’s being held accountable, so we don’t need to hold him accountable. So that’s that. Excellent. I wanted him to be held accountable in some way, if only to make it more difficult or risky for him to do it again, but I did not want to out him. I wasn’t baying for blood; I wanted accountability for someone who called me a liar and a useless putrid twat. I do not think that makes me a medieval witch-hunter baying for blood. I’m glad we have that straight.

Exactly. If only more people realized this.

It’s a question of integrity. If I don’t agree with some of the church’s most central teachings that rule out – on a spectrum from abomination to sinful – contraception, abortion, sex before marriage, homosexual sex, divorce and women priests, then I really shouldn’t be a member.

Quite right, not least because your membership does its bit to endorse those central teachings. Membership is a kind of vote – passive, but nonetheless countable. If you think some of the church’s most central teachings are reactionary and hostile to women, then quite right, you shouldn’t cast your vote for them.

I haven’t practised since I made my Confirmation, yet my name is still on the membership register, the baptismal roll. The church can count on my apparent allegiance when quoting membership statistics to bolster its authority. It does so routinely when opposing legislative change. In Australia a quarter of the population identifies as Catholic, although only 15 per cent of that quarter attend Mass regularly. In Ireland about 43 per cent of the total population are churchgoers, with about 90 per cent of residents identifying as Catholic. Now, after the clerical child abuse scandals, I’ve had enough. Way too much. I want out.

Quite right. See if you can get Madeleine Bunting to go with you.

Salon has an amusing piece by Alex Pareene on what the pranks of Andrew Breitbart mean. First Pareene quotes Politico’s take on that:

Responsible people in power and in the mainstream media are only beginning to grapple with this new environment — in which facts hardly matter except as they can be used as weapon or shield in a nonstop ideological war. Do you dive into the next fact-lite partisan outrage — or do you stay out and risk looking slow, stupid or irrelevant? No one is close to figuring it out.

then points out

Actually, VandeHarris, lots of people figured this one out! It was really easy!

Does that remind you of anything? It reminds me of anything. Some things are not as difficult as some people make out. Obvious glaring fakes are not as hard to spot as some people claim.

Pareene points out a lot of things that made the story look fake to the most casual eye.

Real-life reporters are supposed to be baffled as to how to respond to this fact-lite outrage? Shouldn’t they have just found the full video, or interviewed Sherrod, like the Atlanta Journal-Constitution did? If you have to write about the latest Breitbart outrage RIGHT THIS SECOND, you write, “Bomb-throwing propagandist with history of disregard for factual accuracy posts race-baiting video intended to score political points against NAACP and black people in general.” It was a really easy story!

Yes, that does sound familiar.

Several people (some via email rather than comments) have pointed out this observation of Glenn Greenwald’s in a letter at Salon:

I think it’d be worth it to sue [Andrew Breitbart] just to uncover his “source” who did the editing. “Journalists” are supposed to expose their “sources” if they use the journalist to perpetrate a fraud.

Ignore the part about suing, that’s not the issue here. The issue is the implicit claim that a fraudulent “source” does not deserve or have a right to remain anonymous and the explicit claim that journalists are supposed to expose such sources when they (the sources) use the journalist to propagate the fraud. The above-mentioned people note that this means Chris Mooney, being a journalist, is supposed to expose his fraudulent “source” who used him to perpetrate a fraud.

That is an interesting point. It prompted me to take another look at those two (everlasting, wretched) “Tom Johnson” posts. Well yes – Mooney does help the fraud to perpetrate smears of Dawkins, PZ and Jerry Coyne.

In Counterproductive Attacks on Religion – Exhibit A “Tom Johnson” says

Many of my colleagues are fans of Dawkins, PZ, and their ilk and make a point AT CONSERVATION EVENTS to mock the religious to their face, shout forced laughter at them, and call them “stupid,” “ignorant” and the like…

In comment 10 on that post “Tom Johnson” corroborates his own story by saying it’s true:

Sorbet, I don’t doubt that you have NA friends who are not combative, but please don’t doubt that I have NA colleagues that are. For what it’s worth, I’m not exaggerating my case or making things up.

Well, it is, of course, worth nothing, and exaggerating and making things up are exactly what he was doing. He goes on, in his pleasant way:

…when I ask them about why they feel that they need to chastise the faithful when they’ve asked us to come help (trust me, we have heated discussions), they directly quote PZ Meyers, Jerry Coyne (especially), and Dawkins as why it should be a “good” scientist’s job these days to attack the faithful – no matter how moderate the faithful may be. I then get called a faithiest (thanks, Jerry Coyne) for NOT calling the religious ignorant and stupid.

