Musings of a Lapsed Pagan

The Gid(eon) Delusion

2011-08-20T10:01:00.005+01:00

Can we? Please?

If The RDFRS published these at a reasonable price, I think I'd buy about 10 a year and drop them in various hotel rooms.

*Update : Having just read a little about Gideon Bibles and their colour coding, it seems that I have accidentally created a copy of the God Delusion destined for distribution to the law-enforcement community.

Tell the homeopaths why we object.

2011-07-12T23:04:00.000+01:00

Some homeopaths would like to find out why we're complaining about them, and what Sense About Science and the Nightingale Collaboration have got against them.

They say:

Homeopathy as a profession is under attack from groups such as Sense about Science and groups such as the Nightingale Collaboration.
This Research will gauge public opinion as to the amount of information that the public and prospective patients wish to be able to access from professionally Qualified Practitioners only.

Why not go tell 'em¿

Here's my responses:

Tragical thinking.

2011-06-23T18:06:00.009+01:00

So, inspired by a tweet by Tim Minchin, I'm going to try to rid myself of all the traces of magical thinking. What's magical thinking you say? Essentially it's the kind of thinking that makes bogus connections between thoughts, words or actions effects in the real world, like prayer, spell-casting or, at a lesser level, superstitious beliefs like black cats being unlucky (or lucky, depending on who you listen too). Of course I don't pray, or cast spells (any more), or avoid black cats or walking under ladders, except when safety dictates, but there are traces of this kind of thinking in some of my, and most other people's, words and mannerisms, and I'm going to try get rid of them all.

So this means no more:

wishing people good luck
crossing fingers (or saying crossed-fingers) for luck or to negate bad luck
touching wood (fnarr fnarr)
saying things like "well of course it's rained, it's because I washed the car"
correlating weather with my failure to dress appropriately for it
etc.

even in jest.

Of course most of the time when we say or do these things we're using them as a shorthand for something else, like expressing sympathy for or solidarity with a friend in fix, or exasperation with our own stupidity. I'm just going to have to find better ways of expressing those things without indulging in stupidity. The idea that thoughts or words or actions can affect reality without a non-supernatural causal link really is one of the daftest going around, so if anyone catches me saying or doing such things, please point it out.

I don't think it's going to be easy; wish me luck! ;)

Update: of course there's one symbol I'm not giving up, because it's too fucking awesome, and that's the sign of warding against the evil eye, AKA the rock/metal hand.

Are you chronically skeptical?

2011-05-15T23:29:00.001+01:00

Anyone who frequents on-line forums relating to chronic illnesses will know that they are riddled with bullshit. Sufferers of chronic illness are often desperate for some form of relief, and their conditions are often cyclical, and this makes the more gullible among them easy meat for the so-called Complementary and Alternative Medicine industry. All kinds of claims are put forward as fact without the now legendary "jot of evidence", and anyone expressing skepticism is accused of trying to deny people their relief or being in the pockets of big pharma. Often the afflicted feel let down by the conventional medicine that has failed to offer them the cure they felt sure would be available. This can lead to a mistrust of doctors and scientists, when one media-sensationalised study after another turns out to be wrong, or the silver bullet they felt was on the horizon turns out to be a blank, or to have unpleasant side-effects. In addition to this many people cling to religion to help them through, and while I would not wish to deny a sufferer the small comfort that this may bring them, it does make for annoying reading when someone writes that, f'rinstance, it's been revealed her by divine inspiration that her daughter was crippled by arthritis at an early age as part of god's will to teach them both to appreciate life more.
All this said, these forums are a valuable resource for sufferers to share their experience, learn from others who share their condition, and share some much-needed camaraderie. But for the skeptic, this experience is easily marred by the proliferation of pseudo-scientific drivel that's trotted out unchallenged on these sites.
So what to do? Where is the resource for those who favour an evidence base for treatments and knowledge of their condition, uncoloured by god, crystal healers, homeopaths and Hopi ear-candling? Well it's about time we started one. But, I can't do it all myself, I'll need help moderating and administrating such a resource. So, if you're a skeptic, and chronic disease sufferer or partner or friend of someone who is, and you're inclined to help out with such a project, let me know. I've got server space and the know-how to set up web-sites and forums etc. but assistance with the day-to-day admin/design/rules/moderation etc. would make it much more likely to be a genuinely useful resource. So I've registered www.chronicallyskeptical.org (which currently only points at this article); if you want to help out please contact me on offerhelp@chronicallyskeptical.org describing the kind of help you are prepared to offer, and a little about your background and why you motivated to help.

Fuck Easter reprise.

2011-04-24T12:34:00.001+01:00

Just went to shops to buy last-minute supplies for barbecue. All major supermarkets shut. Fucking fuck Easter and the donkey it rode in on.

Fuck Easter!

2011-04-24T09:19:00.001+01:00

Well it had to happen eventually didn't it?

To save me the trouble of too much writing and you the trouble of too much reading, Here's the bullet point outline of the post I'd write if I could be arsed.

Easter is bullshit.
Chocolate eggs are:

nice
fuck all to do with Jesus

Cute chicks, both kinds, are:

nice
fuck all to do with Jesus

Cute bunnies, both kinds (!?) are:

nice
Fuck all to do with Jesus

Easter is an appropriation of a pagan fertility celebration that has, wait for it, fuck all to do with Jesus.
It might be named after a Germanic fertility goddess Oestre, but the only reference for that is the writings of the "venerable" Bede, but we take his word on a lot of other shit, so why shouldn't he be right about this too?
Jesus knew he was coming back, little bit of torture, three days dead, live in paradise for all eternity, some fucking sacrifice.
Not even dead three whole days.
One man cannot absolve another's sins/crimes, especially one they never committed (original sin pffft)
Probably never happened anyway.
What kind of stupid god makes all this shit up?

Turn self into man who is own son.
Put son in obscure place to gather small following
Have son tortured killed to absolve all mankind's sins including, and perhaps most importantly, an allegorical one that happened in a garden that never existed.

I would say you couldn't make this shit up, except of course that someone did.
Yes, we all like chocolate and hot cross buns (Pagan sun-wheels? Really? Anyone got any evidence for this claim apart from some drivel trotted out by someone called "dreaming sparrow-fart" who heard it during a "pathworking" AKA "Day-dreaming" AKA "making shit up")*
Enjoy the holiday.
mmm nice eggs.

*MOALP is as equal opportunities offending organisation.

NHS homophobic? No, it's all about risk.

2011-04-17T12:00:00.009+01:00

I was prompted to write this by an exchange on Facebook that contained several misleading statements about why the National Blood Service won't accept blood from homosexual men (Oh no, someone is wrong on the internet!). It started with the status update:

Fucking van drove by "NHS: Please Give Blood"
If you'd fucking take it, maybe I would, you bigoted, closed-minded twatheads!

This on its own wouldn't have prompted a blog post, I can appreciate the frustration that must be felt by someone who wants to perform what they perceive to be civic duty but are denied the opportunity for what seems, to them, like unfair reasons. I may disagree that they are unfair reasons, but can understand the frustration.
Before I start with what annoyed me about the subsequent discussion, let me declare a bias; this is a somewhat emotive topic for me having watched my brother and his life-partner and suffer an array of illnesses for years and then die a slow lingering death from AIDS related illnesses in the early nineties. While the excellent staff at the The Sussex Beacon cared for John in his final months, I was told several anecdotes about homosexual behaviours that were leading to the spread of HIV. I won't relate them here as they are just that, anecdotes, and therefore only peripherally useful in any discussion about how HIV is transmitted. Plus they are twenty years out of date, and you have to hope that if the stories I was told (by gay people) of repeated acts of unprotected anal sex with random partners of unknown sexual history were true, that the gay community has responded in some way to mitigate this now. However, one thing that will not help the process of minimising the suffering caused by HIV/AIDS and AIDS related illnesses is misinformation about the manners and mechanisms in which HIV is spread and the risk factors involved, so I can get very annoyed when in response to statements like:

To be honest, for 'men who have sex with men' it's more risky, that's just a fact unfortunately, not a matter of prejudice.

I see people write things like:

So that explains why the fastest growing HIV infection rates are amongst the straight community who are freely allowed to give blood?

or in response to :

Is it not more likely down to risk assessment than bigotry?

Statements like this:

No - the questionnaire doesn't address risk behaviours; have you had sex with a man since 197something? Banned - shagged a female whore without condom last night? No one asks ...

And slightly less annoying but quite interesting is:

It's a homophobic policy based on homophobic assumptions. Rigorous tests are carried out on donated blood. A ban when someone who's heterosexual could just as well be carrying the HIV virus reinforces prejudice.

I think we have a number of closely related questions here:

Is Male/Male sex more likely to transmit the HIV virus? And as a consequence are men who have sex with men (commonly referred to as MSM) more likely to be carrying it?
Is HIV incidence really rising faster among heterosexuals than among homosexual men in the UK? And if so what is the cause?
Since it is all rigorously tested before use, why are we concerned about the potential for HIV to be present in the blood anyway?
Is the lifetime ban on giving blood motivated by fact or simple homophobia?

Fortunately, one thing that didn't come up is the denial that HIV causes AIDS. No one reading this blog or who is a friend of any of my friends believes that particular regrettably oft-repeated piece of bullshit do they? No? Good; then we can proceed.

Q1. Is Male to Male sex more likely to transmit the HIV virus? And as a consequence, in the UK, are men who have sex with men (commonly referred to as MSM) more likely to be carrying it?

A1. Yes. Yes they are.

Oh you need more than that? OK.
The HIV virus is transmitted through bodily fluids. It cannot live for long outside the body, and therefore needs to get into the body either directly into the bloodstream through a wound or in an injection, or through the mucous membranes, which are delicate tissues found in the mouth, nose, eyes, ears, vagina, urethra and anus. Since I've not heard of a lot of nasal, aural or ocular sex, hetero or homo, I think we can safely forget about those, and concentrate on those in the more fun orifices. The primary difference we concerned with here is the difference between vaginal and anal intercourse; from International HIV/AIDS charity Avert's FAQ:

Unprotected anal intercourse does carry a higher risk than most other forms of sexual activity. The lining of the rectum has fewer cells than that of the vagina, and therefore can be damaged more easily, causing bleeding during intercourse. This can then be a route into the bloodstream for infected sexual fluids or blood. There is also a risk to the insertive partner during anal intercourse, though this is lower than the risk to the receptive partner.

Check out these stats from Avert. Let's focus on the Pie Chart at the top for now.

This chart shows the transmission method for all diagnosed cases of HIV in the UK up to 2010. It shows that for all sexually-transmitted cases of HIV, it's around about half-and-half homo/hetero, with a slight bias toward the straight. Superficially, this might be unexpected if, as most of us have, you've been exposed to information that suggests that HIV is more prevalent among homosexuals. However we need to think a bit harder. These figures are absolute numbers, and are therefore not proportional to the to the numbers of people that fall into those groups. Estimates of the percentage of people who are homosexual vary from about 3-10% of the population. For the sake of argument, we'll use the 10% figure.
In 2010 the total population of the UK would have been around 52,000,000, about 50/50 male/female.
If around 10% of the male population are homosexual that gives around 2.6M homosexual males vs 23.4M hetero males, vs. 23.4M hetero females. We shall ignore lesbians, as transmission between this group is so low as to not feature in the statistics in any significant way. Now we need the absolute figures for HIV infections, which we can again get from the Avert statistics. Sex between men: 48,748; Sex between men and women: 50,184.

48,748 ÷ 2,600,000 ≈ 0.019 ≈ 2% of homosexual men infected with HIV.
50,184 ÷ 46,800,000 ≈ 0.001 ≈ 0.1% of heterosexual men and women infected with HIV.

making it twenty times more likely that a randomly selected gay man will be HIV infected than a randomly selected straight person of either gender. As it turns out, infection rates are higher among straight women than they are among straight men, so if we were to exclude women and compare gay men with straight men, this ratio would be even higher. Also, if we take a figure from the lower end of the spectrum of estimates of the proportion of gay to straight, such as 5%, this figure goes up to nearer forty times more likely even without splitting the genders.

So, in case we didn't already know this, we've learned two things. Anal sex is more likely to transmit the HIV virus than vaginal sex, and if a donor (or sexual partner) we choose is a (randomly selected) man who has previously had MSM sex, he is at least a factor of 20 (and probably much greater) more likely to be carrying the HIV virus than a man who hasn't.

One common response to bare assertions of the fact that anal sex among homosexuals is more likely to transmit HIV is the petulant "Well explain why HIV infection rates are increasing faster among heterosexuals then!" as seen above, which leads us nicely to the next question, where we shall see exactly why.

Q2. Is HIV incidence really rising faster among heterosexuals than, among homosexual men in the UK? And if so what is the cause?

Let's go back to the data from Avert, but a bit further down the page:

It is clear from this data, that since 1999, the infection rate has been higher, in real terms, among heterosexuals than among the MSM group. Of course this doesn't take into account the ratio of homo to heterosexual people in the population. Were we to perform similar maths (an exercise for the reader perhaps?) to that in question 1 above, we would find that, even in 2004 when the number of heterosexuals contracting HIV was around twice that of homosexuals, the rate of infection within the group is still much higher, as a percentage of the total group size, among the MSM group than among the heterosexual. Even so "where are all these new cases coming from?" is a very pertinent question, and luckily one which was answered by the Health Protection Agency in 2007. They identified that the vast majority of these new infections in heterosexuals were acquired in sub-Saharan Africa, mostly by those emigrating from Africa, and mostly by women. While the reverse is true for the MSM group where most infections were acquired in the UK. So the short answer to "Why are heterosexuals getting infected with HIV at higher rates than homosexuals then?" is a) there are more of them, and b) they are catching it in Africa. And remember this is diagnosis rates, so such a sharp increase may be due to an increase in testing among heterosexuals, either in addition to or instead of any real increase in infection rates.

Another thing to notice is that since 2004 there's been a marked decline in hetero infection rates, this may be down to a number of factors (change in sexual practices due to increased awareness, less immigration from sub-Saharan Africa, passing the peak of cases revealed by increased testing, etc.) and while rates appear to have recently started declining slightly among the homosexual group, if current trends continue, hetero infection rates will be lower than MSM rates again in a few years.

Q3. Since it is all rigorously tested before use, why are we concerned about the potential for HIV to be present in the blood anyway?

Due to its small size, it is difficult to test for the presence of the HIV virus directly, so the most common form of HIV test, the ELISA antibody test, like the majority of HIV tests, does not directly check for the presence of the HIV Virus, but for the antibodies the immune system produces in an attempt to fight the infection. The problem here is that these antibodies are not normally detectable for 6-12 weeks after infection, and sometimes up to 6 months. So there is a "Window period" during which a person infected with HIV will pass the test with flying colours. There are other tests that can be performed, but these are either more complicated, and hence more expensive, to perform or they more often give false positives.

Short answer: Yeah it's tested, but the tests aren't 100% effective, it's safer to remove the risk earlier.

Q4. Is the lifetime ban on giving blood motivated by fact or simple homophobia?

