NOTE - I tried making this post on PZ Myers blog a while back, but  Im getting a message  that "it has been withheld for moderation". Strangely other entries are making it to Myers blog. Lets see if this post actually gets approved on the Myers blog.

UPDATE - (19th July 2008) This post has now appeared posted on PZ Myers blog.  #415

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/fresh_thread_dont_fill_this_on.php

This is a response to comments from delusional atheists over at PZ Myers blog who feel that atheists can network, organize and work for a common cause and yet not be called a "movement" or an "organization".  The following comments were in response to one of my comments made on this page- http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/fresh_thread_dont_fill_this_on.php

 #208 Richard -
"Heaven forbid that thinking atheists should not follow like sheep everything that PZ says. We should be more like the Catholics who question nothing that their priests do to them or their members and just shut up and bleat.Non-believers"

 #218 Gunofsod-
"Get it straight PZ Meyers does not speak for me as an Atheist any more than you serious atheist circle jerks. This isn't a club, there are no dues, no tithes and no self appointed spokesmen."

# 191 Wowbagger -
"Atheist movement? What the fuck? Get a clue. It's not a gang. It's not a sewing circle. It's not a fucking country club that you choose to join because you think the golf course has the best back nine in the tri-state area or because you're impressed by the wine list."

-------------------------------------------------------

Scrolling down this page will reveal the  obscene amount of approval and cheer, that Myers has been showered with by people who obviously share his beliefs. So far I see no one among the atheists questioning Myers acions.  With all the talk about atheism not being a club, is it forbidden that atheists even question Myers actions?

Its simply obvious that Myers has become a celebrity in blogs run by atheists. In addition to people here praising Myers, heres something I found... http://copache.wordpress.com/2008/07/16/pz-myers-notice-me/

We all thought this type of blindeyed fanboyism was confined to the domain of pop stars and actors. Whats even more more embarassing is that Myers actually responded...

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2008/07/this_better_not_start_a_trend.php

Then heres an excerpt from user comment #238 -

"If non believers and other freethinkers in the USA believe that their cause will be further improved without conflict and without having to provoke and chock the religious folks, they are as deluded as the religious folks."

This is just one tiny example to illustrate the strong "us" mentality  among atheists.

This same "us" mentality is echoed

-In the repeated targeting of communities holding, lets just say, incompatible viewpoints.

-In the networking between atheists to form alliances.
This link provides a list of atheist organizations  http://richarddawkins.net/atheistResources

-In the organized campaigns to achieve common goals under the banner of atheism.
Please go to  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Atheists#Court_cases to read the legal campaigns run by just ONE atheist organization.

The fact that atheism  has now now evolved into "movement" status is pretty clear.

And for those who still insist that atheism isnt a movement...denial makes for  a warm blanket.

But let's not yawn too soon.

In the next few posts, I'll look at a few rhetorical dimensions of Scruton's essay, pointing out how he employs useful slights-of-hand. In this first post, I'll highlight how the first three paragraphs launch a covert attack on the personal credibility of the evangelical atheists prior to laying out their actual case explicitly in the text. It is the sort of rhetorical move that often works really well, but only if the reader does not notice it, in which case it can seem crass and small-minded. This being the rhetorical precipice over which the prose is most liable to fall, let's see how Scruton dances along it.

Scruton starts out by citing a tradition of antipathy toward organized religion, a sentiment that runs from Martin Luther and Voltaire to Dawkins and Hitchens. Maybe it made sense back in the eighteenth century, Scruton grants, but come on,

The violence of the diatribes uttered by these evangelical atheists is indeed remarkable. After all, the Enlightenment happened three centuries ago; the arguments of Hume, Kant and Voltaire have been absorbed by every educated person. What more is to be said? And if you must say it, why say it so stridently? Surely, those who oppose religion in the name of gentleness have a duty to be gentle, even with – especially with – their foes?

Right or wrong, this stuff is pretty outrageous. After Scruton himself promulgates an unbroken line from Luther to Dawkins, he then complains about Dawkins existing in an unbroken line from Luther. Moreover, he has substituted the atheistic point of view - a coherent set of arguments - for the tendency of atheists to be shrill about them. And so a debate about ideas is replaced by a debate about whether it is good or bad to argue too loudly. This way, in order to be victorious on the level of ideas, all Scruton has to do is prove that his opposition is not comporting themselves kindly as they express their perspective. So long as he shows that atheists indulge in too much amplitude, it will seem as if the substance behind their point of view is also daft.

Fine sport. What's next? A long paragraph, telling us how the world works, of course:

There are two reasons why people start shouting at their opponents: one is that they think the opponent is so strong that every weapon must be used against him; the other is that they think their own case so weak that it has to be fortified by noise. Both these motives can be observed in the evangelical atheists. They seriously believe that religion is a danger, leading people into excesses of enthusiasm which, precisely because they are inspired by irrational beliefs, cannot be countered by rational argument. We have had plenty of proof of this from the Islamists; but that proof, the atheists tell us, is only the latest in a long history of massacres and torments, which – in the scientific perspective – might reasonably be called the pre-history of mankind. The Enlightenment promised to inaugurate another era, in which reason would be sovereign, providing an instrument of peace that all could employ. In the eyes of the evangelical atheists, however, this promise was not fulfilled. In their view of things, neither Judaism nor Christianity absorbed the Enlightenment even if, in a certain measure, they inspired it. All faiths, to the atheists, have remained in the condition of Islam today: rooted in dogmas that cannot be safely questioned. Believing this, they work themselves into a lather of vituperation against ordinary believers, including those believers who have come to religion in search of an instrument of peace, and who regard their faith as an exhortation to love their neighbour, even their belligerent atheist neighbour, as themselves.

There's a lot going on in this paragraph. Let's look at few pieces.

1) "There are two reasons ... " This is just not true. People shout at their opponents for a million different reasons: because they are passionate, because they are promoting a book, because they are sick of repeating themselves, because their opponents are very stubborn, or just because they are irremediably French. Scruton is wise to place this at the beginning of a sentence and at the beginning of a paragraph, a juncture at which many readers are unlikely to pause and think things over.

2) "... They think the opponent is so strong ... they think their own case is weak ..." Notice that both of these "reasons" impute that atheists are faking their beliefs. According to this portrayal, the atheists are cool, calculating minds that soberly assess their case and choose a plan of obfuscation after gaming out other strategies. Public intellectuals generally don't think that way. I mean, really: Chris Hitchens dispassionately realizing that his own beliefs are weakly supported and in need of obfuscatory camouflage? The man simply loves himself too much to entertain the possibility that his ideas are weak, let alone in need of over-fortification. Nevertheless, by construing their argument as essentially strategic, Scruton diminishes the sense that the atheist point of view could be conscientiously held. According to the language, evangelical atheists are frauds - they know full well that they are wrong, and are refusing to admit it for some ulterior reason.

3) "... they seriously believe ... the atheists tell us ... they work themselves into a lather ... their belligerent atheist neighbor ..." Scruton continues to build on the image of the unreasonable, browbeating, animalistic atheist. Again, the problem (so far) isn't with the atheist point of view, the problem is with the atheists.

Only after exorbitantly laying this groundwork does Scruton actually tell us the substance of the athiest case

Dawkins and Hitchens are adamant that the scientific worldview has entirely undermined the premises of religion and that only ignorance can explain the persistence of faith.

Coming at this juncture in the prose, this idea is already undermined by the adamance of the haughty, out of touch, animalistic frauds who hold it. Had Scruton provided this sentence nearer to the beginning of the essay, readers may have allied closely with the atheist position, and Scruton would have a much harder time breaking this allegiance. However, since these words appear on the page only after a flood of disparaging remarks about their authors, many readers have been encouraged to consider the atheist position as inherently weak. In this way, the first two paragraphs of the essay do little more than devalue the honesty and trustworthiness of Scruton's interlocutors, rather than making a positive case of their own.

As I mentioned at the outset, this plan only works for readers who don't notice it. Scruton plays with fire on this because so many of his main subject nouns and clauses ("they think .. they believe") make it seem like this is a story "about" damnable atheists and not their impoverished ideas. If this were intended as an essay of philosophy for readers of same, then this is probably a poor choice. But if this is intended as sheer provocation - which is, by the way, a perfectly legitimate and necessary argumentative activity - then Scruton has surely ruffled the right feathers and at the right moment. If this is the case, however, Scruton will have to explain why he starts out an essay against vituperation by getting up his own lather of it.

Next time: Scruton sets out to astonish us with his ability to exterminate paradoxes like godless little roaches.

Die debat oor Intelligente Ontwerp wat van Julie tot Oktober verlede jaar in Die Burger gewoed het ná my negatiewe resensie van Leon Rousseau se boek Die Groot Avontuur (Human & Rousseau) het verder uitgekring. Rousseau het in repliek op Karel de Pauw se oorwegend positiewe resensie op my boek Geloof, Bygeloof en Ander Wensdenkery: Perspektiewe op Ontdekkings en Irrasionaliteite (Protea Boekhuis), die volgende repliek versprei. Ek antwoord hom ná sy repliek hieronder.

Repliek deur Leon Rousseau

Verlede week was daar in Die Burger ’n ophemelende resensie deur Karel de Pauw van die boek Geloof, bygeloof en ander wensdenkery. (http://152.111.1.251/argief/berigte/dieburger/2007/10/15/SK/13/BBclaasen.html).  Daarin verwys De Pauw by wyse van teenstelling afkeurend na “pseudo-wetenskaplike argumente” in Die groot gedagte deur Gideon Joubert en in my boek Die groot avontuur.

Sowel Die groot gedagte (natuurwetenskappe, sterrekunde) as Die groot avontuur (ontstaan van lewe, evolusie) is bedoel om populêr in die sin van “toeganklik” te wees. Pseudo-wetenskap, daarenteen, is so ’n sterk woord dat dit meestal gereserveer word vir wilde bespiegelaars soos David Icke en Von Däniken, skrywer van Chariots of the gods, en dié is Joubert se boek en myne nie.