So there you have it – a known fraud telling lies about people on the blog of a journalist, who is still protecting his identity. “Journalists” are supposed to expose their “sources” if they use the journalist to perpetrate a fraud.

On the second post, My Thanks to Tom Johnson, Mooney smeared a number of people:

Last week, the New Atheist comment machine targeted the following post, in which I republished a preexisting blog comment from a scientist named “Tom Johnson” (a psuedonym).

I’m part of that offensively-named “machine” because I did a post, not “targeting” the Tom Johnson post, but pointing out that it looked like bullshit and was the product of an anonymous source and that Mooney, as a journalist, should be more skeptical than that. I was right, and I did nothing wrong in expressing skepticism about “Tom Johnson,” but I was part of the smear based on the lies told by the fraudulent “source.” “Journalists” are supposed to expose their “sources” if they use the journalist to perpetrate a fraud.

Food for thought.

Martha Nussbaum starts her discussion of burqa bans with her version of the justification for the free exercise clause of the US Constitution and freedom of religion in general. It’s a rather sentimental picture.

Let’s start with an assumption that is widely shared: that all human beings are equal bearers of human dignity.  It is widely agreed that government must treat that dignity with equal respect.   But what is it to treat people with equal respect in areas touching on religious belief and observance?

We now add a further premise: that the faculty with which people search for life’s ultimate meaning — frequently called “conscience” ─  is a very important part of people, closely related to their dignity.

The problem with that as a justification for the free exercise clause and for freedom religious practice is that it’s so incomplete. Nussbaum is very very fond of talking about religion as the way “people search for life’s ultimate meaning,” but that’s far from being all that religion is, and Nussbaum’s presenting it that way is misleading, even obfuscatory. Religion is other things too, including a set of rules. A religious set of rules is often reactionary, and it is always “sacred,” which makes it less accountable to human ideas and wishes, and more difficult to change.

Religion is not just about the individual’s search for meaning; religion is social, and often demanding, or frankly coercive. The free exercise of religion often means the freedom to force subordinates to obey religious rules. Nussbaum makes the whole system sound a lot more benevolent than it can be assumed to be.

That’s especially obvious in the case of the burqa. The burqa is not really part of women’s “search for meaning” in the sense people like Nussbaum, and like me, understand it; it’s part of a system of rules forced on people by tradition and custom and authority. Yes it may be that some people “find meaning” by obeying such rules, but the truth is it doesn’t matter if they do or not; the rules are rules, and they have nothing to do with freedom.

Mona Eltahawy made a compelling point in a discussion of the burqa ban:

What really strikes me is that a lot of people say that they support a woman’s right to choose to wear a burqa because it’s her natural right. But I often tell them that what they’re doing is supporting an ideology that does not believe in a woman’s right to do anything. We’re talking about women who cannot travel alone, cannot drive, cannot even go into a hospital without a man with them. And yet there is basically one right that we are fighting for these women to have, and that is the right to cover their faces. To tell you the truth, I’m really outraged that people get into these huge fights and say that as a feminist you must support a women’s right to do this, because it’s basically the only kind of “right” that this ideology wants to give women. Otherwise they get nothing.

Well yes. That’s not a slam-dunk argument for state bans on wearing it, but it is at least part of the picture, which critics of the ban tend not to dwell on.

 I have met Muslim women who have a very elaborate explanation for why they wear the burqa — they say that women are candy or diamond rings or precious stones who have to be hidden away in order to appreciate their worth. And I’m appalled! We should talk about this because if we’re really going to discuss this as feminists, is that something a feminist should be defending? That a woman is a piece of candy?

………..A bowl of ice cream?

People are discussing the uses and abuses of irritation, or anger, or zeal, or dickishness, or baying for blood. This is prompted by a talk Phil Plait gave at The Amaz!ng Meeting a couple of weeks ago. He took an informal poll, Matt D tells us:

Let me ask you a question: how many of you here today used to believe in something — used to, past tense — whether it was flying saucers, psychic powers, religion, anything like that?…Not everyone is born a skeptic. A lot of you raised your hand. I’d even say most of you, from what I can tell.

Now let me ask you a second question: how many of you no longer believe in those things, and you became a skeptic, because somebody got in your face, screaming, and called you an idiot, brain-damaged, and a retard?

