For shame, Canada…or maybe not

Ann Coulter, professional harridan, was scheduled to give a talk at the University of Ottawa tonight. It has been cancelled, citing a large number of protesters (which is not a problem, I would hope people would publicly express their displeasure!), and the possibility of violence (which is a problem, if true). At the very least, some hooligan pulled a fire alarm.

This is not the proper way to handle kooks at all.

She is a vile lunatic, but she should have been given the right to speak, and then her noise should have been ripped apart with good questions, and conversation after the event. It’s pretty much guaranteed that she would have said things that are stupid and outrageous and embarrassed herself — not that she’d notice, since she’s shameless — but now she gets a free pass and a martyr card.

I may be wrong here. If there was violence, or a credible threat of violence, then it was a bad show for free speech. On the other hand, it’s looking like there really wasn’t any serious threat — it was just a loud mob of people peacefully protesting, of which I entirely approve. The ‘violence’ story is beginning to sound like a contrived excuse for Ann Coulter to bolt out of the hot seat.

Although pulling a fire alarm is still very bad form.

It’s just not worth doing if Deepak Chopra is involved

Don’t watch this debate on “Does God have a future?” (video here) if your temper runs a bit hot. Sam Harris was excellent, Michael Shermer was pretty good, but their opponents, Deepak Chopra and Jean Houston, were blithering morons. Harris’s early point was spot on: that there is the kind of religion that people actually practice, and then there is the New Age woo of cosmic minds and magic powers gussied up with pseudo-scientific noise, and the latter is a dodge to avoid the former.

And that’s all Chopra did: he babbled about science, of all things, supporting his flaky freakish New Age scam, and Houston was also pointless in a lot of pretentious touchy-feely vapidity.

It just isn’t worth it. I think we’re at the point where no godless rationalist ought to share a stage with Chopra — he’s an ignorant phony who will simply lie and misrepresent science while claiming its mantle. Both Harris and Shermer were solid in standing up to him, but they didn’t go far enough in dismissing his phony credentials and his dishonest schtick.

By god, this has to be a confused rationale for a poll

Some days, I feel like the whole issue of the mention of God on our currency is trivial and stupid, and I really don’t care anymore. And then I see an ‘argument’ like the one in this argument defending keeping “God” on our money, and I realize that…YES, I DO CARE. I care very much that people are so deeply infected with religion that they actually think this is a clever defense.

The word “God” is not comparable to an organization, a building, a philosophy or a religion. God, unlike an establishment of religion, is a concept to atheists and believers alike. The believer perceives God as the living creator of all. The atheist perceives God as an unfortunate fictional concept that causes war. Either way, this country was founded on respect for a higher power than man — an entity generically referred to as God in the English-speaking world. The laws of our land protect our right to revere or disavow God, but they do not protect us from hearing and seeing the term. Believer and non-believer alike make up one nation under God, because the first law of the land protects belief or disbelief in God, the right to talk about God, and the right to make God the highest authority in one’s life.

Because we’re a nation under God — with God as a concept we are free to love as truth or disavow as fiction — we have never been one nation under Washington, Lincoln, Reagan or Obama. We are a nation that elevates God — whatever God means — above any human authority because we are a nation that elevates an individual’s choices above the agendas of authorities.

Get that? Believers like God, atheists think god is an “unfortunate fictional concept”, but either way, we have respect for a higher power. And because we are free to disbelieve in God, it is symbolic of our freedom to honor God. His god. That Abrahamic tyrant.

If they’re all interchangeable and we just need to honor a generic concept, then why not have alternating mintings where “God” is interchanged with “Allah” and “Cthulhu” and “Satan” and “Mammon” and whatever? It shouldn’t bother this author. After all, he suggests we just use our imaginations to insert whatever meaning we want.

When annoyed by currency, atheists have the option of interpreting “in God we trust” as “in a fictional concept we trust” for the sake of limited government.

I don’t care what you think of the issue, but you should vote for reason and against sloppy supernaturalist lunacy.

Should “God” be stricken from U.S. currency and the Pledge of Allegiance?

Yes, lose the references to God
43%
No, keep God on currency and in the Pledge
53%
I don’t know
0%
I don’t care
4%

If it helps, you can try interpreting “Should ‘God’ be stricken from U.S. currency and the Pledge of Allegiance?” as “Should gibbering lunatics like Wayne Laugesen be stricken from the editorial pages of the Colorado Springs Gazette?” For the sake of liberty, freedom, and justice for all. Amen.

But you should be!

Answers in Genesis has begun a goofy little campaign called I AM NOT ASHAMED — they’re apparently collecting videos of people declaring their shameless adoration of Jesus. Ho hum. All I can say is that they should be deeply embarrassed to endorse something so absurd.

They use a little unfortunate language, though.

WE WANTED A MESSAGE THAT WOULD OFFER A CLEAR CALL TO CHRISTIANS AROUND THE WORLD TO STAND UNASHAMEDLY AND UNCOMPROMISINGLY ON THE BIBLE.

