Homeopathy & Nutritionists vs Real Science!

Dara O'Briain sets the record straight about the public understanding of science. http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/333/

Are faith in God and science contradictory?

source: http://richarddawkins.net/article,4011,n,n

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Unbelievable? PZ Myers and Denis Alexander on Faith and Science

Premier.org.uk

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http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/06/unbelievable_1.php
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From PZ's blog:
As mentioned previously, my interview on British Christian talk radio is now available — you can download the mp3 directly, and you can join in an online discussion, in which I am accused of "scientism"…which is rather pecuilar, given that in the interview I rather specifically said there were phenomena for which science is not the best tool for examination (although I would also say that there are no phenomena which require something beyond natural mechanisms).

The interviewer also thinks Plantinga's arguments are good, which we didn't talk about at all, but which would have triggered some on-air gagging noises if they had come up.

---

From Premier.org.uk:
Atheist Biologist PZ Myers is an outspoken critic of Christianity. He believes that faith in God and science are contradictory. He debates theistic evolutionist Denis Alexander, Director of the Faraday Institute for Science and Religion. Is science is at odds with Christianity as PZ claims?

Interview page.

This work by crabsallover is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Science - Dumbest Religion Ever?

source:

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This work by crabsallover is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License.

Science is like a good friend: sometimes it tells you things you don't want to hear

• 
• • Charlie Brooker
  • The Guardian,
  • Saturday August 2 2008
  • Article history - source
• 
  
• Tom spotted this article over at BHA Science
  

Must be frustrating being a scientist. There you are, incrementally discovering how the universe works via a series of complex tests and experiments, for the benefit of all mankind - and what thanks do you get? People call you "egghead" or "boffin" or "heretic", and they cave your face in with a rock and bury you out in the wilderness.

Not literally - not in this day and age - but you get the idea.

Scientists are mistrusted by huge swathes of the general public, who see them as emotionless lab-coated meddlers-with-nature rather than, say, fellow human beings who've actually bothered getting off their arses to work this shit out. The wariness stems from three popular misconceptions:

1) Scientists want to fill our world with chemicals and killer robots; 2) They don't appreciate the raw beauty of nature, maaan; and

3) They're always spoiling our fun, pointing out homeopathy doesn't work or ghosts don't exist EVEN THOUGH they KNOW we REALLY, REALLY want to believe in them.

That last delusion is the most insidious. Science is like a good friend: sometimes it tells you things you don't want to hear. It tells you the truth. And we all know how much that can hurt, don't we, fatso?

Many people find bald, unvarnished truths so disturbing, they prefer to ram their heads in the sand and start dreaming at the first sign of scientific reality. The more contrary evidence mounts up, the harder they'll ignore it. And even the greatest, most widely-admired scientists can provoke this reaction.

Take Darwin. Or rather, take The Genius Of Darwin (Mon, 8pm, C4), the latest documentary from professional God-hatin' Professor Yaffle impersonator Richard Dawkins, which sets out to calmly and lucidly explain a) Why Darwin was so ace, and b) Just how much evidence there is to support his findings.

Darwin's theory of evolution was simple, beautiful, majestic and awe-inspiring. But because it contradicts the allegorical babblings of a bunch of made-up old books, it's been under attack since day one. That's just tough luck for Darwin.

If the Bible had contained a passage that claimed gravity is caused by God pulling objects toward the ground with magic invisible threads, we'd still be debating Newton with idiots too.

Since Darwin's death, Dawkins points out, the evidence confirming his discovery has piled up and up and up, many thousand feet above the point of dispute. And yet heroically, many still dispute it. They're like couch potatoes watching Finding Nemo on DVD

who've suffered some kind of brain haemorrhage which has led them to believe the story they're watching is real, that their screen is filled with water and talking fish, and that that's all there is to reality - just them and that screen and Nemo - and when you run into the room and point out the DVD player and the cables connecting it to the screen, and you open the windows and point outside and describe how overwhelming the real world is - when you do all that, it only spooks them. So they go on believing in Nemo, with gritted teeth if necessary.

What was it that spooked them so? Probably natural selection's lack of reassuring narrative. It lays the ruthless, godless world pretty bloody bare.

As Dawkins says: "The total amount of suffering in the natural world is beyond all decent contemplation. During the minute it takes me to say these words, thousands of animals are running for their lives, whimpering with fear, feeling teeth sink into their throats. Thousands are dying from starvation or disease or feeling a parasite rasping away from within. There is no central authority; no safety net. For most animals the reality of life is struggling, suffering and death."

