Oh joy, a lump of paper survived. It’s a miracle!

I wish religious nuts could get a little perspective when they talk about “miracles”. The latest “miracle” is a piece of Ilan Ramon’s diary that is going on display in Israel; Ramon was one of the astronauts on the space shuttle Columbia.

“It’s almost a miracle that it survived — it’s incredible,” Zalmona said. There is “no rational explanation” for how it was recovered when most of the shuttle was not, he said.

The diary was fragmentary, charred, and soaked, and it required months of restoration to be rendered partially readable. The human being Ilan Ramon was similarly fragmentary, charred, and soaked, and no amount of work will ever bring him back. There was no miracle here, only tragedy, and that some piece of a prayer Ramon wrote in his diary survived is an awfully tawdry relic to celebrate the existence of a beneficent deity. It seems to me that it is actually a testament to the refutation of what they believe — not that they will see that, not when every scrap of pain and sorrow in the world is twisted into a prop for their faith.

Sweden? How could you!

I received an email today that brings up a curious decision by Lund University: they have appointed a new head of the university who seems to have a few bats in the belfry, and there is some concern that they may be rabid. The situation isn’t helped by the fact that this newly appointed head, Per Eriksson, refuses to discuss some of his beliefs, even though these beliefs may well affect his performance on the job.

I’m hampered by the fact that all the news about this selection is in Swedish, and I can’t read a word of it. Here’s the short summary I was sent.

The Lund University board ignored the recommendation of an examination committee consisting of 90 university professors, students, and other concerned parties and appointed a renowned creationist Per Eriksson with strong connections to the Baptist movement in Sweden. When interviewed concerning the appointment the appointed headmaster candidate proudly pronounced publicly that he faithfully consulted his bible on a daily basis. Although religious freedom should be adhered to, the appointed headmaster candidate made a clear and conscious gesture by displaying his biases. The public pronouncement of his personal beliefs may be an indication of how personal convictions may influence and bias the Prof Eriksson’s judgement in his influential position controlling the largest seat of learning in northern europe.

If he is a creationist, this is big trouble, and ought to be grounds for tossing him out on his ear. You cannot properly administer a modern university while simultaneously believing that the science disciplines are fundamentally in error because they do not bow down to your bronze age myths. However, I haven’t yet found anything in which his creationism is made explicit. Mainly, I’m finding news stories where Eriksson is pretty cagey about avoiding any association with the tenets of his church.

For instance, here’s a story in which the science faculty unanimously oppose his appointment (google translation), explaining that he is a member of a pentecostal church which is “connected to the Swedish Baptist community and the Evangelical Free Church”—that’s a nice stew of crazy right there. This is an anti-science church with the stated belief that homosexuality is wrong, but nothing about creationism, other than that they say the bible is literally true.

Another source (google translation) tried to grill Eriksson on his own personal views on homosexuality and stem cell research: he’s stonewalling (google translation).

Anyway, it’s a strange situation. The Lund University board has selected a candidate who was strongly opposed by a committee of university faculty, and who has very suspicious affiliations with pentecostal/fundamentalist/evangelical religion. That’s all I know at this point, but perhaps some of our Scandinavian readers can dig a little deeper than I can and report back.

Religulous opens tonight

And it’s not showing anywhere near me. In fact, I will be very surprised if it opens anywhere in this rural, religious area…I’ll probably have to wait for it to come out on DVD. Religulous is the new movie by Bill Maher, an agnostic who thinks religion is a “load of nonsense”, which by all reports is going to mock religion mercilessly — if this hysterical review by a devout fundamentalist is any indication, it’s going to be great. Maher, though, isn’t exactly an unblemished source with a deep dedication to reason, since he’s fallen for some embarrassingly silly altie medicine nonsense before. I’ll have to wait to see it before I can judge, which may be a while.

Any of you out there who get a chance will have to leave a comment. Go ahead, you can gloat that you live in a civilized part of the world burgeoning with readily available material goodies that are obtainable with a snap of the fingers (…and an agonizing ride through heavy traffic to park on a monstrous sheet of asphalt and pay exorbitant sums for admission…)

Still, I can have the fun of criticizing the critics. Andrew O’Hehir interviews Maher, and although it’s largely a sympathetic review, there’s a big chunk in the middle that is the usual aggravating deference to religion that everyone makes without thinking about it.

But as I gently tried to suggest to Maher during our recent phone call, his scattershot and ad hominem attacks against many different forms of religious hypocrisy don’t add up to a coherent critique, and he’s not qualified to provide one.

“Scattershot” is grossly unfair, since he is attacking religion. Go ahead, stack up Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Scientology, Hinduism, etc. next to each other: it seems to me that the fact that there is no possible rubric for judging the validity of any of them, that they typically contradict each other, and that religious belief is so diverse and so inescapably weird means that it is ridiculous to demand a simple, coherent narrative that addresses the flaws in all of them. There they are, the existence of multiple god-beliefs is sufficient in itself to refute them, and it’s perfectly reasonable to expose their various absurdities in brief snippets.

Any serious theologian from the mainstream Christian or Jewish traditions would have eaten his lunch for him, and that’s why we don’t see anybody like that in this film for more than a second or two.

No, I think it more likely that it is because serious theologians are a) dead boring, b) irrelevant to an extreme degree to most varieties of religious beliefs, and c) are just as silly when their ideas are examined. Except for all those serious theologians who have ended up as atheists, of course.

During their brief appearances, for instance, Vatican Latinist Reginald Foster and astronomer George Coyne, who are both Roman Catholic priests, make it clear that contemporary Catholic theology resists literal readings of Scripture and is not in the least antiscientific. You can find liberal Christians who will argue that the resurrection of Jesus was somewhere between a con game and a dream sequence, and numerous Jews who treat the Torah as legendary material and God as a distant hypothesis.