Not many hands. But as lots of people have pointed out…so what? Hardly anyone does get in people’s faces, screaming, and call them idiots, brain-damaged, retards. Many people do various things that are well short of that, some of which could be considered alienating to some; excessive; tactless; and so on. But that’s not a very exciting claim. Some people are tactless and alienating. Well yes, how true. And?

Stephanie Zvan notes that sometimes a blast of well-directed anger is exactly what’s needed.

a friend gave me Flim Flam. James Randi told me how people had lied to me under the guise of nonfiction, under the guise of science. He was, in fact, kind of a dick about it. That’s not a very nice book by any definition of the word. It uses name-calling. It sneers.

But oh, it was exactly what I needed. I needed it both for the information it gave me and for the anger and vitriol. Without Randi’s vitriol, I wouldn’t have been able to make the clean break in thinking that I did.

PZ says again that things aren’t as simple as mean bastards v wonderful nice people.

Everybody seems to imagine that if Granny says “Bless you!” after I sneeze, I punch her in the nose, and they’re all busy dichotomizing the skeptical community into the nice, helpful, sweet people who don’t rock the boat and the awful, horrible, bastards in hobnailed boots who stomp on small children in Sunday school. It’s just not right.

The awful, horrible, bastards in hobnailed boots who bay for blood and stomp on small children in Sunday school. Let’s have the complete picture here.

A Cardiff councillor

 is being investigated for allegedly breaching the code of conduct for local authority members which demands they “show respect and consideration for others”.

How? By calling Scientology stupid on Twitter. So showing respect and consideration for others means one is forbidden to call Scientology stupid? Why?

Are we allowed to call astrology stupid? Is it ok to call homeopathy stupid? Can we say belief in alien abductions is stupid?

In other words, does respect and consideration for others cash out to not calling any ideas or ideologies or religions or pseudo-sciences whatsoever “stupid” on the grounds that some people believe in them?

Mr Dixon said: “I don’t see why the Scientologists should have any greater protection from ridicule than I should have as a member of the Liberal Democrats. I can’t believe it has got this far.”

That’s just it. Why, indeed, should they? Just because they call themselves the Church of Scientology?

The Church of Scientology, whose followers include Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Kirstie Alley, is not recognised as a religion in Britain although it is in the United States.

However, in March last year the Crown Prosecution Service decided that anyone who attacks Scientology can be prosecuted under faith hate laws.

And “attack” of course is defined as “calls stupid” for the purposes of accusing someone of a crime under “faith hate laws.”

Hey, I’ll oblige. I hate “faith” – I hate the word and I hate the thing it nominates. I also hate “faiths”; I also think they’re mostly stupid.

I don’t work for Cardiff council though, so they probably won’t get around to me any time soon. But not for want of ignorant illiberal bedwetters who think people should be forbidden to call unreasonable beliefs stupid.

The complaint was made by John Wood, a member of the Church of Scientology, who lives near the Head Quarters in East Grinstead. He said: “People are free to say what they like but I felt that as a person in a position of public office that he had to be violating some kind of code of conduct.”

People are free to say what they like except they’re not if I can find some pretext to get them into trouble for saying what they like, and fortunately in this case I succeeded in finding one: the guy was violating some kind of code of conduct. So yaboosucks.

I’m getting very tired of this kind of crap. Of foam-at-the-mouth reactionaries faking videos for Fox “News” that get people shut down or fired. They did it with that video that was supposed to show an Acorn guy helping a prostitute and a pimp get gummint funding when in fact the uncut video shows him collecting information which he gave to the police as soon as they left. Now they’ve done it with another fake video that’s supposed to show Shirley Sherrod telling a Georgia chapter of the NAACP that she refused to help a farmer because he was white when in fact she did help him. Sherrod got pushed out of her job with the Department of Agriculture yesterday because some evil windbag called Andrew Breitbart posted the faked video on his pustulent website.

Poisonous. These people are poisonous. I’m sick of them.

Martha Nussbaum has been explaining why the burqa is not such a bad thing, as well as explaining why it shouldn’t be banned. She said one thing (in a long post. much of which I skimmed) that froze me in astonishment for a second.

Several readers made the comment that the burqa is objectionable because it portrays women as non-persons.    Is this plausible?  Isn’t our poetic tradition full of the trope that eyes are the windows of the soul?  And I think this is just right: contact with another person, as individual to individual, is made primarily through eyes, not nose or mouth.

