Actually I'm not. The Sea of Faith In Australia crowd are very nice and easy to get on with folk, and many of them are your garden variety humanists, atheists and skeptics. Lawrence Krauss is a very nice guy with a good patter in anti-ID; nothing I haven't heard before but, and this surprised and educated me, something that few of the audience seemed all that familiar with.
One thing that has been very useful to me is to get a cross bearing on what interested and intelligent folk know and do not know. That will help me be a little more clear in the future. My talk is tonight, so we'll see if they like what I have to say.
OK, back to Mornington Crescent, you lot.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
The first two pieces of this series were largely comic pieces. This one is more serious. I have said this before, but I'll repeat it - I came to science blogs for one reason, and one only - because there was no one else talking about facing up to our material limits on this kind of site, with…
Since I was going to be down here anyway to sign books at the World Science Festival Street Fair, Kate and I decided to catch one of the Saturday events at the Festival. It was hard to choose, but we opted for the program on Hidden Dimensions: Exploring Hyperspace (Live coverage was here, but the…
Contrary to what some of my detractors think, I don’t mind criticism of my viewpoints. After all, if I never encounter criticism, how will I ever improve? On the other hand, there are forms of criticism that are what I would call less than constructive. One form this sort of criticism takes is…
I was on a panel discussion of "Confrontation vs. Accommodation" yesterday at the Secular Humanism conference. It wasn't an entirely satisfactory format; there were four of us (Chris Mooney, Eugenie Scott, Victor Stenger, and me), and we each gave a short spiel and then answered questions. There…
This might interest you:
http://www.jobs.ac.uk/jobs/RO048/Research_Fellow/
St. Pancras
Krauss was in Minneapolis in March for an Atheist Convention, and while I was only able to attend part of his talk I did get to chat with him a bit following the book signing. He is a very nice guy, and will be calling in to be our guest on "Atheists Talk" very soon.
Speaking as a Trekkie, I have to say that Krauss's greatest contribution to the enterprise of science is unquestionably The Physics of Star Trek. Of course, I do realise that's probably similar to a great classical actor like Alec Guiness being best known for the part of Obi-wan Kenobi.
Still, better to be known than not.
Hainault
Thanks for some very interesting information and discussion, John, about the possible origins and evolution of religion. And for your willingness to engage any of us in discussions about the many and varied topics in which you take an interest. I would have thought that most of the people there knew about ID. (I met Ken Ham once in Brisbane years ago and couldn't believe that some one so smart could have such dumb ideas. Ohio is welcome to him.)
Keep up the good work.