Yes? And this refutes the contention that religion is absurd how? The only way most religious beliefs can be rationally justified is by running away from them very fast, and then making a delicate and distant wave of appreciation, acknowledging their past role in the intellectual tradition, while denying the substance of their arguments. Fine with me, probably fine with Maher.

It’s perfectly legitimate to argue that all such people are putting lipstick on a pig, to coin a phrase — that they’re apologizing for a ruinous and ridiculous body of mythological literature whose influence on human history has been overwhelmingly negative. But Maher’s idiots-of-all-nations anthology in “Religulous” doesn’t even try to make that case; it’s as if he doesn’t even know that religion has centuries’ worth of high-powered intellection on its side, whether you buy any of it or not.

Now there’s a valid criticism of the movie, and until I’ve seen it, I won’t know if the show makes a poor case or not. O’Hehir may be right, but I’m immediately rendered dubious by this justification that “religion has centuries’ worth of high-powered intellection on its side”. I don’t see that at all. I mainly see that religion has had centuries of cultural monopoly, where intellectuals had no choice (and no alternative) but to work within the framework of religion. All the intellectual circle-jerking over religion? Pfft. Nothing useful came of it. Progress came only when smart people started breaking free of the straitjacket.

Maher and Charles’ film also doesn’t engage the value of religious narrative in moral or existential terms, nor does it even try to address the ubiquitous nature of supernatural and spiritual experience in human life.

I do wish people would knock it off with the automatic bestowal of moral authority on religion. It was the only game in town for millennia, and it didn’t make people better — deeply religious cultures have always been as nasty and brutish, if not more so, than more secular cultures, and religious individuals had as much capacity for evil as atheists. Religion gets no edge here.

But OK, I suspect the movie doesn’t ask the question of why so many people are religious. So what? It’s a comedy-documentary. It’s not supposed to answer all questions, especially not tragic-serious ones about the universal human affliction of faith.

But of course this is actually an interview with Maher, and he does answer those questions — so read the whole thing.

David Popescu, all around sweet guy

Popescu is running for some political office (the article doesn’t say what), and he recently gave a talk at a high school where he frankly stated his views.

“A young man asked me what I think of homosexual marriages and I said I think homosexuals should be executed,” he said. “My whole reason for running is the Bible and the Bible couldn’t be more clear on that point.”

I get the impression that this guy doesn’t have a chance of winning his election, but still — it’s likely that saying homosexuals are evil will cost you fewer votes than saying you don’t believe in any gods, at least in this country. That always seemed backwards, to me.

Aaargh — I have to disagree with Harry Kroto

And it doesn’t feel good. Kroto is a Nobel-winning chemist, and I’ve had dinner with him — he’s a good guy, a very outspoken atheist, strongly on the side of science education, and all around smart and personable. So I hate to say it, but this opinion piece on the Michael Reiss affair is just too exclusionist for even me. Reiss, you may recall, was the education director for the Royal Society who resigned after making some conciliatory (or reported as conciliatory) remarks about creationism.

I do not have a particularly big problem with scientists who may have some personal mystical beliefs – for all I know the President of the Royal Society may be religious. However, I, and many of my Royal Society colleagues, do have a problem with an ordained minister as Director of Science Education – this is a totally different matter. An ordained minister must have accepted that there was a creator (presumably more intelligent than he is?) thus many of us (maybe 90% of FRSs) cannot see how such a person can pontificate on how to tackle this fundamentally unresolvable conflict at the science/religion interface. Reiss cannot have his religious cake in church and eat the scientific one in the classroom. This is where the intellectual integrity issue arises – and it is the crucial issue in the Reiss affair.

This is too close to blacklisting people for their personal affiliations, and it should not be acceptable. I agree that being an ordained minister implies that the guy is fairly deeply into weird old woo, but surprise: people are really good, for the most part, at holding a lot of disparate ideas in their heads, and people trained as scientists are especially good, for the most part, at keeping the spiritual blather out of their science. Keep in mind that generic religiosity can be rationalized to avoid conflict with specific issues in science (in ways that are deplorably vague and pointless, of course); this isn’t like discovering that Reiss was a card-carrying creationist with an a priori commitment to anti-science. If we’re going to start kicking scientists out of organizations because they have some bit of irrationality in their lives, we’re all going to be in trouble. Do I need to start expunging the space operas from my bookshelves and the old cheesy horror movies from my DVD collection?

I say that qualified scientists should be awarded positions like Director of Science Education solely on the basis of their record as science educators. Give them the benefit of the doubt that they understand the difference between science and their private hobbies, and aren’t going to mix the two up. And, of course, if they do mix them up, go after them for the specific infraction, and not for their private interests.

This is also difficult for me to say because I do think religion is a taint that corrupts the thinking of otherwise intelligent persons, and I do find it personally suspicious when an ordained minister is given authority in a scientific organization…but no one is perfect, it’s a rational principle to judge by only appropriate criteria, and it’s simply an injustice to shut people out with such an unyielding criterion.

How about an utterly trivial poll?

Rather than asking random internet voters to decide who should be Leader of the Free World, how about this one: Should Montel have psychic Sylvia Browne on his new show?

For those who don’t know who this is about, Montel Williams is an ex-talk show host best known for having gullible tripe on every week — in particular, the odious, awful Jabba the Hut Sylvia Browne. Williams is apparently getting a new show (don’t ask me why, as far as I’m concerned he’s a cut-rate version of Oprah, who’s rather awful, too), and a few people are wondering if it’ll be as credulous and phony as his old one.

Anyway, after that dull debate last night, we need something really stupid to lighten the tone.