One thing to notice about the questionnaire given to those who would give blood is that the words "gay" or "homosexual" never appear anywhere. In the interests of plain language they don't use "MSM" either. What it does say is "Are you a man who has ever had oral or anal sex with a man, with or without a condom?" This is a bare statement of a behaviour that indicates a risk. It is not a judgement on a person's sexuality or lifestyle. Of course you may interpret this as being a politically correct, coded statement, when what they really want to say is "URGH keep that fucking gay blood away from me!" if you wish to indulge a persecution complex, but that is clearly not its intent if you think a little more rationally. There is a follow-up question for women: "In the last 12 months have you had sex with a man who has ever had oral or anal sex with another man, with or without a condom?". So apparently the advisory committee responsible for these decision is so homophobic it won't even allow women who have slept with a bisexual guy to give blood!
There are several other criteria for who can give blood, despite what anyone may say. Our original poster for example was labouring under the misconception that it is fine for a straight man to have sex with a prostitute and give blood the next day. This is quite clearly not the case. You may not give blood if you have, in the last 12 months, had sex with anyone who has ever accepted money or drugs for sex. Of course this may not be clear if you were looking for the word "whore" in there somewhere ;) The questionnaire also forbids you from giving blood if: you have ever been a prostitute (even once) or have recently had sex with someone who has ever been a prostitute; you have ever been an intravenous drug-user or have recently had sex with someone who has; have had sex in an area where AIDS is common, or have had sex with someone else who has; have ever had hepatitis B or C or had sex with someone who has; recently had a tattoo, piercing or acupuncture; if you have visited somewhere where malaria is common or think you might be getting a cold. These are all, like the ban on MSM giving blood, because they indicate a high risk of the blood being contaminated with HIV or other blood-borne diseases; not out of prejudice against any of those groups, but because the risk factor of the blood being taken infecting the recipient is simply too high.

So the last question that I think remains unanswered is why, if it's only up to 6 months that the tests are ineffective, is the is the restriction on MSM blood permanent? Rather than just 6 months or one year like the limit after having had sex with someone who's had sex with someone from Africa? According to HIV/Sexual-health charity the Terence Higgins Trust, the most recent review decided that:

for example allowing MSM to donate if they haven’t had sex in the past year, this would still lead to the vast majority of gay men being excluded from giving blood. The last review of the policy found that the risk to the blood supply would rise by 60% if men were allowed to self assess based on these criteria. For this reason it was decided that a blanket ban was safer.

Another interesting note about the above graphs, is that infection of IV Drug users is tiny in comparison to those infected via sexual contact. So why are these people excluded from giving blood? Quite simply it's because a greater proportion of those who take drugs intravenously are infected and therefore, for the same reason the MSM group is excluded, they are excluded too. It simply isn't worth the risk; it's not prejudice, but like much in medical risk-assessments, it's a numbers game. HIV/AIDS, and some other infections such hepatitis B and C, are problems that disproportionately affect those who have anal sex, and homosexual men are having most of the anal sex, and homosexual men are disproportionately likely to be carrying the HIV virus. This is not bigotry; it is fact.

Of course anyone who wishes to deny services to gays based on these facts is bigoted arsehole, as is anyone who wishes deny services to someone who is HIV positive, beyond reasonable safety precautions, regardless of their sexual orientation. And anyone who blames homosexuals for the spread of HIV, or tries to claim that AIDS is some kind of divine retribution for sin can just fuck off and die. But we mustn't allow the fear of being labelled as prejudiced to influence matters of public health, and so we exclude those in high-risk groups from giving blood regardless of whether any of those groups are persecuted minorities who are often the victims of bigotry or not.

Update
It turns out that earlier this year, the NHS revised their rules to a more sensible 12 month ban after MSM sex, bringing it in line with the currently available science, but keeping an all important period in which contracted diseases may not be detectable. Of this probably won't mean the many more gay men can give blood, unless they've remained celibate for 12 months.

If you must be religious...

2011-03-06T15:56:00.002Z

So apparently, the British Humanist Association's ads bearing the legend "If you're not religious, for God's sake say so." were, ridiculously, deemed "likely to cause widespread and serious offence". In a bid to demonstrate what adverts that may genuinely cause widespread and serious offence might look like, skeptical humorist blogger extraordinaire Crispian Jago came up with his own, and later tweeted asking for others to do the same. I thought it had to be done, so I offer you:

Fuck Valentine's Day

2011-02-14T12:46:00.000Z

Continuing my recent theme (laziness) and just linking to other posts instead of writing one...

I was going to do a post about how Valentine's Day is a shit, but I can't be arsed. Instead read my Christmas post and mentally replace the word "Christmas" with "Valentine's Day". OK, so some of it doesn't really work very well, but you get the picture.

Osteomancy (or chiropractic and medical imaging)

2011-02-11T12:57:00.003Z

I think I spend about half my working life worrying about the potential for, and trying to minimise, the exposure of patients and healthcare practitioners to unnecessary radiation, right down to worries about amounts so small that you might conceivably expect to receive more from cosmic rays while on a transatlantic flight. So when some bright spark put up ads for a local chiropractor on all the office noticeboards showing a picture of him holding an x-ray I experienced a minor apoplexy. I was going to write a lengthy blog post about the ALARP principle and the fact the the spine-wizards freely admit that their magical "subluxations" can't be detected by conventional means, and that they're not required to have genuine medical training and so aren't qualified to detect anything that might counter-indicate their manipulations. But while googling for some references I found that Le Canard Noir had got there first. Damn him!

Another attempt to make the Soil Association see sense.

2011-01-19T20:58:00.000Z

So I received a wholly unsatisfactory response from the Soil Association to my enquiry about their recommendation of the use of homeopathy to treat farm animals. It's worth another go isn't it?

Hi Georgia,
Thank you very much for your response. Unfortunately it largely fails to address the points of concern in my email. While I applaud your commitment to animal welfare and all the measures you require regarding conditions the animals are kept and transported in and the prevention of habitual, unnecessary use of growth-hormones and antibiotics, homeopathy cannot be seen to be a valid part of such a practice. You speak of using alternative medicines "where these can be shown to be effective", but the standards of evidence you use to determine this must be set very low indeed in order for homeopathy to be included in any treatment regime. The opinion of any number of organic farmers or even veterinarians, based on their personal experience is not the same as data from genuine trials, it is just a collection of anecdotes, which proves nothing. The only way to genuinely prove the effectiveness of an intervention is through a properly controlled trial including subject and experimenter blinding, and a control group, the allocation to which is randomised. Such tests repeatedly demonstrate that Homeopathy is not effective for anything. If you (or Yeo Valley and their vets) have references to papers describing such studies that demonstrate the effectiveness of homeopathy for, using two examples from Yeo Valley blog, the control of flies or reducing stress in livestock, I would be very interested to read them.
You say that the "philosophy" of homeopathy would encourage empathy or observance in stockmen; I have read fairly widely on this practice and have not come across anything that would indicate this to be the case. Perhaps you could direct me to some reference?
The bottom line is that, as has been demonstrated by the available scientific literature, homeopathy is not an effective intervention for anything it has so far been tested for, and that enough work has been done to indicate that further testing would be a waste of time and money. If an intervention is required then an effective one should be given or this is neglect. If no intervention is required then one should not be given otherwise the price - a significant barrier to adoption by many consumers - of organic produce is needlessly driven up. The worst possible situation is where an intervention is required and an ineffective one is given, thus both neglecting the animal and driving up the price of produce. Vets who practice or encourage homeopathy may be well-meaning but have been fooled by the unscientific nonsense that surrounds the practice of so-called "complementary" and "alternative" medicines.
I feel that adherence to the recommendation of this practice tarnishes the reputation of your organisation and would again recommend that you strongly reconsider it and raise the bar of evidence for medical interventions you recommend significantly.
Please do not think I am against your organisation in principle, I just think that adherence to complementary medicines, and particularly obvious bunk like homeopathy, does you a disservice that hampers the adoption of organic produce by consumers; it will cause some who support your cause to abandon it as it both gives a poor impression of your ability to correctly judge scientific evidence, and constitutes unintentional neglect of the animals.
Regards,
T.McG.

The Soil Association Replies

2011-01-18T18:05:00.005Z

Here's what I've been sent in response to my email (and Ben's Tweets presumably)

Dear Tim,
Thank you for your letter regarding the use of homeopathy in organic standards.
The trust and support you have given the Soil Association is much appreciated and I am sorry you feel this issue may make you re-consider buying organic produce given our ongoing commitment to, and highest level of engagement with, animal health and welfare.
The welfare of animals is central to Soil Association organic principles - No system of farming has higher levels of animal welfare standards than organic farms working to Soil Association standards and Compassion in World Farming believes the “Soil Association's welfare standards are leaders in the field.” (Joyce d'Silva).
Under organic rules, all aspects of animal health and welfare are tightly controlled, including rearing, shelter, feeding, transportation and slaughter. We do however believe that ensuring good health is better than relying on drugs to treat disease, which is why we put so much emphasis on practices that encourage healthy farm animals. Organic farmers do this in many practical ways, such as keeping numbers down to reduce stress, providing appropriate nutritious feed and ensuring easy access to the outdoors. Organic animals cannot be given growth promoting hormones, regular doses of antibiotics or genetically modified (GM) feed.
Encouraging healthy farm animals also means using complementary therapies where appropriate. Under our standards, sick animals are treated using complementary remedies- of which homeopathy is one part of- where these can be shown to be effective, unless a vet says an animal needs antibiotics or other medicines; in which case they must be given. When this happens organic standards require a set period of time has to pass before the animal can produce products for sale as organic. These are generally three times as long as those required by law for non-organic food.
For all complementary therapies our standards specify that they are used 'with professional veterinary guidance and provided that their healing effect works for the species and condition you are treating'. This affords farmers and their professional advisors the freedom to make choices for the animals under their responsibility, in full knowledge that they will lose organic status if we find that they have not met their overriding duty to ensure good animal welfare.
The underlying philosophy of homeopathy will support the farmer to be more observant and empathetic stockman, which has to be a good thing. For more serious problems, conventional treatments, such as antibiotics, may also be needed to help return an animal to good health. The important thing is that we actively encourage each and every organic farm to create a model for optimum health and vitality, that sees disease as a reflection of something deeper in the system that needs correcting, and that uses conventional drugs when genuinely needed, rather than as substitute for poor husbandry.
We have much collective experience that for many routine problems homoeopathic and herbal treatments will be do the job very well, without any compromise to animal welfare, and put simply, many farmers and vets find that the homoeopathic approach works - which is why they continue to use it. The choice of treatment is ultimately down to the livestock keeper. This blog from Yeo Valley talks about use of homeopathy on their farms if you're interested in reading more -http://blog.yeovalleyorganic.co.uk/alternative-treatments-for-our-cows/
We do not shy away from the debate that surrounds this therapy with both sides of the argument receiving regular airings in our own membership publications. I would encourage you look at some more sources of information on this large and in-depth field – I have included these below.
I hope this explains our position sufficiently and that you feel able to continue to support our work.
Best wishes,Georgia Catt
To see our standard on complementary veterinary medicines, including homeopathic treatments see section 10.9 of our organic standards onlinehttp://www.soilassociation.org/Certification/Standards/tabid/353/Default.aspx
A wide range of treatments and debate about their use can be found in the proceedings of the SAFO workshopshttp://www.safonetwork.org/index.html These present a balanced perspective from across Europe and show that veterinary professionals are on both side of the debate.

Georgia CattPress & e-Communications Officer

Hats off to them for bothering to respond. Needless to say I still disagree and will be responding in the not too distant future.

Atheist school visits?

2011-01-07T22:45:00.004Z

So an interesting question was posed on Facebook by a theistic neo-pagan pal; interesting enough, I thought, to be worthy of a relatively comprehensive response, so here it is.

The feint went thus:

To all my good atheist/Dawkins following/SitP friends out there, please indulge me, I am curious, if you were invited to go to a local school and do a talk on the subject would you accept?

and then after a number of responses from atheist/skeptics in the affirmative, the actual thrust of the argument:

"very interesting. I didn't really set a context but the question came up in a conversation the other day. Most people who share Dawkins view would be up in arms going bonkers if a priest came to give a talk at there local school, explaining and encouraging his religion.. yet most dedicated Athiests etc don't see any reason why they should not do so themselves. Is this not a touch... hypocritical?"

With the follow up, which I'm assuming was at least half in jest :

P.s. What do Athiests call a Devil's advocate?

In the interests of any easy win, I'll hit the postscript first; most of us call it a "Devil's advocate". By and large we're not so prissy as to reject accepted metaphorical language constructs, even when they originate from a now defunct role within the Catholic church. I don't hate the term, but I do hate how it's often used these days. I may elaborate on why in a later post, but for now let's get back to the meat.

I think in order to adequately talk about this topic it's important to get a bit of groundwork done; there are a number of points that need making clear up front.

There is a bias toward faith, and particularly the Christian faith, both implicit and explicit in the state schooling of the UK.
Atheism is not a faith-based position, nor is it a type of religion, nor is it a belief system. Flippantly "Atheism is a religion only in the same sense that baldness can be said to be a hair-colour"¹
It's by no means clear that all, or even most, atheists would be "up in arms" if a religious leader were to talk to a class, depending on the religious leader, in the right context. This appears to be a straw man.

a. The Faith Bias.
I shan't dwell too long on the tolerance of Faith schools, which have been shown to be divisive within society by perpetuating mistrust and intolerance, which would otherwise dissipate (and don't actually improve results by and large but achieve better results by the tighter selection criteria). I also shan't talk for too long about the idiotic new idea of academies, which allow religious organisations free reign with most of the syllabus. But it is worth talking about the mandatory requirement in state-funded schools (apart from the new academies), for a daily act of "collective worship...wholly or mainly of a broadly Christian character". Now you may argue that parents may withdraw their children from such a practice, which is clearly an anachronism in a country where the majority now say they are not religious. However this would single out such children as different and expose them to ridicule, and additionally there is no mechanism for a child that is so inclined to opt out for themselves.
There is no mandated syllabus for religious education, so faith schools are free to teach only their brand of supernatural nonsense with no requirement even to tell pupils of any age that there are other religious viewpoints, let alone that it is perfectly normal to believe in no gods.
Religion gets a shoe-in at all state funded schools, faith schools and academies, an atheist speaker would go some tiny way to providing a little much needed balance. Is it hypocrisy to ask for a small redress of a significant imbalance? or to take the chance if it's offered?

b. Atheism is not a religion or faith-based position.
Atheist simply means "not a theist". A "theist" is a person who believes in the existence of god or gods, an "atheist" is simply someone who is not one of those people; a person who has no belief in a god or gods. This encompasses a pretty broad spectrum of positions including

most people who self-profess as agnostics: those who believe it is not possible to know for certain whether god exists, and IMHO those who either haven't yet thought about it hard enough, and those who are pretty sure there's no god, but are too chicken to state their opinion clearly.
people who don't actively believe in god but aren't really sure (see above)
those who think there's probably no god, but are open to further credible evidence (no, you can't reasonably call these people agnostics)
those who are certain there is no god, of whom there are very few; N.B. not even Dawkins puts himself in this category.

and all points in between. Being an atheist does not require the belief of anything that cannot be proven.

