Back to the future

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?

The Mystery of the She-Pope

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.

Dean Baker on solving the budget deficit problem

I just returned from a talk by Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, and he said that there is no crisis in social security and the real crisis is the rapid rise in health care costs that, if unchecked, could raise the budget deficits from their current value of around 10% of GDP to disastrous levels of 30%, 40%, and even 50% in the next few decades. But our policy makers, instead of addressing this issue head-on, are instead deflecting attention to other things.

If our per capita health care costs could be made the same as Canada and the UK, the current budget deficits would become surpluses even if we did absolutely nothing else, such as raising taxes or cutting costs in other areas. It is that simple.

This is pretty much what I have been saying for some time, but Baker has studied this issue in great depth for many years and so has way more facts at his fingertips. He is one of the foremost authorities on social security, Medicare, and the budget. You can follow him on his blog.

The accommodationists’ best case (Part 3 of 3)

(Part 1 and Part 2)

Continuing with the case for accommodationism as made by the NAS, on page 37 they describe the other group of believers, those who think that science should conform to revealed religion and their holy books. This group is hostile to science but people who believe these things are politically powerful in the US and need to be placated in some way.

Advocates of the ideas collectively known as “creationism” and, recently, “intelligent design creationism” hold a wide variety of views. Most broadly, a “creationist” is someone who rejects natural scientific explanations of the known universe in favor of special creation by a supernatural entity. Creationism in its various forms is not the same thing as belief in God because, as was discussed earlier, many believers as well as many mainstream religious groups accept the findings of science, including evolution. Nor is creationism necessarily tied to Christians who interpret the Bible literally. Some non-Christian religious believers also want to replace scientific explanations with their own religion’s supernatural accounts of physical phenomena. [Read more…]

What is a soul?

In a previous post titled The fog of religious language I said that sophisticated religious apologists tend to speak so vaguely and elliptically that it is hard to know exactly what they actually believe, and singled out Marilynne Robinson as one culprit. In an interview in the September/October issue of The New Humanist, she does it again.

Q: You use the word “soul” in your book. What do you mean by this?

A: There is a very primary self, a companion self one answers to, intimate and aloof, keeper of loyalties, bearer of loneliness and sorrow, faithful despite neglect and offence, more passionate lover of everything one loves, the unaccountable presence of joy in quiet and solitude. Soul is one name for this self within the self, which I believe is a universal human possession.

Well, I’m glad we cleared that up.

The accommodationists’ best case (Part 2 of 3)

(See part 1 here.)

The problem with the attempts by theologians to argue that understanding the ‘mystery’ of human experience lies outside the realm of science is that tools to better understand how the brain works are already at hand, with ambitious plans to map out all the brain synapses. (Thanks to Machines Like Us for the link.) Since the brain is what creates consciousness, understanding how the brain works is the precursor to understanding how we think and experience. (Those who think that consciousness or the ‘soul’ exist independently of the brain are of course resorting to Cartesian dualism, that there is a mind-body split, an idea which no serious scientist takes seriously and which even Descartes found difficult to justify.)
[Read more…]