Medieval mind meets modern science

I have to rush off to more meetings today — Taslima Nasreen will be speaking this morning — but I got the day off to a laughing start with this review of Hawking’s Curiosity: Did god create the universe?. The reviewer is some conservative Christian minister, and he’s one of those fellows who is really annoyed by all this Big Bang talk. So he turned his television on to watch Stephen Hawking get in his face.

I’ve heard variants of this argument so many times…

Since there is no more proof that the universe began with the Big Bang than there is that Christ was resurrected from the dead we have to engage the element of faith to build the hypothesis. In fact there is a great deal more historical, archaeological and eye witness evidence for the resurrection of Christ than for the Big Bang but that is a subject for another time.

Historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus: None. There are no contemporary accounts of this miracle; even the books of the bible that mention it were written long after his purported death by people who weren’t there.

Archaeological evidence for the resurrection of Jesus: None. I don’t think the market for ginned-up relics to gullible Catholics counts as archaeology.

Eyewitness evidence for the resurrection of Jesus: None. A book saying that there was a guy who saw the resurrection doesn’t count as eyewitness evidence, and witnessing something is actually very poor evidence anyway. Go to a Las Vegas magic show.

Evidence for the Big Bang: ubiquitous and replicable. Aim your radio telescope at the sky and measure the cosmic background radiation. Look at the red shift of the stars as a function of distance, and see that they’re all expanding away. This isn’t a point of dogma, but a product of observation and theory.

Hawking knows a little bit about black holes, and one part of the show explained that time would stop as one entered a black hole — this is another subject that annoyed the reviewer.

The biggest leap Curiosity takes is where it completely misses the mark. Interspersed with Hawking’s remarks and surmising about using the simple kinder alternative of science to explain the universe, we are subsequently taken on a swirling thrill ride through the entire universe to arrive at an un-named giant black hole. It is there we are told that everything, matter, stars, planets and even science’s revered creator, the original sub-atomic particle, will be sucked in and even time itself will cease to exist.

No allusions to the Bible or the science of homeostasis is relied upon to explain fully how, or why, time ceases to exist and the sense of the doom of all things manages to prevail. In some way the entire idea is like a scientifically inspired version of hell. It is hopeless, final and indescribable. Again the faith that would have to be mustered to accept this theory is incomprehensible. The Bible’s version certainly is less cerebrally taxing, has a real historical context, and is for most people still far more credulous.

Oh, no, the bible doesn’t say anything about black holes, therefore, it’s just not believable. The bible also doesn’t say anything about people flying, therefore I’m going to have a really tough time getting home from Oslo on Tuesday.

I snorted a bit when I read “the science of homeostasis”. I’m sure it just sounded good to him, but homeostasis is a biological term that refers to the property of physiological or ecological systems maintaining a stable, constant system by regulatory feedback. We biologists don’t really have anything to say about black holes, I’m sorry to say, except maybe to mention that conditions of intense radiation and tidal forces great enough to shred bacteria probably aren’t going to be conducive to organisms; even space medicine becomes irrelevant in such situations.

But it’s the last line that is a real winner. Yes, I will agree: the bible is less cerebrally taxing, and certainly is the source for people with a willingness to believe any ol’ thing. I suspect he probably meant to write “credible” there, but God must have guided his hand to write the truth, instead.

It’s so…sniny…

So I’m at this humanist conference in Oslo, and I’m having a good time at the delicious dinner with musical accompaniment at the Oslo Opera House, when they start giving out awards to all these fabulously accomplished people who have don so much to advance the cause, when they name me. It was a complete surprise and for a moment I was sure this was a joke, but there it is, it’s even got my name etched on it.

I’m the International Humanist of 2011.

How unexpected!

Now if only I were somewhat less discombobulated right now…the several glasses of wine at dinner didn’t help, either.

Vote for this guy

Valentin Abgottspon was a teacher in the Swiss public school system. He was fired because he removed a state-mandated crucifix from the wall of his classroom. It’s weird; apparently, the Swiss constitution requires religious neutrality, but the local canton thinks tradition trumps law.

Anyway, he’s up for a prize, the Prix Courage, which is apparently going to be determined by the result of an internet poll. You know what to do! In principle, at least: the poll is in German, so you might need some guidance.

Vote for the Prix Courage, a very prestigious Swiss prize for outstanding actions: http://www.beobachter.ch/?id=727 (choose Valentin Abgottspon, “Ich will an der Verlosung teilnehmen.*” choose “Nein”, that means you don’t want to win a week-end in a Swiss hotel, that way you won’t have to write down your name, then “Senden”)

Of course, maybe you want a weekend getaway to a Swiss hotel…also, as usual, always look over the other candidates and vote your conscience. I think going against religious dogma and losing your job over it is a great example of courage, though.

Vote here.

I’ve known for years that Norwegians are beautiful and talented

I married one, after all. But do they have to flaunt it so? This is the monumental statuary in front of my hotel here in Oslo.

I wonder how long a similar statue would last in the US?