The hypocrisy charge won't stand, because it is not comparing like for like to consider a school visit from an atheist to that of a religious leader.

c. Are atheists really against religious people talking to schools?
Now I couldn't possibly accuse such an honest and genuine chap as our questioner of such tactics, but this statement seems akin to a theme/strategy often used by the religious where they say "atheists think this, and that's just stupid/hypocritical" when actually atheists don't really think that at all, and the accuser has either just assumed something without asking any atheists, have only asked one or two possibly unrepresentative or stupid ones, or is deliberately and deceitfully constructing a straw-man to poke sticks at. Let's be clear that it's very hard to say what all atheists believe, since they explicitly share nothing in common except the absence of belief in a deity; I can only tell you what I, and many eminent atheists such as Dawkins and particularly atheist philosopher Daniel Dennett believe. In his work "Breaking the Spell : Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" Dennett proposes that the key to eliminating, not all religion, but those forms of religion that are most toxic, is to ensure that a proper religious education is given to all children. By "toxic" he means those forms of fundamentalism that cause people to perform horrific acts like beating up homosexuals, practising genital mutilation, shooting abortion doctors, blowing themselves up or flying planes into buildings; and by "proper" he means religious education that teaches about all religions, the history of that religion, and what people of that religion believe. Of course, despite atheism not being a religion, the syllabus must also make it clear to the students that there are people who follow no faith. Crucially, no child should be allowed to be excluded from such learning; surely any religion worth its salt can stand up to its practitioners learning about others? He even goes as far as to say that it doesn't matter how it is taught: the teacher could say "this is what those idiot Muslims/Hindus/Jains/Neo-Pagans/atheists think, and we know they're wrong" as long as they also make it clear that they will be tested on their knowledge of the beliefs and practices, not on their opinions of them. I won't go into the reasons why Dr Dan thinks this will work, but suffice to say that this idea is endorsed by many athiests including Dawkins and representatives of the National Secular Society and British Humanist Association.
It is of course true that many atheists would get angry at the thought of certain religious dogmas being taught to children: that homosexuality or the use of condoms is a sin, that women are inferior to men, that women should be stoned to death for showing their hair among examples of religious twattery; but you would hope that atheists wouldn't be the only people to become annoyed at such idiocy. And, of course we reserve the right to ridicule even the most harmless religious nonsense, but object to them telling children that's what they believe? Probably not.

To summarise, I don't think it is true that atheists (at least not all atheists, or even the so called "new" atheist celebrities) would object to a religious person explaining to a school what it is they believe, as long they weren't preaching hate, and even if it were true, it's not comparing like for like to compare atheists with the faithful, and even if that were true, it would still not be hypocrisy for an atheist to agree to present their beliefs to a school, in fact it would be a much needed step toward redressing the balance.

¹ Anyone know the original source of this quote? I'd love to know.

Toward bullshit-free organic farming.

2010-12-27T09:43:00.002Z

Why is it that compassion for animals and pseudo-scientific hippy bullshit seem to go hand in hand so often? Well one possibility is that the Soil Association, who set and certify against the standards farms have to meet to put "Organic" on their produce, discourage "allopathy" and encourage homeopathic "remedies" as an alternative. Even DEFRA have seemingly bought into this idiocy and encourage homeopathy for organic farms.

I've decided I'd like to do something about it, and I think the first step is to try to find out where this requirement comes from. To that end, I've written an email to the press office* at the Soil Association.

Dear Sir/Madam,

I write to you as a consumer and meat-eater who is strongly concerned about the welfare of farmed animals. While I applaud much of the work of the Soil Association, and admire the ideals of the organic standard with respect to reduced pesticides, greater freedoms for animals etc, there is one area that troubles me strongly. Homeopathic treatments have no plausible scientific method of operation and have been demonstrated not to work time and time again. There is no properly controlled evidence from studies that cannot be biased by the opinions of the investigators that demonstrate its efficacy beyond the placebo (and yes animals are susceptible to placebo by proxy). The current state of the best scientific evidence available indicates that homeopathic remedies are worthless. I put it to you that using worthless "remedies" on animals is not compassion, it is neglect. Where an ineffective intervention is given in place of effective one animals suffer needlessly, whether it is given as treatment for an existing condition or as prophylaxis against a potential one. In addition to this, the cost of these ineffective medicines must of course contribute to higher price of organic produce, which is a significant barrier to adoption by some consumers. Of course you may say that they are cheaper than conventional medicines in some respects (although I suspect vets fees are similar), but since homeopathic preparations do nothing it would be cheaper and no less neglectful to give no treatment at all.
I buy all organic produce where possible, but as a result of the discovery that you and the organic standards endorse the useless practice of homeopathy, I am having to strongly reconsider and may simply buy free-range where possible. I think that on-balance this may be more ethical, since at least there is a greater likelihood of these animals receiving adequate care.
I would like to know where this policy originates, and urge you to reconsider it. I would begin by reviewing the results of the recent government panel on homeopathy, which adequately sums up the best evidence available, and concludes that it is nothing more than a placebo and that sufficient testing has been performed to confirm this such that no more research need be undertaken to confirm it. http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200910/cmselect/cmsctech/45/45.pdf
Please could you put me in touch with the best person with whom I should communicate on this matter, in the hope that I can convince them to have this policy changed, or at the very least understand why it is present.

Regards,
T.McG.

We'll see if I get anything back.

*They don't seem to have an address on their site where consumers can express their concerns or ask questions. If anyone knows of one, I'd love to hear from you.

Homeopathy: treats the disease, not just the symptoms like conventional medicine.

2010-08-01T16:51:00.005+01:00

Short answer:

No it doesn't, it doesn't treat anything
The whole endeavour of homeopathy is based around only looking at symptoms, and not in determining the real cause of the disease.
this is based on a complete misunderstanding of the way genuine medicine actually works

A little more:

This is a most interesting claim and it's based on three main incorrect assumptions:

That homeopathy works at all.
That homeopathy is concerned with anything other than symptoms
That conventional medicine only treats symptoms.

Claim 1 will be dealt with in a later post so we won't talk about it here, except to remind readers that there is no good quality, repeatable evidence from properly conducted trials to show that homeopathy is effective for anything, so we'll focus on 2 and 3.
Homeopathy was invented in a time when it was not understood that many diseases are caused by microbes, and therefore it has absolutely nothing to say about this. It's entire foundation is based on the "like cures like" principle that essentially says "substances cause symptom X can cure all diseases that also have symptoms like X." For example one of the indications of Arsen Album (That's arsenic to you and me) is purported to be for mouth ulcers, because if drink arsenic your mouth understandably becomes rather ulcerated. There are a number of causes (bacterial, viral, fungal etc.) of mouth ulcers, and homeopathy is silent on all of these, because it claims that all that is needed to select the correct treatment is a description of the symptoms, and the cause is irrelevant (Or perhaps some mythical "miasm"). Some go on to claim that what is happening is that the remedy is somehow activating the bodies own defences against the cause, but I have dealt with that already in another post.
When it comes to conventional medicine (often referred to as "Allopathy" by quacks and their adherents) the example is often given that a decongestant merely masks the symptoms of a cold, and therefore all of genuine medicine deals only with symptoms and not looking for the cause of the symptoms. This example is a ridiculous strawman argument, and the whole idea is just plain wrong. Antibiotics treat the microbes that are the root causes of disease, as do antivirals and antiretrovirals; vaccines prevent the root causes of disease; radiotherapy and chemotherapy eliminate the cancers that are the cause of distress; other treatments correct chemical imbalances that cause a variety of disorders. The accusation that genuine medicine does not consider causes is quite simply false. Of course there are medicines that seek to alleviate symptoms while the disease is otherwise treated, or while it resolves itself, or where there is no known cure, but it is an outright lie to suggest that all medicines are such.
The charge that conventional medicine sees patients as simply a collection of symptoms while homeopathy sees the whole patient and their condition is one that is designed to appeal to the emotion of the sufferer and make them feel cared for; it is not only wrong but is also more accurately levelled at homeopaths themselves. Homeopaths make this claim but cannot in any way substantiate it, while their whole methodology is based around the study of symptoms without any concern for the actual cause.

Government Policy on Homeopathy is...

2010-07-26T18:18:00.005+01:00

...bullshit.
My summary of the report:

Yes we know homeopathy is worthless bullshit, but some people don't know or don't believe it's bullshit, so we'll let individual regions' trusts decide whether they want to spend public money on it.

We promise to tell people it doesn't work though, but we'll still buy it for them with your money if they still want it after we've told them.

It's too difficult to find out how much we're currently spending on it, so we won't bother.

We'll continue to allow people to put indications on remedies, because it's better to have something rather than nothing on the label (even if that something is wrong), because at least then we can regulate how they are made.

It's OK to lie to people about how these pills can cure minor self-limiting illnesses, and that probably won't lead to people thinking it works for Malaria or AIDS.

Fucking moronic cowards.

Please read the sci-tech evidence check report, if you haven't already.

Homeopathy: it's natural.

2010-07-11T10:52:00.000+01:00

Short answer:

No it isn't - it's extremely artificial and contrived.
Even if it were, something being "natural" is no guarantee of either effectiveness or harmlessness.

A little more:
As with the claim that homeopathy is an ancient tradition, I suspect the reason some make this assertion is due to a confusion of homeopathy with herbalism. It's important to remember that homeopathy is not herbalism; herbalists can at least genuinely claim that their treatments are "natural", for what it's worth, and unlike homeopathy many of them even have active ingredients.
All kinds of ingredients are used at the start of the homeopathic process, many of which may be considered natural, but the process of dilution and succussion is anything but. For a full description of the manufacturing process and it's origins, see my earlier post. And in any case, the idea that because something meets some arbitrary definition of "natural" does not necessarily mean it will work, or that it's somehow more in tune with your body and hence safer than any lab produced chemical. Go eat a handful of nightshade berries or fly agaric if you don't believe me¹. This fallacy this particular claim falls under is the Appeal to Nature.
The only other things that could be meant by this claim of naturalness is that the remedy somehow stirs the body's natural defences into action, and I have dealt with that claim here.

¹ Do not do this under any circumstances.

Homeopathy: Activates the body's own natural healing processes.

2010-07-11T10:50:00.004+01:00

Short answer:

No it doesn't - there is no biologically plausible method for this to occur, and there is no credible evidence for it having ever occurred.

A little more:
This little number is often explained as operating a little like a vaccine; e.g. the remedy somehow tells the immune system "look for things that cause symptoms like this" and that stirs it into action. Of course this a completely false analogy, and it wouldn't work even if the analogy were valid.
Vaccines work by introducing a harmless form of an actual microbe into the body. The immune system produces antibodies against that microbe and this enables it to be prepared for invasion of the genuine microbe (or ones very like it) should it encounter it at a later date.
Homeopathic remedies with "potencies" beyond 12c do not contain anything other than water, and even below that the content is negligible. There is nothing present for the immune system to learn from. Even if there were still some of the original preparation present, this would not stir the immune system into life when encountering a genuine illness-inducing microbe. Most of the the "mother tinctures" for those homeopathic remedies that are used for microbial diseases bear no structural relationship to the actual cause of the malady, and thus immune system will not recognise the real thing when it arrives. Additionally remedies are rarely prescribed as preventatives (with the exception of "nosodes" like the one idiotically prescribed for malarial prophylaxis), there are usually given when the disease is already present and the immune system is already fighting the disease, and has no need of such activation.
Add to this the fact that homeopathic remedies are also prescribed for disorders where the immune system has little or no involvement (like anxiety or type-2 diabetes), and for auto-immune related disorders (coeliac disease, rheumatoid arthritis) where the problem is that the immune system perceives part of the sufferer's own body as an enemy, and all that is left is a supernatural explanation for homeopathy's supposed mechanism of action. Some would attempt to counter these arguments by saying the immune system thing is just an illustrative analogy. They are then hard pressed to described any plausible actual mechanism by which their claims may be substantiated. Homeopaths' talk of vital forces and miasmas is just medieval thinking, and this whole argument of activating the body's own natural defences is simply superficially plausible nonsense.

Homeopathy: it worked for me! (or someone else of my acquaintance)

2010-07-10T10:29:00.004+01:00

Short answer:

No it didn't - You got better on your own, or as a result of some other intervention.

A little more:
I'm afraid you have fallen for the fallacy known somewhat ostentatiously as "Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc" (after this therefore because of this) or "false cause". It was not the homeopathic remedy that effected your cure. It is likely that your ailment was of a trivial nature such as a cold, flu, headache, bruise, mouth ulcer or somesuch. These things go away on their own. It is also possible that your ailment is one of a cyclical nature, that has periods when it is severe, and intervals where it is less so. If you took the remedy during a bad stretch, a moderate period is sure to follow, and you will attribute the improvement to homeopathy. Homeopaths even have a get out clause for when you take their remedy and the affliction has not yet reached its peak; they call this a healing crisis, claiming the action of your body, triggered by the remedy to fight the disease temporarily causes symptoms to appear worse, before they get better. This ensures that whether your symptoms increase or decrease, you still think it was the remedy that did it, when in actual fact it was simply the natural course of the ailment.
Perhaps you have benefited from the placebo effect, where you feel better simply for believing you have been given a treatment and the attention you received from an apparently qualified physician.
If the disease you recovered from was more serious, then perhaps you were also receiving conventional treatment but were frustrated with the speed of results, or believed it has failed, and so took a homeopathic remedy, and you subsequently recovered. It was the conventional treatment that worked, you just hadn't waited long enough. If you weren't receiving any other treatment, then you were very lucky; sometimes seemingly miraculous recoveries occur by purely natural, if hidden or inexplicable means.
If you still think homeopathy cured you, try to think how you would tell the difference between a natural self-effected cure, or one brought on by the remedy your homeopath gave you?
If you were using homeopathy as prophylaxis, say for malaria, then you were unknowingly exposing yourself to risk while completely unprotected, and were simply lucky.

Homeopathy: it's an ancient practice/it's been in use for hundreds/thousands of years!

2010-07-10T09:21:00.003+01:00

Short answer:

It's not an ancient practice, it was invented by a failed German Physician in 1796, only just over 200 years ago.
So what? People in the past were wrong about a lot of things.

A little more:
The ancient practice argument would be invalid if it were true, but also is just plain wrong. Here's my full post on the history of homeopathy. I suspect the reason that some people attribute homeopathy with a much longer history is that they mistakenly equate it with herbalism, which is a whole different kettle of bullshit, but that parts of which might have at least some basis in truth.
The fallacy at work here is The Appeal to Tradition. To paraphrase Tim Minchin, just because ideas are tenacious it doesn't mean that they're worthy. Our predecessors were wrong about a great many things for a very long time: the earth is at the centre of the universe; powdered tiger penis will make you virile; the universe is only 8000 years old; fires, floods, earthquakes and volcanoes are the acts of angry gods or spirits. The longevity of an idea or practice gives no credence to its veracity. Samuel Hahnemann, the inventor of homeopathy, quit medicine largely because he saw that the practice of bloodletting was killing more than it saved, and bloodletting had been standard practice for nearly every illness for around 2000 years. Among his faults Sam clearly did not count susceptibility to the this particular error of reasoning. The fact is that homeopathy was never properly proven to work in the fist place; the many people since then who have believed homeopathy helped them or others were just as deluded as modern practitioners/patients, and their opinions should not influence us now.