Later maak De Pauw die pap nog ’n bietjie dikker aan en sê “die argumente en feite [in Geloof, bygeloof . . . is] die spreekwoordelike pêrels voor die swyne wat sekere skrywers betref.” Hy verwys kennelik na my en na Gideon Joubert.

Die rede vir dié nydigheid is eenvoudig. De Pauw, saam met geesgenote soos Nathan Bond en George Claassen (skrywer van Geloof, bygeloof . . .) is ’n spraaksame voorbok in die militante ateïstiese beweging. Dié broeders in die ongeloof praat uit een mond.

Daar is ’n verskil tussen ateïste – elke mens het die reg op sy eie mening – en militante ateïste, wat die ateïsme aanhang soos pasbekeerdes wat die hele wêreld wil bekeer en selfs nie die sweem van ’n ander standpunt duld nie.

Hulle verdoem Die groot avontuur omdat ek, sonder om dit as wetenskaplike teorie voor te lê, op ’n paar plekke vertel van my indruk dat daar ’n groot intelligensie agter die wondere van die heelal moet wees. Aan dié ongeveer 1% van die boek het een van hulle 70% van ’n lang, venynige resensie bestee. In Gideon Joubert se boek speel geloof ’n nog groter rol, en hy word ooreenstemmend nog meer verguis as ek. Hulle praat van “Joubertisme” in ongeveer dieselfde toon as wat sekere Christene van “satanisme” praat.

My eie boek was onder meer ’n poging om die kloof tussen geloof en wetenskap (spesifiek evolusie) te verklein, soos ook die doyen van Suid-Afrikaanse wetenskaplikes, prof Phillip Tobias, al lewenslank probeer doen.

Omstreeks 1960, kort ná Koos Human en ek Human & Rousseau gestig het, het ek enkele briewe met prof. Raymond Dart van Wits gewissel. Dit was op ’n besoek aan Johannesburg dat hy my kort daarna aan die woeste wêreld van Australopithecus, die Suideraap, bekend gestel het.

Met idealistiese sending-ywer het ek toe by Human & Rousseau ’n boekie, Die wording van die mens, evolusie vir jongmense, uitgegee, maar kerk en staat was (in Jurie van den Heever se woorde) toe nog so stewig aan mekaar vasgesweis dat dit ons all-time worst seller was. Biblioteke was te bang om ’n boek oor evolusie te koop omdat sekere predikante dit afkeur. Dit was seker een van die dinge wat my aangespoor het om Die groot avontuur te skryf, met die doel om kreasioniste sagkens, sonder aggressie, tot ’n geloof in evolusie te bekeer. Ook in dié opsig het die militante ateïste my boek volkome verkeerd verstaan – anders as gebalanseerde wetenskaplikes soos prof Hilary Deacon, dr Sarah Wurz, prof P A J Ryke (skrywer van Evolusie) en prof Phillip Tobias, wat dit goedgekeur het.

Die groot avontuur is vroeër vanjaar met die Recht Malan-prys vir nie-fiksie bekroon, Die groot gedagte reeds vroeër met sowel die Andrew Murray-prys as die Insig-prys vir nie-fiksie.

Die polarisering tussen geloof en evolusie woed veral in die VSA al baie dekades. Kreasioniste was aanvanklik die lawaaierigste maar deesdae het ’n invloedryke groep  wetenskaplikes ewe onverdraagsaam en kleingeestig geword. En by ons is die lekepredikers vir die ateïsme more loyal than the queen.

As iemand soos Galileo in die 17de eeu gesê het, “Ek is ’n gelowige mens, maar my teleskoop wys my dat die aarde om die son draai en nie andersom nie,” kon hy groot probleme van die onverdraagsame inkwisisie verwag. As jy vandag sê “Ek glo in evolusie, maar my [onbewysbare] indruk is dat daar ’n groot intelligensie agter die wondere van die heelal is”, kan jy groot probleme van die militante ateïste verwag.

Van ’n middeweg soos die een wat ek in Die groot avontuur probeer bewandel, het dwepers nog nooit gehou nie. 

George Claassen se repliek:

Leon Rousseau se tirade waarin mense wat van hom verskil as “dwepers”, “militante ateïste”, “lekepredikers vir die ateïsme” en ander skelwoorde gebrandmerk word, herinner darem baie aan die Jesuïte se selektiewe aanbieding van feite oor hekse en ander “sondaars” tydens die Spaanse Inkwisisie.

Hy verkies om mense etikette om die nek te hang, maar sy betoog hiernaas verdraai die waarheid oor sy boek, Die Groot Avontuur (Human & Rousseau-uitgewers). Ek sal op die gebreke in sy boek konsentreer en my nie tot persoonlike beledigings wend soos hy nie.

 Hy maak beswaar dat sy boek en die soortgelyke pseudowetenskaplike boek van Gideon Joubert, Die Groot Gedagte (Tafelberg-uitgewers), nie as sodanig getipeer kan word nie omdat hulle nie “wilde bespiegelaars soos David Icke en Erich van Däniken” is nie.

 Ek verskil van hom: Altwee boeke is deurspek met pseudowetenskaplike aansprake.

Rousseau vertel ons met smaak van al die wetenskaplikes wat sy boek ondersteun het, maar verswyg om een of ander duister rede die feit dat prof. Phillip Tobias hom ná my resensie oor die boek in Die Burger in ’n brief aan die koerant van die boek gedistansieer het weens die pseudowetenskaplike aard daarvan. (Terloops, die twee beoordelaars van die Recht Malan-prys wat Rousseau se boek bekroon het, was, raai-raai ’n teoloog en ’n sosioloog. Een van hulle het daarna teenoor my erken hulle het nie Tobias se brief aan Die Burger by die beoordeling in ag geneem nie!).

In sy brief, gepubliseer op 9 September verlede jaar in Die Burger, skryf Tobias, nadat ek in my resensie gevra het of hy “die skade wat sy aanbeveling van die boek in die lig van die openlike IO (Intelligente Ontwerp)-aard daarvan, aan sy reputasie as gerekende wetenskaplike doen”, besef:

“Noudat ek die finale gepubliseerde weergawe van Die Groot Avontuur gelees het, het dit vir my duidelik geword Rousseau ondersteun die pseudowetenskaplike konsep van Intelligente Ontwerp ... Veral wil ek van hierdie geleentheid gebruik maak om myself ondubbelsinnig van daardie dele van Die Groot Avontuur wat IO ondersteun, te distansieer” (my kursivering).

Vergeet ’n oomblik my resensie (http://152.111.1.251/argief/berigte/dieburger/2006/07/17/DB/11/BBgclaassenrousseau.html) en lees dieselfde klagte teen Rousseau se boek in die resensie van die wetenskaplike Andries Lategan in Beeld (16 Oktober 2006) (http://www.news24.com/Beeld/Vermaak/Boeke/0,,3-2109-2112_2014373,00.html).  Lategan wys daarop dat Tobias se avant propos eerder met  ’n waarskuwing vervang moes gewees het soos op sigaretpakkies: “Die lees van hierdie boek is skadelik vir ’n gesonde oordeel oor wat evolusioniste sê.”

Lategan spreek hom nes ek, dr. Karel de Pauw, die resensent van my boek, dr. Jurie van den Heever en ander wetenskaplikes uit oor die openbarende toevlug wat Rousseau gereeld in sy boek by ’n Intelligente Ontwerper soek sodra hy nie iets begryp of kan verklaar nie. “ ’n Argument wat berus op iets wat onbegryplik is, kan beswaarlik deel wees van ’n gesprek oor die geldigheid van wetenskaplike teorieë ... Rousseau behoort dalk ag te slaan op Karen Armstrong se waarskuwing in A History of God dat mense wat hul godsbegrip wil haak aan die immer krimpende gebiede van natuurverskynsels waarvoor daar nog nie ’n deeglike teorie ontwikkel is nie, altyd aan die hardloop gaan bly voor wetenskaplike vordering,” skryf Lategan.

Rousseau trek so fel met onwetenskaplike bravade los teen my, De Pauw en andere asof ons die enigstes is wat nie die lig oor sy pryswennende boek gesien het nie, maar probeer dan maak asof hy godsdiens en evolusie, gelowige en wetenskaplike, nader aan mekaar wil bring en wil versoen.

Rousseau en ander aanhangers van Intelligente Ontwerp neem nie kennis van die basiese verskil tussen die wetenskap en geloof nie, dat gelowiges absoluut glo, maak nie saak wat die wetenskaplike sê nie, maar dat wetenskap deurgaans met onsekerhede werk en bly vrae vra.

Armstrong is reg: elke stukkie bygeloof wat die wetenskap aftakel en blootlê ­– en dit sluit die vasklou aan ’n Intelligente Ontwerp-scenario in ­– laat mense soos Rousseau en Joubert, wat hul godsbegrip wil haak aan alles wat hulle nie kan verklaar in die natuur nie, ’n bietjie vinniger aan die hardloop. Is dit hoekom hy so uitasem reageer op my boek wat rasionaliteit en wetenskaplike bewyse voorstaan as die enigste wyse waarop ons kan weet?

Die Amerikaanse fisikus Lawrence Krauss verwys onlangs in sy tweeweeklikse rubriek “World lines” in New Scientist na dié onhebbelikheid so deel van C.S. Lewis se werke wat die populêre standpunt inneem “that science, by explaining the inner workings of the universe, robs it of the wonder that religion provides – a viewpoint that, frankly, I find offensive.” Voeg maar Rousseau en Joubert by Lewis as die Groot Meesters van die Orde van Intelligente Ontwerp, met my oudkollega Leopold Scholtz as hul stafhoof in die hoofstroommedia. Wie sal sy vreemde en wetenskap-begriplose verdediging van Intelligente Ontwerp in sy rubriek Sake van die Dag ooit kan vergeet midde in die Rousseau-debat in Die Burger ná my resensie van Die Groot Avontuur? (http://152.111.1.251/argief/berigte/dieburger/2006/08/04/SK/8/Sakie4Aug.html).

