Category: Notes and Comment Blog

The US Catholic church is giving the gnu atheists support for their claim that science and religion are not epistemically compatible. Very obliging and civil of them, I must say.

There are only a handful of priests in the country trained as exorcists, but they say they are overwhelmed with requests from people who fear they are possessed by the Devil.

Now, American bishops are holding a conference on Friday and Saturday to prepare more priests and bishops to respond to the demand. The purpose is not necessarily to revive the practice, the organizers say, but to help Catholic clergy members learn how to distinguish who really needs an exorcism from who really needs a psychiatrist, or perhaps some pastoral care.

So they are operating on the assumption that some people really do need an exorcism, and that there are reliable repeatable teachable ways to distinguish between those people and lunatics. Right. Well this is our point, isn’t it – there is no evidence that anyone “really needs” an exorcism, but the Catholic church thinks that some people do, all the same.

“Not everyone who thinks they need an exorcism actually does need one,” said Bishop Thomas J. Paprocki of Springfield, Ill., who organized the conference. “It’s only used in those cases where the Devil is involved in an extraordinary sort of way in terms of actually being in possession of the person.

“But it’s rare, it’s extraordinary, so the use of exorcism is also rare and extraordinary,” he said. “But we have to be prepared.”

Thank you Bishop Paprocki for spelling it out some more. The bishop is telling us that (according to his religious belief) there is an entity called “the Devil” and the Devil (however rarely and extraordinarily) can be “in possession” of a person, by which is meant can magically inhabit a person and make the person do things. This is a pre-scientific belief. There is no evidence of the existence of an entity that fits the description of “the Devil,” or of anyone inhabiting another person and making the person do things. It’s a magical story, yet here is the modern church taking it seriously and holding conferences on how to spot it.

“What they’re trying to do in restoring exorcisms,” said Dr. Appleby, a longtime observer of the bishops, “is to strengthen and enhance what seems to be lost in the church, which is the sense that the church is not like any other institution. It is supernatural, and the key players in that are the hierarchy and the priests who can be given the faculties of exorcism.

“It’s a strategy for saying: ‘We are not the Federal Reserve, and we are not the World Council of Churches. We deal with angels and demons.’ ”

“People are talking about, are we taking two steps back?” Father Vega said. “My first reaction when I heard about the exorcism conference was, this is another of those trappings we’ve pulled out of the past.” But he said that there could eventually be a rising demand for exorcism because of the influx of Hispanic and African Catholics to the United States. People from those cultures, he said, are more attuned to the experience of the supernatural.

There are a couple of indignant people replying to my and others’ comments on Charles Freeman’s reply to James Hannam at the New Humanist. They are indignant about my claims about the Templeton connections and possible agenda of some of the historians who write about Science ‘n’ Religion. One uses the pseudonym “Thiudareiks,” which is Theodoric in Saxon or Old German or something, so I don’t know anything about that one. But the other is one Humphrey Clarke, who…

has a long admiring review of the very book at issue at a blog called Quodlibeta, or Bede’s Journal. Who else blogs there? Why…

James Hannam, that’s who. So far Humphrey Clarke hasn’t bothered mentioning that fact. Ho hum.

Is Indonesia a beacon of free speech and open discussion? Not exactly.

…just seven months ago, Indonesia’s highest court issued a landmark ruling widely considered to be a major setback to speech and religious rights. The Constitutional Court upheld the constitutionality of Indonesia’s Blasphemy Act, which criminalizes speech or acts considered offensive to government-approved religions as well as “deviations from teachings of religion considered fundamental by scholars of the relevant religion.”

So if someone should say that Mohammed was actually a very liberal feminist kind of guy who never said that women should be beaten for disobedience…that would be a crime in Indonesia? Interesting.

The Blasphemy Act provides for both civil and criminal penalties for those who insult approved religions and those who attempt to persuade others to adhere to unofficial religions. This translates into a de facto ban on proselytizing that lends itself to overly broad and arbitrary interpretations by local governments. For example, in September 2005, three Christian women were sentenced to three years imprisonment for conducting a Christian youth program, even though the Muslim children in the program had parental permission to attend, and none of the children had converted to Christianity.

I wonder what happened to the parents who signed those permission slips.