Seriously? Contact with another person, as individual to individual, is made through the face – not through the eyes or the nose or the mouth, but the whole face. That’s why men don’t wear burqas: men want to be free to interact with people (that is, in this context, men) in the normal natural way. They also want to be free to breathe, eat, drink, hear, look around – they want to be free to do all the usual things one does with one’s face.

There’s something oddly typical about that ridiculous, sentimental claim. Nussbaum is brilliant, but she also has this strange blindness and tendency to sentimentalize. It could be that having a lot of New York Times readers commenting on her posts will teach her something.

The problem here is not just that state schools shouldn’t be fussing around with particular religions and their rules and fasts, though of course it is that. It’s also, frankly, that state schools (or for that matter any schools) shouldn’t be helping to implement rules and fasts that are fundamentally unhealthy and unsafe. It’s a really bad idea to forbid hydration for extended periods (such as dawn to dusk), so schools should at least abstain. They shouldn’t anxiously help religions to enforce stupid dangerous “rules” of that kind. That’s not their job, and it’s a dereliction of their responsibility for the students’ safety while on the premises.

Stoke-on-Trent City Council has issued an 11-page Ramadan guide for schools to help pupils who may be fasting when the school year starts in September.

It said swimming was acceptable to Muslims but posed a high risk of swallowing water that may break a fast.

Schools and city councils shouldn’t be conveying the idea that swallowing water is “a risk.” It’s bad enough that mosques impose that idea; secular institutions should not be helping them.

Ann Widdecombe explains it all to the New Statesman.

 Under the last government we saw a raft of law, principally equality law, which specifically set out to crush religious freedom and to crush freedom of conscience. There is an immense difference between being told that you must not discriminate against something and being told that you must promote it.

Like what, the NS asks. Poofters, of course. Poofter adoptions, poofters in your B&B. Half the population are non-believers, the NS says feebly; not a bit of it, says Widdecombe, most are Christians and what they say goes. No, really, the NS bleats; Widdecombe says not at all.

People may say they’re not religious, and when Richard Dawkins says he’s not religious he actually means it; so would Christopher Hitchens and Stephen Fry. But when people who are shrugging say they’re not religious, they mean they’re not attached to a particular church, they’re not practising at the moment. They may not necessarily mean that they discard the concept of God altogether.

Case closed! Three people really are not religious, but the others are all just shrugging, so we get to count them as believers. And yes, thank you, that does mean we get to force Christianity on everyone.

You can’t get away from the fact that our culture and our heritage is that way, and if we just deny it all and become nothing and everything we shall lose our character. That actually weakens a country: it can weaken a country very, very badly not to have a clearly defined character…So I think there are all manner of reasons for keeping the church at the centre of society, and the established Church in this country is Anglican.

So there. Take it or leave it, liberalism be damned.

And the pope was absolutely right to interfere with UK legislation.

The Vatican is a state, and we all have diplomatic relations with the Vatican. It’s not some isolated little cult somewhere, it represents 17.5 per cent of the world’s population. And that’s just the Catholics — there are all the other Christians on top of that.

It’s a state, god damn it! Plus it represents a lot of people. Plus there are all the Christians. Therefore, the pope is pretty much an honorary MP, and it’s just fine if he meddles with lawmaking in the UK.

And the child rape was only 2% of the priests, and teachers and plumbers and florists do it too.

And then there’s that pesky women question.

I left the Church of England because there was a huge bundle of straw. The ordination of women was the last straw, but it was only one of many. For years I had been disillusioned by the Church of England’s compromising on everything. The Catholic Church doesn’t care if something is unpopular. As far as the Catholic Church is concerned if it’s true it’s true, and if it’s false it’s false. The issue over women priests was not only that I think it’s theologically impossible to ordain women, it was the nature of the debate that was the damaging thing, because instead of the debate being “Is this theologically possible?” the debate was “If we don’t do this we won’t be acceptable to the outside world”. To me, that was an abdication of the Church’s role, which is to lead, not to follow.

There speaks the theocratic mind at its purest. It can’t even entertain the possibility that acceptability to what she calls the outside world, by which she means everybody who is not a priest, actually has something to do with morality and justice and equality, and that those are good things and priests should take them into account. No, to her that’s just whoring after popularity instead of buckling down and being dogmatic and authoritarian and keeping women Out.