A new approach to homeopathy.

2010-07-10T08:41:00.001+01:00

No it's nothing radical, it's just that my articles were getting a bit long (I've got about 6 unfinished ones here all with pages of text) and it wouldn't have been the punchy answers I wanted. The answers to the homeopathic drivel were getting lost in all the explanation and required interpretation. Plus I spent Ages writing an article about what makes a good clinical trial and then the NHS go and publish one before I get around to finalising it. Mine was funnier ;) and had more about bias, but theirs is more authoritative.
So what I've decided to do is a series of punchy little articles each of which starts with a common homeopathic canard (no not the duck they use to make oscillococcinum), then a short response, and then a slightly longer response and some background info.
Hopefully, with an index, it should prove to be a slightly better resource.

Homeopathy 101.

2010-06-03T20:27:00.007+01:00

This is Part II of a run of posts about homeopathy. Here's Part I, which is really just an intro and will become an index to the other posts as they become available. This post is a primer in the history and theory of homeopathy, which I will try to without too much criticism. The debunking will follow in subsequent posts.

One common claim of those who endorse homeopathy, although rarely by practitioners, is that it has been in use for thousands of years and therefore must be effective. There are two things wrong with this statement: the first is that it is a shining example of the Appeal to Tradition, a logical fallacy exemplified by the fact that is plainly possible (née likely) for our ancestors to be wrong about many things for a very long time; longevity is no guarantee of veracity. The other objection is that not only would the claim be invalid if the statement were true, but also that it is just plain false. Homeopathy is not part of some ancient tradition or folk-wisdom; it was invented in Germany in 1796.

Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), a German physician, became understandably disillusioned with the state of 18th century medicine; claiming, quite rightly, that it often did more harm than good. Double-blinded, randomised, controlled (placebo or otherwise) trials would not come into standard use for many years yet, so no reliable mechanism of testing treatments was available; the germ-theory of disease was not yet completely synthesised and its budding principles were not accepted by most. Medicines with unknown effects were often administered to patients with unknown diseases with little idea of the consequences. Bleeding, the practice of draining people's blood, was still the favoured technique for many conditions; this frequently killed patients who would otherwise have survived without intervention, and accelerated the demise of many others. Early medicine was so fraught with problems that it caused Hahnemann to retire from practice to focus on writing and translation. He later explained why thus:

My sense of duty would not easily allow me to treat the unknown pathological state of my suffering brethren with these unknown medicines. The thought of becoming in this way a murderer or malefactor towards the life of my fellow human beings was most terrible to me, so terrible and disturbing that I wholly gave up my practice in the first years of my married life and occupied myself solely with chemistry and writing.

I think this passage illustrates to some degree that the scorn heaped upon poor old Sam is unjust; he was clearly a man who wanted to help but rightly felt that medicine did not have the tools to enable him to do so. He also obviously had an eye for when he was harming more than helping.

Some while after his retirement from medicine, while translating William Cullen's Materia Medica into German, Hahnemann encountered a claim that cinchona bark, from which the anti-malarial quinine was later isolated, worked against malarial fevers due to astringent properties acting as a "tonic to the stomach"; a claim of which he was sceptical¹, and during his investigations decided to experiment on himself. Shortly after taking his first dose he experienced symptoms that he described as "ordinarily characteristic of intermittent fever", and repeated doses had a similar effect. This lead him to the following reasoning: If a substance that can relieve a disorder causes the symptoms of that disorder in a healthy person, then it is also true that other substances that causes symptoms in a healthy person, will cure diseases that have similar symptoms². Our Sam calls this principle Similia Similibus Curentur (like cures like), while modern homeopaths sometimes refer to the "law of similars". He writes:

The curative power of medicines, therefore, depends on their symptoms, similar to the disease but superior to it in strength, so that each individual case of disease is most surely, radically, rapidly and permanently annihilated and removed only by a medicine capable of producing (in the human system) in the most similar and complete manner the totality of its symptoms, which at the same time are stronger than the disease.

Calling his new system of treatment "homeopathy", from the Greek for "Similar Feeling", or "Similar Disease" he then embarked on a series of experiments he called "Provings", so named from "Prüfung", the German for "Test". These experiments consisted of taking groups of healthy individuals and administering a substance purported to have some effect on the body of a period of time and recording any symptoms suffered by the subjects.

There is no other possible way of correctly ascertaining the characteristic action of medicines on human health, no single surer, more natural way, than administering individual medicines experimentally to healthy people in moderate doses...³

The symptoms experienced by these subjects were meticulously noted and studied after the experiments to determine what the substance would purportedly cure. In this manner, Hahnemann assembled his own Materia Medica, laying the foundation for those still in use by homeopaths today.

When administering his new found cures to patients, he discovered that some suffered from complications and unpleasant side effects from the remedies. He found that diluting the base remedy ameliorated the side effects, and eliminated them after sufficient dilution had occurred. Remarkably, the more dilute the solution, the faster the patient's recovery. This lead him to another principle of homeopathy: that dilution actually makes the curative powers of the base substance grow; that it is, somewhat counter-intuitively made more potent by the dilution process. This is often referred to as the "law of infinitesimals". The process followed is to drop 1 part of the active ingredient (or mother-tincture) into either 10 or 100 parts of water, and then take 1 part of the resultant solution and put that in 10 or 100 parts of water, repeating until the desired potency is reached. The nomenclature for the potencies is 1X for 1 part in 10, or 1C for 1 part in 100. 2C does not mean 2 parts per 100, but rather 1 part in 100 in 100 or 1 in 10,000. Today remedies are commonly between 10C (1 part in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000) and 30C ( 1 part in 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000), although mother-tinctures and potencies up to 1000C (such as carcinosin, a nosode⁴ made from cancerous cells and purported to cure cancer⁵) are available. Modern science has taught us that at dilution beyond 12C there virtually no chance of their being a single molecule of the mother tincture in a litre of water, at 30C to have a reasonable chance of getting a single molecule you would need a sphere of water the same diameter as the distance from here to the sun, and at 100C you would need around twelve times more molecules of water than there are atoms in the entire observable universe to expect to see a single one of the original substance with any certainty. Homeopaths tell us that these absurdly large numbers are irrelevant, and that the water somehow retains a "memory" of the original substance, or that the physical structure or arrangement of the H2O is altered by the presence of the substance, and it is this memory that can effect cures to diseases. This memory is ostensibly aided by another principle of homeopathy that we shall come to next.

At some point during the formulation of the principle of dilution, Hahnemann hit on the idea of "succussion". Succussion is a process whereby the bottle containing the solution is struck firmly a number of times on a firm but elastic body which, Hahnemann said, increased the potency of the remedies. Some have suggested that he hit upon this idea after transporting some of his remedies on horseback, and later found these remedies to be of greater effectiveness. This is hotly disputed amongst homeopaths, and there is nothing directly referring to the discovery in his writings. We do however know two things that are pertinent to this. The first is that the "elastic surface" against which Hahnemann struck his phials of solution was a pad made of leather and stuffed with horsehair, which he had specially commissioned from a saddler. The second is that his writings cautioned against taking remedies on long journeys because the remedy "receives an enormous number of additional succussions during the transport, and they are so highly potentized during a long journey, that on their arrival they are scarcely fit for use"[ref]. Whatever the origin, modern homeopaths claim that the succussion is integral to transferring the potency of the original ingredient to the water; that the knocking causes the water to somehow pick-up or resonate with the energy⁶ of the solute; this memory remains, and in fact strengthens, long after there ceases to be even the tiniest part of the solute remaining in the solvent. Hahnemann even claimed that after a period of rest, a remedy could be shaken to reinvigorate its powers. Luckily, when the remedy is in pill form, no amount of extra transport succussion will render the the remedies any more unfit for use than they were when they left the factory.

What's that? Pill form you say? Yes, although Hahnemann did make solid matter into remedies by grinding them down with lactose, this is rare today. Many modern homeopathic remedies come in the form of vials of "pillules". Pillules are tiny balls of sugar, onto which has been dropped some water from the diluted remedy, which are then allowed to dry out. I haven't actually heard any homeopaths explain how this is meant to work. Presumably the sugar retains the memory of the memory of water? Whatever the mechanism of action, it is apparently imperative for the effectiveness of the pillules that they do not come into contact with the hands, as the acids or other impurities on the skin are alleged to inhibit the remedy.

Hahnemann's theory of diesease, is that disorders are caused by something called Miasms, which are often described as a "peculiar morbid derangement of vital force". He also claims that allopathy⁷ fails because it treats only the symptoms of the disease, while failing to address the miasms that are the root cause. Homeopathic remedies however are believed to go deeper and address these miasms directly. It is this belief that causes many homeopaths today to continue using phrases like "it treats the disease not just the symptoms".

And that's just about it. More than any non-homeopath ever needs to know about the principles and practice of homeopathy except for one small thing: it just doesn't work. And it's mechanism of action is implausible. OK two things. Oh and there is no scientific evidence for any of its principles. OK three things. And there is no good evidence that it is effective against any disorder. OK, among the things any non-homeopath ever needs to know are such diverse elements as: it's worthless, unbelievable and has no scientific evidence for it's principles or its efficacy⁸. Subsequent posts will give more detail on all of the above, in case the stupidity of it all isn't quite obvious to the reader at first glance.

¹ Incidentally, Samuel was wise to be sceptical; the proposed mechanism of action was implausible, and other treatments with similar properties did not show similar effects. the question of how quinine does what it does is still not fully resolved, however we do now have significant empirical evidence of it's effectiveness, although other more effective drugs are now available.

² We will deal with the logic of this reasoning in a later post.

³ It's getting harder not to take the piss. Again these claims, which are made based on what may superficially appear similar to clinical trials, will be addressed later.

⁴ A remedy prepared from diseased tissue or other matter (blood, faeces, urine, etc.) which homeopaths tell us have an action much like a vaccine but without any of the associated risks.

⁵ A claim which, by the way, it is illegal to make in the UK. Which I think this lady may fall foul of were someone to report her for directing people to her website not moments after claiming homeopathy can cure cancer. Also note that she claims she has 2000 years of evidence for homeopathy.

⁶ AAARRRRGH!!!!

⁷From the greek for "other feeling" or "other disease", this is Hahnemann's term for 18th/19th century mainstream medicine, which still persists today as a derogatory term for evidence-based medicine

⁸This doesn't really work does it? I'm now starting to think I should have gone with the "What has homeopathy ever done for us?" instead of the "main weapons of the homeopathic inquisition are..." Oh well it's too late now ;)

H2Omeopathy

2010-05-31T15:32:00.016+01:00

There's been a lot of talk in the media this year about homeopathy; most of it negative, despite the BBC's efforts to spin it back the other way in the interests of their holy grail/poison chalice of "balance". This year we've had the 1023 homeopathic "overdose" events (a public demonstration to wake the general population up to the fact that homeopathy is not like herbal medicine, but in fact has nothing in it); the publication of the Parliamentary Select Committee's Evidence Check on Homeopathy (There is no credible evidence for its efficacy or effectiveness, and the NHS should cease funding it), and a parliamentary Early Day Motion in response to it (by a crackpot MP who claimed £500 in expenses for astrology software, and thinks the government should fund research into "Medical Astrology" among other bullshit); a statement by the members of the British Medical Association that "Homeopathy is witchcraft"; the Pharmaceutical Society of Northern Ireland stating that "there is no scientific or clinical evidence base for the efficacy of homeopathic products, beyond a placebo effect", among other reports.

When Dr Simon Singh came to speak on alternative medicines at Skeptics in the Pub Brighton (blatant plug) recently, a few of the same old invalid and disproven arguments¹ for homeopathy came up during Q&A: "How come it works on animals?", "Even if it is only placebo, where's the harm?" etc. These issues, and others, come up again and again, so I thought I'd try to definitively answer all of them in a series of blog posts². These posts are intended to be a useful resource for directing people to when they speak in defence of homeopathy so I'm going to try to keep the scorn to a minimum to avoid alienating people. We'll see how I get on :-/

These posts will address many of the claims commonly made by homeopathic practitioners and supporters, including:

It's an ancient tradition (and therefore must work)
It's natural (and therefore is better for you)
It's holistic (and therefore fuck knows what?)
It treats the person and not the disease.
It worked for me!
Like cures like.
Dilution (and succussion) increase the potency of a medicine
Not all homeopathic remedies are in such high dilutions
It works a bit like a vaccine (but without the potential for side-effects)
It encourages the body to cure itself.
Sometimes it makes you get a bit worse before you get better (the "Healing Crisis")
Illnesses are caused by "Miasms" (disturbances in one's "vital force")
Water has memory (and that memory is effective at treating disease)
There are clinical trials demonstrating its efficacy
Clinical trials are an inappropriate mechanism for testing the efficacy of these "remedies"
It works on babies and animals.
Lots of other countries use it.
It doesn't do any harm.
It's cost effective (even if it is just a placebo)
It's offering patients a "choice" (even if it is just a placebo)
Critics of Homeopathy are in the pay of Big Pharma.
Conventional medicine is evil.

...and many more. Also on the way we'll talk about why clinical trials are set up the way they are and the nature of the placebo effect etc.

By way of an intro, the next post will be a primer in the history and practice of homeopathy, with as little criticism as I can manage of homeopathy itself, although I may take some swipes at some of the idiocy that attends it. We'll see if I've ground my teeth away to nothing by the end of it, thereby possibly making them more effective ;-). In subsequent posts I'll pull apart the fallacious reasoning and dodgy thinking that went into its invention, and continue to perpetuate this massive embarrassment to the medical profession.

¹ Ben Goldacre calls these "Zombie Arguments" because they "survive, immortal and resistant to all refutation, because they do not live or die by the normal standards of mortal arguments." or in other words no matter how many times you kill them, they just will not fucking die.

²Actually, originally it was going to be one post, but it quickly became clear that a single post with all the detail I want to put in would be somewhat unwieldy.

Desirism - A worked example?

2010-05-21T16:02:00.000+01:00

Prompted by this idiocy, I started pondering about the issue of abortion and I thought maybe a worked example how desirism might help us make moral decisions would be greatly aid my comprehension of it.

With that in mind, would it be possible to explain how we might decide:

Whether to abort a foetus when the life of the mother is threatened?
At what age it might be ethical to do so if the foetus was not threatening the life of the mother.?

Desirism - an interlude.

2010-05-09T11:06:00.001+01:00

Martin's most recent post "Letters to a lapsed Pagan III" in response to my "Desirism II" has been up a little while.
Apologies for the delay in response but I'm busy with lots of other stuff, and still cogitating on what Martin is telling me. I've also been reading some more of Sam Harris' output on morality (this article among them) and trying to work out why it is I agree with almost everything Harris says, and find myself resisting, and even struggling to understand, some of the things Martin says. I suspect some considerable confirmation bias is involved. :-/
When my brain has sorted itself out enough to ask more questions, I'll post again.

What Caroline Lucas' blog said.

2010-05-07T09:32:00.001+01:00

The following article went missing from Caroline Lucas' blog in Feb, and when asked she denied all knowledge of it. It's also now expired from Google's cache, but luckily I took a copy first. Although the Greens as a party have a little change of heart over alternative medicines, it's worth remembering what their leader, who as of this morning is the MP for Brighton Pavilion, believes (or at least professed to believe last year).