Charles Freeman on a crucial moment in history (from The Closing of the Western Mind):

In January 381 Theodosius issued an imperial decree declaring the doctrine of the Trinity orthodox and expelling Homoeans and Arians from their churches…

This council, together with the imperial edicts which accompanied it, was the moment when the Nicene formula became part of the official state religion (if only for the moment in the Eastern empire). All those Christians who differed from it – Homoeans, Homoiousians, Arians and a host of other minor groups – were declared to be heretics facing not only the vengeance of God but also that of the state. The decision of Constantine to privilege one Christian community over another was consolidated in that a “truth” was now defined and enforced by law, with those declared heretical to be punished on earth as well as by God. It was unclear on what basis this “truth” rested, certainly not one of exclusively rational argument, so it either had to be presented as “the revelation of God,” as it was by Thomas Aquinas, or accepted that “truth” was as defined by the emperor. [pp 193, 194]

Not what you would call a science-friendly world, then.

A couple of pastors have realized that they don’t believe the stuff they preach any more, and they’re stuck.

The two, who asked that their real identities be protected, are pastors who have lost their faith. And these two men, who have built their careers and lives around faith, say they now feel trapped, living a lie.

That must be a horrible situation. (It’s interesting that they don’t go on to say – that we’re told, at least – that nevertheless they still feel they are providing something their parishioners need. They feel trapped and crappy and dishonest; they don’t feel helpful or benevolent.)

Jack said that 10 years ago, he started to feel his faith slipping away. He grew bothered by inconsistencies regarding the last days of Jesus’ life, what he described as the improbability of stories like “Noah’s Ark” and by attitudes expressed in the Bible regarding women and their place in the world.

“Reading the Bible is what led me not to believe in God,” he said.

He said it was difficult to continue to work in ministry. “I just look at it as a job and do what I’m supposed to do,” he said. “I’ve done it for years.”

See? That’s not a guy who thinks religion is a wonderful thing. It’s a guy who thinks it’s a job, and one that he doesn’t like any more.

Adam said his initial doubts about God came as he read the work of the so-called New Atheists — popular authors like the prominent scientist Richard Dawkins. He said the research was intended to help him defend his faith.

“My thinking was that God is big enough to handle any questions that I can come up with,” he said but that did not happen.

“I realized that everything I’d been taught to believe was sort of sheltered,” Adam said, “and never really looked at secular teaching or other philosophies. … I thought, ‘Oh my gosh. Am I believing the wrong things? Have I spent my entire life and my career promoting something that is not true?’”

Really? Oh my goodness – here was I thinking that gnu atheists can’t possibly convince anyone except near-atheists, because we’re always being told that, and yet here is an actual pastor being convinced by gnu atheists. Fancy that, eh? But then that’s what I keep saying (despite what I just said about what I thought, which was not entirely sincere): that nobody knows who will or won’t be convinced, and some people even among firm believers may be turned around by reading a book. So here’s one. And there are others; they write to gnus and tell us so.

I wonder how that cop feels.

Elizabeth Smart’s ordeal as a kidnapped polygamist child bride could have ended weeks after her abduction when a policeman challenged her captor to lift her veil.

But he backed off when Brian Mitchell insisted that it was an inviolable religious obligation, condemning the 14-year-old to another eight months as a sex slave.

…

When a police detective approached an oddly dressed teenager in a Salt Lake City library and asked her to lift her veil, Mr Mitchell refused, saying their religion only permitted her husband to see her face.

“He said he was looking for Elizabeth Smart,” Ms Smart told an engrossed courtroom…

Smart said that the policeman “asked if he could be a part of our religion for a day, just so he could see my face, just so he could go back and say, ‘No, it wasn’t Elizabeth Smart’.” When Mr Mitchell refused, the detective gave in.That moment she felt “like hope was walking out the door”, Ms Smart told the jury.

He was looking for her. He saw a girl of the right sort of size, with a veil over her face. He tried to check her identity. The kidnapper said no, citing an inviolable religious obligation. The cop gave it up. Smart got eight more months of misery as a result.

Maybe people should start to learn that a woman or girl with a bag over her head is a sign of something seriously wrong. That particular “inviolable religious obligation,” where it exists, is a symptom of a systematic social abduction of women. It hides powerlessness and helplessness.

Charles Freeman replies to James Hannam’s reply to Freeman’s criticism of Hannam’s book God’s Philosophers.

My most important point, and one that Hannam does not even address in his response, is that, in comparison to the Greeks the natural philosophers operated within the context of a much more authoritarian society. Christianity brought the concept of absolute theological truths, many ring-fenced as “articles of faith” which, as Hannam notes, apparently with approval, were unchallengeable.

