Sermon
evolvingthoughts | August 19, 2008
The local evangelical students society had me along last night to talk about "Is belief in the Christian God rational?" I was on the negative, although I did ask them which side they wanted me to argue for. It was done in traditional debating format, and I found it incredibly restrictive - speakers were allowed to get away with introducing stuff they hadn't mentioned in their main point piece, and a number of things were left up in the air.
Kudos to the undergraduate organisers Tim and Stewart for having a philosophy lecturer and a graduate student in physics and moral philosophy (…
evolvingthoughts | August 1, 2008
Every so often we start a discussion somewhere about who is and who isn't an atheist. PZ Mackers has the poster shown below up on his blog:
I want to look at the term and associated meanings of "atheist" and cognate terms, because the way I taxonomise the world, only two of those guys are possibly atheists. Sagan and Hemingway, maybe. I don't know much about them; but Jefferson, Franklin, Darwin were all deists; Lincoln a theist (though not an orthodox Christian), and also Clemens (unless that's Tom Selleck), and Einstein a "Spinozan theist".
Atheism has a number of conflicting…
evolvingthoughts | July 29, 2008
The Labor government has a policy to force ISPs to filter web requests to prevent child pornography. Sounds nice in theory, but I've been using a filtered ISP at my university (they're running a trial) and what I can do online at home in one minutes takes the better part of fifteen at work. I am doing all work online at home in the mornings before I go to work, because just trying to find images for my slides is grindingly slow. Now a consultant's report gives it a tick (what else? They're being paid to), and no matter what the results, minister for communications Stephen Conroy says it will…
evolvingthoughts | July 24, 2008
I spent three days trying to reinstall Vista on my son's Dell Inspiron laptop; three solid days. Using Dell's supplied disks and instructions, no less. Each time it would fail for some unknown reason. We lost everything on the hard drive because it seems you can't boot from the rescue disk and copy data to another drive and you have to reformat because Vista won't recognise that the partition of the old system can be reused. That's just bullshit. It turns out that if I want to activate the media control buttons, I have to reformat the drive and do it all again. Like hell I will.
I bought…
evolvingthoughts | July 22, 2008
Once upon a time, a Roman author named Quintus Ennius wrote: "how like us is that very ugly beast, the ape!" It was quoted by Cicero, and from him Bacon, Montaigne and various others. But always it was thought that apes (simia, literally "the similar ones"), which in that time include monkeys and what we now call apes indifferently, were distinct from humans in every meaningful way. As Cicero said after citing Ennius, the character is different.
But then along came a Swedish botanist turned generalist, Carolus Linnaeus, in the 18th century, and despite being a creationist, he put apes,…
evolvingthoughts | July 1, 2008
Readers may be somewhat surprised that Evolving Thoughts hasn't made much of the Darwin bicentennial and the Origin sesquicentennial so far. Well, I haven't needed to, given the number of other folk making hay from this. In particular I recommend Carl Zimmer's piece, over at his new digs with Discover magazine. Carl points out John van Whye's paper that showed that Darwin didn't "sit on the theory for 20 years" but rather followed a preplanned sequence for backing up his ideas. However, when Charles planned this research, he greatly underestimated the time it would take him (the Cirripedia…
evolvingthoughts | July 1, 2008
This is me commenting on American politics again. Sorry.
I am somewhat amazed at the furore over Wesley Clark's comment that being a prisoner of war doesn't automatically make one qualified as Commander in Chief of the armed services, a position that the President fulfills. Not only is that true, it raises the matter of what it is that does make one qualified to be CiC. As I read American history and the Constitution, the answer is plain and simple: representing the popular will.
The president has advisors with military expertise, presumably those whose merit got them to that position in…
evolvingthoughts | June 26, 2008
Barbara Forrest has an excellent analysis and background story on the introduction of the creationist bill in Louisiana, and the organisations supporting it, here at Talk2Reason.
There's a new phylogeny of birds out. See GrrllScientist's post, and a full size tree here. Late edit See Bird Evolution - Problems with Science for more.
Jesse Prinz has an essay on atheism and morality, which I think jumps the shark at the end (how can there be atheist charities? Atheism is the lack of some belief, so any charity that doesn't make theism part of its core mission already is atheist), here at…
evolvingthoughts | June 24, 2008
Here's a somewhat different take on the late great George Carlin, in an interview with Keith Olberman last year:
For me, though, he'll always be the hip Catholic Archbishop who brings about the end of the world in Dogma.
evolvingthoughts | June 21, 2008
A conference is being held in Sydney soon about whether God is necessary for morality. I find that an almost incomprehensible question. Of course humans are moral without gods to back up their moral systems. They can't help it. It's what humans do. We are social apes that follow rules. Sometimes the sanctions for following rules (which turn out to be sanctions for potential defectors rather than the majority, who will tend to follow rules with or without promises of reward or punishment) rely on a god. Mostly, they don't. The famous Euthyphro Dilemma (whether something is good because God…
evolvingthoughts | June 9, 2008
Few things make me very angry: injustices perpetrated by the powerful against the weak, good science fiction series being canned by network executives, and people who think they can say whatever they like without regard for their audience. I find it disgusting that some people think it's okay to be aggressive, rude and swear blindly in front of children, for instance, which matches two of my aversions. So when a communal forum that I spend a lot of time in, and which includes many of my friends, turns into that sort of street scene, I want to leave it. Am I being an old fogey?