Woo-hoo! Compare and contrast with the plot of Finding Nemo and it's easy to understand why people would rather believe in the purdy singing clown fish. But this is our reality, people. Like the man says, there's no safety net - so since we're all in this together, we'll have to make our own. And we can't do that with our eyes and minds shut now, can we?

Is religion a threat to rationality and science?

Prof Daniel Dennett and Lord Winston present their arguments ahead of tonight's public debate

Daniel Dennett and Robert Winston
Tuesday April 22, 2008
The Guardian

Is religion a threat to rationality and science?

Yes, says Prof Daniel Dennett

If religion isn't the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress, what is? Perhaps alcohol, or television, or addictive video games. But although each of these scourges - mixed blessings, in fact - has the power to overwhelm our best judgment and cloud our critical faculties,

religion has a feature of that none of them can boast: it doesn't just disable, it honours the disability. People are revered for their capacity to live in a dream world, to shield their minds from factual knowledge and make the major decisions of their lives by consulting voices in their heads that they call forth by rituals designed to intoxicate them.

It used to be the case that we tended to excuse drunk drivers when they crashed because they weren't entirely in control of their faculties at the time, but now we have wisely inverted that judgment, holding drunk drivers doubly culpable for putting themselves in that irresponsible position in the first place.

It is high time we inverted the public attitude about religion as well, finding all socially destructive acts of religious passion shameful, not honourable, and holding those who abet them - the preachers and other apologists for religious zeal - as culpable as the bartenders and negligent hosts who usher dangerous drivers on to the highways. Our motto should be: Friends don't let friends steer their lives by religion.

Right now, Sayed Parwez Kambakhsh, a young student, resides on death row in Afghanistan, sentenced to execution for committing blasphemy. Imagine! We're living in the 21st century, and in "liberated" Afghanistan (not Taliban Afghanistan) blasphemy is still a capital crime. Most of the rest of the world is tongue-tied, unwilling to tell those bent on carrying out this barbaric sentence that they are simply wrong, and should not thus humiliate themselves and their traditions. Where are the peaceful demonstrations of protest? Are people unwilling to hurt the feelings of Muslims? We are quick to condemn other outrages, but

religious passion, genuine or feigned, shields people from the moral judgments of their fellow human beings, judgments to which we should all alike be subject.

There is an unbalance in the framing of this resolution, and Robert Winston has the worst of it. He must try to allay a host of concerns, an unending task, while - as everyone knows all too well - in a single cataclysmic day my side could be proven by one fanatical act, not that anyone would be left to cheer my victory. Not just rationality and scientific progress, but just about everything else we hold dear could be laid waste by a single massively deluded "sacramental" act. True,

you don't have to be religious to be crazy, but it helps.

Indeed, if you are religious, you don't have to be crazy in the medically certifiable sense in order to do massively crazy things. And - this is the worst of it -

religious faith can give people a sort of hyperbolic confidence, an utter unconcern about whether they might be making a mistake, that enables acts of inhumanity that would otherwise be unthinkable.

This imperviousness to reason is, I think, the property that we should most fear in religion.

Other institutions or traditions may encourage a certain amount of irrationality - think of the wild abandon that is often appreciated in sports or art - but only religion demands it as a sacred duty.

This might not matter if the activities that composed religion were somewhat insulated from the rest of the world the way they are in sports and art. Then we could treat religious allegiances the way we treat differences in taste: if you have a taste for kick boxing or heavy metal bands, that's your business. Knock yourself out, as we say, it's only a game. Not so with religion. Its arena includes not just the participants but all of life on the planet. Given that, it's troubling to note how avidly some people engage in deliberate make-believe in order to execute the prescribed duties.

The better is enemy of the best: religion may make many people better, but it is preventing them from being as good as they could be.

If only we could transfer all that respect, loyalty and intense devotion from an imaginary being - God - to something real: the wonderful world of goodness we and our ancestors have made, and of which we are now the stewards.

· Professor Daniel Dennett is director of the Centre for Cognitive Studies, Tufts University

No, says Lord Winston

Daniel Dennett would be unlikely to place a stake alongside Blaise Pascal, whose famous wager runs: "You cannot lose by professing belief in God - if He does not exist you lose nothing, and if He does exist, you will be rewarded in the afterlife." Dennett argues that it is better to live as if there is no God, attempting to make the world a rational and better place. He points out that it is costly building cathedrals and that churchgoing is a massive waste of time. An atheist will lose nothing if God does not exist - his or her memorial will be good deeds. And if there is a benevolent God, Dennett will find himself judged by the Almighty on his merits, not because of the disbelief he professes.