That has to have been a considerable stumbling block, surely.

As intellectual life evolved in the Middle Ages, no one quite knew where the boundaries lay, the threat of heresy was used all too widely in personal power struggles between opposing factions and individuals and the ultimate punishment was burning on earth as a preliminary to eternal burning in hell. If Hannam cannot see how this affected free discussion in the Middle Ages, there is little hope for him. Yet, as I show in my critique, he even seems to be sympathetic to the process.

Well that would slow me right down, I can tell you. Burning? Oh well I guess I’ll just stick with making shoes.

There’s been a discussion of agnosticism in comments at Pharyngula, with Stephen Novella offering some attempted clarifications. I think agnostics or “agnostics” of the Mark Vernon type have muddied the waters. Not knowing doesn’t have to be some mushy compromise between theism and atheism; not knowing really does matter.

That’s central to all these “what would it take to convince you of god/the supernatural” questions – often the examples offered are of things it would be very hard or impossible for people to actually know. If a 900 foot Jesus appeared – well, appeared where? And how would anyone know it was Jesus? And what about all the people who didn’t see it, because they were ill in bed, or in prison, or stuck in a collapsed mine? For them it would be hearsay. But there would be videos. Yes but videos aren’t the same thing. And so on. It’s really hard to think of something that everybody could know about first-hand. Magic tricks with a particular word in every book and magazine in the world, for instance, wouldn’t work, because how would anyone know that?

What we can and can’t know really does matter.

The question should therefore be more limited. “What would it take to convince you that there are good reasons to believe in god/the supernatural?” That would be a lower standard, because the reasons wouldn’t have to convince you, but you could agree that they could reasonably convince other people. That question is more like asking, “What would be a better gap than the ones people point to now?”

All you would have to come up with would be something hard or impossible to explain given our current knowledge, without having to agree that you yourself would be forced to agree that it convinced you that god/the supernatural exists.

This is helpful because it’s hard to think of anything that really forces that conclusion. It’s always possible to think “but I could just think I might be hallucinating, so I would never be really convinced.”

Unless you simply make that part of the thought experiment, in which case it becomes true by definition. Let’s stipulate that, then. Yes: if there were something that forced me to believe despite thoughts of hallucination, then yes, I would believe.

We could say that the experience would be such that it made the hallucination possibility unreal – that I could mouth the words, but not actually believe them. But saying that is itself  mouthing words. We can’t know that there is such a thing, or that there could be. Maybe there could, but we don’t know.

Tricky, isn’t it.

Chris Stedman is excited about inter-faith thingies again – interfaith cooperation, interfaith training, interfaith leadership, interfaith youth, interfaith activism, the interfaith movement, the interfaith table, interfaith work, interfaith events, interfaith understanding, interfaith coffee, interfaith ice cream, interfaith bicycles…the list goes on.

Anyway, the thing that’s so particularly exciting this time is that even atheists can do it. You would think that wouldn’t make any sense, since if there’s one thing atheists can be counted on not to be interested in, it’s faith – but it turns out that you would be wrong to think that. Atheists are all over it.

Speaking before a group of policy and philanthropic professionals, I explained that there are many atheists, agnostics, humanists and other nonreligious individuals like Anderson, Chituc, Link, Garner, Liddell and others at the institutes who wish to seek understanding, respect and collaboration with their religious neighbors.

Why does that statement give me the creeps? Why does it make me want to duck my head and slam the door and run quickly in the opposite direction?

I suppose because it sounds so damn intrusive and pious and missionary-like. I don’t want to seek anything with my neighbors, nor do I want them to seek anything with me. I don’t want to pester people that way. I don’t want to be always meddling with people, and I’m suspicious of people who do. I’m suspicious of Chris Stedman. I’m suspicious of all this teaming up and leadershipping and faith-based initiativing.

And I suspect that faithiness has something – perhaps a lot – to do with that habit of mind, and atheism has a lot to do with its absence. I think faithy people tend to think they have The Answer, and to want to force it (in the nicest possible way, of course) on everyone else. I think atheists tend not to think that. Yes we tend to think atheism is liberating, but we’re not so sure of it in every case that we feel like knocking on people’s doors to tell them so.

I don’t know – I just think all this reaching out can’t help being patronizing, and it creeps me out for that reason. There they all are, the fresh-faced youngsters, planning how things are going to be for the rest of us. I don’t want them planning things for me. I want to do my own planning. I want to be grumpy if I feel like it. Maybe I’ll start wearing a big red G for Grumpy.