 Krauss se volledige rubriek lui:

 LAST month I read a column in The New York Times by David Brooks (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/22/opinion/22brooks.html?_r=1&em&ex=1209096000&en=60aba79d67739095&ei=5087&oref=slogin)  that has bothered me ever since. In it Brooks describes an essay about the medieval concept of the universe entitled C. S. Lewis and the Star of Bethlehem by Michael Ward (http://www.christianitytoday.com/bc/2008/001/15.30.html), a chaplain at the University of Cambridge.

Brooks writes that "while we moderns see space as a black, cold, mostly empty vastness, with planets and stars propelled by gravitational and other forces, Europeans in the Middle Ages saw a more intimate and magical place. The heavens, to them, were a ceiling of moving spheres, rippling with signs and symbols, and moved by the love of God... The modern view disenchants the universe, Lewis argued, and tends to make it 'all fact and no meaning'."

Brooks's and Ward's articles both reflect a popular view that science, by explaining the inner workings of the universe, robs it of the wonder that religion provides - a viewpoint that, frankly, I find offensive. How anyone can suggest that medieval hallucinations might spark the imagination more than the actual universe that we have been so fortunate to uncover is beyond me. The "heavenly actors" populating the spiritual universe of Lewis were, like many religious myths, intellectually lazy creations of fundamentally ignorant minds. It is a far grander kind of imagination that is needed to fathom the real universe.

The night sky isn't populated with mythical beasts, but with a small slice of the 100 billion or so stars in our small island galaxy, the Milky Way, one of 400 billion galaxies in the observable universe. Each of the stars, while not alive in an anthropomorphic sense, houses an exotic world of action at a searing 10 million degrees, releasing the energy equivalent to a thousand billion hydrogen bombs going off every second - a wonder-work of nature's creation.

The light from the stars of other galaxies takes billions of years to reach us. A Hubble Space Telescope photograph, in which every speck of light represents not a star, but an entire galaxy, with each galaxy containing billions of stars, surely spurs the imagination more than any fable. Around some of these stars there may be planets that once housed life. I say once, because the stars that produced the light in Hubble's images are probably long gone. We are literally watching the history of the universe unfold before our very eyes.

In our own galaxy, a star explodes in a brilliant supernova once every hundred years or so, and is briefly as bright as 10 billion suns. Yet most such explosions are invisible, obscured by dust, so in fact the last exploding star observed from Earth in our galaxy was seen by Kepler in 1604 (http://space.newscientist.com/article/dn13514-light-echoes-help-gauge-supernovas-fury.html). Yet the universe is so big and old that these events are happening all the time. With a powerful enough telescope a region in the sky at night the size of a dime held at arms length will reveal more than 100,000 galaxies - so many that one may see up to 10 stars explode on a given night. Over time, 200 million stars have exploded in our galaxy, producing almost all the elements that make up our bodies. The atoms in your left hand may have come from a different star than those in your right: we are all star children.

If this poetry of nature does not change the way we view our place in the universe, providing not mere facts but new meaning, then we are truly spiritually bereft. Yet too many people feel that they must invent alternate realities to justify human existence.

Why does it matter if people cling to myths for solace? Because real-world problems such as climate change can only be solved by real-world thinking. Like it or not, the harsh reality is that nature doesn't exist to serve humanity, and turning to myths that put humans at the centre of creation only distract us from appropriate actions.

Brooks's column also mentioned Barack Obama's much-maligned statement that some people turn to religion for refuge from the inequities that abound in Bush's America - a truth many people would rather not hear. If we live at a time when honest questions about the role of religion and people's motivations for action cannot be voiced in public, then I worry about our future.”

 Aldus Krauss.

 Die Rousseauseaanse en Jouberteaanse pro-Intelligente Ontwerpargumente word nou in gewysigde vorm deur ’n buitengewone professor in sielkunde van die Universiteit van Pretoria, Wilhelm Jordaan, herhaal in ’n bespreking van Geloof, Bygeloof en Ander Wensdenkery in die Winter-uitgawe van Boeke-Insig, die puik kwartaalblad onder redaksie van Irna van Zyl. Koop dit gerus, veral om die verstommende vergelyking wat hy tref tussen wetenskap en godsdiens onder oë te kry. Ek lewer in die Lente-uitgawe van Boeke-Insig repliek op Jordaan.

 Intussen wag Karel de Pauw steeds op 'n antwoord van Joubert oor die verkeerde wyse waarop hy wetenskaplikes buite konteks aanhaal om sy godsdienstige sienings te probeer staaf.

 ’n Laaste gedagte: die Amerikaanse genetikus Jerry Coyne som die Rousseau- en Intelligente Ontwerp-benadering raak op: “. . . die werklike oorlog is tussen rasionaliteit en bygeloof. Wetenskap is maar een vorm van rasionaliteit, terwyl godsdiens die algemeenste vorm van bygeloof is . . . As die geskiedenis van die wetenskap ons iets wys, is dit dat ons nêrens kom deur ons onkunde ‘God’ te noem nie.”

I tried to upload a copy of the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case, but I guess you'll have to use the Wikipedia article (with the memo related to the verdict under Wikisource) while I figure out why I can't upload files to my blog.

In the meantime, I have to go take a shower, have lunch, mind the gap and commute for hours for a meeting. Pff...

PROF WALTER VEITH LECTURES IN HEIDELBERG

Professor Walter J Veith obtained his doctorate in Zoology from the University of Cape Town in 1979. While senior lecturer in Zoology at the University of Stellenbosch from 1979-1987, he made important discoveries concerning the origin of life and the theories of evolution and creation [apparently not important enough to stun the legit scientific community]. Retired professor from the University of the Western Cape, Dr Veith is one of the few scientists who believes that the theory of evolution does not provide a plausible explanation of our origins [hey, not all scientists can be smart]. Dr Veith's research has led him to the discovery that archeology, history and world events prove the Bible to be true, turning him from an atheistic evolutionists to a Christian creationist [gods I wish I could get him and that schmuck Richard Dawkins into the same room - poetry]. In the last 20 years, Dr Walter Veith has lectured internationally to large and enthusiastic crowds [drunk naturally] in Europe, Africa, Canada and North America on the creation/evolution question, diet and disease, and Biblical truths. Dr Veith will be lecturing in Heidelberg Town Hall from 21 to 27 July. Come and listen to this world renowned speaker.

I might actually go, if just for the farce of it.

The Art of Reading Scripture (Ellen F. Davis & Richard B. Hays). I've been looking for a long time for an apologist counterpoint to my favorite Biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman. Ehrman is excellent, and extremely scholarly, but he is in fact an agnostic. He began as a Fundamentalist, but in-depth exposure to the actual Bible drove his faith from him. Not surprising; it did the same thing to me. But even so, I've wanted to find an actual scholar who was still a Christian apologist. That C. S. Lewis is considered a great modern apologist just demonstrates how bankrupt the field really is (c.f. my review of Mere Christianity).

Then I discovered Richard B. Hays in a "debate" with Bart Ehrman. This is much more a conversation than a "debate" and there is not dramatic disagreement between the two. Even so, Hays is a Christian and apologist, and I was interested in more of his stuff. In the process I found The Art of Reading Scripture, and through that I discovered the essays of Ellen F. Davis, who is worth reading no matter your beliefs. The rest of this book, which is a collection of essays, is inconsistent. Some are insightful, some are useless, but as a whole I recommend this book to Christians and non-Christians who are interested in exploring the place of scripture in the modern Church and the modern world. Of particular note is the clear understanding among these authors of the actual history of the Bible. These are not contra-evidence "Answers in Genesis" positions (which I now refer to as "fourell" positions due to the covering of the ears and chanting "La La La La" which is required to hold them). These are actual scholars who understand the...interesting...history of the Biblical canon, and yet are honestly seeking its place in a postmodern world. You will need to get used to talking about postmodernism. Nearly every essay mentions it.

The Black Hole War (Leonard Susskind). I thought I knew a thing or two about quantum mechanics. Hah! The maximum information density is proportional to the surface area of space and not its volume? This is crazy talk. I know nothing. Susskind kindly leads us through the difficulties and absurdities that are quantum mechanics with almost no resort to equations. I originally wasn't even going to blog about this book here, because it doesn't really relate to the religious topics I focus on here, but I was struck by one thing. Much of The God Delusion talks about the wiring of the human mind. There are certain things that make sense to us because we have an evolutionary disposition to think that way. What does Susskind tell us right off the bat? Quantum mechanics is hard for humans to understand because we have an evolutionary disposition that does not include the very small or the very fast. Susskind's "middle world" is exactly the world described by Dawkins when he describes how religion natural forms, and how morality can also easily form without religion due to our wiring. In both cases, we have to consciously break our natural wiring in order to see the world more as it is. There's a whole sermon in that.

Free-thinkers often love FIRST EDITIONS of old books. Imagine how violated we would feel if somebody entered a property owned by a secular group, and when nobody was looking, snuck and tore a page out of a displayed first edition of the Origin of Species, then brought it home, recorded a narrative of how he had obtained it, shot video of it being pissed on, and posted it on the Internet.

Or how about fossils?

Imagine an atheist group that gives a fossil trilobite necklace to new group members, kind of like a Kurt Vonnegut "granfalloon"---a shared object that enhances group solidarity. It's something that the group members identify with and wear.

And lets say that a group of religious fundamentalists enters a meeting and pretends that they are new initiates. They receive ten of these necklaces, under pretense of joining the group, then go home and smash them with hammers and post them on the Internet. They scroll this message over the smashed pieces: "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Period."

Isn't this obviously illiberal behavior, and a threat to an atheist group's right to form an efficiently functioning association, without interference, infiltration, or harrassment?

Until atheists leave their property and go out into the community to distribute literature, there is an expectation that their group has a reasonable degree of control and privacy surrounding its functioning.

Myers's momma surely must have taught him to respect people's boundaries. What's his problem here? Might it be that he is not a liberal---but instead has an authoritarian personality---but just happens to be on our side (the agnostic/atheist side) of the God question?

