Is there a middle ground between atheism and theism?

To me the answer is ‘no’ but the title of this post was suggested by this essay by Philip Goff, a professor of philosophy, who clearly wants to find one. The subheading says, “Neither atheism nor theism adequately explains reality. That is why we must consider the middle ground between the two.”

Goff says that he was brought up as a Catholic but started identifying himself as an atheist at the age of 14 and was comfortable with it for about two decades. Then about five years ago, he had to teach a course on the philosophy of religion that required him to present the arguments for and against God. In doing so he says that he found the arguments for God “incredibly compelling too! In particular, the argument from the fine-tuning of physics for life couldn’t be responded to as easily as I had previously thought.”

A few weeks into this existential morass I was peacefully watching some ducks quack in a nearby nature reserve, when I suddenly realised there was a startingly simple and obvious solution to my dilemma. The two arguments I was finding compelling – the fine-tuning argument for ‘God’, and the argument from evil and suffering against ‘God’ – were not actually opposed to each other. The argument from evil and suffering targets a very specific kind of God, namely the Omni-God: all-knowing, all-powerful, perfectly good creator of the universe. Meanwhile, the fine-tuning argument supports something much more generic, some kind of cosmic purpose or goal-directedness towards life that might not be attached to a supernatural designer. So if you go for cosmic purpose but not one rooted in the desires of an Omni-God, then you can have your cake and eat it by accepting both arguments.

And thus my worldview was radically changed.
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Confabulation, dementia, and Trump

Those of us in the reality-based world face a challenge in the current US political climate. Trump and his cult followers can say anything they like without feeling the need to provide a shred of evidence in support. On the other hand, we feel that we need to provide at least some evidence for any claim.

The most recent example of this is Trump’s claim that the Bureau of Labor Statistics has rigged the latest appalling jobs numbers report to make him and Republicans look bad. Not only that, he said that the head of the bureau had faked the numbers even last year to make the economy under Joe Biden look good.

Contrast this with the increasing suspicion that Trump is suffering from severe cognitive deterioration, that he might already be in the throes of dementia. Most people will hesitate to openly say this because dementia is a medical condition that needs to be diagnosed by a professional.

But a conservative Republican attorney by the name of Chris Truax says that the evidence of Trump’s dementia has become so obvious that pretty much anyone, and definitely those who have had loved ones suffer from it, should be able to recognize it easily, especially the confabulation. He says that the kind of confabulation that Trump is demonstrating goes well beyond the more common problems of misremembering past events or conflating distinct events into one.
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“Died peacefully surrounded by family”

I have read the above line many times in newspaper reports of the deaths of celebrities, most recently that of Ozzy Osbourne.

A statement from the Osbourne family reads: “It is with more sadness than mere words can convey that we have to report that our beloved Ozzy Osbourne has passed away this morning. He was with his family and surrounded by love. We ask everyone to respect our family privacy at this time.” No cause of death was given, though Osbourne had experienced various forms of ill health in recent years.

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Can AI treat loneliness?

Although I mostly live alone, I fortunately do not suffer from feelings of loneliness. That might be because I am an introvert, comfortable with solitude and being in my own thoughts and engaging in fundamentally solitary pursuits like reading and writing. It takes very little interaction with other people to satisfy my need for human companionship. But for those who thrive when engaging with others, solitude can be a real problem, leading to feelings of loneliness. Loneliness can also strike people when they are in the presence of others if they do not feel a sense of connection with them.

There has been some attention paid recently to the question of loneliness, with suggestions that its adverse effects go beyond just mental health.

A 2023 report issued by Vivek Murthy, then the U.S. Surgeon General, presented evidence that loneliness increases your risk for cardiovascular disease, dementia, stroke, and premature death. Persistent loneliness is worse for your health than being sedentary or obese; it’s like smoking more than half a pack of cigarettes a day.

Estimates suggest roughly half the US population over sixty say they feel lonely. The causes of loneliness among older people are not surprising. Friends and family die, and as their physical capabilities decline, people go out less less, engage in fewer activities, such that their social circle starts shrinking and they find new friends harder to make.
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The revolutionary water clock

Creating accurate time pieces has been a long-standing goal. Some of the earliest devices, such as the sun dial, suffered from the fact that they depended on the presence of sunlight. Water clocks, that measured the level of water in a container as it flowed out through a hole at the bottom, solved that problem but suffered from others, such as that the rate of flow depended upon the height of water in the container and was thus irregular and that the water had to be manually replenished. Another thing that had to be taken into account was that in those days, an ‘hour’ was not a fixed time interval as it is now. Instead, an ‘hour’ was defined by dividing the total amount of daylight in a day by twelve, and thus the length of an ‘hour’ varied with the seasons and this was hard to take into account.

But way back in the in the 3rd century BCE, a Greek inventor in Alexandria named Ctesibius devised an ingenious water clock that solved all these problems and which remained the standard for about 1800 years until the invention of the pendulum clock in 1656.

This video explains how he did it.

Ultimate cause of Air India crash remains a mystery

Indian aviation authorities have released the preliminary report on the Air India flight 171 crash that occurred just minutes after take off from Ahmedabad airport , killing 241 of the 242 people on board. While it pinpoints the proximate cause of the Boeing crash, it leaves unresolved how that came about.

The proximate cause is that the engine fuel switch to both engines was switched to the ‘off’ position.

