For a long time, scientists and historians and philosophers of science have struggled to try and figure out how we can know which theories of science are true and which are false. It is a very difficult problem, and my first book Quest for Truth: Scientific Progress and Religious Beliefs (2000) focused on this very question.

But Albert Mohler, president of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, has found the solution!

Are science and Christianity friends? The answer to that is an emphatic yes, for any true science will be perfectly compatible with the truths we know by God’s revelation. But this science is not naturalistic, while modern science usually is. Too many evangelicals try to find middle ground, only to end up arguing for positions that combine theological surrender with scientific naïveté. [My italics]

Got that? We don’t need no stinkin’ evidence and reason and logic and math and all that high falutin’ stuff to determine which scientific theories are true. The ones that agree with what is in my particular holy book as interpreted by what my particular Magic Man whispers in my ear is what is true. Simple, isn’t it?

Of course, this is what the pope told Galileo a long time ago. If we had simply listened to the pope then, we could have stayed at the same level of scientific development as at that time. Wouldn’t that be wonderful?

The invaluable cartoon strip Jesus and Mo deserves to have the last word on this topic.

If you are ever going to publicly debate a religious person, I recommend that as part of your preparation you watch this 15-minute collection of clips of brutal Christopher Hitchens put-downs, referred to as ‘Hitchslaps’. The one he administers to someone defending circumcision (it begins at 11:50 and I think his victim is Harold Kushner) is a thing of beauty.

(via Machine Like Us.)

If there is one thing that the sex scandals in the Catholic Church should have taught us, it is that young boys should not be left unsupervised in the presence of clergy.

But now come reports that the Sri Lankan government, in another shameless attempt to pander to the majority Buddhist community, plans to have 2,600 boys as young as 10 years of age ordained next year as Buddhist monks to commemorate year 2600 according to the Buddhist calendar. This means that the boys will have their heads shaven, be put in robes, and made to live in temples with older monks.

People are protesting on many grounds, one of which is that the boys are too young to make such a drastic decision. The second is that there have long been strong rumors of sexual abuse in Buddhist temples in Sri Lanka, but it is a taboo subject that people are fearful to bring out in the open or investigate. Like with the Catholic Church for so long, the authorities have been hesitant to take the allegations seriously.

Poor parents often give up their children to become Buddhist monks because then they will have food and shelter and clothing and receive some sort of education. There is also apparently a bizarre belief that by ‘donating’ their children to the priesthood, the parents receive ‘merit’ that can be cashed in to get a better next life (Buddhists believe in reincarnation) or even gain nirvana, the ultimate goal. It is amazing how children are used as pawns in religious games.

It should come as no surprise that as a result of being conscripted, some Sri Lankan Buddhist priests become venal, showing little resemblance to the ideals preached by their founder Siddhartha Gautama.

A strange and sad story has surfaced. A person claiming to be Michael Behe’s son has said that he has rejected his family’s Catholic faith and become an atheist. Those who have been following the ‘intelligent design’ movement will be familiar with Behe. He is the author of Darwin’s Black Box, the book that became the Bible of that movement with its claims that things like the bacterial flagellum and the blood clotting mechanism were conclusive evidence of the existence of a supernatural designer.
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Jerry Coyne has a good article in today’s edition of USA Today with the above title.

Tomorrow the US Supreme Court will hear the case as to whether the Westboro Baptist Church has the right to conduct their anti-gay protests at funerals.

I think it is misguided to try and use the law to suppress the Westboro group because not only it does infringe on their free-speech rights, it also gives them the kind of publicity they crave and allows them to act as First Amendment defenders.

What should be done is to organize flamboyant counter-demonstrations, the way that the people at Comic Con did in July of this year or as Michael Moore did back in 1999 in his TV show The Awful Truth.

Or as Red State Update did.

Ridicule and humor is the best weapon against hateful speech. We should laugh them out of business.