Below is Myers’s paragraph, from his blog last week, that generated the initial controversy. We need to keep it in mind that this, and not something else, is what he is defending:

Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I’ll send you my home address. 

Holy Sonnet XIV: Batter My Heart, Three-Person'd God
John Donne (1572-1631)

Batter my heart, three person'd God; for, you
As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and seeke to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow mee,'and bend
Your force, to breake, blow, burn and make me new.
I, like an usurpt towne, to'another due,
Labour to'admit you, but Oh, to no end,
Reason your viceroy in mee, mee should defend,
But is captiv'd, and proves weake or untrue.
Yet dearley'I love you,'and would be loved faine,
But am betroth'd unto your enemie:
Divorce mee,'untie, or breake that knot againe,
Take mee to you, imprison mee, for I
Except you'enthrall mee, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish mee.

I love John Donne.  I once read a commentator state that his is 'the most seductive spiritual poetry and the most spiritual seductive poetry ever written'.  This sums him up pretty well.  Born Catholic, after succumbing to pressure from King James To convert to Anglicanism he eventually became the Dean of St Paul's, gave really cool sermons and obsessed about death in a very creative manner.

The reason I love him (apart from the fact that his poetry rocks) is that he really craved God. He ached for God with an intensity that shakes me. I can taste it in every line of this poem. I understand it. I feel the same, sometimes.

Yesterday Wolf and I were in a book shop and I saw Richard Dawkins' book The God Delusion. The title scared me, I leafed through it with ill-concealed hysteria and asked Wolf if he found the title sad or threatening. Wolf is grounded in his faith (unconventional, he is no monotheiest) and moves easily past naysayers. I fear contamination. A guy, a clever guy, a scientist, publishes a book asserting God is nothing more than a dangerous delusion and I linger, fearfully - wanting to read it, and yet not.

It is like passing the scene of a car accident, not wanting to look and yet wanting to. You want to look and see people ashen faced and trembling, lighting cigarettes and saying "what a relief I could have been killed". You want to see survivors not corpses. I want to read The God Delusion and survive. I don't want to be contaminated with even more doubt.

Like Donne I crave God, like Donne's God, mine remains just beyond my fingertips. People who know God exists draw me, people who know He doesn't scare me. The beauty of faith is in its struggle.

To protect myself from Dawkins the non-believer I call upon another love, Einstein, the pantheist - speaking in Hindu:

'A human being is part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. We experience ourselves, our thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest. A kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from the prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty. The true value of a human being is determined by the measure and the sense in which they have obtained liberation from the self. We shall require a substantially new manner of thinking if humanity is to survive.'

So who's deluded now? Thanks Albert I owe you one.

MnIndy: Has the outrcry over your post given you second thoughts about getting a host and treating "it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web"?

Myers: The response has done nothing but confirm it: I have to do something. I'm not going to just let this disappear. It's just so darned weird that they're demanding that I offer this respect to a symbol that means nothing to me. Something will be done. It won't be gross. It won't be totally tasteless, but yeah, I'll do something that shows this cracker has no power. This cracker is nothing.

Myers's response here is mendacious. It is not "respect to a symbol" that is being demanded. It is respect for harassment-free religious assembly. 

If a Catholic approached Myers on the street and offered him a piece of religious literature, or a statue of the Virgin Mary, or told him to bow and receive a communion wafer on his tongue, Myers would be within his rights to receive such items from the evangelist and then desecrate them on the Internet. He is equally free, any time he pleases, to go to a Catholic bookstore, purchase an item, and desecrate it on the Internet.

It would be uncivil and juvenile, but he could do it.

But what Myers is actually wanting to do is of a different order. He is going out of his way to procure, by deceit, within the confines of a church's property, an object that Catholics do not share with nonbelievers. Period.

He is, in short, encouraging his readers to interfere with a particular people's ability to practice their religion without interference within their own property boundaries.

And he is indulging a primitive and volatile human passion: iconoclasm (taking from a religious people, against their will, objects sacred to them for desecration or destruction).

This is an enormously serious breach of the liberal foundations of our society. We would not, for one moment, condone or tolerate an anti-Semite interfering in a similar fashion with a Jewish synagogue service, and we must not condone or tolerate an atheist attempting to interfere with a Catholic mass.

Tolerating such behavior threatens the very foundations of a liberal society. 

To illustrate the seriousness of this issue, let's imagine that, not Myers, but an anti-Semite, was interviewed by the Minnesota Independent, and let's replace the word "cracker" with "Talmud" in the interviewer's question and Myers's response:

MnIndy: Has the outrcry over your post given you second thoughts about getting a Talmud from a synagogue and treating "it with profound disrespect and heinous Talmud abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web"?

Anti-Semite: The response has done nothing but confirm it: I have to do something. I'm not going to just let this disappear. It's just so darned weird that they're demanding that I offer this respect to a symbol that means nothing to me. Something will be done. It won't be gross. It won't be totally tasteless, but yeah, I'll do something that shows this Talmud has no power. This Talmud is nothing.

If an anti-Semite gave such a response, would we not hear the illiberalism, intolerance, paranoia and hate undergirding it? And wouldn't we recognize immediately that the Jewish community was being harrassed by a fanatic?

Myers needs to come down off his high-horse, admit he exercised poor judgement in a rash moment, apologize to the Catholic community, and reaffirm liberal values. Otherwise, agnostics and atheists should treat him as an illiberal pariah upon our community.

Below is Myers's paragraph, from his blog last week, that generated the initial controversy. We need to keep it in mind that this, and not something else, is what he is defending:

Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I’ll send you my home address. 

• Both a Virgin Mary icon and a communion wafer are fashioned for a sacred purpose.
• Cathedral icons and communion wafers are used for purposes of ritual, symbol, and worship.
• Neither cathedral icons nor communion wafers are manufactured by the Catholic community of believers for any other purpose than ritual, symbol, and worship within the confines of their church property.
• To destroy or desecrate an object used for a distinct religious purpose, and against the will of the community of believers to which it belongs, is to engage in iconoclasm---and so both cathedral icons and communion wafers are subject to iconoclastic gestures by someone who might be wishing to engage in a hostile symbolic gesture toward Catholicism. 

Two reasons this makes University of Minnesota biologist, PZ Myers, an advocate of iconoclasm:

• Myers asked his readers to enter Catholic churches, and under false pretenses obtain from priests communion wafers, then secret them from church property.
• Myers asked his readers to send him the communion wafers via mail for the purpose of his desecrating them, and posting their desecration on the Internet.

Here is Myers's exact quote, posted on his blog site, last week:

Can anyone out there score me some consecrated communion wafers? There’s no way I can personally get them — my local churches have stakes prepared for me, I’m sure — but if any of you would be willing to do what it takes to get me some, or even one, and mail it to me, I’ll show you sacrilege, gladly, and with much fanfare. I won’t be tempted to hold it hostage (no, not even if I have a choice between returning the Eucharist and watching Bill Donohue kick the pope in the balls, which would apparently be a more humane act than desecrating a goddamned cracker), but will instead treat it with profound disrespect and heinous cracker abuse, all photographed and presented here on the web. I shall do so joyfully and with laughter in my heart. If you can smuggle some out from under the armed guards and grim nuns hovering over your local communion ceremony, just write to me and I’ll send you my home address.

Please note that at the end of Myers's quote, he explicitly recognizes that to obtain communion hosts from a Catholic service requires an act of "smuggling," beneath the watchful eyes of "armed guards and grim nuns." In other words, even though Myers knows that the act is a gross violation of the space of a religious community, he encourages it anyway.

Can a liberal individual, group, or society, secular or religious, condone such interference with the free and unharrassed practice of religion and still be liberal?

Would we tolerate an anti-Semitic group interfering with a Jewish synagogue service in a similar fashion?

Hedges has been an international correspondent for the New York Times, and he wrote, last year, a widely discussed book on the dangers of Christian fundamentalism titled, American Fascists.

In his most recent book, Hedges's thesis is that the neo-atheist movement is as susceptible to authoritarian, and even totalitarian, impulses as religious fundamentalism.

Hedges's book is thus practically a primer to thinking about the drift of PZ Myers away from liberal tolerance and basic civility. 

Hedges is concerned about the human propensity toward externalizing evil, demonizing opponents, and committing violence in the name of utopian progress, whether conceived as bringing on the second coming of Jesus, an Islamic caliphate, or a more broadly secular society.

A few months back, when I first read the book, I thought that Hedges's rhetoric was excessive, and I was not prepared to call the neo-atheist impulse as, in the main, tending toward the authoritarian or the fundamentalist.

But after following reader forum comments on various topics at Dawkins's website, as well as the recent incident surrounding Myers, I now think it is fair to say that prominant neo-atheists sometimes veer toward being illiberal, and are often attracting followers who are deeply bigoted, impatient with nuance, intolerant of human diversity, and psychologically closed off in ways that mirror fundamentalism. 

Another thing I like about Hedges's book is that he does not let neo-atheist leaders (such as Dawkins and Sam Harris) off the hook wherever they indulge in illiberalism (as in the areas of parental control over child-rearing, and saber-rattling toward Muslim nations). He offers an example of a principled, liberal stance against extremism and intolerance. 

Hedges wants to live in a pluralistic global society, not one that increasingly veers toward homogenization (religious or secular). He wants people to grow up, walk in the shoes of others, and not be so cock-sure of their own conclusions.

But in this sense, alas, Hedges is being a bit Utopian himself.

Still, I Don't Believe in Atheists is an excellent, life affirming, and complex reflection on the human condition. The title of the book strikes me as mostly a way of grabbing attention so that Hedges can address the (to me more profound) subject of the human propensity toward totalitarianism.