An item from last August, which I hadn’t seen before. For about £5,000 a taxi driver in Bradford would track down women and girls who had run away from home to escape a forced marriage.

Zakir’s job was never to harm his targets, but to return them home to face their “destiny” of being made to marry someone their parents had chosen. Despite the fact that runaways can be beaten for having escaped, he sides with the families on the issue. The softly spoken driver, speaking to G2 on the condition his real name was not used, insisted: “I did it as a favour to the families, as I knew most of them. It wasn’t about the money. It was about izzat [honour]. I saw the effect it had on them when their daughter ran away. The worry and the shame from the community talking about them. I was part of the ‘taxi driver network’, so we shared information about who we picked up and where they got dropped off.

Of course, returning them home to be forced into marriage is harming them, to put it mildly. Returning them home to be beaten is also harming them. And notice how the concern is all for “the families” and not for all the individuals who make it up, which would have to include the escaped women and girls. Notice how the families are assumed to have every right to treat women and girls as inanimate objects to be forced to do whatever the families ordain.

One woman who knows what it feels like to be hunted down is Jaspreet. She ran away from her home in Sheffield after discovering that her father was arranging her marriage. The 21-year-old said: “I overheard my dad talking to his brother in Pakistan about getting me married to my cousin over there. He’d never discussed marriage with me.

“I didn’t want to get married yet. I wanted to finish my law degree. I would have been happy to have an arranged marriage in my mid-20s. But when I protested, my dad threatened me physically and said I would be letting the family down if I refused. I couldn’t take any more of the rows, so I ran away.”

Like that. It’s her life, but she doesn’t get to decide what she does with it, “the family” does, as if she were the dining room table.

Something Allen Esterson pointed out to me a couple of weeks ago and which I had to share. From Brandt, K. J. (2005). Intelligent bodies: Women’s embodiment and subjectivity in the human-horse communication process.

The cowboy’s stranglehold on the label of expert in human-horse relationships, as well as mythic construction of the woman-horse bond, have effectively silenced women’s voices and rendered their experiences with horses non-authentic. This dissertation takes women’s knowledge of horses seriously as data and draws from three years (2001-2004) of ethnographic research of in-depth interviews and participant observation. I explore the human-horse communication process and argue that the two species co-create what I call an embodied language system to construct a world of shared meaning. I problematize the centrality of verbal spoken language and the mind in theories of subjectivity, and maintain that the privileged status of verbal language has left untheorized all non-verbal language using beings, human and non-human alike. I bring questions of embodiment–in particular women’s embodiment–to the center and examine how lived and felt corporeality shapes human subjectivity. I call for an understanding of embodiment not as deterministic but as a lived process that has a meaningful impact on how individuals understand themselves and others. Further, the women’s experiences of embodiment when working with horses propose a way to subvert oppressive dominant constructions about female bodies as inherently flawed and allow for a re-imagining of women’s bodily comportment.

Pesky privileged status of verbal language…

He’s not a very pleasant-looking character, is he – he looks pissed off, not to say violent. He looks as if he’s going to take a swing at you as soon as somebody fastens his arms on. He looks as if he thinks you’ve got a fucking nerve cluttering up his world the way you do, with all your talking and breathing and walking to and fro.

Makes sense. The pope thinks so too, after all. No more messing around; let’s get this straight: God is the boss, and the pope is God’s enforcer. We don’t want none of your poxy seculsrism around here; you’ll do what the pope says God says, and you’ll like it. Capeesh?

Pope Benedict XVI defended religion from critics Sunday as he dedicated the Sagrada Familia church, a still-unfinished emblem of the Spanish city of Barcelona.”This is the great task before us: to show everyone that God is a God of peace not of violence, of freedom not of coercion, of harmony not of discord,” he said.

Peace correctly understood, that is; freedom ditto, harmony ditto. Secularists of course have a completely wrong understanding of all those items.

And he pushed back against what he sees as increasing secularism in the world, saying, “I consider that the dedication of this church of the Sagrada Familia is an event of great importance, at a time in which man claims to be able to build his life without God, as if God had nothing to say to him.”

Quite right; how dare we claim to be able to build our lives without the hidden magical deity that only the pope gets to talk to. The pope will set us straight about that all right, thank you very much. And if the pope should happen to want one of your children, you are to curtsy and say “Yes your majesty” and hand that child over; do you hear me?