Complementary therapies - Greens ahead of the game on health (again)

31 May 2009
It was interesting to see last week the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence - commonly known as NICE - recommending patients with persistent back pain be offered complementary therapies on the NHS.
Going against the grain, the watchdog took a brave decision in endorsing acupuncture, massages and other exercises for treating this common condition.
When you consider that some £1.5 million is spent each year on treating back pain, and that this initiative could actually save money - by reducing reliance on other techniques - I believe it makes complete sense.
Whilst the best treatment programmes probably dip into both conventional and alternative medicine (reliance on alternative alone would probably be unwise) the Green Party has been way ahead of the game for years in advocating this greater integration of complementary and alternative medicines into NHS services.
Here in Brighton we are lucky to be served by an excellent network of complementary and alternative medicine practicioners.
The Green Party would fully integrate their services and expertise into NHS treatment plans, not only improving patient choices but helping to boost this important sector of the local economy.
Complementary and alternative medicine may be written off by drug companies and other sceptics as "mumbo jumbo" medicine, but recent evidence strongly contradicts such claims.
A little reported year-long pilot scheme in Northern Ireland recently found complementary and alternative medicine offers significant health improvements to NHS patients.
After receiving a range of such treatments on referral from their GP, 81% of patients reported an improvement in physical health and 79% in mental health.
The majority, 84%, directly linked improvements in their health and wellbeing to the alternative treatments they had received. 94% said they would recommend it to others with a similar condition.
Therapies offered included acupuncture, chiropractic, osteopathy, homeopathy, reflexology and aromatherapy administered by local practitioners.
The scheme was the brainchild of the excellent social enterprise Get Well UK ( http://www.getwelluk.com ) which campaigns to improve access to complementary therapy on the public health service.
The study backs up our own findings: people we talk to time and again say they want to be offered complimentary medicines, either on their own or in combination with other treatments. They want the choice.
But choice is not something easily associated with Labour's current record on health.
They're selling hospitals and health care services to private companies which actually costs tax payers more money, and reduces the ability of clinical staff to provide good health care.
The supposed promotion of choice offered by this ill-lanned sell off does little to ensure that efficient - and effective - health care is provided locally and actually limits the options available to many people.
The reversal of this healthcare privatisation is a key priority for the Green Party - and a major focus of our current manifesto pledge ( http://www.greenparty.org.uk/policies/health.html )
We want to give people their choice back.

Desirism II

2010-04-25T10:13:00.002+01:00

Martin's second post in our discussion on desirism, in which he tries to explain desirism to me further is up.

I think it's becoming a little clearer to me, but one of the problems with me trying to get my head around all this stuff is that I lack a succinct definition that I can begin to ask questions about. There is so much information in your posts that I struggle to see the wood for trees and can't pick out the crux of what it is all about. So I think I'd like to take you up on your offer of a short description of the basic principles or desirism. A single paragraph or around five bullets, would be sufficient I think. Try to imagine what the opening intro paragraph of a Wikipedia article about it might say. If you wish to further embellish or offer definitions after that, that's fine, but I'm looking for concise here; a rock on which I can anchor my flailing thoughts about the topic.

I do have a few questions though, from what has already been said:

Since Desirism is sometimes called Desire Utilitarianism, does it agree that it is the outcome of an action that is important when determining its moral status and that an increase in the wellbeing, or reduction of suffering of sentient creatures, is the goal of moral actions?

Does Desirim dictate that there is a right thing to do in any given situation, regardless of the culture in which it is taken? Are there, as Sam Harris contends, "many peaks on the moral landscape", or is there one rule for all?
Are there grades of right and wrong rather than a binary decision?
Does Desirism resolve the ought-is problem, or does it have nothing to say about this and just work from the principle that we ought to be moral and only concern itself with the "how" rather than the "why"?

Sorry to throw the ball back into your court so strongly, but since the object of this discussion is for me to understand your position, I feel it is justified.

If it ducks like a quack...

2010-04-22T23:50:00.004+01:00

When I was starting up the Brighton Skeptics in the Pub, I invited MEP, Brighton MP candidate and Green Party leader Caroline Lucas to come and speak in defence of the party's ludicrous health policies. These policies included a glowing endorsement of all alternative medicines, and the promise to ensure that, in particular, homeopathy and herbal medicine would not be subjected to same regulation and evidential claims as other medicines.
Here's a few choice bits:

HE300 Health services must be effective, efficient, comprehensive, accountable and equally available to all. Effective health services will deploy a broad range of interventions, operative at many levels: pharmaceuticals, surgery, psychological therapies, complementary and alternative medicine, and community and social interventions will be used where appropriate. All services will be available without charge at the time of need.

HE317 When assessing the degree of control required over the availability of medicines, a balance must be reached between the right of the individual to freedom of choice, and the duty of society to protect the individual from the consequences of unwise choices. We are concerned to protect users from unanticipated adverse effects of novel pharmaceutical compounds, some of which may not be evident until the drug has been in use for many years. The Green Party proposes the founding of a regulatory agency with responsibility for natural medicines, including nutritional supplements, medicinal plants and herbal remedies, essential oils and homeopathic remedies. This agency should be founded on the principles of:
Freedom of information and full labelling of ingredients.
High standards of safety in production methods.
No animal testing.
Strong encouragement towards organic production.
A ban on GM ingredients.
However when the drugs have been in use for many generations, as with many natural medicines, the need for statutory control is diminished. Measures will therefore be taken to protect the availability of established herbal and homeopathic remedies, subject to basic safeguards.

There's also some rubbish about amalgam fillings being evil, but we won't go into that here.

Lucas has also personally endorsed CAM on her blog. Again, in case google's cache expires, here's some choice pieces.

....the best treatment programmes probably dip into both conventional and alternative medicine (reliance on alternative alone would probably be unwise) the Green Party has been way ahead of the game for years in advocating this greater integration of complementary and alternative medicines into NHS services.

Here in Brighton we are lucky to be served by an excellent network of complementary and alternative medicine practicioners.(sic)
The Green Party would fully integrate their services and expertise into NHS treatment plans, not only improving patient choices but helping to boost this important sector of the local economy.
Complementary and alternative medicine may be written off by drug companies and other sceptics as "mumbo jumbo" medicine, but recent evidence strongly contradicts such claims.

Therapies offered included acupuncture, chiropractic, osteopathy, homeopathy, reflexology and aromatherapy administered by local practitioners.

Leaving aside the truth or falsehood of these claims for a moment, except to say that there is no good evidence that most of the mentioned treatments are good for much at all, what is most interesting is that all these references are now expunged from the websites they were once on. The party as a whole seems to have had a bit of an about-face on the topic, as is evidenced by this post by a pro-evidence green party blogger. They have abandoned the idea that anything will be exempt from regulation, and that any treatments are above needing to have evidence for their efficacy. Now of course we know what some people regard as sufficient evidence (fuck-all in many cases) so while this is encouraging, it doesn't exactly fill me with confidence. You see, I and a few of my sceptical friends, have strong sympathies with the Green Party's ethos, just not with certain specific policies. The problem really is that if they can't be trusted to seek out genuine evidence in the arena of medicine, it doesn't bode well for their ability to find proper scientific solutions to climate-change. I for one don't want to be betting the future of life on this planet on Chakras, chanting and dream-catchers.
However, this just wasn't concrete enough for me. I wanted some statement from the party, not just a quiet removal of some idiotic statements. I need something that says "The Green Party, due to an examination of the evidence, have abandoned their goals of promoting and integrating alternative medicine except where it can be proven to work in properly controlled trials conducted with the rigour expected in the field of evidence-based medicine" so I wrote to Dr Lucas again:

Hi Dr Lucas MEP,

You may remember that some months ago I invited you to speak on the topic of the green party's policies on alternative "medicine" at the newly formed Brighton "Skeptics in the Pub" meeting. I notice that all traces of these leanings have been expunged from your blog, the website and stated policies? Does this mark a change in the direction on this topic for the party? Or merely that you no longer wish to publicise these goals in light of the recent negative publicity toward Homeopathy and Chiropractic? If this is a genuine change in direction, and you could provide me with a statement to this effect, I would be more than happy to spread it around the "Skeptical" community, which I suspect may gain you a significant number of votes, my own among them.

Cheers,
T.McG.

I fully expected to be ignored, as I had been the first time, so much to my surprise after 5 days I received this:

Dear Tim,

Thank you for your email. The offices here are exceptionally busy, so this reply is simply to acknowledge receipt of your message and let you know that a full response will be sent as soon as possible.

Kind regards,

Cath Miller
Constituency Coordinator and Researcher
Office of Dr Caroline Lucas
Green Party MEP for SE England

Blimey, maybe I'd got her all wrong? Then, only 3 days later:

Dear Tim,

Thank you for your email, which Caroline has asked me to respond to on her behalf.

Neither she nor I quite understand what you mean when you state that all mention of alternative medicine and therapies have been removed from Caroline's website. Her blog on the MEP site was suspended recently for practical reasons but all past entries are available via the search option. Also, the only changes to the Green Party's policy website will be those that reflect the result of conference votes by members. I can tell you that our General Election manifesto contains a commitment to ensure that complementary medicines that are cost-effective and have been shown to work are made available on the NHS. Our supporting policy documents say that appropriate methods of assessment will be developed for both synthetic pharmaceuticals and natural medicines, involving practitioners expert in their respective uses. We want to make sure this process is driven by clinical need rather than either political or commercial influence and will also regulate all alternative healthcare practitioners.
I hope that helps and thank you again for getting in touch.

Kind regards,
Cath.

Cath Miller
Constituency Coordinator and Researcher
Office of Dr Caroline Lucas
Green Party MEP for SE England

So, we're left with a few possibilities; either:

Dr Lucas and her coordinator do not know that the blog article in question has been removed from her website, or that the quack policies have gone.
She is aware of the above and wants to cover it up, and was unaware that we could still read it on Google cache.

I don't really like either of these options. My trepidation is further compounded by the fact that their new policy says this:

H326 The safety and regulation of medicines will be controlled by a single agency. This agency will ensure that medicines meet minimum safety standards, provide clear labelling of both ingredients and side-effects. The agency will cover existing synthetic medicines as well as those considered as natural or alternative medicines.

HE327 We shall improve the protection provided under the law to users of medicines. Prescribed and over-the-counter medicines will be monitored more rigorously with regard to both efficacy and toxicity. Appropriate methods of assessment will be developed for both synthetic pharmaceuticals and natural medicines, involving practitioners expert in their respective uses. Assessment will not be dependent on commercial interest in production. All information gathered during the process of assessment and licensing shall be publicly available.

It is abundantly obvious that even "expert" CAM practitioners are in no position to judge the efficacy of their "remedies" or "therapies", since they believe that they work at all. This doesn't look like an about face; it looks like a cover-up.

WTF is Morality?

2010-04-20T08:18:00.000+01:00

Matin's reply to my "WTF is desirism" is up here.

There's few terms I'm unfamiliar with in there and a ton of references, so I may be some time reading before I do another post on this topic.

WTF is desirism?

2010-04-17T09:34:00.001+01:00

A little while ago on Facebook, fellow skeptic Martin Freedman posted a link to a quiz that was meant to tell you how "consistent" your moral philosophy is, based on a handful of trolleyology questions. We both came out as 100% consistent for different reasons. I killed the one man to save the many every time (note that the transplant dilemma was not one of the questions asked), as Martin pointed out "like a good utilitarian should", but mentioned that he himself did not as he favoured a philosophy called "Desirism" I hadn't heard the term before, and Wikipedia was no help. Martin helpfully provided references but most of if seemed to be to be too detailed or not pitched at the right level for me, so I struggled to get my head around the concepts.
After a round of comments on one of Martin's posts defending desirism from an attacker we decided that we'd have a public exchange about it, so that he could explain it to me, and perhaps in the process explain it to others.

Firstly we thought, by way of introduction, we should explain why we are interested in ethics and morality. Perhaps least importantly, and as should be obvious from my other posts, I utterly reject the idea that what is moral is dictated by some Deity and that it is handed down to us in a holy book, which may need interpretation by a priesthood. For hundreds of years the morality espoused by the big three Abrahamic religions has lagged behind that of the general population. Those books may have been relevant in their time, though I'm not even convinced of that, but they are an anachronism now. As Bertrand Russell said "the moral objection [to religion] is that religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow." Even now, most of the major religions count homophobia and misogyny among their many faults, though they perceive them as virtues, not to mention the one that seems to think condom use and abortion are worse sins than child-rape and its subsequent cover-up.

So with religion out of the equation what do we have left? How do we make moral decisions? Some religious persons will tell you that without a god there is no reason for atheists to be good. Well, it appears that natural selection has built at least a rudimentary grasp of morality into us. Compassion and empathy of a sort manifest at a very young age, and are also present in some of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom. These tendencies are strongly influenced by society as we grow, but the building blocks of our morality are apparently innate. The problem here is that the rules that evolution has given us were "designed" by that blind watchmaker to cope with the tribal life of early hominids, and have not kept pace well with the acceleration of change in the way we live our lives that has happened over the last ten thousand years or so. Rules of thumb that helped us propagate our genes by giving aid to those who are likely to share them do not scale up well to the global economy; they barely scale up to the complex nature of our own local social interactions. How can we tell if banning burkhas is a bad thing? If homophobic B&B owners have the right to refuse services to homosexuals? If starting a war against an oppressive and mass-murdering regime in a foreign country is the right thing to do? Our intuition, borne of evolution and coloured by our culture, no longer serves us well. How do we know if our instincts are "right"? Especially since many other people's instincts are different? Just because something is some way in human-nature, does not mean that this is how things ought to be, that is the naturalistic fallacy at work. Just how do we resolve these dilemmas?

I've read a little of what various philosophers and other thinkers have to say on the subject of morality, and currently favour a variety of modified utilitarianism. Utilitarianism asserts that the moral worth of an action is determined by its utility, which is to say how much the results of that action increase the sum of happiness among all sentient beings.
My reason for adopting a utilitarian view essentially goes something like this:

I know that I can suffer.
I assume that others are also capable of suffering (it certainly appears that they are).
The (apparent) suffering of others causes me suffering.
I would prefer that others do not inflict suffering on me.
Others are less likely to inflict suffering on me, or on others who may subsequently inflict suffering on me, if I do not do so to them.
It therefore works in my favour, and everyone else's, for me to try to minimise the suffering of as many others as possible.

In summary, it makes me feel good to be good, and what constitutes "good" is minimising suffering, and thereby maximising the pleasure/happiness/wellbeing of as many sentient beings as possible. It's a bit more complicated than that, but that gets the main point across. Some, particularly the religious, might say that this a selfish way of looking at morality, and to an extent they may be right, but Darwin and Dawkins have taught us that selfishness is in the root of our morality, in reciprocal altruism (you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours) and kin-selection (advanced-nepotism). And in any case, someone who is only good because of the promise of eternity in paradise or threat of eternity in torment is in no position to criticise.