In this sense, a good book to accompany this one is Michael Burleigh's Earthly Powers, a historical study of the clash between religion and politics in Europe in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Hedges book can be found here: http://www.amazon.com/Dont-Believe-Atheists-Chris-Hedges/dp/141656795X/ref=cm_cr-mr-title

Most of us are aware of the background. William Paley (1743-1805), a British philosopher, argued that just if you were to find a watch in a field you would assume a designer, so also the universe itself must presuppose a designer. No one, he believed, would expect that nature would construct this fairly simple machine, no matter how long it had to do so. He then reasoned that the universe is infinitely more complex, and thus, calls infinitely more for an intelligent designer.

Supposedly, this argument was finally refuted by Richard Dawkins in his book The Blind Watchmaker. Dawkins believes that evolution explains this complexity naturally, and therefore no designer is necessary. He further argues that the argument is self refuting:

Organized complexity is the thing we are having difficulty in explaining. Once we are allowed to postulateorganized complexity, if only the organized complexity of the DNA/protein replicating engine, it is relatively easy to invoke it as a generator of yet more organized complexity. That, indeed, is what most of this book is about. But of course any God capable of intelligently designing something as complex as the DNA/protein replicating machine must have been at least as complex and organized as that machine itself. Far more so if we suppose him additionally capable of such advanced functions as listening to prayers and forgiving sins. To explain the origin of the DNA/protein machine by invoking a supernatural Designer is to explain precisely nothing, for it leaves unexplained the origin of the Designer. You have to say something like, 'God was always there', and if you allow yourself that kind of lazy way out, you might as well just say 'DNA was always there', or 'life was always there', and be done with it. (141)

Dawkins' argument, fails on two counts. First, even if Darwinian evolution, as Dawkins explains it, is an accepted reality, it still leaves untouched the vast majority of the Teleological argument's assertions. Indeed, if anythingin the universe is found to be incapable of being produced by natural means, then the argument stands vindicated. Whether or not such things exist remain to be seen, but it is enough, for now, to note that Dawkins' rebuttal is, at best, only partial. But secondly, and more importantly, he has misunderstood the most basic element of Christian Theism. He rightly notes that the naturalist must explain organized complexity--that, indeed, is their great problem--but fails to properly classify that organization. What, we may ask, is it exactly that is being organized? And the answer must be "matter." We are dealing, then, with physical/biological organization.

But who would assert that God is physical and biological? Even if it were true that God were amazingly complex (though we will see shortly that He is not), it is not true that He is biologically complex. And thus, Dawkins is wrong in asserting that we are just as qualified in declaring biological complexity's eternality as we are God's. Put differently, it is a scientific fact that biological complexity has not, nor could have, always existed. It is not a scientific fact, nor could it be, that God--however complex He may be--could not have existed for eternity.

But further, God is not complex. Quite the opposite, one of His attributes (i.e., omniscience, omnipresence, omnipotence, etc.) is Simplicity, which goes hand-in-hand with His Immutability (that is, He cannot change). The doctrine of simplicity states that God is a single essence that cannot be reduced or broken down in any way. It is, admittedly, a radical doctrine that even most modern theologians have failed to consider, but it is indispensable to classical Christian thought. For if God could be broken down into component "parts," then there would be a reality that is more basic and more fundamental than God Himself. But such a notion is absurd, for God is, by definition, the foundation for all existence. So there is a very real sense in which God's love is His omnipotence, which is His mercy, which is His justice, etc.

So much for rebuttals.

But does the universe imply design? The answer must be Yes, for the simple fact is that the universe need not exist as it does now. While advocates of this argument are fond of citing the incredible improbability of our universe's make up (see Hugh Ross' list, for example), it is enough for us to point this fact out. Life is improbable, and not for any evolutionary reasons. There is no scientific or mathematical reason that the universe must exist in its present state, a state that, if modified only slightly, would be incapable of producing life. For reference, we may appeal to the oft-quoted Stephen Hawking on the matter:

The laws of science, as we know them at present, contain many fundamental numbers, like the size of the electric charge of the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron. We cannot, at the moment at least, predict the values of these numbers from theory--we have to find them by observation. It may be that one day we shall discover a complete unified theory that predicts all of them, but it is also possible that some or all of them vary from universe to universe or within a single universe. The remarkable fact is that the values of these members seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life. For example, if the electric charge of the electron had been only slightly different, stars either would have been unable to burn hydrogen and helium, or else they would not have exploded . . . it seems clear that there are relatively few ranges of values for the numbers that would allow the development of any form of intelligent life. Most sets of values would give rise to universes that, although they might be very beautiful, would contain no one able to wonder at that beauty. One can take this either as evidence of a divine purpose in Creation and the choice of laws of science or as support for the strong anthropic principle. (The Illustrated Brief History of Time, 160-61)

The "strong anthropic principle" is the view that an infinite number of universes exist in attempt to explain the amazing configuration as our own. In an infinite number of universes, the reasoning goes, an infinite number of life-sustaining--however improbable--will come into existence. Of course, this view is just as unscientific as any God hypothesis may be, for other universes are, by definition, unobservable (if they were observable, then they would be part of our own). But if they are unobservable, then they are not the object of scientific study, and, thus, unscientific in the strictest sense of the term.

And so it appears that we are forced to choose between two "unscientific" notions regarding the apparent design of the universe. Either that design is real, which requires a Designer, or there are an infinite number of universes, an idea that cannot be tested. Put differently, either our Designer is an intelligent God or an unintelligent multiverse.

In either case, something--or Someone--exists beyond our universes' boundaries.

I hate to ruin the good mood that Mr. Wayne just left us in, but; statistically speaking, half of you will not be Christians in a few years from now.

A guy by the name of Gary Railsbeck did a survey recently, where he found that 30 to 50 percent of all Christians fall away from their faith within their first few years of attending a secular college.

http://www.summit.org/about/world/

I heard from a different study that 80 percent of Southern Baptists Christians fall away from their faith in their freshmen year.

I don't want that to happen to you guys.

I thought long and hard about what I wanted to say to you tonight. I don't have too much time to say it all, so I thought about the most important advice I could give you before you head out into the world.

You see, I do a lot of arguing with skeptics and Atheists. Most of them kind of hate my guts, but the point is, I KNOW what yall are about to walk into. I know their attitudes, and how they think, how they view YOU, and most importantly, what they are going to try and do about it.

In the short time I have to talk with you, I want to tell you two ways you can keep your faith in college.

Mark Twain is quoted as saying, "Faith is believing what you know aint so."

Famous Atheist Richard Dawkins says this about faith:

"The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as "faith" - Virtues of the Mind

Guys; THIS is how your professors WILL view you if you let them know you have faith. This is how they see Christians. As Richard Dawkins says, "Patients" in need of a doctor.

This is how your non-Christian class mates will view you and your faith. You will be surrounded by people who believe that your faith is nothing more than an irrational belief in something you KNOW doesn't exist, but for emotional reasons, (or mental handicaps of some sort) you INSIST on believing in God anyway despite the lack of evidence.

I want to tell you right now that if this is what you think Faith is, then you will have no problems at all in College.

Nothing in this world can touch you! No matter what you learn in biology class, no matter what your physics professor tells you; you wont have to worry. You already KNOW that what you believe in is irrational. You already believe that Faith is "believing what you know aint so."

They think that you turn your brain off for a few hours every Sunday, and turn it back on when you get to your first class on Monday. If you believe this about faith then they would be right!

This is a full proof way to keep your faith through college. The only problem is, it is not the Christian Faith.

When someone I'm arguing with tries to define faith as "believing what you know aint so," I love throwing Hebrews 11:1 back in their face.

"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen. For by it the men of old gained approval. By faith we understand that the worlds were prepared by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things which are visible."

Unless you want to completely make your faith irrational and meaningless (as the Atheists would have you do) then you're going to have to accept the Bible's view of Faith. You're going to have to fight for it!

Our Faith is NOT irrational, it is NOT based on something we already know isn't true! In fact, it is just the opposite! We KNOW God is real, that is the only way we can know anything else at all!

I don't have time now to get into all the different ways we go about proving how rational our faith is, but I assure you, our Faith is every bit as rational, (no I take that back,) MORE rational, and indeed makes FOOLISH, the Atheists faith, or the faith of your college professor.

One of my favorite verses assures us of this. 2 Corinthians 10:3 says this:

"For though we walk in the flesh, we do not war according to the flesh, for the weapons of our warfare are not of the flesh, but divinely powerful for the destruction of fortresses. We are destroying speculations and every lofty thing raised up against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ..."

You guys are ballistic missiles! Aimed straight into the world! Special delivery to Satan, from (...this church...)!

We are to take EVERY thought captive and destroy EVERY false speculation in the name of Jesus Christ. No! Our faith is NOT something to be kept inside, and only utilized on Sunday mornings! We are to subdue the world for Christ!

You have many opportunities facing you now to do just that.

Do you want to sit around all day and look at the sky? Go be an astronomer! I just met a great Creation astronomer last week: Mr. Danny Faulkner. He was in a debate about the age of the universe with Dr. Hugh Ross, (who says this universe is millions and millions of years old) Dr. Russell Humphreys is another EXCELLENT creation astronomer. He is trying to prove how the universe can be as young as the Bible says it is, and still have starlight from stars that are millions of light years away. These guys NEED help from young Christians like yourselves.

Do you like playing in the dirt? Go be a geologist! Go out into the world and PROVE that Noahs flood was real, and that the Earth really is only a few thousand years old! The Creation geologists need your help!

Do you want to crawl around in sewers and rescue hot blondes from Nazis? Go be an Archaeologist! Dr. David Down is a wonderful Archaeologist, who just wrote a book called, "Unwrapping the Pharaos". In his book he shows that by matching up the secular Egyptian time line with the Bible, a bunch of so called "mysteries" are solved! Just recently Archaeologists in Israel claimed that they have found the tomb of King Herod! These guys NEED young Christians to go out into the world, and learn, get trained up, and help them in the field!

Philosophy! We need Christian philosophers. This is what I personally love doing. If you walk into a conversation between two philosophers you might think they were nuts! But, there are battles to fight on the philosophical front, and we need Christian philosophers out there to fight them!

We desperately need to take back Hollywood! Do you guys like writing stories, or playing around with cameras? Are you creative? Christians MUST take back Hollywood, and begin reclaiming this culture for Christ!