This is not news, of course; it’s Ann Widdecombe, but it’s interesting…and it’s in the New Statesman. Make of that what you will.

Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl says it’s not that the church disrespects women. Oh fuck no, said the chair of the US bishops’ Committee on Doctrine, the church thinks women are just lovely.

Noting that women hold a variety of church leadership positions in parishes and dioceses, Archbishop Wuerl said, “The church’s gratitude toward women cannot be stated strongly enough.”

“Women offer unique insight, creative abilities and unstinting generosity at the very heart of the Catholic Church,” he said.

They have that there women’s intuition, and they’re so creative with the flowers and the packed lunches and the…the flowers, and the generosity just never quits, they give us all their money and a lot of the time they let us fuck their children. But. When all is said and done, you know, however insightful and creative and generous the dear little things are, they are after all still women. They’re soft in the head, and their crotches are all ew yuck, so they can make lunch all they like, but they can’t be priests. That’s fair. Plus it’s traditional.

But, the archbishop said, “the Catholic Church through its long and constant teaching holds that ordination has been, from the beginning, reserved to men, a fact which cannot be changed despite changing times.”

That’s unanswerable, I’m sure you’ll agree. Ordination has been from the beginning reserved to men, therefore, that is a fact which cannot be changed despite the fact that people have become slightly less stupid and narrow-minded and rigid than they were back at that beginning. No. Yes we realize that some things have changed since “the beginning,” it’s just that the maleness of the clergy isn’t one of them and isn’t going to be one of them.

You may wonder why. It’s like this. It has to do with the fitness of things. Men are better, and that’s why God is always called he, I mean He; if God were called she or She that would sound all weak and bubble-headed and wrong. It’s not that we don’t love you, it’s just that we think you’re not good enough. We love you to bits but you have to be subordinate to us and do what we say and not try to do jobs only we can do, like telling everybody not to use contraception and not to end pregnancies. If we let you share in the rule-making you might start to make rules that would suit you instead of us, and we don’t want that.

Michael Zimmerman of the Clergy Letter Project is annoyed at (wait for it) “New Atheists.” He says members of the project have been “relentlessly attacked by “New Atheists.”

The crux of these attacks seems to take two forms. In the first, clergy members are ridiculed simply for having religious faith. In the second, supposedly intelligent people pretend they are unable to distinguish these clergy members from the fundamentalists…

He doesn’t quote or name or link to any “New Atheists” doing this, so it’s hard to know if his description is accurate, but in any case…he seems to have the usual, and socially conventional, blind spot about “religious faith.” He seems, in other words, to be blind to the fact that to people who don’t have it, “religious faith” and fundamentalism aren’t all that different. To non-believers, the important difference is between religious belief and its absence, not degrees of fundamentalism.

Yet another smug unthinking cliché-filled diatribe about zealous fundamentalist literalist evangelist atheism, this time from Reza Aslan. It’s as original as the other nine million.

The parallels with religious fundamentalism are obvious and startling: the conviction that they are in sole possession of truth (scientific or otherwise), the troubling lack of tolerance for the views of their critics (Dawkins has compared creationists to Holocaust deniers), the insistence on a literalist reading of scripture (more literalist, in fact, than one finds among most religious fundamentalists), the simplistic reductionism of the religious phenomenon, and, perhaps most bizarrely, their overwhelming sense of siege: the belief that they have been oppressed and marginalized by Western societies…

He says, in the very act of marginalizing them himself. Gee, why would we believe we have been marginalized, just because there’s a steady stream of mendacious vituperative horseshit directed at us by hacks like this?

This is not the philosophical atheism of Feuerbach or Marx, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche (I am not the first to think that the new atheists give atheism a bad name).

Ah, well spotted; you’re not the first to think any of this, sport; you’re not the hundredth to think of it; you’re the latest of a long, long line. You’re recycling. You’re recycling and marginalizing at the same time. You should be embarrassed.

What the new atheists do not do, and what makes them so much like the religious fundamentalists they abhor, is admit that all metaphysical claims–be they about the possibility of a transcendent presence in the universe or the birth of the incarnate God on earth–are ultimately unknowable and, perhaps, beyond the purview of science.

Yes they do. They don’t stop there, they don’t treat that as a reason to believe all metaphysical claims, but they do admit exactly what you say they don’t. Nice job.

Well the Washington Post has a “faith” column, and it has to fill it somehow.

Alan Cowell in the New York Times spots a connection between the Bishop of Bruges and Roman Polanski. They both fiddled with children and they have both escaped the long arm of the law.