This still leaves me with a problem. How do I, in a world where the information available to me is often incomplete and imperfect, and all the results of my actions cannot be accurately predicted, decide which actions will minimise the suffering for the most sentient beings? Well, largely, like most people, I wing it. I make decisions based on the best information I have; if I don't think I have enough I seek more until I either have all that's available or I think I have enough, or the effort I would have to expend to get more goes beyond what I'm prepared to invest. I guess you could call it "guided intuition". Several people have tried to propose mathematical models for calculating or approximating the balance of suffering/happiness, but they are all so far (IMHO) flawed.

So then I hear of Desirism, apparently also sometimes called "Desire Utilitarianism" which, if I've understood it correctly, seems to want to offer an answer to this problem by approximating a method of minimising suffering and maximising wellbeing, with a rule of thumb that says we should foster behaviours that will, in most situations, fulfil the desires of the maximum number of people. Therefore we don't have to do complicated maths or reasoning every time we want to make a decision, we just have to do it for a set of given hypothetical situations, and then run our life by those rules, re-evaluating them as new evidence comes along.

I have my doubts about it, which may simply be down to my lack of grasp of the theory, but before I express them, I'll hand over to Martin to tell me what Desirism is in his own words.

Letter to Celia re: EDM 908

2010-03-04T12:05:00.002Z

David Tredinnick MP, he of the appeal to fund research into Medical Astrology (I shit you not) has created Early Day Motion 908 in which he calls on MPs to offer their support for homeopathy against the recent parliamentary select committee report that called for its withdrawal.
My MP signed it, so I wrote her a little letter. I encourage you to do similar if your MP's name should appear on the list.

Dear Ms Barlow MP,
I am writing to express my disappointment that you have signed this early day motion in support of homeopathy.

I believe a quick dissection of the EDM is in order.

EDM: That this House expresses concern at the conclusions of the Science and Technology Committee's Report, Evidence Check on Homeopathy; notes that the Committee took only oral evidence from a limited number of witnesses, including known critics of homeopathy Tracy Brown, the Managing Director of Sense About Science, and journalist Dr Ben Goldacre, who have no expertise in the subject;

Response: This is untrue. Ben Goldacre is a medical doctor who works for the NHS and is fully conversant with what is required for medicines to be considered effective, and Tracy Brown heads the Sense About Science organisation and has considerable knowledge of the legislation in this area and the science surrounding the issue. It should be noted that one does not need to be an expert in the behaviour of fairies to know that fairies do not exist; the absence of evidence for fairies should be enough. Additionally, evidence was heard from many other parties including representatives of pro-homeopathy groups such as the head of the Royal Homeopathic Hospital, and a representative from the association of homeopathic manufacturers, all of whom failed to offer any credible evidence. The Society of Homeopaths were not asked to give verbal evidence because the written report they submitted did not contain any written evidence, merely an appeal that homeopathy should not be subject to the same evidential criteria as conventional medicine. Additionally professor Edzard Ernst, formerly a practitioner of homeopathic "medicine" and a current professor of complementary medicine, presented his evidence that demonstrates conclusively that homeopathy has no effect beyond the placebo.

EDM: believes that evidence should have been heard from primary care trusts that commission homeopathy, doctors who use it in a primary care setting, and other relevant organisations, such as the Society of Homeopaths, to provide balance;

Response: Evidence was taken from the only PCT to have investigated this area. West Kent determined that there was little or no evidence to support its funding and has therefore withdrawn it. Additionally, anecdotal evidence from anyone, including doctors, is no substitute for properly controlled trials which the homeopaths have completely failed to produce. Even ten-thousand people claiming to have cured people with it would be insufficient. "The plural of anecdote is not data."

EDM: observes that the Committee did not consider evidence from abroad from countries such as France and Germany, where provision of homeopathy is far more widespread than in the UK, or from India, where it is part of the health service;

Response: that France, Germany and India have failed to adequately investigate the evidence for homeopathy, or failed to act appropriately on said evidence is neither here nor there. If genuine evidence was available from any country, the homeopaths surely would have provided it in their written submissions?

EDM: regrets that the Committee ignored the 74 randomised controlled trials comparing homeopathy with placebo, of which 63 showed homeopathic treatments were effective, and that the Committee recommends no further research;

Response: This is quite simply untrue. Meta analysis and systematic review of ALL of the studies available were considered. The data shows that studies that are methodologically flawed (improperly blinded or randomised etc.) do tend to show some effect for homeopathy, but those that are properly controlled show none beyond the placebo. There is a clear correlation between properly methodologically conducted trials and the inefficacy of homeopathy. Given the extent of the evidence against it, further research in this area would be a waste of public money.

EDM: further notes that 206 hon. Members signed Early Day Motion No. 1240 in support of NHS homeopathic hospitals in Session 2006-07;

Response: That 206 MPs were hoodwinked 4 years ago, before the evidence was presented, should have no bearing here.

EDM: and calls on the Government to maintain its policy of allowing decision-making on individual clinical interventions, including homeopathy, to remain in the hands of local NHS service providers and practitioners who are best placed to know their community's needs.

Response: The evidence is in; homeopathy does not work, it's continued provision must be viewed as either ignorance or deception. Local NHS services should not need to conduct these investigations themselves at further cost to the nation. It is high time this quackery was removed from the NHS list of services, if not banned altogether. Much is made of patient "Choice" on the NHS, however an uninformed choice is no choice at all. In order to provide adequate choice, patients must be informed of the inefficacy of homeopathy before they are offered it. Since homeopathy "works" by placebo only, this would negate any point providing such a service. Either homeopathy works (it doesn't) or it can be knowingly provided as a placebo, thus lying to patients, or it should be removed. Homeopaths are steeped in pseudo-science and unproven principles (like-cures-like, dilution and succussion increases potency, etc.) and are therefore inadequately equipped to deliver evidence-based medical care. If placebo treatments must be offered on the NHS for certain conditions that do not respond well to conventional treatments, and in opposition to the principle of informed choice, they should at least be done so knowingly by persons medically trained. This would at least ensure that conditions requiring genuine medical care do not go untreated. It would also allow the placebos to be prescribed in a way that does not give undue credibility to unsatisfactorily regulated quacks who discourage patients from seeking genuine medical care when it is required, as many homeopaths have been shown to do. Of course most persons medically trained would view it as a violation of their ethics to practice the deception required prescribe placebos to their patients. Some doctors it seems, while unable to prescribe placebo themselves, are happy to refer patients to homeopaths who will unwittingly do their dirty work for them. In my opinion this should not be allowed to continue.

It should also be noted that the proposer of the EDM, David Tredinnick, recently expressed his opinion in the house that funding should be given to "medical astrology". If that wasn't enough to ring alarm-bells about his ability to form cogent opinions on the topic of medicine, I don't know what is. In my opinion it ought to be enough to have him removed from his position on grounds of insanity.

I call on you to withdraw your support for this motion. If the brief summary I have given here is insufficient to convince you, I am happy elaborate further. I would recommend reading "Trick or Treatment" by professor Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh. Dr Singh will be speaking in Brighton on July 11th at a meeting of the local "Skeptics in the Pub" group on the topic of alternative medicine. This event is sold out, but if you wish to attend please let me know and I will arrange it.

Yours Sincerely,
Mr T. McGregor BSc (hons) CEng MBCS CITP

P.S. on previous occasions I have written asking you to give your support to early day motions and you have indicated that were unable to do so due to your role in government. I assume this situation has now changed?

And on the 7th day, he blogged.

2010-02-14T23:54:00.000Z

It's late, so I'm only doing three today.

3. Of course the religious have a clearer moral code than secularists.
Like fuck! It might be clearer, but clearer != better. A.C Grayling annihilates Cherie Blair and her apologists.

2. Traditional Chinese Herbal Medicine Kills
Woman's treatment for spots causes kidney failure and cancer. But apparently herbal medicine can't hurt you, becuase it's "natural"

1. Anne Widdicombe talks shite about the 10 commandments.
This program is so embarrassing I almost can't believe she allowed it to go on the air. When I watched it, they showed an advert for solutions to erectile dysfunction before the program. After 45 minutes looking at that harridan, I ordered some.
The Heresiarch pulls it apart

The week in bullshit?

2010-02-07T11:18:00.002Z

Brooker's already got "The Week in Bullshit" as a regular slot on his show, so I need a new name. Anyone got any ideas? "Weekly wank-round?" Also need theme music. So everyone hum Led Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love in TOTP style while you're reading.

Anyway, here's my favourite idiocy-related stories from this week:

5. UK taxpayer to pay £200 million for visit of homophobic, misogynistic bigot who thinks our equality laws fly in the face of some non-existant "natural law".
He's a cunt, vote against him here.
Laugh at some parodies here and here.

4. Cherie Blair let's a guy off jail sentence because he's religious
Apparently being religious means violence is OK. Daily Mash strike back.

3. Tories given ticking off about their bullshit violent-crime statistics
Here's the original article explaining why they're bullshit

2. MMR scare doctor found to have acted dishonestly and irresponsibly.
Like we didn't know that already. He'll likely be found guilty of serious professional misconduct too. The Lancet finally fully withdraws the bullshit paper he was probably paid to produce, and yet still some parents would still rather risk the death or blindness of their babies than give them a proven vaccine, despite there being no genuine evidence against it.

1. Scientologists practice "Touch-Healing" in Haiti before going home in disgrace.
Fuckwits.

We've got no poison; we've got a "remedy"

2010-02-01T12:57:00.011Z

On Sat 30th Jan 2010, I led the small but perfectly formed Brighton 10²³ : Homoeopathic "overdose" event. We only had a few people as I only had a couple of weeks to put it together while the other groups had been planning for months. But we made the video and had a few laughs before and in the pub after.
Before that, at the previously unheard of hour of 8 O'clock on a Saturday morning, I had a brief appearance on BBC Radio Sussex. In the interests of the much vaunted BBC "balance", they had arranged for a practising water-wizard (and graduate microbiologist!) Trevor Gunn to come and oppose me.
Here's the link on Listen Again if you're interested, although I don't know how long those things stay up. I'm on at around 2:14.45
Firstly let me say that Trevor seemed like a very nice guy, as many homoeopaths are; a pleasant persona really helps the placebo effect along nicely. Plus they usually genuinely care about the health and wellbeing of the people under their misguided care. So I'm not intending this as a character assassination on Trevor, but some criticism is inevitable. Also props to him for keeping his cool since I was essentially suggesting that his whole profession is built on lies and/or idiocy.
One point he made, which had also been stated by several other homoeopaths in the press this week, was that the "overdose" wouldn't prove anything because homoeopathy is a very individual thing and it was likely that none of us would be susceptible, or somesuch trite weaselly nonsense. Trevor made an analogy with teasing a room full of people with a peanut allergy by eating handfuls of peanuts and saying "look it doesn't do anything to me!". Unfortunately this analogy is flawed and the argument as a whole even flies in the face of one of the things that homoeopaths themselves claim about the mechanism of action for their "remedies"
When Samuel Hahnemann pulled the idea for homoeopathy out of his arse in the late 18th century, he did so on the basis that taking a substance that would cause a symptom in a healthy subject, would also cure that symptom in an ill subject, and vice versa. This is of course completely unproven and without any basis in science, but nonetheless it's what they claim. In fact, the very mechanism that these dilution-druids use to establish what each remedy is useful for is based on this principle. Hahnemann came to this "realisation" after he consumed doses of of cinchona bark (a source of quinine, and treatment for malaria) and then experienced some of the symptoms of malaria. Here we see our old favourite fallacy "post hoc ergo propter hoc" come visiting again, along with a spectacular "Illicit Conversion". Coincidentally, the symptoms Hahnemann experienced after taking his cinchona could also be interpreted as the symptoms of stress and anxiety; draw from that what you will.
The inaptly named "provings" (from the German "Prüfung" meaning "test" or "exam") is a method where a homoeopathic "remedy" is given to healthy subjects, Hahnemann having had a rare moment of clarity and realised that symptoms of other diseases could confound the results, and their health is monitored to note any symptoms that might occur. Hahnemann recommended the use of a 30c* "potency" in "provings", the same "potency" used by everyone taking part in the 1023 event, and these ultra-dilutions are still most commonly used in "provings" today. Interestingly "provings" do often include a control group, and sometimes today the tests are even "double-blinded". Blinding is where the person concerned is unaware of whether the treatment being given is a placebo or not. In single blinding, the patient does not know; in double-blinding the therapists do not know either, thus preventing them from giving clues, unconscious or otherwise, to the patient which may cause them to respond differently to the treatment. So this at least is a step in the right direction, but of course with homoeopathy both groups are actually receiving only placebo.
Unfortunately there remains one problem with this method, and it is that the symptoms under examination are decided upon after the testing is complete. Note that this is not just that statistical analysis is performed after the results are in, as in genuine clinical trials, but that what is being looked for isn't decided until after the data is available. In genuine clinical trials it is regarded as suspect if a proposed medicine is tested for a particular condition and after the fact the statistics show that it seemed to have an effect on some other condition that was not the original focus of the trial. In these circumstances there is a good chance that the apparent pattern is simply down to chance or over-interpretation of the results. As is beautifully demonstrated by the Bible Code nonsense (check this out, for Simon Singh's amusing debunking of the Bible Codes), if you look at a large enough dataset for long enough, seemingly meaningful, but ultimately meaningless, patterns seem to emerge. Erroneous results of this kind have caused some physicians to call for all trials to declare their aims and describe their protocol before the trial begins. This would also assist with eliminating another confounding factor in medical trials called Publication Bias. It is true that some medicines have been found to be effective for other conditions because of these apparent anomalies, but the effectiveness for that condition can only be determined after further studies looking specifically for that effect, thus eliminating the possibility that the original result was down to chance alone. Essentially what happens here is that whatever symptoms the treatment group coincidentally experience in greater amounts than the control group is assumed to be what that treatment will be effective for. Of course which statistics the experimenters pick from the data will be guided by all the cognitive biases that the genuine clinical trials are designed to guard against.
Bottom line is, "provings" are bunk-science, spectacular examples of Post Hoc reasoning, and have about about as much relation to real science as the mock landing-strips of the cargo cultists have to real military airfields. This exercise in hydromancy proves nothing. Homoeopaths also claim that dilution and succussion** increase the potency of the substance. If provings were any kind of proof, then you would expect a significant portion of last Saturday's "Overdosers" to fall ill with the symptoms of arsenic poisoning. It's been two days now and as far as I know everyone is still fine.

P.S. this first post in a year or so, resurrecting this blog marks a slight change in direction away from criticism of religion alone, and a turn towards my thoughts on all kinds of bullshit. Religion is unlikely to get off lightly, but it's no longer going to be the sole focus of the blog.

*A 30c "potency" let's not forget is about the same a one molecule of active ingredient in a sphere of water with the same diameter as the distance from the earth to the sun. There is a statistically negligible chance that there is even a single molecule of the active ingredient in a given "remedy". Homoeopaths claim that the water somehow retains a memory of the substance it once contained and that this memory is enough to effect a cure. There is no credible evidence for either of these leaps of faulty reasoning. It's also worth remembering that with the pillules as sold by Boots, a drop of this water is applied to some sugar pills, and then allowed to dry out, so the water is not even present anymore. So, now we are relying on the power of sugar to remember the power of water to remember some substance that causes the same symptoms we are trying to cure. I would say that you just can't make this shit up; except of course that someone did.
**Banging the bottles of water on a pad made of leather and horsehair to simulate the "effect" of Hahnemann's transportation of his remedies on horseback. I shit you not!

