I’m holed up in a hotel room, writing, writing, and writing some more, only emerging sporadically to see a little Australian sun and get a little exercise, and also to exercise my brain a bit. A few things are going on here in Melbourne.
I wish I could attend this panel discussion on the “Science and God: Incompatible?”, just because it’s stacked with Christian apologists who will no doubt be annoyingly superficial, and because it was the topic of my lecture at the GAC (my answer: yes. Incompatible, irreconcilable, and dear sweet baby Jebus, keep your superstitions away from the grownups). It’s at the St James Conference Centre, 12 Batman St, West Melbourne, tonight at 8.
I’m skipping it, though, because I’d rather attend a lecture by Craig Venter tonight, at 6 in the Melbourne Convention Center. Evidence-based reasoning always wins over old farts exercising in wishful thinking in a church.
And tomorrow afternoon, Thursday, I’m going to try and drop in on the University of Melbourne Secular Society’s dissection of creationism and specifically of Ray Comfort’s bad introduction to the Origin. That’s at 1:00 in Theatre 4, the Alan Gilbert Building.
I’m spending my weekend in Canberra, and I will be giving a talk to Skeptics in the Pub at 12:00 on Saturday, in King O’Malley’s Irish Pub, 131 City Walk. I haven’t quite decided what I’ll be talking about yet, though — I’ll probably sort that out on the plane on Friday.
The offer to see the Solnhofen squid still stands, PZ. Plus, I may let you hold our Darwin holotype :)
Keep this up, and you will be like Asimov. Give you five minutes, and you have a new speech. You’ll just have to make do without organized slides.
See, you’re just plain prejudiced against “faith.”
Sure, there’s just a chance that it’s a prejudice born of experience, but you know it can just be grouped with all of the irrational ones–via irrational prejudice.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Nerd,
Glad to hear that you can make Venter’s talk, though if the dean sees me talking to you, my career here is over.
Batman Street? They have a Batman Street? Sweet, holy, fragrant, tasty, vagemite! And they’re talking about Jebus? They should be talking about Batman. He really is coming back. And boy is he pissed (off, not drunk). At least Batman is reality based.(Adapted from Zorro).
I know, I’ve read his autobiographies. But on short notice, he could change the topic of his speeches, even coming up with a new one if need be. All with cheerful self appreciation…
http://www.whitehat.com.au/Melbourne/People/Batman.asp
Sorry to disappoint, but it’s named for John Batman, a settler involved in the founding of the city. Although some of the city does look a bit Gothamesque…
Sweet. If I manage to say hi tonight I will have seen PZ more often than my family this week.
Batsman St. for the cricket fans.
And ‘Batman’ isn’t pronounced bat-man anyway; the second ‘a’ is unstressed so it’s more like bat-mun – or ˈbætmən for those who’re phonetically inclined.
Yeah, reality-based like I said. (Probably not coming back though.) :[
Yay you’re coming out to Melb Uni on Thursday! :D See you there!
I wonder if I can still make it in to the Venter talk tonight even though I haven’t registered yet. Worth a try!
That’s good advice in general for the Australian accent. Destress as many vowels as possible. Thus, Melbourne sound more like Mel-bun than Mel-born. Remember, the more often you open your mouth, the more chance the flies have of getting in.
There’s also a Batman park and the entrance looks like the gates at the front of Wayne manor. I always expect the playground equipment in the middle to slide aside whenever I drive past and see some form of batmobile come flying out.
So we have a suburb of Batman. What about the suburb called Balaclava? :P
Hah see you at uni tomorrow then.
I, for one, welcome our cephalopodan overlord. May death come quickly to his enemies.
We also have a suburb called Sunshine. As a friend put it: “if you want to destroy your soul, move to Sunshine”
Awesome
Looking forward to the Skeptics In The Pub on Saturday, it should be great fun – and from what I can gather very well attended.
OTOH, still uncomfortable about Australians embracing the k-ness in scepticism. There should always be the ‘c’ in sceptic. (that would have worked better phonetically)
My remaining plans to conquer Australia
I for one welcome our beer swilling, bearded, cephalopod loving overlord.
Another deep rift…
Atheists can’t agree on anything! God must exist!!1!
Yay. Looking forward to Pharyngulating King O’Malley’s. From the responses on Facebook alone, this’ll be a well attended event.
Might see you at the Venter talk, PZ! I’m going, my boyfriend is going and my PhD supervisor is going. I don’t like anyone’s chances of getting in if they haven’t registered, though.
And I live in the electorate of Batman. I get promotional material from our local MP talking about all the great things he does to support Batman, and representing Batman in federal parliament.
This is an example of the incoherent positions that are problematic for the movement. Can’t we just get PZ to issue an edict declaring the absolute, unquestionable truth of the matter? Who wants all that debate and critical thought anyway?
Does anyone know if Venters talk will be recorded and viewable on the web anytime soon? The website wasn’t helpful.
Skeptics In The Pub in Canberra sounds great. I am suffering from post-Atheist-Convention-withdrawal-symptoms.