We also need Christian lawyers. I know that sounds like a contradiction in terms, but we do need them! If some woman ever loses her mind, and decides to marry me, and we have kids, I want them growing up in a world where they don't have to worry about being arrested for reading their Bibles! I want to be able to home school them, and bring them up in the faith with freedom! We need Christian lawyers!

Also, and this may sound a little funny; you guys need to go out, get married, and have lots of babies! You need to be good Christian parents. Where two Christians come together, they can create 5 or 6 or, if you're really brave 10 to 12 other Christians! We need to begin rebuilding the strength of the family in America!

This world needs more preachers, teachers and evangelists! The crop is plentiful but the workers are few! We need preachers.

So, please, don't practice the first type of faith I mentioned. Contend fearlessly for your faith, and take EVERY area of thought and academia captive for Christ! Demolish EVERY False idea, no matter where it springs up!
Look the Devil in the eye, and tell him, "I am a Christian; I am rational; and I am proud of it!"

Congratulation on your graduation,

and

God bless you!

Mockery, parody, and blasphemy are forms of speech that should always receive vigorous and outspoken protection. But what PZ Myers did is of a very different order of seriousness. Myers called on people to broach a group’s inner private worship space, and what this means is that Myers moved from the realm of BLASPHEMY to ICONOCLASM.

Iconoclasm is the destruction of sacred objects taken from others against their will.

Iconoclasm is not just a gesture of disagreement or mockery, but an infringement upon the rights of people to practice their beliefs without expectation of harrassment.

An extreme example of iconoclasm is this passage in the Bible (2 Kings 10.26-27), in which the monotheist King Jehu, in a fit of Taliban-like zeal, had a temple to Baal destroyed, and its ruins turned into a urinal, a place to take a piss:

And they brought forth the images out of the house of Baal, and burned them.

And they brake down the image of Baal, and brake down the house of Baal, and made it a draught house unto this day.

PZ Myers’s call to his readers to steal hosts from Catholic churches is in the family of this kind of Jehu-like gesture—it is simply being concealed from full consciousness because he is asking them to obtain “a cracker.”

But we might absorb the disturbing import of his request more fully if he were to ask his followers to steal hymnals from churches, or statues of the Virgin Mary, large or small, and desecrate them, or spray paint a church wall with the word “ATHEIST.”

If Catholics sold consecrated hosts to tourists in Catholic gift shops, then desecrating a host would be fair game for Youtube video desecration (though uncivil, and in extraordinarily poor and juvenile taste).

But they don’t. There is an expectation of unharrassed privacy around consecrated wafers, and they are as sacred a symbol to Catholics as the icons within their churches.

Hence Myers asked his readers to broach the boundary between blasphemy and iconoclasm, one that no liberal society can condone and go on being liberal.

In a civil and free society, iconoclasm is every bit as bad as racism and sexism. It makes the exercise of basic freedoms impossible, and makes all of us susceptible to hooliganism.

That’s why Myers should apologize. He shouldn’t lose his job, but he should apologize.

And if he doesn’t, Catholics, atheists, and agnostics should call him on it, and not defend, intellectually or otherwise, his uncivil and illiberal gesture.

I'd like to offer one more analogy.

If Myers was an anti-Semite, and his call went out to his readers to pretend to be Jews, and visit synagogues, and steal symbols of their worship, and con rabbis, under false pretenses, into giving them something from their synagogues, so that Myers could get the objects in the mail and desecrate them on the Internet, we would have moral clarity on this.

We would recognize immediately that anti-Semites are harrassing Jews in their private religious practice, and we would condemn it in the clearest possible terms.

That's what we need to do here.

This is what we need to do with regard to PZ Myers.

I have been reading Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man (NY: Harper and Row, 1975), and gotten as far as his third section, “Thought.” His premise is fascinating, that consciousness underlies all matter. Consciousness is thus omnipresent, and ever-increases with biological complexity. It flows from geosphere to biosphere, then---with the advent of intelligence---the noosphere. On its evolutionary journey it rises from elemental chance to reasoned choice. Père Teilhard attempts to reconcile divinity with evolution, teleologically pointing life towards what he terms the “Omega Point:” a sort of Mobius strip for life whereby all life eventually folds back and returns to its origins in God.

Interestingly, this morning’s NY Times (July 15, 2008) carried a somewhat related story about the Harvard scientist, Edward O. Wilson, who studies ant social behavior and extrapolates lessons for humanity. Wilson is currently writing a treatise on “social evolution,” a controversial argument that connects of social behavior and genetics.

Wilson sees an evolutionary impetus for cooperative, selfless behavior that favors the group over the individual. The Times article states, “In humans, these may include genes that underlie generosity, moral constraints, even religious behavior.” It goes on to say, “Morality and religion, [Wilson] suspects, are traits based on group selection. ‘Groups with men of quality — brave, strong, innovative, smart and altruistic — would tend to prevail, as Darwin said, over those groups that do not have those qualities so well developed,’ Dr. Wilson said.”

Wilson and like-minded colleagues have come under fire from others in the Sciences, such as Richard Dawkins (author of The Selfish Gene [Oxford U. Press, 1976] and The God Delusion [Bantam Books, 2006]). Dawkins and his camp narrowly see genetics, the “survival of the fittest” and natural selection in individual terms, as an organism’s single minded ("take no prisoners") drive to survive and reproduce at all costs. Wilsonians, on the other hand, believe that natural selection works on many levels, including “multi-level or group-level selection”: in essence, an evolutionary process favoring the survival of the group over the needs of an individual.

For many reasons, I am most tempted to agree with Wilson’s view, not Dawkins’, as I’ve made abundantly clear elsewhere in other articles, such as “Turtles All the Way Down” and “Krishna’s Dictum.”

I’m not yet sure how closely Père Teilhard’s thesis overlaps with Wilson’s, but if Wilson can prove an evolutionary theory of morality, his work would certainly seem to harmonize with Teilhard’s belief that something greater than mechanical evolution is “afoot in the world.”

When I complete The Phenomenon of Man, I will surely have further observations to add. Stay tuned.

This may seem like an uncivil statement, but it is actually the opposite.

Nothing could be more corrosive to human interaction than the inability to express one’s true thoughts. Therapists have long told us that family relationships are only as strong as the amount of truth that can be safely expressed within them.

How much more so with the human family?

Of course, in our day-to-day interactions, people wisely avoid discussing religion and politics. But it must be possible to honestly speak about them somewhere. And that is one of the functions of media and the Internet: to give free expression to thoughts and feelings that may be inappropriate to display elsewhere, such as the workplace.

Thus, when a person places a crucifix in a vat of urine or draws an image of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban, and displays it on the Internet, that person is saying,

I feel that religious sensibilities are treated with too much deference in the public square and I reject the concept of the sacred as such.

You may not like such a message, but it is not without intellectual content and there must be a place for sentiments like this one to be expressed publicly.

Toward the beginning of George Orwell’s novel “1984” a man living in a totalitarian society takes the fateful step of writing a diary. The moment his pen touches the paper he perceives it as the signing of his own death sentence—and yet he continues.

He begins the diary with this dedication:

“To the future or to the past, to a time when thought is free, when men are different from one another and do not live alone.”

If we forbid cartoonists to draw Muhammad, or the creators of "South Park" to make fun of Richard Dawkins---and if we drive them into isolation by threat of violence or law, and force everyone into polite conformity in the name of respect for religious opinion, then that diary dedication cannot be addressed to our time.

Think about that.

Now having said this, why is PZ Myers's recent call to his blog readers to "score" consecrated wafers from Catholic churches, and send them to him for Internet desecration, of a different order of seriousness than blasphemy?

Because Myers is calling on people to broach a group's inner private worship space, and what this means is that Myers has moved from the realm of BLASPHEMY to ICONOCLASM.

Iconoclasm is the destruction of sacred objects taken from others against their will.

Iconoclasm is not just a gesture of disagreement or mockery, but an infringement upon the rights of people to practice their beliefs without expectation of harrassment.

An extreme example of iconoclasm is this passage in the Bible (2 Kings 10.26-27), in which the monotheist King Jehu, in a fit of Taliban-like zeal, had a temple to Baal destroyed, and its ruins turned into a urinal, a place to take a piss:

And they brought forth the images out of the house of Baal, and burned them.

 

And they brake down the image of Baal, and brake down the house of Baal, and made it a draught house unto this day.

PZ Myers's call to his readers to steal hosts from Catholic churches is in the family of this kind of Jehu-like gesture---it is simply being concealed from full consciousness because he is asking them to obtain "a cracker."

But we might absorb the disturbing import of his request more fully if he were to ask his followers to steal hymnals from churches, or statues of the Virgin Mary, large or small, and desecrate them, or spray paint a church wall with the word "ATHEIST."

If Catholics sold consecrated hosts to tourists in Catholic gift shops, then desecrating a host would be fair game for Youtube video desecration (though uncivil, and in extraordinarily poor and juvenile taste).

But they don't. There is an expectation of unharrassed privacy around consecrated wafers, and they are as sacred a symbol to Catholics as the icons within their churches.

Hence Myers asked his readers to broach the boundary between blasphemy and iconoclasm, one that no liberal society can condone and go on being liberal.

In a civil and free society, iconoclasm is every bit as bad as racism and sexism. It makes the exercise of basic freedoms impossible, and makes all of us susceptible to hooliganism. 

That's why Myers should apologize. He shouldn't lose his job, but he should apologize.

And if he doesn't, atheists and agnostics should call him on it, and not defend, intellectually or otherwise, his uncivil and illiberal gesture.

Is Science a Religion? – A Ciência é uma Religião?

por Richard Dawkins

A Humanist of the Year de 1996 fez esta pergunta em um discurso aceitado com honra da Associação Humanista Americana

É moda descrever como "apocalípticas" as ameaças à humanidade apresentadas pelo vírus da AIDS, doença da vaca louca, e muitas outras, mas eu acho que um caso pode ser feito de que a fé é um dos maiores males do mundo, comparável à varíola, mas mais difícil de extirpar.