It's not…
evolvingthoughts | June 4, 2008
This is a kind of scattered post on a few things that have caught my eye, while I am avoiding boring work.
Paeloblog reports that a paper in Nature has done a phylogeny on continuous rather than discrete characters, using morphometric criteria to do a hominin phylogeny. This is not the first such attempt to use continuous characters in cladistics, and I would be interested if those who understand this topic comment on this attempt. It seems to me that the main difference between discrete and continuous data would be that the continua are an ordered set of otherwise discrete data points, so…
evolvingthoughts | May 2, 2008
One of the enduring patterns of the history of the history of evolution is for historians to claim that their favourite individual, or their country's best and brightest, invented evolution. The most recent appears to be this guy from New Zealand, claiming that evolution was actually invented by an artist, Augustus Earle, who visited Australia and New Zealand, and spent some time on board the Beagle with Darwin. Earle wrote a book entitled A narrative of a nine months' residence in New Zealand in 1827: together with a journal of a residence in Tristan D'Acunha, an island situated between…
evolvingthoughts | April 29, 2008
The Australian government, still in the period of meeting its election promises, has legitimised the relations between homosexual couples so that they now have the same rights as defacto couples, which is long overdue. But they didn't quite get it right. Why not?
They didn't allow gays to get married. The reason is that, as the attorney general, Robert McLelland, said, "the government regards marriage as being between a man and a woman and we don't support any measures that seek to mimic that process."
Why not? Where is it said that marriage must be heterosexual? Answer: only in a…
evolvingthoughts | April 27, 2008
The Nays won, narrowly, and the debate, between Daniel Dennett and Lord Robert Winston, will be available as a podcast here. A summary is here.
One thing that I find interesting in these debates, which let's face it are more important for allowing people to vent than actually proving anything, is that those opposed to religion tend to think, as the Guardian commentator does, that anyone who has what I would think is a rational approach to belief, is a kind of "God-Lite", "an unthreatening and more-or-less rational - and private - approach. It's hard to object to that: practised in this way…
evolvingthoughts | April 20, 2008
Imagine a scientific theory that very few people know or understand. Let's call it "valency theory". Now suppose someone objects to valency theory because it undercuts their view of a particular religious doctrine, such as transubstantiation. So they gather money from rich members of their faith community and start a public relations and political campaign to have the form-substance dichotomy (hylomorphism) taught as chemical science. What would be the outcome?
Well, for most people they would remain as uneducated on the topic as before. They may know, vaguely, there is a dispute of some…
evolvingthoughts | April 11, 2008
I've been pretty preoccupied this week with lectures and meetings, so this is my first post for a bit.
Yesterday I attended a meeting at my university which pretty well aimed to wind up the disciplines of my school (history, philosophy, religion and classics) and present a single school with five majors and no departments. It set me thinking: why has it come to this? It's not unique to the university I work at - all around the world, the humanities, and in particular the "core" humanities like philosophy and history, have been increasingly wound back in favour of science, technology,…
evolvingthoughts | April 6, 2008
Over the past few months I have increasingly become aware of the greatness of the last work of Johnny Cash. I don't much like country and western, and Cash was always regarded as a bit twee in my youth. But recently I came across what is surely one of the greatest of all music videos - "Hurt" (below the fold). It is the last thing Cash released before his death, and despite his age and obvious impending death he interprets a Nine Inch Nails song, of all things, in absolutely the only way it can be, as an American great rural song.
Then I discover that he's also done Sting's "I Hung My…
evolvingthoughts | April 2, 2008
Idiots and the ignorant should not speak on matters they do not understand. As I am both, I want to make some vague and ultimately useless comments about Framing, yet again. This has been motivated by Chris Mooney's admirable attempts to get to the heart of the matter: here, here and here.
In a book that I really liked– The Science of Discworld - Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart and Jack Cohen refer to teaching as "lying to children". The reason is that teachers can only teach what children are ready to receive. So they get cartoon versions of science and other topics, which are then refined…
evolvingthoughts | March 31, 2008
David Williams sent me this snippet of Ursula Le Guins' review of Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel:
Some boast that science has ousted the incomprehensible; others cry that science has driven magic out of the world and plead for "re-enchantment". But it's clear that Charles Darwin lived in as wondrous a world, as full of discoveries, amazements and profound mysteries, as that of any fantasist. The people who disenchant the world are not the scientists, but those who see it as meaningless in itself, a machine operated by a deity. Science and literary fantasy would seem…