According to a preliminary report by India’s Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau, moments after take-off both the switches in the cockpit that controlled fuel going to the engines had been moved to the “cut-off” position. Moving the fuel switches almost immediately cuts the engine.
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According to the report, the fuel switches were moved to cut-off “one after another”. Seconds later, the switches were moved back to turn the fuel back on and one of the plane’s engines was able to restart, but could not reverse the plane’s deceleration.

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Nautical units

I had heard of the term ‘nautical mile’ and also of the term ‘knots’ but had no idea where they came from, only that they were terms used by aircraft pilots and seafarers. I knew that a nautical mile was a little longer than a standard mile (one nautical mile is now defined as exactly 1,852 meters or 1.151 miles) while a knot is just one nautical mile per hour. Why we still used two units of distance and speed that were so close to each other was unknown to me. I assumed that nautical miles and knots were retained for sentimental reasons.

But I have learned that those units have an interesting meaning and practical use in that one nautical mile originally was defined as one minute of latitude. If one takes the circumference of the Earth and divide it by 360 degrees (the number of degrees in a full circle) and then again by 60 (the number of minutes in a degree), the number that you get is one nautical mile. So by knowing the difference of two latitudes in degrees, one could immediately calculate the distance between them along a great circle (i.e., following a line of longitude) in nautical miles by multiplying it by 60.
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Great moments in legislation

The Republican controlled legislature of Louisiana has passed a bill that bans what they call ‘chemtrails’, the sinister sounding label given to contrails (short for condensation trails) that form, if the atmospheric conditions are right, when hot, humid air from the plane’s jet engines mixes with the cold, dry air of the upper atmosphere, causing the formation of ice crystals. 

Louisiana is not alone. Seven other states have passed similar bills.

Believers in chemtrails hold that the aircraft vapor trails that criss-cross skies across the globe every day are deliberately laden with toxins that are using commercial aircraft to spray them on people below, perhaps to enslave them to big pharma, or exert mind control, or sterilize people or even control the weather for nefarious motives.
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Despite the outlandishness of the belief and the complete absence of evidence, a 2016 study showed that the idea is held to be “completely true” by 10% of Americans and “somewhat true” by a further 20%-30% of Americans.

At least eight states, including Florida and Tennessee, have now introduced chemtrail-coded legislation to prohibit “geo-engineering” or “weather modification”. Louisiana’s bill, which must pass through the senate before reaching Governor Jeff Landry’s desk, orders the department of environmental quality to record reported chemtrail sightings and pass complaints on to the Louisiana air national guard.

While there are no penalties for violations, the bill calls for further investigation and documentation. Opponents fear it could be used to force airlines to re-route flights, challenge the location of airports and bring legal action against carriers.

There are many outlandish things that people believe and this may be one of the more harmless ones. But unlike many other wacky conspiracy theories, (like the moon lading being faked or alien spacecraft having crashed to Earth), this one requires a vast number of people to be involved, as this critic notes

In order to undertake such a conspiracy, literally tens of thousands of people across the globe would have to be in on it, including people manufacturing the fictional weather control chemicals and dispersing equipment, the baggage handlers standing there while the fake technicians are loading it into planes, pilots, plane mechanics, air traffic controllers, and political leaders of countries that don’t like each other. That’s not even considering the untold thousands of red-tape loving, approval stamp wielding bureaucrats needed to undertake such a feat.

But once you have swallowed the big idea, all these other things are seen as just minor details.

The dangerous practice of subway surfing

Just when I thought that the needless risks that some people take for thrills could not get any crazier, along comes news of something called ‘subway surfing’. This is a phenomenon spurred by social media, where people climb onto to the roofs of subway cars and stand while the cars move. As you can imagine, this can, and does, sometimes end in tragedy when they fall off.

Jaida Rivera’s 11-year son, Cayden, was supposed to be in school at Brooklyn’s Fort Greene preparatory academy on the morning of 16 September last year. Staff saw him in the cafeteria after his grandmother dropped him off at 7.45am.

But 30 minutes later he was marked as absent. Cayden had somehow slipped out, boarded a G subway train traveling south and was riding on top of one of its carriages when he fell on to the tracks at the Fourth Avenue-Ninth Street station just after 10.00am. He was pronounced dead at the scene.

The boy was the youngest of six to die subway surfing in New York City last year – a highly dangerous practice of balancing on top of the swift-moving subway trains as they rattle through the city. It is typically attempted in Brooklyn and Queens, where New York’s subways often run aboveground, and typically in warmer months when schools are in session – suggesting that it has become a dangerous type of after-school activity often spurred by social media cachet.

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Texas lottery controversy

In the US, lotteries are a big business, raising huge revenues for state governments. But recently, here has been a controversy over the Texas state lottery.

There are various versions of the lottery but the one that gives out the biggest prize is where you pick six numbers from 1 through 54, with no number being repeated. If the drawing throws up that particular combination, then you win. The odds of winning are easy to calculate. The number of permutations of six numbers with none repeated is 18,595,558,800 (=54x53x52x51x50x49). Since the order of the numbers does not matter, there are 720 combinations that are equivalent (=6x5x4x3x2x1). Hence the number of possible results is the first number divided by the second, which gives 25,827,165. Since it costs $1 to pick a set of six, in theory if you buy one ticket for every possible combination, thus spending $25,827,165, you are guaranteed to win.

The catch is that the prize is usually less than that amount. A second problem is that if more than one person picks the same combination, then the prize gets split between the winners. A third problem is the sheer logistics of buying so many tickets, because the tickets are printed out by machines at various locations like convenience stores.
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