A fé, sendo uma crença que não é baseada em evidência, é o principal vício de qualquer religião. E quem, olhando para o Noroeste da Irlanda ou o oriente médio, pode ter certeza que o vírus cerebral da fé não é excessivamente perigoso? Uma das histórias contadas para os jovens homens-bombas suicidas muçulmanos é que se tornar um mártir é o caminho mais rápido para o paraíso - e não apenas um paraíso comum, mas uma parte especial do paraíso onde eles receberão sua recompensa especial de 72 noivas virgens. Isso parece para mim que nossa melhor esperança seria prover um tipo de "arma de controle espiritual": mandar um teólogo treinado especialmente para diminuir a taxa de virgens.

Dados os perigos da fé - e considerando as realizações da razão e observação na atividade chamada ciência - eu acho irônico isso, pois, não importa quando eu dou palestras públicas, parece que sempre há alguém adiante que diz, "É claro, sua ciência é apenas uma religião como a nossa. Essencialmente, ciência acaba partindo para a fé, não é?”.

Bem, ciência não é religião e ela não acaba partindo para a fé. Embora possua muitas das virtudes da religião, não possui nenhum de seus vícios. Ciência é baseada na verificação de evidências. A fé religiosa não apenas carece de evidências, mas sua independência de evidências é seu orgulho e alegria, gritadas do topo dos telhados. Por qual outro motivo os cristãos fugiriam de criticar e duvidar de Tomé? Os outros apóstolos são apresentados para nós como exemplos de virtude porque a fé deles era o bastante para eles. Duvidar de Tomé, por outro lado, requer evidências. Talvez ele deveria ser o Santo Padroeiro dos Cientistas.

Uma razão pela qual eu recebi o comentário sobre a ciência ser uma religião é porque eu acredito no fato da evolução. E ainda acredito nisso com uma grande convicção. Para alguns, isso pode superficialmente parecer fé. Mas a evidência que me faz acreditar na evolução não é apenas preponderantemente forte; ela é claramente disponível para qualquer um que se dê ao trabalho de ler sobre ela. Qualquer um pode estudar a mesma evidência que eu estudei e aparentemente chegar à mesma conclusão. Mas se você tem uma crença que é baseada somente na fé, eu não posso examinar as tuas razões. Você pode se recuar atrás da parede privada da fé, onde eu não posso lhe alcançar.

Agora na prática, é claro, cientistas individuais às vezes deslizam para o vício da fé, e poucos podem acreditar tão cegamente em uma teoria que isso favoreça que eles ocasionalmente falsifiquem evidências. No entanto, o fato de que às vezes isto acontece não altera o princípio de que, quando eles fazem isso, eles fazem isso com vergonha e não com orgulho. O método da ciência é tão bem definido que eles normalmente são desmascarados no final.

A ciência é na verdade uma das disciplinas mais morais, mais honestas - porque a ciência ia completamente entrar em colapso se não fosse por uma aderência escrupulosa à honestidade em registrar evidências. (Como James Rhandi apontou, essa é uma das razões pela qual os cientistas são enganados freqüentemente por charlatães paranormais e pela qual o papel de reveladores da verdade é mais bem interpretado por mágicos profissionais; cientistas apenas não percebem tal deliberada desonestidade.) Há outras profissões (não é necessário mencionar os advogados, especificamente) na qual falsificação de evidências, ou ao menos o fato de contorcê-las, é precisamente o motivo pelo qual estas pessoas são pagas e ainda ganham pontos por fazê-lo.

A ciência, então, é livre do principal vício da religião, a fé. Porém, como citei, a ciência possui algumas das virtudes religiosas. A religião pode aspirar a prover seus seguidores de vários benefícios - com sua explicação, consolação e grandeza. A ciência, também, tem algo a oferecer nessas áreas.

Os seres humanos possuem fome de explicação. Pode ser uma das principais razões pela qual a humanidade universalmente possui uma religião, desde religiões para inspirar e religiões para prover explicações. Nós percebemos em nossa consciência individual um universo misterioso e queremos entendê-lo. A maioria das religiões oferece cosmologia e biologia, uma teoria da vida, uma teoria das origens, e razões para a existência. Fazendo isso, eles demonstram que religião é, de um modo, ciência; apenas uma ciência ruim. Não acredite no argumento que religião e ciências operam em dimensões separadas e estão preocupadas com diversas questões diferentes. As religiões têm sempre tentado ao longo da história responder as questões que pertencem propriamente à ciência. Deste modo, as religiões não devem se distanciar muito do terreno no qual eles escolheram, tradicionalmente, lutar. De fato eles oferecem cosmologia e biologia; porém, em ambos os casos é falso.

Consolação é mais difícil para a ciência prover. Diferente da religião, a ciência não pode oferecer a chance gloriosa de se reunir com os entes queridos no além. Os que foram injustiçados na terra não podem, na visão científica, receber uma boa recompensa pelos seus sofrimentos em uma próxima vida. Seria argumentado que, se a idéia de uma vida após a morte é uma ilusão (e eu acredito que seja), a consolação oferecida é furada. Mas ela não é assim necessariamente; uma crença falsa pode ser tão confortante como uma verdadeira, provendo que o crédulo jamais descubra que é falsa. Mas se a consolação vem tão fácil, a ciência pode ser pesada com outros paliativos, como drogas para acabar com a dor, do qual o conforto pode ser ou não ilusório, mas elas funcionam.

Grandeza, no entanto, é onde a ciência se sente em casa. Todas as grandes religiões possuem um lugar a temer pelo transporte extático das maravilhas e belezas da criação. E é exatamente este sentimento de arrepio na espinha, perda do fôlego – quase de veneração – dessa inundação no peito de maravilha e extática, que a ciência moderna pode prover. E faz muito além do que os sonhos mais loucos dos santos e místicos. O fato de que o sobrenatural não tem lugar nas nossas explicações, na nossa grande compreensão sobre o universo e a vida, não diminui a grandeza. Muito pelo contrário. Um simples olhar por um microscópio para o cérebro de uma formiga ou por um telescópio a uma galáxia antiga de bilhões de mundos é o bastante para reverter os limitados e paroquiais salmos de louvor.

Agora, como eu dizia, quando dizem para mim que a ciência ou outra parte em particular da ciência, como a teoria da evolução, é apenas uma religião como qualquer outra, eu geralmente nego isso com indignação. Mas eu comecei a perguntar será que esta é a tática errada. Talvez a tática certa seria aceitar o fardo com gratidão e exigir tempos iguais para o ensino de ciências e religião nas aulas. E quanto mais eu penso nisso, mais eu percebo que um caso excelente poderia ser feito disto. Então eu quero falar um pouco sobre educação religiosa e o papel que a ciência ocupa nela.

Eu percebo fortemente o modo como as crianças são induzidas. Não sou inteiramente familiarizado com o modo em como as coisas são nos Estados Unidos, e o que digo pode ter mais relevância para o Reino Unido, onde há uma obrigação-estadual, forçando legalmente instrução religiosa nas escolas. Isto é inconstitucional nos Estados Unidos, mas eu presumo que as crianças, todavia, recebem instrução religiosa em qualquer religião em particular que os pais deles consideram adequada.

Isto me lembra da minha opinião sobre abuso mental infantil. Em 1995, uma edição da revista Independent, uma das revistas líderes de Londres, havia uma fotografia de uma cena meiga e emocionante. Era véspera de natal, e a foto mostrava três crianças vestidas como os três reis magos para uma peça de natal. A história que a acompanhava, descrevia uma das crianças como muçulmana, uma como hindu e a outra como cristã. O suposto sentido meigo e emocionante da história foi que todos eles estavam participando desta peça de natal.

O que não é meigo e emocionante é que estas crianças tinham quatro anos de idade. Como você pode descrever uma criança de quatro anos como um muçulmano ou cristão ou hindu ou judeu? Você falaria sobre um economista monetarista de quatro anos de idade? Você falaria sobre um neo-separatista de quatro anos ou um republicano liberal de quatro anos? Há opiniões sobre o cosmos e o mundo que as crianças, assim que crescerem, vão presumidamente encontrar uma posição para se avaliar. A religião é o único campo da nossa cultura que é absolutamente aceitado, sem questionamento – sem ao menos notar o quão bizarra ela é – que os pais tem uma visão total e absoluta sobre o que as crianças vão ser, como os seus filhos vão ser criados, qual opinião seus filhos terão sobre o cosmos, sobre a vida, sobre a existência. Você vê o que quero dizer como abuso mental infantil?

Olhando agora para as várias coisas que a educação religiosa espera-se efetuar, um de seus objetivos é encorajar as crianças a refletir sobre as profundas questões da existência, convidá-los a crescer junto às insípidas preocupações da vida ordinária e pensar sob specie aeternitatis.

A ciência pode oferecer uma visão da vida e do universo que, como eu já adverti, para abater as inspirações poéticas, separam de modo desapontador e mutualmente contrário à fé, as recentes tradições das religiões do mundo.

Por exemplo, como pode uma criança nas aulas de educação religiosa reprovar ao imaginar se poderíamos, por outro lado, insinuar a idade do universo? Suponhamos que, no momento da morte de Cristo, a notícia de sua morte tenha começado a viajar na maior velocidade possível sobre o universo fora da terra. O quão longe as terríveis notícias teriam viajado até agora? De acordo com a teoria da relatividade espacial, a resposta é que as notícias não poderiam, sob quaisquer circunstâncias, ter alcançado mais que um cinqüenta avos (1/50) do caminho através da galáxia – nem um milésimo do caminho para a nossa galáxia vizinha mais perto nas 100 milhões de galáxias enormes no universo. O universo em seu tamanho não poderia possivelmente ser qualquer outra coisa a não ser indiferente à Cristo, seu nascimento, seu desejo, e sua morte. Nem mesmo tais notícias momentâneas, como a origem da vida na terra, poderia ter viajado apenas através do nosso pequeno grupo de galáxias. Ainda, este evento é tão antigo na nossa escala temporal terráquea que, se você medir sua idade com os braços abertos, toda a história humana, toda a cultura humana, cairia como poeira da ponta do seu dedo com uma simples pancada de uma lixa de unha.