And yes, I have arrived, I’m ensconced in a nice hotel, I even had time to go to dinner with an international cast of humanist heroes, which was awesome. But now it’s sinking in that I haven’t slept in about 30 hours. I should do something about that right now. I have to give a talk tomorrow!

Remind me to “hijack” more crazy crank polls

Another site expresses outrage that atheists “hijacked” the Blaze poll, and I just got through to my email from Amsterdam and whew, I have gotten so much hate mail overnight! It gives me a warm happy glow to see the frothing.

Here’s a ‘nice’ one. Too bad he wants to argue creationism with me!

Our tax dollars go to support you and the educational elite to “educate” the youth of this nation and this is how you use your position?

Who don’t you get out in the real world and leave the world of academia and see how the real people of this country live and what they worship?

If you would like to carry on some “long distance” dialogue, please feel free to call me.

BTW, I only have an undergraduate degree in music, but I am fairly decent at communicating.

May God bless you and yours,

Jack

This one from Joseph Hasay isn’t so friendly, but more representative.

Loser asshole!

Hahaha! Beck caught you with your pants down you pathetic piece of human flesh!

David Dunn doesn’t like me at all.

YOU PROFESSOR

You are a FUCKING scumbag and you will rot in HELL!!! ENJOY eternity you waste of space!!

I could go on, but that’s enough — I’ll have to find more reasons to annoy Glenn Beck fans.

Wingers are such post-modernists

I had a strange and twisted conversation with Billy Hallowell, a writer for Glenn Beck’s lunatic site, The Blaze, and and also the creator of that poll we pharyngulated the other day. He was not happy. He was also more than a little obtuse. He has now posted a rather fragmentary and unrepresentative version of the interview on his site.

I had to explain to him more than a few times that these online polls are utterly pointless — they are just exercises in back-patting among the commentariat, where they give themselves a false sense of confidence that they really are the majority with skewed numbers generated from their own ranks, and that all we do is show up and demonstrate that there are other views out there, and their numbers go all wacky. I even told him the situation would play out the same if I were stupid enough to put up a poll, and Beckian microcephalics showed up en masse…I don’t do these open polls because you learn nothing from them.

It’s a measure of their insularity that Hallowell seemed quite shocked that their poll could be shifted around so much; he says I “ignited a mini-firestorm”! My post was a “battle-cry”! No, I casually put up a quick link to a bad poll, as I often do, and suddenly the creators of that poll were distressed to see that they didn’t have the comfortable majority they expected.

He’s now claiming that we were making an “effort to prevent Blaze readers from participating in the Adam and Eve poll”. You naughty, naughty Pharyngulistas. Were you visiting wingnut homes and slapping the mice out of their hands? That wasn’t nice.

He also has a bit of a blind spot.

Whatever happened to making a solid case and fairly proving it? What was the point of these atheists’ time-sucking exploits?

My point exactly. Why is The Blaze substituting a stupid poll for making a solid, substantive case? It’s empty of facts, and is only an opportunity for people to cheer for their side in a complete absence of evidence.

One thing that didn’t really make it into his article, though, was his insistence that everyone had a right to their own opinion and their own beliefs. When we discussed the subject of his poll, I pointed out that there actually is a right answer in it, one that is selected by virtually all intelligent, educated adults who are familiar with the evidence, and it doesn’t jibe with the one his readership selected. He was persistent in his belief that that didn’t matter: there are creation scientists, he said, who disagreed (I explained that any large group of people will have a tiny fringe of crackpots, and that’s who he was talking about), and that surveys show about 40% of Americans believe in creationism (scientific truths aren’t settled by popularity contests), and by golly, his people had a right to believe whatever they wanted.

And of course they do. They have a right to be wrong. We have a right to show that they’re wrong.

People can disagree in their interpretations of the evidence, and I went out of my way to explain that theistic evolutionists, for instance, try to have beliefs that are consonant with the facts, but also add their own peculiar explanations, like the ensoulment of humans, that aren’t contradicted by the facts, but also lack actual evidence supporting them. The literalist interpretation of the book of Genesis, though, is something different: that’s an explanation that ignores the majority of the evidence, and is even contradicted by that evidence. That his readers largely opted for the counterfactual claim is evidence that they are ignorant of the science, or willfully defying the evidence because it does not prop up their ideology.

He was happy at one thing, though. I told him that I had readers who loved exposing stupidity, and his site looked like a rich vein of inanity, so he could expect a few new readers who’d be looking over his nonsense with a critical eye. He just likes the idea of more traffic, I guess. But sure, have fun; the comments to his article are just full of blinkered Christian bigotry and foolishness.

Planet of the Apes

Isn’t it obvious that the story of Planet of the Apes is about apes from one planet dominated by apes finding themselves on a planet dominated by apes of a slightly different species?

i-899ef88ed2f05c9d6ee8ec587cd64d6c-planetofapes.jpeg

Also, this comic bugs me a little bit: I’m flying off to give a talk in which I argue that the hallmark of human evolution isn’t brutality and conquest, but cooperation.

(Also on FtB)