Nice letter, but is it worth £170,00

post from Pharyngula on 07 October 2009 10:59:25 PM. © Pharyngula

Yeah, probably. It's a letter from Einstein that we'll have to brandish next time some faitheist claims Einstein for their cause.

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.

Wow. He's so strident.

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Nice letter, but is it worth £170,000

post from Pharyngula on 07 October 2009 10:59:25 PM. © Pharyngula

Yeah, probably. It's a letter from Einstein that we'll have to brandish next time some faitheist claims Einstein for their cause.

The word God is for me nothing more than the expression and product of human weakness, the Bible a collection of honorable, but still purely primitive, legends which are nevertheless pretty childish. No interpretation no matter how subtle can (for me) change this.

Wow. He's so strident.

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My regrets on your traumatic brain damage!

post from Pharyngula on 07 October 2009 10:55:13 PM. © Pharyngula

I was looking for a Hallmark card with that on the cover (and also, preferably, a sad-eyed puppy dog) to send to Josh Rosenau and Chris Mooney, but they didn't have one, so I had to settle for a blog post. Here's the sad puppy, at least.

Oh, Internet, you are like a giant greeting card store that is always well-stocked with lovely cliches.

What seems to have scrambled their brains is that Richard Dawkins said, in an interview for Newsweek, that "there are many intelligent evolutionary scientists who also believe in God" and accepts that "there is that compatibility". Shock! He must have changed his mind! He's coming around to thinking like an accommodationist!

Actually, I suspect the damage must have occurred earlier, caused by all that masturbatory wacking away at a straw man. The real shock to both of them ought to be that they haven't been paying any attention to what all these New Atheists have been saying all along. Dawkins didn't say anything at all different from what we've all been saying all along — his position is practically the party line among the New Atheists.

For instance, Jerry Coyne was very clear:

First of all, nobody doubts that science and religion are compatible in the trivial sense that someone can be a scientist and be religious at the same time. That only shows one's ability to hold two dissimilar approaches to the world simultaneously in one's own mind. As I've said umpteen times before, you could say that being a Christian is compatible with being a murderer because a lot of murderers are Christians. Yet Mooney, and Scott, make this argument, and Mooney touts it as "powerful."
It isn't. This is not what we mean when we say science and faith are incompatible. Got it, folks?? Let's not hear the "there-are-religious-scientists" argument any more. It's trivial, and insulting to anyone who can think.

I similarly spelled it out.

I have now discovered that I was trying to make the same points Lawrence Krauss is doing in the Wall Street Journal: religion is wrong. It's a set of answers, and worse, a set of procedures, that don't work. That's the root of our argument that religion is incompatible with science.

That word, "incompatibility", is a problem, though. The uniform response we always get when we say that is "Hey! I'm a Christian, and I'm a scientist, therefore they can't be incompatible!" Alexander was no exception, and said basically the same thing right away. It's an irrelevant point; it assumes that a person can't possibly hold two incompatible ideas at once. We know that is not true. We have complicated and imperfect brains, and even the most brilliant person on earth is not going to be perfectly consistent. When we talk about incompatibility, we have to also specify what purposes are in conflict, and show that the patterns of behavior have different results.

It's a shame. We've been writing this stuff repeatedly for so long, and these critics have failed to pay any attention. It's as if rational discussion doesn't sink into their heads. It makes me sad. We need another sad puppy; maybe they'll notice that.

With some obvious exasperation, Jerry Coyne has also revisited this clueless distortion of our position, and best of all, since we were all together in Los Angeles this weekend, he got Richard Dawkins to testify.

All I was saying is that it is possible for a human mind to accommodate both evolution and religion because F. Collins's mind seems to manage the feat (along with lots of vicars and bishops and rabbis). I also needed to make the point that TGSOE [The Greatest Show on Earth] is not the same book as TGD [The God Delusion] because many interviewers who are supposed to be interviewing me about TGSOE have simply ignored it and gone right back to assuming that it is the same book as TGD.

Despite all this clarity from our camp, Mooney still doesn't get it. He now has an article in the Huffington Post (booooo) in which, even though he has read Richard Dawkins' unambiguous statement that he was simply stating the position that he has held all along, Mooney has to continue to fellate his strawman some more.

And that makes puppies cry.

And worse, Mooney draws a ridiculously untenable conclusion: that Dawkins is backpeddling and regrets the association of evolution and atheism.

In other words, Dawkins appears to be grappling with a communication problem. Linking together atheist advocacy and the defense of evolution, as he has done so prominently, poses a pretty big problem when you hit the US media with a new book on the latter. After writing a million-selling atheist "consciousness-raiser" and "come-out-of-the-closet" book, is it at all surprising that Dawkins now finds his evolution book being prominently linked to atheism in the media mind?

Jebus. Guess what? Dawkins is as adamant an atheist as ever. That's just wishful thinking on Mooney's part. More puppies for delusional journalists!

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Whew, that was fast

post from Pharyngula on 07 October 2009 10:36:10 PM. © Pharyngula

I'm in Cincinnati — I was flown down here to give an interview for a Canadian show, as I mentioned before. They bumped up the time of the interview to shortly after I arrived here, which was nice…I'm all done now! Free in Cincinnati! Of course, then I fly out early tomorrow afternoon, so I don't have much time to be free. But I'll be back home tomorrow evening, anyway.

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Scientists discover quantum fingerprints of chaos

post from Machines Like Us - Science at the speed of thought on 07 October 2009 08:22:30 PM. © Machines Like Us - Science at the speed of thought

Chaotic behavior is the rule, not the exception, in the world we experience through our senses, the world governed by the laws of classical physics.

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While adolescents may reason as well as adults,
their emotional maturity lags, says new research

post from Machines Like Us - Science at the speed of thought on 07 October 2009 08:21:10 PM. © Machines Like Us - Science at the speed of thought

A 16-year-old might be quite capable of making an informed decision about whether to end a pregnancy ? a decision likely to be made after due consideration and consultation with an adult ? but this same adolescent may not possess the maturity to be held to adult levels of responsibility if she commits a violent crime, according to new research into adolescent psychological development.

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Current Affairs: Egypt- No Love for the Louvre

post from DigiPast on 07 October 2009 08:15:00 PM. © DigiPast

The Louvre holds five mural fragments illegally chipped off the walls of a Theban tomb in the 1980s and has yet to return them despite promising to do so, according to Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities director Zahi Hawass. Since the famed French[...]

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o-love-for-the-louvre.html

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Genome-wide study of autism published in Nature

post from Machines Like Us - Science at the speed of thought on 07 October 2009 08:13:35 PM. © Machines Like Us - Science at the speed of thought

In one of the first studies of its kind, an international team of researchers has uncovered a single-letter change in the genetic code that is associated with autism. The finding, published in the October 8 issue of the journal Nature, implicates a neuronal gene not previously tied to the disorder and more broadly, underscores a role for common DNA variation. In addition, the new research highlights two other regions of the genome, which are likely to contain rare genetic differences that may also influence autism risk.

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Script us not into temptation

I'm teaching a statistics course and everyone wants to use GUI tools. The only trouble is, they'll give you the wrong answer.Why? Not because they are mathematically wrong (well, doubtless they have some errors) but because they make it unpleasant to[...]

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White House Star Party

This is pretty cool: tonight, President Obama will have a bunch of professional and amateur astronomers over to the White House to show the First Family and a group of middle schoolers the sky. The event coincides with the International Year of Astronomy[...]

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