O argumento do projeto, uma parte importante da história da religião, não seria ignorada nas minhas aulas de educação religiosa, é desnecessário dizer isso. As crianças olhariam para as maravilhas encantadoras do reino dos seres vivos e levariam em conta o Darwinismo junto às alternativas criacionistas e fariam suas opiniões. Penso que as crianças não teriam dificuldade em formar suas opiniões do modo certo se apresentadas as evidências. O que me preocupa não é a questão do tempo ser igual mas, de acordo com o que vejo, as crianças no Reino Unido e dos Estados Unidos não tem essencialmente nenhum tempo com o evolucionismo e ainda assim são ensinadas sobre o criacionismo (seja na escola, igreja ou em casa).

Eu também estaria interessado em ensinar mais do que uma teoria da criação. O fator dominante nessa cultura é o mito da criação Judaica, que é feita exatamente sobre o mito da criação da Babilônia. Há também, é claro, muitos e muitos outros, e talvez todos eles deveriam ter tempos iguais (exceto que não teria muito tempo para estudar qualquer outra coisa). Eu entendo que há Hindus que acreditam que o mundo foi criado em uma desnatadeira de manteiga cósmica e os Nigerianos acreditam que o mundo foi criado por deus dos excrementos das formigas. Obviamente estas estórias têm o mesmo direito de ter tempos iguais tanto quanto o mito Judeu-Cristão de Adão e Eva.

Chega de Gênesis; vamos para os profetas agora. O Cometa Halley irá retornar sem errar no ano de 2062. Bíblica ou Delphica, as profecias não começam a esperar tal precisão; astrólogos e Nostradâmicos não ousam se comprometer com as profecias factuais porém, ao invés disso, disfarçam seu charlatanismo em uma névoa de incertezas. Quando os cometas apareceram no passado, eles freqüentemente foram interpretados como portadores dos desastres. A astrologia tem exercido um papel importante nas várias tradições religiosas, incluindo o Hinduismo. Os três reis magos que eu mencionei antes, dizem que foram guiados para o berço de Jesus por uma estrela. Nós podemos perguntas às crianças por qual rota física eles imaginam que o pressuposto estelar influente nos relacionamentos humanos possa viajar.

Incidentalmente, houve um programa chocante na radio da BBC na época do natal em 1995 apresentando uma astrônoma, um bispo e um jornalista que foi enviado em uma tarefa para rastrear os passos dos três reis magos. Bem, você poderia entender a participação do bispo e do jornalista (que era um escritor religioso), mas o astrônomo era uma respeitada escritora de astronomia, e ainda assim ela foi em frente! Durante todo o programa, ela falou sobre os presságios de quanto Saturno e Júpiter estavam ascendentes acima de Urano ou o que quer que seja. Ela não acreditava em astrologia na verdade, mas um dos problemas de nossa cultura é que foi ensinado a se tornar tolerante à ela, vagamente entretidos por ela – tanto que até mesmo pessoas científicas que não acreditam em astrologia chegam a pensar que ela seja uma diversão inofensiva. Eu levo a astrologia muito a sério, inclusive: eu penso que é profundamente prejudicial porque ela mina a razão, e eu gostaria de ver campanhas contra ela.

Quando as aulas de educação religiosa se tornar ética, eu não penso que a ciência tem muito a dizer, eu a substituiria por aula de filosofia racional moral. As crianças pensam que existem padrões para o certo e o errado? E se pensarem, de onde eles vêm? Você pode construir princípios de certo e errado que dão certo, como “faça o que quer que façam com você” e “o maior bem para o maior número” (o que quer que isso signifique)? É uma pergunta recompensadora, qualquer que seja sua moral pessoal, perguntar a um evolucionista de onde a moral vem; de que modo o cérebro humano adquiriu a tendência a ter ética e moral, o sentimento de certo e errado?

Nós deveríamos valorizar a vida humana acima de todas as outras vidas? Há uma parede rígida a ser construída ao redor das espécies Homo sapiens, ou deveríamos discutir se há outras espécies que são nomeadas para nossas afinidades humanas? Nós deveríamos, por exemplo, seguir o lobby do direito de viver, que é totalmente preocupado com a vida humana, e valorizar a vida de um feto humano com a utilidade de um verme acima da vida de um chimpanzé que pensa e que sente? Qual é a base dessa cerca que nós erguemos ao redor do Homo sapiens – mesmo por um pequeno pedaço de tecido fetal? (não soa como uma idéia evolucionista quando você pensa sobre isso.) Quando, em nossa descendência evolucionária do nosso ancestral comum com os chimpanzés, esta cerca se ergueu sozinha?

Bem, continuando, então, da moral pra o final, para a escatologia, nós sabemos pela segunda lei da termodinâmica que toda a complexidade, toda a vida, todas a alegria, todo o sofrimento, é inferno dobrado ao se comparar com um fim frio e sem valor. Eles – e nós – jamais poderemos ser mais do que temporários, apostas locais do grande deslizamento universal para o abismo da uniformidade.

Nós sabemos que o universo está se expandindo e que provavelmente se expandirá sempre, embora é possível que ele possa se contrair novamente. Nós sabemos que, não importa o que aconteça com o universo, o sol engolirá a Terra em aproximadamente 60 milhões de séculos.

O tempo em si já começou em um certo momento, e o tempo pode terminar em um certo momento – ou pode ser que não. O tempo pode vir a um fim localizado em pequenas implosões chamadas buracos negros. As leis do universo parecem ser verdadeiras para todo o universo. Por que é assim? Pode ser que as leis mudem nessas implosões? Para ser realmente especulativo, o tempo poderia começar novamente com novas leis da física, novas constantes físicas. E ainda tem sido sugerido que poderiam existir vários universos, cada um isolado tão completamente que, por isso, outros não existam. Então novamente, possa haver uma seleção Dawriniana sobre os universos.

Então a ciência poderia dar uma boa explicação sobre ela mesma na educação religiosa. Mas não seria o bastante. Eu acredito que algumas familiaridades com a versão da bíblia do Rei Jaime seja importante para qualquer pessoa que queira entender as alusões que aparecem na literatura inglesa. Junto com o Livro das Orações Comuns, a bíblia possui 58 páginas no Dicionário de Citações de Oxford. Apenas Shakespeare possui mais. Eu penso que sem ter qualquer tipo de educação bíblica seria infelicidade se as crianças quereriam ler literatura inglesa e entender a origem de frases como “through a glass darkly”, “all flesh is a grass”, “the race is not to the swift”, “crying is the wilderness”, “reaping the whirlwind”, “amid the alien corn”, “Eyeless in Gaza”, “Job’s comforters” and “the widows mite”. (*expressões literárias optadas por não serem traduzidas).

Quero retornar agora para a acusação de que a ciência é apenas uma fé. A versão mais extrema dessa acusação – e uma que eu freqüentemente encaro tanto como um cientista e um racionalista – é sobre o fanatismo e a inveja cega dos cientistas ser tão grandes quanto às das pessoas religiosas. Algumas vezes pode haver um pouco de injustiça nesta acusação, mas como fanáticos invejosos, nós cientistas somos amadores neste jogo. Nós ficamos satisfeitos em argumentar com aqueles que discordam de nós. Nós não os matamos.

Mas eu gostaria de negar até mesmo a menor acusação puramente verbal de fanatismo. Há uma grande, e de grande importância, diferença entre acreditar fortemente, até mesmo passionalmente, em alguma coisa pelo fato de termos pensado sobre ela e de ter examinado as evidências de um lado, e acreditar fortemente em alguma coisa porque foi revelada de forma interna para nós, ou internamente revelada a outra pessoa na história e subseqüentemente consagrada por tradição. Há toda uma diferença no mundo entre uma crença em que um está preparado para defendê-la com uma citação de uma evidência e lógica e uma crença que é sustentada por nada mais do que tradição, autoridade ou revelação.

Esse texto foi originalmente publicado na revista Humanist, em 1997.
http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/art

G. H. Hardy deserves credit for being able to recognize genius when it confronted him, especially since some of his colleagues apparently didn't.  Hardy is said to have made the following comment about Ramanujan's work: "must be true, because, if they were not true, no one would have the imagination to invent them."  This dynamic is related by Snow in a anecdote he relays when Hardy visits Ramanujan in the hospital.

Hardy used to visit him, as he lay dying in hospital at Putney.  It was on one of those visits that there happened the incident of the taxicab number.  Hardy had gone out to Putney by taxi, as usual his chosen method of conveyance.  He went into the room where Ramanujan was lying.  Hardy, always inept about introducing a conversation, said, probably without a greeting, and certainly as his first remark: 'I though the number of my taxicab was 1729.  It seemed to me rather a dull number.'  To which Ramanujan replied: 'No, Hardy!  No, Hardy!  It is a very interesting number.  It is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.'

That is the exchange as Hardy recorded it.  It must be substantially accurate.  He was the most honest of men; and further, no one could possibly have invented it.

How someone just knows that, I will never know.  But from the informal glancing at Ramanujan's work, he saw numbers differently.  How much of this was a product of not being substantially formally educated, I don't know.  I do think that learning in a more open-ended fashion as Ramanujan did, has benefits.  Hardy made some remarks in a similar vein.

Regardless, I double-checked Ramanujan assertion, although there are a few caveats.  Since we are dealing with cubes, we will limit ourselves to whole numbers.  The sum of cubes that one arrives at 1729 are 1^3 + 12^3 = 1729 and 9^3 + 10^3 = 1729.  1729 turns out to be smallest.  The two distinct sum sequence is as follows.

In the context of the book, it is meant to show how people of a scientific persuasion see the world differently.  Where one person sees something bland, another sees it as a source of wonder.  In a certain sense, every number has something special about it.  Ramanujan's gift was seeing what that special thing was.