Spain’s King Juan Carlos and Queen Sofia were in the full-to-overflowing church as the pope poured oil on the altar and rubbed it in with his hand, then swung incense over it.

He was surrounded by four rows of priests in white robes and pointed white hats, their mitres the same shape as the pope’s own headdress, as he honored the architect of the church.

Do you detect a hint of amusement in those lines? Do you think this devilish “wire staff” is having a little fun with the papal ceremony-type deal? I think I do. Secular bastards.

So if a very very tall Jesus appears in a Polish cabbage field (by which I mean a cabbage field in Poland, not a field in which Polish cabbage grows, which I don’t know if there is such a thing), is that reason enough for you to believe in god? Or would you be hesitant to believe because of the news reports that the tall Jesus is the brainchild of a Polish priest and was built by some people?

I think I would, at least at first, until we knew more, find the report of the Polish priest deciding to build the statue out of material more convincing than the possibility that the statue actually only appears to be a statue and is really a Jesus 108 feet tall, or even more if you count the bump he is standing on. I know this is very dogmatic and stubborn and fundamentalist of me, but I can’t seem to ignore the news reports. I try to be open-minded, but there they are, talking of construction teams and Polish people who think the statue is tacky.

After many delays, a crane on Saturday morning lifted the arms and shoulders and slowly placed them onto the figure’s lower body. Hours later, workers hoisted on the head, which is crowned with a golden king’s crown — rather than the crown of thorns favored in Christian iconography.

See what I mean? It just sounds as if somebody built it. I can’t help it; it does.

Workers in safety helmets and neon vests gathered at the base of the statue for a group photo, and Rev. Sylwester Zawadzki, the 78-year-old priest who created the statue, waded into an adoring crowd.

Safety helmets and neon vests – that’s a realistic touch. No, sorry, I’m going to have to wait and see what happens. If it starts to wander around, then maybe we can start to talk supernatural.

Drat, the updating tool is misbehaving again, so I’ll post some News items here again.

Pope orders Spain to be more theocratic

No secularism, no gay marriage, plenty of incense and pointed hats.

Pope tells everyone what to do some more

Said children’s lives are “sacred and inviolable” but forgot to explain about protecting child-raping priests.

I’m reading Charles Freeman’s very interesting The Closing of the Western Mind, and in a nice bit of serendipity I happened on a long review he did of James Hannam’s God’s Philosophers at the New Humanist. Hannam is a Catholic and an apologist, and his book is apparently what one would expect from a Catholic apologist.

Yet for Hannam Catholic authority is never the problem. “However sympathetic we might be to his [Abelard’s] plight, the fact remains that he brought most of his problems on himself. His blatant hypocrisy and breathtaking arrogance ensured that he had a ready supply of enemies who were quite happy to see accusations of heresy to bring him down”. (P.59) Hannam has no understanding of the intellectual inhibitions that arise from ring-fencing large areas of knowledge as “faith”, or using the threat of heresy for those who transgressed, often unwittingly, the boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy. Inevitably these tended to arbitrary. The freedom of intellectual debate was bedevilled, literally – the punishment for heresy was eternal suffering at the hands of devils in hell fire, something unknown to the Greeks. One will never know what fruitful pathways of knowledge remained closed as a result. (I have detailed the process by which religious “truths” were declared to be absolute and challenges to them worthy of excommunication and eternal punishment in my The Closing of the Western Mind and AD 381. I see the fourth century as one of the most important, if still neglected, turning points in the history of European thought. Hannam’s discussion of “Heresy and the Inquisition”, (pp.52-6), never considers that the definition of heresy is problematic. He takes it for granted that orthodox Catholic Christianity must be defended.)

No Templeton money will be finding its way to Charles Freeman any time soon, I suspect.

Am I being too obstinate and nitpicky about accepting (notional) evidence for a god? People are whispering in my ear to that effect, but I don’t think so. I’m not saying “No evidence would ever convince me no matter what” – I’m saying “I don’t at present see how anyone would know it was a god and not just a very surprising Something that we didn’t know about before and still have no idea how to explain.”

I’m having a hard time figuring out what kind of evidence would force me to accept the label “god” for a novel and surprising something – even if it were very very very surprising. Maybe I just haven’t thought hard enough. Maybe various kinds of cognition and action would convince me that this new entitity could only be called a god…

Unless I said that an entity couldn’t be a god if there were evidence for it because it’s central to my definition of god that it is always Hidden.