Happy Jihad’s House of Pancakes is willing to oblige. You too can send in photos of yourself standing unashamedly on a Bible — you don’t even have to wipe your feet.

Dreher is really a piece of work

Jerry Coyne has unearthed a few maggoty tidbits about Rod Dreher, the Templeton director of communications. It seems the Templeton Foundation has been padding his credentials a bit, claiming that he is a 7-time nominee for a Pulitzer Prize. Dreher? A Pulitzer? Has the prize become that worthless now?

Only it turns out the operative word in that phrase is “nominee”. Anyone can be a nominee: heck, somebody could write a letter nominating me for a Pulitzer, which, if the committee has any standards at all, would go nowhere. Much like Dreher’s nominations.

The real revelation, though, is much more amusing. Dreher had one of those Templeton Fellowships, and toddled off to England to learn about the intersection of faith and science. Here’s his short summary of the experience:

The truth of the matter is that I turned up in Cambridge knowing a lot about religion, but not much about science. What I saw and heard during those two-week seminars, and what I learned from my Templeton-subsidized research that summer (I designed my own reading program, which compared Taoist and Eastern Christian views of the body and healing) opened my mind to science. It turned out that I didn’t know what I didn’t know until I went on the fellowship.

Rod Dreher is completely ignorant of science. I’d like to know how doing a compare-and-contrast essay between two clueless aboriginal superstitions gave him any exposure to scientific thinking at all. Gosh, I think I’ll go read a book about organometallic chemistry to open my mind to Zoroastrianism.

I’m a starry-eyed techno-utopian, and proud of it

Freeman Dyson (with whom I have many disagreements, so don’t take this as an unqualified endorsement), wrote an interesting article that predicted, in part, a coming new age of biology. I think he’s entirely right in that, and that we can expect amazing information and changes in this next century.

If the dominant science in the new Age of Wonder is biology, then the dominant art form should be the design of genomes to create new varieties of animals and plants. This art form, using the new biotechnology creatively to enhance the ancient skills of plant and animal breeders, is still struggling to be born. It must struggle against cultural barriers as well as technical difficulties, against the myth of Frankenstein as well as the reality of genetic defects and deformities.

Apparently, this freaks some people out. The so-called Crunchy Con, a knee-jerk Catholic nicely described as a “weird, humorless, smart, spooky, self-rightous, puritan wingnut”, is one of the people who takes particular exception to this optimistic view of the future. Rod Dreher wrote an egregiously ignorant whine about the possibilities, which I will proceed to puke upon.

[Read more…]

Sins of omission

The other day, I got a request for an interview: a reporter was writing a story about Ken Miller. I was happy to do so — this was clearly going to be a friendly piece about Miller, and I thought it was good that he get some more press. I talked on the phone with this fellow for 20 minutes or so, and I told him what I thought: Miller is a smart guy, a great speaker, a hardworking asset to the people opposing creationism, and I also said that his efforts to squeeze religion into science were ill-founded and badly argued. I said, “It’s an effort to reconcile a legitimate discipline with foolishness.”

Guess what the only quote to make it into the article was?

Yeah, it turned out to be a crappy atheist-bashing article. It wasn’t enough to talk about Miller’s good work and the respect he gets from others — no, it had to be turned into a fight, with poor Miller unable to win because he’s being “attacked by Darwin-hating fundies and leftie atheists alike,” and the New Atheists are the primary villains of the piece. The more complex story I tried to tell got discarded, and only one short sentence made it to the final result. I must have been a major disappointment to the reporter, since I didn’t give him much in the way of vicious attack-dog quotes.

He also got a little bit from Jerry Coyne. Again, it’s clear but temperate stuff. The story really does not have anything to justify the claim that we’re out to get Miller, or that the New Atheists are somehow in symbiosis with fundagelical loons.

“By discussing science and religion together and asserting that science more or less points you to evidence for God, he blurs the boundaries between science and faith,” says Coyne, “boundaries which I think have to be absolutely maintained if we’re going to have a rational country and we’re going to judge things based on evidence rather than superstition.”

I agree completely with that — Miller does blur the lines in very silly ways. The article even reiterates Miller’s notorious explanation from his book, Finding Darwin’s God, and obliviously confirms Coyne’s point by approvingly citing the way Miller mingles nonsense with science.

But the cell biologist also makes explicitly scientific arguments: maintaining, for instance, that quantum indeterminacy — the ultimately unpredictable outcome of physical events — could allow God to intervene in subtle, undetectable ways.

This sort of sly intervention, he argues, is vital to the Creator’s project: if God were to re-grow limbs for amputees, for instance — if God were to perform the sort of miracles demanded by atheists as proof of his existence — the consequences would be disastrous.

“Suppose that it was common knowledge that if you were a righteous person and of great faith and prayed deeply, all of a sudden, your limb would grow back,” he says. “That would reduce God to a kind of supranatural force . . . and by pushing the button labeled ‘prayer,’ you could accomplish anything you wanted. What would that do to moral independence?”