Even the church now admits that education is corrosive to religion!

2008-11-17T20:01:00.003Z

Bishop says education is ruining the church, and for some reason he seems to think that's a bad thing.

Essentially this guy (Rt Rev Patrick O'Donoghue, the Bishop of Lancaster) is saying that when a catholic goes to university, they get all sorts of funny ideas about most of Catholicism being bullshit and then they have the gall to continue to call themselves Catholic and go around telling other Catholics what they've learned!
And apparently their education has "a dark side, due to original sin". What the fuck? Original sin, let us remember was caused by Adam and Eve eating fruit from a tree that God told them not to; an event the catholic church even admit never fucking happened.

Again I offer you what I think may be becoming my catchphrase "You just can't make this shit up; except, of course, that someone did."

Fuck Christmas!

2008-11-07T09:20:00.005Z

Fuck Christmas! Fuck it in its stupid ass.

Christmas is shit. The never-ending ads on TV trying to sell me Christmas crap are shit. Crowded streets and shops are shit. Millions of Christmas lights using valuable energy is shit. Loads of people having to go places they don’t want to because of family obligations is shit. Christmas music is really shit. Christmas music repeated endlessly in every fucking shop and pub is really fucking shit. Annual “What I’ve done this year” bulletin letters are shit. Buying gifts for people who don’t buy you presents is shit. Being given a gift by someone for whom you don’t have a present is shit. Getting shit presents you don’t feel you can immediately sell or throw in the bin because you feel you might offend the giver is shit. Christmas cards, office Christmas parties, Salvation Army bands, children singing carols, Cliff Richard, lying to kids about Santa: all shit. Christmas TV specials, even ones of shows that are normally good, are shit. Houses covered in lights, illuminated giant Santas on ladders or in sleighs or giant inflatable snowmen are shit. Advocaat, “Eat Me” dates, net-bags of nuts, turkey, sprouts, jokes from crackers, “gifts” from crackers, people buying mountains of food because the shops will be shut for a whole day: shit, shit, shit, all of it.

Let’s get one thing clear from the start: Jesus, if he was born at all, almost certainly wasn’t born on the 25th of December; that date was almost certainly chosen by the Romans because that’s when the festival Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (The Birthday of the Unconquered Sun) fell. You would think that if a religion was meant to hold the birth-date of their messiah as some special event that Jesus himself might’ve said that, or even told people when it was, but apparently he never mentioned it; it certainly doesn’t appear in the bible anywhere, or even in the apocrypha*. You can’t even rely on the gospels to decide the year he was supposedly born, let alone the month and day. The census of Quirinius, explicitly mentioned by name in the gospel of Luke (2:1-7), the one Joseph and Mary were supposedly going to, was held after Quirinius took power over Judea in 6/7AD; while Matthew tells us that they lived in Bethlehem, so no need for the census to take them there, and only moved to Nazareth later. He also tells us that Herod the Great massacred all young male children in the village of Bethlehem† (Matthew 2:16-18), trying to murder Jesus, but Herod died in 4BC. So Jesus was born after 7AD and before 4BC? Hmmm, something is not quite right here. Oh and the census was for Roman citizens only, and thus didn’t cover supposedly pure-bred, descendant of David, red-sea pedestrians like Joseph the carpenter‡. The whole nativity stuff in Bethlehem was just fabricated to make it look like Jesus fulfilled some old Jewish prophecy. It’s not even mentioned in some of the gospels; in fact even the Gospel of John even tells us of complaints that Jesus cannot be the messiah as he wasn’t born in Bethlehem (John 7:41-42). It’s fiction; just all made up; no stable, no manger, no star, no shepherds, no magi (that’s wise-men or “kings” for the ill-educated among you), no angels or little lambs, no gold, frankincense or myrrh; none of it; It’s all bollocks, sorry.

So having established that the principle on which we base the three-month long orgy of commercialism we call Christmas is just plain false, what’s actually wrong with it? Surely it’s only a nice tradition that we can and should all enjoy? The festival of goodwill to all men, surely? A time for remembering that we have it well, gathering with our friends for a little life-affirming merriment, and perhaps giving a little something to the poor? Well if that’s all it was I’d be happy to go along with it and you wouldn’t hear a word of complaint from me, but unfortunately it has been hijacked by hucksters and hawkers, who have turned it into a festival of greed and ostentatious waste that lasts fully one quarter of the year.

Christmas cards

What a fucking waste of paper? OK I’ll grant that having a time of year when you think about those you haven’t seen for a while and send them a token to show you haven’t forgotten them is a nice thought. But to friends you see all the time? Your spouse? Your fucking workmates? If giving a bit of card with a picture of a snowman on it to someone you hate but are forced to see every day isn’t a waste of time, money, effort and natural resources I don’t know what is. And if the people you do like and see all the time don’t know that you like them already then a card probably wont help and is frankly the most pathetic way of trying to show it.

Christmas presents

People like giving gifts, people really like receiving gifts. However, the idea that you have to give gifts to all your friends and family all at once is just a colossal pain in the arse that leads to all the big-businesses rubbing their hands with glee at all the cash they can get from us poor bastards who’ll buy any old shit just to have a prezzie for great-aunt wossname who we never see and don’t like anyway. Boots lily-of-the-valley twat-freshener? She’ll love it. C’mon people, let’s give it up and save the cash for either A. giving to charity or B. getting that person a better birthday present than usual when you have more time to think of a decent gift and the shops aren’t full of pointless tat and crowds of inconsiderate idiots buying it. If you were going to buy me a present, I’d rather you gave that money to charity, especially if you were going to go for a “thought that counts” type present from the “3 for 2” aisle. I don’t want it and that money could feed a child in Africa for a month; assuming of course you don’t give it to one of those “Christian” charities that will waste it setting up schools that do nothing but teach them about the bible, and that using a condom (likely the only thing that will save them from a lingering death) is evil. If you bought me something from my Amazon wish-list, excellent, thank you; that is the thought that counts: the thought that you might buy me something I actually want. I really do appreciate the gesture, but I would still prefer you to have given the cash to a worthy cause.

Christmas Lights on Houses

I’ve no serious objection to the odd string of lights tastefully strung from your eaves or windowsill, except that the combined energy waste of everyone doing so probably contributes significantly to global warming, but c’mon, an entire house smothered with gaudy flashing monstrosities? Who’s that for and why? Not only is it a monumental waste of our dwindling energy reserves and a contributor to global warming, it’s also fucking gaudy, hideous, and makes your house look like the eyesore abode of an over-extended family of charving scumbags. Save the money you’re spending on lights and electricity and buy your school-age kids (and their kids) some books for fuck’s sake.

Christmas TV

Actually, I’ve been finding it increasingly OK over the last few years thanks to the advent of cable TV “on-demand” services and PVR technology. Last year I rarely had to watch any of the re-runs of shit Christmas specials of yesteryear (Dad’s Army FFS!? Haven’t we been tortured enough?), Eastenders, The Queen’s Speech, or any of the twee movies that are hideous in their niceness. I could instead pretend Christmas wasn’t happening and watch Sharpe, Ray Mears, Coast, Planet Earth and the like. Last year the either the History Channel or National Geographic did a whole day of programming about why Christianity is all bunk, which was nice, but I bet we won’t get anything similar this year.

Christmas Music

Insipid drivel all of it. Look at the list of UK Christmas Number Ones, go on, LOOK AT IT! Now download all those songs and listen to them in one sitting, in the order of your choice. I defy you not to try to gouge out your inner ear with the nearest object that looks sharp/solid enough before you get halfway through. If by some miracle you do make it, invite the local old people’s home round to jostle you while you mime picking tat out of the “3 for 2” section and listen again and you will have accurately simulated the experience of Christmas-shopping in Boots or Woolworths.

Strangely I’ve nothing in particular against religious Christmas music, other than the obvious fact that it’s religious, at least it’s largely written by decent composers; when it’s murdered by pop-artists though it does become the world’s most execrable horror.

“Carol” Singers

Sorry kid, badly shouting “We wish you a merry Christmas” through the letterbox doesn’t entitle you to free handout. Fuck off and beg somewhere else. If you can actually sing and will sing an actual Christmas carol I’ll to do my best not to stab you, although I can’t promise anything, but either way you’re still not getting any cash.

A Christmas Carol

When I wrote my list of things I wanted to rant about last year, I put this on it, so it must’ve fucked me off in some way, but currently I can’t remember why. It’s shit anyway.

Supermarkets

Christmas gifts on display at the start of October! FFS! Is Christmas not bad enough without making it last for three fucking months?

I could go on, but I think the prosecution rests here. So, you can don your “gay apparel” and watch the year’s most depressing episode of the most execrable example of the detestable genre that is soap opera, if you like. Then you can follow it with a speech by another pointless relic of an embarrassing history if you must, but I won’t be joining you. Next year, we’re going to take a holiday in whatever place around the world celebrates Christmas the least, although finding one may be hard; I understand there was a Christmas tree stall in Baghdad square a few year back. So it’s the North Pole here we come. Ooh maybe we’ll see Santa!
_________________
*The gospels that the Romans decided were too embarrassing, or not sufficiently misogynistic, to be included in the New Testament.

† A mass-slaughter for which there is not one shred of actual contemporary evidence.

‡This just reminded me of an old gag:

Jesus dies and goes up to Heaven. The first thing he does is look for his father Joseph; He looks high and low but can’t find him.

He asks St. Peter "Where is my father?" But St. Peter says he doesn't know.

He asks the archangel Gabriel "Where is my father?" But Gabriel doesn't know.

He asks John the Baptist "Where is my father?" But John does not know. So he wanders Heaven, impatiently searching.

Suddenly he sees out of the mist an old man coming toward him. The man is very old, with white hair, stooped over a little, and seems familiar. It’s been years since he’s seen his father so he’s not sure if it’s him so he says to the old man. "Who are you?"

"Oh, please help me, my name is Joseph, I was once a carpenter, I am just an old man in search of my son, you look a little like him." Jesus is very curious. Could this be his father?

He demands "Tell me of your son, old man."

"Oh, you would know him if you saw him. Holes in his hands where the nails used to be, he was once nailed to a cross, you know..."

"Father!" Screams Jesus, throwing his arms wide to reveal the holes in his hands.

"Pinocchio!" yells the old man.
_________________
FYI: Geppetto is a nickname for Giuseppi, which is the Italian form of Joseph.

My Christmas Wishlist

2008-11-02T10:26:00.017Z

I fucking hate Christmas. It's a three month long celebration of commercialism centred around a myth. With that in mind, as in previous years, I've decided to ask my friends not to buy me stuff this year, but instead to spend any money they would have used to buy me a present that'll do some good in the world. My wife and I sponsor a child in Africa through Plan International, a wholly secular organisation doing good works where it's needed, regardless of religion, and without wasting any of the money given to them indoctrinating children into foreign religions. They have a selection of gifts you can buy for disadvantaged children all over the world at a range of prices. Here are some of my suggestions for things you might like to purchase for them on my behalf this festive season, please demonstrate your goodwill to all men (and women obviously) by not buying me something I don't need, and instead giving to those do really need stuff.
P.S. Plan's wish list feature is a bit rubbish and won't tell me that you've given anything on my behalf. I'll just assume that my friends have given something and that other people haven't, but if you would like to let me know what you've given, please feel free to post a comment on this blog.
Merry Mythmas everyone. :)

Register a child (includes mosquito net)
Price: £6.00

Give a child an identity. In Burkina Faso, if a child isn’t registered at birth, they are not officially recognised. This means they won’t be able to receive any health care, urgent medical treatment, go to school, own their own land or vote. Just £6 will give two children birth certificates and a big mosquito net to help protect them from malaria.

Three Textbooks
Price: £6.00

This gift will provide one child at school in the Philippines with three text books, covering Maths, English and Science. As a result, the quality of their education will be greatly improved. They’ll no longer have to share with lots of other children in their class, making the learning process much more enjoyable.

Water for school children
Price: £7.00

Give a child in Ethiopia access to safe, clean water at school. This gift will help to install water systems in two primary schools, providing safe drinking water and improved sanitation facilities. Children will no longer have to travel long distances during lesson time to fetch water and will be less likely to catch water borne diseases from a dirty source.

Sight for sore eyes
Price: £8.00

Give the gift of sight to two children in Nepal. They will be screened for eye problems and receive treatment they may need in the form of glasses or medicine. What’s more, you’ll also be helping to set up and maintain special eye clinics which make these much-needed tests possible.

Chickens for change
Price: £10.00

Give a family in Uganda a feathered friend. This cracking gift will provide a family with a hen or cock and training on how to keep livestock. By breeding the chickens and selling their produce, the family will be able to earn an income. Plus the eggs will help to improve the diet and health of the children.

Village vaccinations
Price: £12.00

Be a life saver. Help to improve the health of young children and their families in Burkina Faso. This precious gift will not only immunise 30 villagers from meningitis. It will also help to raise awareness of the importance of meningitis vaccinations throughout the communities.

Accessible education for girls
Price: £14.00

Help give girls in Nepal better access to education. This special gift provides a girl with essential materials for a whole year and includes text books, school bags and stationery. If parents can’t provide these basic materials children can’t go to school and where there are several children, it’s often the son’s education that takes priority. This gift will give girls the same opportunities.

"Little doctor" training
Price: £16.00

This gift will provide 2 children with special healthcare lessons in Niger, so they can promote better personal hygiene, first aid and healthcare practises in their school. Teachers will be given lesson materials and training on these subjects, as well as the child to child teaching approach. The children will be encouraged to pass on their knowledge and will be able to use the school health and hygiene kit provided.

Fruit tree seedlings
Price: £20.00

Help a child to grow. By learning how to grow trees from seedlings, Ugandan children and their families will eat more fruit, improve their health and even earn an income by selling the surplus produce. Every child receives 20 seedlings and the community as a whole gets agricultural management training.

School dinners
Price: £21.00

Food for thought. This gift will provide 50 nutritious school dinners for girls in Sierra Leone who have been left vulnerable with little or no family after the civil war. This is a vital part in a project that aims to give girls their final years of education and board, before they are old enough to leave. It will provide them with more chance of getting a job and having a safer future.

Farmyard Friends
Price: £30.00

Help malnourished children have a better chance of survival. This gift will help to buy cows, goats, chickens and ducks for families in the Philippines, providing eggs and milk as well as a source of income. They will be trained on the care and management of these animals. And community-based enterprises will be set up, so that they will be able to generate a shared income across families.

After-school education for girls
Price: £35.00

Help send girls in Senegal to the top of the class. This gift will provide a practical opportunity for girls who have missed out on education and want to catch up with their learning and maximise their potential in their community. It will encourage girls to stay in school and acquire basic skills, as well as allowing them to achieve some educational independence.

Well water
Price: £40.00

Keep a family fit and well in Pakistan with safe drinking water. This gift gives one family access to a safe local source of water by helping their community to build a well, fitted with hand pumps. They'll also learn how to look after and maintain it. Women and children won't have to travel for miles to get water for basic household use and having safe drinking water will help to prevent disease.