Perhaps if I invented a new and exciting word for it – would that be good enough? I wouldn’t want to be both gnu and obstinate. That would be bad.

Something is broken so I can’t post news items in News for the moment, so I’ll post them here.

Peace breaks out

Massimo holds out an olive branch.

Peace consolidates

Jerry returns the olive branch.

Frans De Waal on god-science shouting match

He would love to see a debate among moderates.

Mehdi Hasan is annoyed with Roshonara Choudhry. She doesn’t get it – she doesn’t understand that Islam doesn’t approve of her going to her MP’s surgery for the purpose of stabbing him to death, nor of her actually sticking a knife in his stomach.

She is, for example, ignorant of the specific Quranic verses that she claims inspired her horrific and cowardly attack on Timms – “the main chapters about it are chapter . . . chapter eight and chapter nine, I think,” she says, pathetically. In fact, there are no verses in the Quran which justify such brutal, vigilante attacks on innocent civilians. Suicide bombings for example, are un-Islamic.

Oh tut – isn’t that awful. But if there were such verses in the Quran, would that justify such brutal, vigilante attacks on innocent civilians? If suicide bombings were Islamic, would that make them a good thing?

Mehdi Hasan doesn’t address that question; it doesn’t seem to occur to him. It ought to. It doesn’t matter whether stabbing civilians is in the Quran or not; it matters whether it’s bad or not. Focus.

Those who claim that our mosques are breeding grounds for terrorists and extremists should note the two names Choudhry cites as her influencers: Anwar al-Awlaki and Abdullah Azzam. She discovered both on the internet (on YouTube!), not at her local Islamic centre. Both, I hasten to add, lack the credentials and qualifications of mainstream Islamic scholarship; al-Awlaki has a PhD in human resource development (!) from George Washington University. Why on earth did she think such a person had the “Islamic” or moral authority to instruct her to carry out a murder, one of the greatest sins in Islam?

But why on earth is Hasan so concerned about who has the “Islamic” authority to instruct people to murder? Why is he so worried about credentials and qualifications and mainstream Islamic scholarship? Is he shocked by what Choudhry did, or is he shocked by the association of Islam with brainless brutal violence?

So as Sigmund says, the point is that if there is (what looks like) convincing evidence of ‘God’ we will not be able to tell whether it is simply evidence of an advanced alien technology. My similar point is that we won’t know of any way to distinguish between a natural intelligent agent and a ‘god’ of whatever sort.

I think that observation is hard to get around. We could of course say that it could be a ‘god’ – that we don’t know that it’s not a god, that it has powers that seem to us to be what is called ‘miraculous.’ But could we say ‘this is supernatural for sure’? I don’t think so. It seems like the kind of thing we couldn’t know, in the nature of the case.

Another, and perhaps more relevant, thing we couldn’t know is that the agent/god had legitimate authority over us. Believers take that idea for granted – ‘God’ is great, God is bigger and stronger and better than we are, God made us and the flowers too, therefore God is the boss of us. Non-believers however don’t take that for granted. Lots of people are bigger and stronger than I am, but I don’t consider them to have legitimate authority over me. An agent with miraculous-seeming powers might have the ability to force us to obey it, but that’s not at all the same thing as legitimate authority.

But that’s not it, the devout listeners in the audience murmur to each other; it’s not just superior strength, it’s also infinite wisdom and goodness. That’s what makes the authority legitimate.

Well – I’ll suspend judgment on that point until I meet such an agent…or until someone gives me a good argument. One of those.

The more I think about it, and read what other people have to say about it, the more I think “supernatural” is a meaningless word. That’s just another way of saying I’m a naturalist, I guess. I think the same thing about the word “god” or “gods” – I think that word brings a lot of excess baggage, and warps thinking about it from the outset. I kept stumbling on that in a discussion on a post of Jerry’s yesterday. Sigmund said

I suspect we will be unable to determine whether such evidence indicates a ‘God’ or a ‘God-like alien’.

And I thought, and said, what is the difference anyway?

Really – what is the difference? The idea is: maybe there is something out there, something with a mind, something that can do things. Maybe it has powers that go way beyond any we have. But that could be something natural, and there’s no obvious reason to call it “god.” I find it not at all hard to believe that there could be agents elsewhere in the universe, but if there are, they’re part of nature.