Perfect way to spend Saturday arvo: Enjoying rational, reasoned conversations and debates with new Pharyngula phriends, whilst downing a glass of Jebus blood. Or wheat beer.
Should I go ahead and book those plane tix?…
@Phasic #25
I just registered online a couple of hours ago, it seemed to accept my registration and didn’t tell me to go hump-a-duck off, hopefully if I show up early enough I’ll get in…
What other reason is there to visit Canberra? Hells yes!
Well, if he doesn’t do anything, we will talk it to death over a few hundred posts, all feeding the Trophy Daughter Tuition Fund™. Guess what his action will be?
pfft, the problem exists because American skeptics think that they have the right to police the spelling of the world…
(Actually in this case, I think it makes a lot more sense to spell it with a ‘k’. But firefox keeps reminding me that sceptic is the only true way to spell sceptic and does so by negative reinforcement through the use of a squiggly red line. You just can’t compete with that level of brainwashing.)
Batman is pretty good, but by far the coolest thing is the fact that we have a city named Darwin.
PZ, I was surprised that you found yourself at a loose end last night. If you find yourself bored or at a loss for something to do over the next few days, drop me a line at ambulocetus1 at gmail.com. I live near the city and can be at Chloe’s Bar on 20 minutes’ notice.
One thing that sh*ts me about Young & Jacksons is the way they’ve idiotically painted their windowsills corrosion-lime-green to match the corrosion on the dome on Flinders St Station. Once a decade or so the station people get around to polishing the dome and it looks a nice burnished brown. Sigh.
Mine is the reverse, with the sceptic having a red underline. Mac vs. PC? American vs. English/Aussie/NZ/Canadian spellcheckers?
So Brisbane gets shunned again, nobody ever wants to come here, why did I have to be born in a state full of hillbillies.
Love your work P.Z.
Is the Friday 5pm at the Wig & Pen still on?
Friday at the Wig & Pen? Yes, somewhere in my email there’s something about that. A gang of us, including Chris Nedin, Jim Foley, Ian Musgrave, and John Wilkins are gathering in Canberra, and we have to go somewhere for our bee-ah, and I think that was the destination selected.
The Wig and Pen do excellent beer. Brewed on the premises. Good choice.
I fondly remember the Wig & Pen. Particularly their Imperial Stout.
I bought a keg of their Irish Red for my 19th birthday party (or was it my 20th? anyway…) back when I lived in Canberra. Good stuff, and I’m not even really a beer drinker.
I’d also just like to add that if the NHMRC grant application server doesn’t stop crashing soon, I’m going to cry. I mean, it’s only the future of my career and all….
Perhaps I need a beer.
PZ: dear sweet baby Jebus
Sweet? Cooked how?
Hmmm … might ride my bike over to the pub if I finish moving house before then. No booze for me though; booze and bikes just don’t go together.
1) Right-click on “skeptic”.
2) Select “Add to Dictionary”
3) Drink a pint in memory of the Σκεπτικοί
One happy ‘munkey
And looking forward to meeting some of you on the weekend…
Mine will be the pint of cider…
:)
abb3w, perhaps honey glazed BBQ?
If you are in Canberra, and like the odd bit of paint on canvas (including Gauguin’s Tahitian women) the National Gallery is hosting an exhibition from the Musée d’Orsay of some of the great Impressionist works.
Tickets hard to get though!
Good strategy. Everyone knows if you want to conquer the world, you first get Australia. Easy to defend and you get two additional armies every turn.
Alright, booked in to drive the 300km’s down from Sydney. Shall be bringing the amasing Dr Rachie with me as well. :D
Places with names like Balaclava date simply date the naming of them. For eg around here there are lots of places named after Camperdown, which is a corruption of the Dutch and commemorates Admiral Lord Duncan’s (local lad made good) victory over the Dutch in 1797. There’s a bronze of him fiddling with his telescope in the city centre, but he can’t see the sea or even the Tay from where he is . . .
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Camperdown
Though I noticed a bit sadly that when you type ‘Battle of’ into Wikipedia it suggests ‘Battle of the Boyne’ quickly and almost alone.
Your powers of prediction are uncanny. I don’t know if any other Pharyngulites attended, but I was there (wearing a science joke t-shirt) to show the flag and ask questions.
In summary: there are many people who simultaneously have religious beliefs and do science; scientists use a form of faith when they trust other scientists’s credentials, or when they put lots of effort into a pet hypothesis; scientists act today as a secular priesthood; scientists are dogmatic in trying to apply science to claims of religion.
For an event with “God” prominently in the title, I don’t think the panelists discussed the sky father at all, besides quotations from the scriptures.
One highlight was physics professor John Pilbrow noting that the scientific method was waning in the public consciousness, and that it’s important for them as scientists to reassert that validity of the scientific method. There were general murmurs of approval, without a hint of irony.
Some choice moments:
Alan Gijsbers trotted out the old “fundamentalist atheists” canard.
He also told a story of his children asking “what will you do when you get to heaven and find out the muslims are right?” This gained much polite laughter, but Alan seemed to think it fit to leave the tale there; no answer was ever provided.