It must be really frustrating to be a thinking person who believes in god because he doesn’t help you in the least. Since god does not seem to actually do anything that you can point to as incontrovertible evidence of his existence, believers have to look in obscure corners of knowledge, as was the case with so-called intelligent design. God seems like this passive-aggressive personality who wants you to believe unquestioningly in his existence and worship him but doesn’t give you anything in return. As a result, believers have to confront the question of why god is so elusive.

A rabbi by the name of Alan Lurie has taken up the challenge and written an essay titled “Why Does God Hide?” His essay lays out the problem clearly enough:

This notion, that God’s presence is hidden, is a significant dilemma for many, and for some is clear proof that God does not exist. Why, one asks, would the creator of the Universe be so difficult to spot? Surely if such a creator exists, there would be obvious evidence. And why wouldn’t this creator, in order to silence disbelievers and recruit more faithful, simply appear on the White House lawn, announce his presence, and miraculously end all war, hunger, and disease? For some, this hidden presence is evidence that even if a creator deity does exist, such a being is not worth worshiping. What kind of a god, who religious people say loves us, would stand by as horrible atrocities happen, and silently allow us to suffer? Such a god is either not all-powerful, not all-knowing, or certainly not completely benevolent. Many site [sic] the Holocaust, for example, as clear proof of God’s impotence or indifference.

Why yes, rabbi, these are excellent points and exactly what we atheists say. But please go on.
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On Tuesday 9:00am-10:00 am, I will be on our local NPR affiliate WCPN 90.3 on their Sound of Ideas program to discuss the results of the latest Pew survey on the state of religious knowledge, in which atheists/agnostics came out as the best informed.

You can listen live or to a podcast after the show.

[Update: This show has been pre-empted and will be re-scheduled.]

Blog reader Norm sent me this link to something called “The first annual conference on geocentrism” to be held in South Bend, Indiana near the University of Notre Dame. It has the title Galileo Was Wrong: The Church Was Right.

My first reaction was that this was an Onion-type spoof but it seems to be legit.

Of course, the choice of any point in space to be the origin of the frame of reference is purely arbitrary. Which frame one chooses depends on one’s purpose. For purely practical purposes such as navigation, choosing the Earth to be at rest makes sense. The heliocentric model is the best choice for describing the motions of the planets, and the center of a galaxy is most convenient to describe the motions of stars in the galaxy.

The church was wrong in insisting that the geocentric model was the only choice and it was Galileo’s assertion that there were alternatives to it that disturbed them. All this has been well known for some time and so the point of this conference completely mystifies me. Are the organizers really suggesting that there is only one allowed frame of reference and that its origin is at the Earth?

A young Catholic woman dresses up as a man and joins the priesthood (not hard, given that the robes they wear), goes to Rome, and ends up as the pope. She then gets pregnant and delivers the child on a public street during a procession in which she is wearing the full papal regalia. The bystanding worshippers, outraged by the revelation of her deception, kill her and bury her by the roadside. This is the story in a new German film called Die Papstin.

Far fetched? Perhaps, except that the film is based on events that might have actually happened. The September/October issue of The New Humanist has an article by Sally Feldman (not available online) that looks at the story of ‘Pope Joan’ who supposedly lived in the ninth century. The catch is that even though there are about 500 reports on this episode written from early medieval times to the 17th century, there are no contemporaneous records of what happened during her time, which has rightly called the Dark Ages, and the powerful Catholic Church would have had every reason to expunge any mention of such an embarrassing episode.

The article points out that this story has been investigated by many people and even though unproved is quite widely known and believed. In the course of investigating it, Peter Stanford, the former editor of the Catholic Herald discovered a chair that was used in papal elections in medieval times that had an odd key-shaped hole cut in the seat. According to accounts, before the election of a new pope could be confirmed, the would-be pope was required to sit in it and then the youngest deacon present would have to reach up through the hole and confirm the pope’s ‘eligibility’, if you catch my drift. Such a precaution might well have been the result of the Pope Joan episode.