That question seemed likely to be asked more searchingly this week after the Vatican issued new rules about the handling of priestly abuse, listing pedophilia in a catalog of other supposed grave crimes including “the attempted ordination of women.”

“What I did, supporting the ordination of women, they saw as a serious crime,” said the Rev. Roy Bourgeois, an American priest excommunicated less than two months after he participated in a ceremony ordaining women. “But priests who were abusing children, they did not see as a crime. What does that say?”

That they really really really think women are Not Good Enough. Other things too, but that’s a biggy.

“The many artists and intellectuals who haughtily dismissed what Polanski had done on the basis of his talent and achievement” were thinking of his films, Richard Cohen wrote for The Washington Post. “They should have thought of their own daughters.”

Well maybe they too really really think women are Not Good Enough. Maybe they think that partly because of the relentless pressure of the “great” monotheisms. Maybe they just do think that a male artist matters more than a female age 13. They probably don’t realize they think that, but that doesn’t mean they don’t think it, in a buried kind of way.

This is nice: Ben Nelson has joined Talking Philosophy. He has a post on Realisms, the first of a series. It has only three comments, the first two just introductions and the last just rude. Go comment, get him started. I would, but I’m not allowed, because I’m so eeeeeeevil, so you do it.

Actually even if I could comment I wouldn’t have anything of interest to say, because I don’t know enough. Ben’s clever. Go sharpen your wits on him.

I’ve been commenting on that thread at CFI. The moderators want it to go away, but I think they shouldn’t want that, because the underlying issues are entirely relevant to CFI. They think it’s all personal, but it isn’t. It really isn’t. The truth is I don’t care about Chris Mooney as a person at all. Of course I don’t. I care about what he’s saying and doing; I care about the ideas and their consequences. It’s not personal. (I admit it seems personal, while it’s going on, but when I think about it, I realize it isn’t, at all.)

So here’s some of what I said.

He has still never explained what he thinks Jerry Coyne should have done differently, and by extension, what everyone should do differently.

It’s an important question, especially for people who are fans of inquiry. It’s an important question for anyone who reviews books about religion or religion-and-science or related subjects. I, for instance, wrote a review of such a book for the April/May edition of Free Inquiry. I thought it was a pretty bad book, and I said so. If I had been following Chris Mooney’s advice, presumably I would have done something else – but even if I had wanted to follow his advice, I wouldn’t have known exactly what it was. Pretend I thought the book was good? Refuse the invitation to review it in case I thought it was bad? Decide not to review it after all once I had read it, because I thought it was bad? I don’t know.

Mooney could answer that question right now. He could answer it here, where he is among friends – he works for CFI. It really is a question worth answering. He wants us – us “new” atheists – to be more civil, but he won’t explain exactly what he means by that. I don’t see why not. I also think the unwillingness is an uncomfortable fit with support for free inquiry.

I’m back. Well, I do think that. I also – still, after all this – think it’s odd that CM doesn’t think that. I still think it’s odd that he’s comfortable with this level of silencing and stonewalling, given his other commitments.

Mark Vernon explains that John Polkinghorne is not a god of the gaps theist-scientist. He’s a nature is underdetermined theist-scientist. That’s much more sensible, apparently.

…there is a possibility of giving an account of divine action within nature, which is compatible with science. It relies neither upon a God who intervenes outside the usual play of nature, nor seeks low-level causal gaps. Rather, God’s action could be viewed as analogous to top-down, emergent causation – particularly when it implies signs of purpose or intentionality.

He doesn’t explain why “God” is the right name for top-down, emergent causation, or how one is to reconcile that with the familiar “God” of the people who pray to it, but never mind – it’s all worthwhile, because it introduces us to the Ian Ramsey Centre for science and religion in the University of Oxford. I didn’t know there was such a place, and now I do. Guess who has given it money? I bet you can’t.

The Ian Ramsey Centre is part of the Theology Faculty in the University of Oxford. It has the special aim of promoting high quality teaching and research in the exciting field of science and religion. Within the University the Centre runs a regular seminar series, bringing scientists, philosophers and theologians together to explore interests they have in common. The seminars are open to students and informed members of the public. In addition, the Centre sponsors regional conferences to encourage new networks through which connections between theology and the sciences can be explored. International workshops are organised to enhance the quality of courses on science and religion that are taught worldwide.

See, there’s another outfit with global reach.