Denise Cooper-Clarke seemed content to narrate the slide show and moderate the discussion, raising few points herself. She did ask one good question of the panel: “Does it make sense to speak of belief in science the same way one speaks of belief in god?” Unfortunately, this wasn’t addressed very memorably by any of the panelists.
Murray Hogg got science so very wrong (“secular priesthood”, “science works by trust”) that even his other panelists had to interrupt him sometimes to point out his misrepresentations.
He then raised some balderdash about Einstein contradicting the Michelson–Morley experiment and then having the scientific priesthood accept Einstein’s theory, which he claimed demonstrates that scientists ignore evidence too.
Oh, and: A.C. Grayling has joined Richard Dawkins on their approved list of meanies who criticise religion, being quoted at least a dozen times; but they still think Dawkins is the biggest meanie. (Sorry, P.Z., you just didn’t rate a mention, despite your talk addressing exactly what they were there to discuss.)
(continuing from the above comment)
I waited for a few other people’s questions to see if anyone was going to call them on their lies, but eventually had to step up myself.
I used Alan’s “fundamentalist atheists” jab to ask what exactly it means to be a fundamentalist in the atmosphere of eager criticism, peer review, and constant testing of details that characterises science.
I got my money’s worth on that one; to their credit, all four of the panelists gave me serious answers and allowed me to rebut points they raised.
They danced around it by pooh-poohing my notion of scientists vigorously questioning each other’s claims; Alan told me that he’d even been rejected from presenting a paper at a conference by the cabal of consensus science.
They also resorted to re-defining fundamentalism, by saying that Dawkins (everyone kept raising his name like a sorcery, though I never mentioned any particular scientist once) is a fundamentalist in that he “asserts that the knowledge he has of evolutionary biology necessarily applies everywhere”. I’d already used more than my share of time, so I had to let it slide at that point.
I found much more receptive ears in the audience afterwards, which was very pleasing. A lot of the twenty-somethings thanked me for challenging the claim of fundamentalism, and I got a fair way along showing them how they compartmentalise their faith beliefs from critical enquiry.
Hopefully I’ve helped amplify the cognitive dissonance that Ayaan Hirsi Ali recommends we use to help these people see the incompatibilities in their thinking. It was an audience of about fifty; if some of those see the light enough that they stop indoctrinating their kids, that might be all I can hope for.
All in all, they were quite polite and welcoming of my questions, and I can hope that not all of that was just because they insulated their core beliefs from scrutiny.
Ben Finney
Melbourne, Australia
WE NEED A NEW WORD!
The ABC coverage included the priest who said that “atheism” is a negative belief system. If the anti-choice abortion opponents can brand themselves as “pro-life”, why can’t we come up with a word that means “pro-reality” or “pro-reason”? After all, we aren’t just “a-god”, we’re also “a-angel”, “a-demons”, “a-leprechauns” (happy St. Patricks Day!), etc.
Any of you smart people out there have a suggestion?
Frankly, I’m more concerned that there is an Alan Gilbert building at Uni of Melb. I remember getting arrested during a protest against his policies. Naming a building after him seems a little macabre.
I’m having a good week (healthwise) this week, so, hopefully, I shall be there.
Friday evening? Dressed as a pirate…
Bad Earl:
I’d go with secularist. Easily defensable, politically actionable, and quite a few of various people of various faith traditions will help you with the various specific battles. Secularism protects everyone from everyone else.
I frankly don’t care if someone privately believes in the big pancake in the sky, or the Lord of Peace or whatever. Go right ahead. It’s the actions in the public, legislative, educational sphere that are the problem.
Longtime lurker, first time poster and delighted to discover that there are fellow Canberra Pharyngulites. I’m going to Sceptics in the Pub on Saturday and my local is generally the Wig on Friday – it it okay if this shy Pharygulite seeks to join the table on Friday evening? I am willing to wear a pink carnation for ID purposes if required.
Warning: I may fan-girl PZ.
I am hoping work lets me post this, as Telstra has killed my phone line and I have no home access to the interwebs…
A
AmandaS wrote:
He should be used to it by now. Just walk toward him slowly, with the hand holding the beer outstretched. That seems to have a calming effect.
Another one, awesome!
AmandaS wrote:
Going with the pink theme, is it OK if I wear my pink pirate hat?
Not many pink pirate grannies in Canberra as far as I know.
I could even go with the more appropriate Jimmy Buffett theme and wear a white sports coat and a pink crustacean :)
Except I haven’t got a white sports coat…
If it’s not too hot, I’ll try for some combination of scientific atheist Goth wench. If it’s warmish, I might leave out the Goth bit.
A
We are legion. Well, a platoon, maybe.
AmandaS: He seems to be very tolerant of fan-girling. I think the beer helps.
I was so busy trying not to be a fangirl over the weekend, that I barely said more than ‘hi’ to PZ. I’ll have to make up for it at The Wig & Pen or O’Malley’s.
Looking forward to tonight.
Just about time to leave work and head to the city. Good times to be had today and tomorrow.
I really enjoyed the evening! It was great to meet you PZ, plus neon-elf, Cath the Canberra Cook, Kel, AmandaS and others.
Looking forward to tomorrow…