That is not a scientific argument in any way—I guess the reporter was fooled by the flinging about of “quantum”. All that is is tired old post hoc theological apologetics without a hint of evidence to back it up.

Nowhere anywhere in the article is any reasonable support for the notion of a god, nor especially of any peculiarly Catholic deity. Of course there isn’t, because he doesn’t have any.

What he does do, again, is try to throw atheists under the bus. It’s more bullshit about how science has to compromise with the public’s version of spiritual superstition, rather than remaining true to the evidence.

But Miller rejects any suggestion that the science in his work suffers when he brings in the spiritual. And he argues that the New Atheists, in their forceful rejection of God, are doing damage, in their own right, to a scientific brand already under assault.

…

Indeed, Miller argues that the creationists and New Atheists are in an odd sort of symbiosis — reinforcing each others’ extreme views of the incompatibility of science and religion.

Well, fuck that noise.

The New Atheists are as much a force in opposition to creationism as is Ken Miller; more so, I would argue, because we don’t make fuzzy, muddled compromises with absurd medieval humbug. Even if he disagrees on that last point, his constant efforts to belittle the atheists on his side in this struggle, to repeatedly argue that they are a detriment to science education, is getting tiresome. Miller wants to turn the pro-evolution movement into a stalking horse for Catholicism, while his godless colleagues have repeatedly stated that we want no endorsement of religion or atheism in science education. The only one doing damage to the “brand of science” is the guy with pitiful idea that god is noodling about at the quantum level in ways that are completely undetectable — he wants to claim that he has an invisible dragon in his garage, and what’s more, that that claim is scientific.

Remind me, next time I’m asked about Ken Miller, that I shouldn’t bother to say anything appreciative. It will be ignored and won’t be reciprocated. And I’m not going to endorse his crusade to taint science with supernaturalism.

A quick question for Deepak Chopra

Chopra has another mindless post on the HuffPo, titled Only Spirituality Can Solve The Problems Of The World. I read the whole thing. He’s got some fuzzy definitions, praises god-consciousness, gushes about love, joy, kindness, peace, etc., but overall, it’s the usual vacuous fluff. I am left with one question in reference to the bold assertion in his title.

How?

Just to name a few problems of the world: overpopulation, famine, resource depletion, water scarcity, war, and disease. Deepak Chopra, quick, 30 seconds: how will you solve any one of those problems with spirituality?

Bzzzt, time’s up. OK, clearly you can’t answer questions with that kind of scope. Let’s narrow it down a bit: the aftermath of the Chilean earthquake. How will you fix infrastructure problems with spirituality? 30 seconds.

Oh, man, you suck at this game. We’ll simplify some more. A woman comes into your office looking for medical help. She has breast cancer. In 30 seconds, tell us what spiritual advice you would give her that would actually help her with this disease?

Bzzzt. Oh, so sorry, you’ve been skunked. Better luck next … wait. The judges have made a decision. Really? You’re going to give it to him?

The judges have decided that the correct answer for each of those questions was “No, spirituality can’t fix any of those problems” and that your stupefied silence counts as a legitimate response. You lucky dog, you win the grand prize! We’re going to give you a shovel, a hammer, a bag of antibiotics and vaccines, and airdrop you into a remote African village where you can use your “spirituality” to solve a few problems. Congratulations!

In which I am convinced I’ll never get any money from  the Templeton Foundation

It’s tough to tread that line between contempt and admiration: Jerry Coyne writes about the Templeton journalism awards. It really is a smart move on the part of the Templetonites to coopt journalists to sell their bankrupt line by tossing a good-sized chunk of money at them.

One interesting revelation is that the journalism awards aren’t simply handed out by cunning Templetonistas who spot a promising compromiser in the ranks of reporters — you have to apply for the fellowship. Hey, should I? They’re closed for now, but I imagine there will be a bunch of 2011 fellowships awarded, and I wouldn’t mind spending time in Cambridge.

All I have to do is write an essay “outlining [my] interest in science and religion and detailing a specific topic [i] hope to cover”. Here’s my start:

Religion is the antithesis of science, an anesthetic for the mind that disables critical thought and encourages the acceptance of inanity as fact, and wishful thinking as evidence.

Do you think it will appeal to their review panel?

Oh, probably not. Here’s John Horgan’s experience.

One Templeton official made what I felt were inappropriate remarks about the foundation’s expectations of us fellows. She told us that the meeting cost more than $1-million, and in return the foundation wanted us to publish articles touching on science and religion. But when I told her one evening at dinner that — given all the problems caused by religion throughout human history — I didn’t want science and religion to be reconciled, and that I hoped humanity would eventually outgrow religion, she replied that she didn’t think someone with those opinions should have accepted a fellowship. So much for an open exchange of views.

Oops. And John is so much more polite than I am.

Now I really wish those application essays were available for public reading. I’m sure they’re exceptionally entertaining.

Mooney ‘fesses up. I’d love it if he’d post his application essay!