The problem with his interesting views of the possible evolutionary basis of religious belief is that he seems unable to treat the beliefs and feelings of believers seriously. Might not God disapprove of this much more? Like many evangelical preachers, he repeatedly seems to claim to be open to the sincerely held views of others. Yet, in Dennett's world, humans are divided into "brights" or believers - and if you are not a "bright", you disagree with his point of view because you are intellectually inferior, closed-minded or too scared.

To some extent, he falls into a similar trap to Dawkins. He feels he knows about religions but seems to have done too little research; a number of his points - for example, about Jewish attitudes or Muslim practices - seem to show a lack of serious scholarship.

Dennett, like Dawkins, is affronted by the "fact" that moderate religious people have done little to curb the excesses of the extremists of their own traditions. Who does he define as an extremist? If, as a Jew, I decide to adhere to totally irrational dietary laws or bizarrely not travel on a bus on Saturday, does that make me an extremist? If I go further and wear a kippa on my head and build an eruv around the part of London in which I live, is that an unacceptable excess? Or is he arguing against dangerous violence, which is condemned by every responsible religious Jew?

Religion is built into human consciousness and there is plentiful evidence of it being a cohesive force. Apart from the survival of our prehistoric ancestors, in recent times there are powerful examples of how a notion of the transcendental has spurred humans on in desperate situations. Viktor Frankl, in the midst of the extreme deprivation, dehumanisation and despair of Auschwitz observes how, in his assessment, only those with some spirituality - not necessarily a belief in God - survived the depravity of the camp.

Dennett seems to believe science is "the truth". Like many of my brilliant scientific colleagues, he conveys the notion that science is about a kind of certainty.

Daniel Dennett is well aware of the provisional nature of scientific hypothesis; any hypothesis can be replaced by another hypothesis that better describes the world.

For example, in his book Breaking the Spell, he quotes Eva Jablonka in support of his views on memes. He forgets that she challenges the very essence of Dawkins's view of evolution - a view Dennett obviously passionately supports.

Perhaps he might care to re-read the book of Job. Throughout most of this deeply mysterious and spiritual book, Job patiently suffers but essentially is steadfast in his faith in God's justice. But finally beyond provocation, he rails against the irrationality of God's punishment. At the very end of the story, God appears out of the whirlwind saying: "Who is this that darkeneth counsel by words without knowledge?" God asks Job where he was when He laid the foundations of the Earth? Do we understand where we come from, where we are going, or what lies beyond our planet?

The problem is that scientists now too frequently believe we have the answers to these questions, and hence the mysteries of life. But, oddly, the more we use science to explore nature, the more we find things we do not understand and cannot explain. In reality, both religion and science are expressions of man's uncertainty. Perhaps the paradox is that certainty, whether it be in science or religion, is dangerous. The danger of Dennett's relatively gentle brand of certainty is that it increases polarisation in our society. With inflexible positions on both sides, certainty surely is the biggest threat to rationality, and to science.

· Lord Winston is emeritus professor of fertility studies, Imperial College London

· The debate on religion versus science will take place tonight at the British Council. This is the finale in the Rethink education public debate series, hosted by the thinktank Agora and Education Guardian. For details go to www.agora-education.org

Six impossible things before breakfast

Alison at PhiloGym, Thanks, many thanks for the brilliant video.

"Why when i was your age i believed in Six impossible things before breakfast." (The Queen in 'Alice Through the Looking Glass')
http://tinyurl.com/2jfhx2

From Steven Wright http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9X_xQRrPFY&feature=related

0'
1) " maybe the stars are made to play music with .. what are the chances?

3' 03"
why do you think we are here? 'life is just an interruption from not existing'
2) You are going straight to the middle of hell.

3) is that whisky? No its the tears of the devil after he laughed so hard thinking about what he was going to do to you.

5' 47"
4) do us a favour. Just stop thinking. Please you are driving us crazy. Don't worry where you will be in 40 years. It is fate.

6'30"
5) 'i believe in reincarnation because I have a lot more woodworking to do'

6'50"
6) 'I've wasted my whole life thinking about this stuff ... I should have gone fishing, I should have had a sandwich, I should have just had a few laughs .. now I get it!

6' 40"
"I'm not dead, I'm not really alive, I'm in a very uncomfortable position. I don't really like it."

8'50"
"I'm going to miss beling alive"

Like the Queen, I've believed 6 impossible things. Its 7.31am. Now for my breakfast!