Tools for teaching
Price: £50.00

Give teachers the tools to teach. In Indonesia teachers need tools and training to encourage a child’s educational development. It will help them achieve better results and make lessons more interesting. This wonderful gift provides books, school supplies, play and art materials and teacher training activities.

Vocational training for girls
Price: £50.00

Improve girls’ lives in Bangladesh. This gift will help to increase their chances of employment, as well as their earning potential, by allowing them to take part in a structured vocational training programme. Not only will they learn a new skill – either dressmaking or electronic technology. They’ll also receive expert support to help them get a job at the end of the programme.

Forgotten children
Price: £60.00

Along with Sponsorship, Plan’s Forgotten Children programme is one of the ways in which people support our work with children through monthly contributions. This special gift is unique because it runs for a whole year and gives support to a range of projects focussed on helping children in extremely vulnerable circumstances, such as those who have been trafficked into illegal labour or are living and working on the streets.

It also includes the opportunity for your friend or family member to receive two updates on some of the projects they have supported during the year, to see how their gift is really helping.

Support a school for disabled children
Price: £70.00

Help a school for disabled children in Tanzania. You could give these children a much richer school experience by providing specialist help and equipment. Your gift will help to improve the facilities at a school for disabled children and provide specialist teaching aids for children with special needs.

Has Nicky Gumbel proved anything (Part 1... probably)

2008-08-12T10:00:00.005+01:00

A while back an ex-colleague and friend of mine, an excellent and very clever chap, posted a link to a talk by happy-clappy Christian evangelist Nicky Gumbel to his Facebook profile. Mr. Gumbel, in case you don't already know, is vicar of the Holy Trinity Brompton church, and co-founder of the Alpha Course: the highly popular course in basic homophobic Christianity that seems to appeal so much to those in emotional crisis or lacking their own social group. A less charitable person than I might accuse them of deliberately preying (or perhaps praying) on the vulnerable, but I'm fairly sure it's not deliberate. Anyway, the text that my erstwhile work-chum chose to accompany the article was:

Christian or not... this is an excellent talk by an excellent preacher who breaks down Richard Dawkins arguments for disproving the existence of all religion (not just Christianity) - Do check it out... it's well worth the time.

Since he's generally an excellent chap (despite the ellipsis abuse ;p), and I like to be fair and at least listen to and consider both sides of an argument, I decided to follow his advice and give it a go. This talk is the first in a series of three talks entitled "Is God a delusion?" This one is called "Has science disproved God?" with the subsequent talks being "Does religion do more harm than good?" and "Is Faith Irrational?" In order that Mr. Gumbel's arguments are given a fair crack, that I not be accused of quoting out of context, and to enable me to respond to each point in turn, I've transcribed the talk in full. I don't think I'm infringing any intellectual property laws by reproducing it here, since it was given publicly and distributed freely, and I have correctly attributed it to its author. In any case you would think that he would want his words spread as widely as possible, so really I'm doing him favour ;). If you do want to listen to Nicky's dulcet tones, here's the talk on HTB's website, but be warned, it is nearly 50 minutes long and, while nowhere near as annoying as the slimy Alister McGrath (or Sméagol, as I like to call him), his soft obsequiousness does start to grate a bit after the eighth listen or so. Over to you Nicky:

On my last holiday I read a number of books by leading atheists. I read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, who’s been described as the nearest thing to a professional atheist since Bertrand Russell. I also read books by A. C. Grayling who’s an atheist philosopher; by Cristopher Hitchens who’s an atheist journalist; by their equivalent in America, Sam Harris who wrote a books Letter to a Christian Nation and the End of Faith. All of them are atheists attacking faith.

Let me start by giving a similar background: I too have read Dawkins' and Harris' books, The Hitch's excellent, informed and insightful book "God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything", and Grayling's pithy "Against All Gods". Unlike Nicky, I found little to disagree with in any of them.

NG:

Sam Harris says this “All religions are both false and dangerous”; Richard Dawkins: “I think of religion as a dangerous virus. Faith acts like a virus that attacks the young and infects generation after generation. For many people part of growing up is killing off the virus of faith with a good strong dose of rational thinking. But if an individual doesn’t succeed in shaking it off, his mind is stuck in a permanent state of infancy, and there’s a real danger that he’ll infect the next generation. Faith can be very, very dangerous and deliberately to implant it in the vulnerable mind of an innocent child is a grievous wrong.” “Horrible as sexual abuse no doubt was, the damage was arguably less than the long term psychological damage inflicted by bringing the child up Christian in the first place.” Sam Harris says this “The prospects for eradicating religion in our time do not seem good, but the same could’ve been said about the efforts to abolish slavery at the end of the 18th century” That’s the aim: to eradicate faith. Although Richard Dawkins would still allow religion provided it was restricted to private acts between consenting adults. [audience laughter] Now of course in one sense there’s absolutely nothing new about this; the writers in Ecclesiastes said “There’s nothing new under the sun.” Christianity has been under attack for two-thousand years, but it’s survived and it’s still growing. The history of the attacks is summed up in the story of the graffiti artist: you know Nietzsche was the 19th century equivalent of Dawkins who said that “God is dead.” And a graffiti artist wrote “‘God is dead’ – Nietzsche”, underneath another graffiti artist wrote “‘Nietzsche is Dead’ – God” and a third graffiti artist wrote “If Nietzsche’s dead and God is dead then I’m not feeling too well myself.” [audience laughter] So there’s nothing new, but what’s different? And why does it matter? I think what’s different is that these atheists have a very clear purpose. In fact they’ve been described as “purpose driven” atheists. Richard Dawkins starts his book The God Delusion, one of the things it says early on is “If this book works as I intend, religious believers who open it, will be atheists when they put it down.” And there’s a new aggression and a vehemence; at least it’s new to us in the west because we’re not used to it. A couple of weeks ago I was in Budapest in Hungary and they have just come out of forty years of it. Forty year of communism, atheistic communism, where they tried to stop faith. They tried to stop people bringing their children up as Christians. They imprisoned people. A cardinal was imprisoned in Hungary for his faith and tortured for his faith. Perhaps not surprisingly, Richard Dawkins’ books are not so popular in Hungary. They’ve been there.

Not much to disagree with here, especially since it's mostly quotes from the so-called "New Atheists", except that he makes one invalid sideswipe at atheism. He's makes the oft-repeated mistake of implying that because totalitarian communism did bad things, and it was atheist, that it was atheism’s fault that bad things happened. This, the first of our logical fallacies, is of the “false cause” or “With this therefore because of this” variety. I'll leave this for now as it was only an offhand comment to which I'm guessing he'll return in "Does religion do more harm than good?", except to say that after admitting, albeit grudgingly and with a misquote, that Dawkins has no intention of banning religious practice, to draw this analogy is despicable and underhanded. I'll probably do a full article on the "What about Stalin/Hitler/Mao?" non-sequitur at some later date.

NG:

Of course also we see the potential impact of this because they’re so widely read. When they did a survey on MPs what they were reading, this was one of the most common books: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. And so has implications potentially, for our law, for our education, for ethics, for genetics, for human rights, the right to bring up our children as Christians, and that’s why we’re devoting this series because there are very important things at stake here.

FYI, I bet there's only one reason most MPs were reading TGD: because there was a successful campaign on pledgebank encouraging concerned citizens to send a copy to every one of them... the cheapskate bastards! ;D

NG:

Six positives to begin with, this is simply by way of introduction; six positives about these men and about their arguments:
First of all, these are clever people, they’re professors, they’re intellectuals, they’re skilful in their use of rhetoric, humour and ridicule.
Secondly, some of their attitudes, some of their attacks on religion, for example their attack on Islam, requires courage on the part of the authors.
Fourthly (sic), some of the attacks on Christianity are well-founded, and must be taken seriously so that the errors of the past are not repeated. For example, the church mistakenly opposed Galileo for his discovery that the planets revolve around the sun.
Fourth, Christian faith, can and should benefit from the criticisms of its attackers .
Fifth, they’ve actually put faith back on the agenda; people are talking, and that’s why again it’s so important for us to address these arguments. Peter says “Always be ready to give an answer, for the hope that’s in you.” And if these questions are raised at school, your university, or in your workplace or at a dinner party: he’s says “be ready”, know what the arguments are.
Sixth positive is: they’re right to say that truth matters. It’s a move away from relativism. There’s been a lot around of “it doesn’t really matter what you believe as long you’re sincere.” They’re saying it does matter, because what you believe has implications for your life. And they’re right, there is such a thing as truth. Roger Scruton, professor from oxford, writes in the Oxford Dictionary of Epistemology “If anyone tells you that there’s no such thing as truth, they’re asking you not to believe them, so don’t”

Again, not much to disagree with here, except that he should have stopped after “they’re right” really. But the point about truth being available to be had is also good.

NG:

Now they’re are huge issues, that’s why I’ve divided them into three talks “Has science disproved God?”, “Does religion do more harm than good?” and “Is faith Rational?” and even dividing it in this way we’re going to be skating over the issues, and today I’m going to be skating over the issue of science because there’s so much to cover. But the central argument, what Richard Dawkins describes as the central argument of his book is in the chapter which he calls “Why there almost certainly is no God.” And the argument basically is that science has disproved God, and therefore those people who believe in God are deluded. And he quotes from a dictionary supplied with Microsoft Word, which defines delusion as “A persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence, especially as a symptom of psychiatric disorder.” And he says that “the first part captures religious faith perfectly and for the second part I’m inclined to follow the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance when he said ‘when one person suffers from a delusion it’s called insanity; when many people suffer from a delusion it’s called religion.’”

This is where it all starts to go wrong. Dawkins never once claims that science has disproved the existence of God, in fact he asserts that it is not possible to do so, Mr Gumbel is setting up a straw man which he will later attempt to knock down. The chapter entitled “Why there almost certainly is no God” is actually mostly a series of counter-arguments against common pseudo-scientific arguments for God (Hoyle's Hurricane in a scrapyard, irreducible complexity and, so called, "intelligent" design, the anthropic principle, the argument from personal incredulity etc.) rather then the other way around. He also says that historically, people have used the “science can’t explain x, so therefore there must be a God” argument many times, and then science often goes on to explain x. This hypothetical “God of the gaps” in our current understanding is getting smaller all the time. The likelihood of the existence of God tends-toward zero. He then proposes his own, less flawed, version of Hoyle's scrapyard analogy called the "Ultimate Boeing 747 Gambit" which proposes that if life and its evolution are unlikely, then any being complex enough to be capable of creating it must be even more unlikely.
On top of this, even if science doesn’t know x at the moment, even if it never will, there is no reason to insert some hypothetical God into the equation. And if you do, why pick Yahweh? Why not Wotan, Apollo, Lugh, or Baal? Or any of the other myriad of mythical divinities man has concocted in the last few millennia? Why not the flying spaghetti monster? Because someone made them all up, that’s why; they were all invented by man, including Yahweh. The idea that the answer to the origins of the universe must be either current science or Yahweh, is an example of the false dilemma. So if the chances of any God at all are tiny, and then within that the chances any specific God are even smaller, the odds for Yahweh aren’t looking good; Ladbrokes will be happy to take your cash at any price you name. What would you call someone who stakes their life on a 200 trillion to one shot? Deluded doesn’t begin to cover it. In another chapter, Dawkins explains that the evidence for God is about as good as the evidence for a Flying Spaghetti Monster, or an invisible pink unicorn or Bertrand Russel's hypothetical celestial teapot, which is none at all, and we can therefore ignore it on the same grounds as we ignore those obviously ludicrous claims. As "The Hitch" sums up most elegantly "What can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence."

NG:

So, what is the evidence; has science disproved God? Let’s look today at the evidence.

Yes let’s. Having established that the entire premise for the speech is false, let's go on to see what further points are to be made...

NG:

It’s a well established fact that for much of history Christianity and scientific study have been allies, not opponents. In fact the Christian world-view provided the right environment for modern science to emerge. Genesis 1 verse 1 “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, God saw all that he had made and it was very, very good.” It’s this belief that there is one God who, created the world, that lead scientists to expect a world that was ordered, and intelligible, rational, uniform. As C.S. Lewis put it “Men became scientific because they expected law in nature, and they expected law in nature because they believed in a legislator.” And then belief in a transcendent God, a God who was the creator of this universe, and who had created a universe that was good, but not God. That’s what made scientific study worthwhile, and legitimate. You see if you believe that world is evil, or you believe in pantheism, in other words that God is in everything, then it’s very risky investigating and doing experiments. But if you believe in a transcendent God who created a world that is good but not God, then it’s worthwhile and legitimate. So interestingly as Lesslie Newbigin pointed out, in the great cultures of China, India, Egypt, in spite of the brilliant intellectual powers that they manifested, science in the modern sense didn’t emerge from there. As professor Polkinghorne puts it, the Christian doctrine of creation provided an essential matrix for the coming into being of the scientific enterprise. So this is a historical fact as Herbert Butterfield wrote “science is a child of Christian thought.” Interestingly when professor Alister McGrath put this point to Richard Dawkins, he seemed a little bit surprised by it but he said “That could of course be a historically valid point, but I don’t know enough about history to judge.” This week in another debate I noticed, that he said “it has to be admitted that of course science grew out of religious tradition.” And in fact it was religion that was the driving force for science, because if you believe that this universe is created by God then, by investigating the world in a scientific way, you are actually discovering more about God. You’re investigating God’s revelation if you like, in creation.

"It’s this belief that there is one God who, created the world, that lead scientists to expect a world that was ordered, and intelligible, rational, uniform. " Is it? Would it not more likely be that mankind has evolved to be a pattern seeking species? We seek uniformity because we have evolved in a largely uniform environment and it has helped our evolution to be able to notice that, for instance, when we throw a rock, it travels a distance, and strikes with a force, related to how hard and at what angle we threw it, and always eventually returns to the ground. We expect uniformity because we observe uniformity. It was where early man encountered infrequent and inexplicable events like floods, fires, droughts, earthquakes that he invented Gods, ancestors and spirits to explain them. This is the origin of the God of the gaps; "I cannot explain this, it does not fit with normally observed behaviour, therefore something supernatural must be involved." and we can see that it is here that the argument from personal incredulity also originates. Fortunately for mankind, we now know what causes all those natural disasters and have the germ "theory" of disease, and therefore have no more need of such superstitious claptrap. Despite this, various idiots continue to try and blame natural disasters on God: U.S. Televangelist "Reverend" Pat Robertson stated that the destruction of New Orleans by hurricane Katrina was God's wrath for promiscuity and homosexuality there, and he's not alone. Even the Church of England is not immune to this kind of lunacy: Anglican Bishop of Carlisle, "exorcism specialist" and top tip for the next Archbishop of Canterbury, Graham Dow says that the floods in Yorkshire last year were God's punishment for the UK's introduction of laws forbidding discrimination against gays. As Hitchens points out in a discussion far superior to this talk recently, if God was trying to punish homosexuality, his aim was a little off and somewhere a bit further south like London or Brighton might've given better results. Against this kind of nonsense, genuine science has had to fight tooth and nail for millennia.
When we come to the discussion of the origins of "modern" science, if indeed Dawkins did admit that it grew from religious tradition, he probably wasn't talking about Christianity. McGrath was seemingly unaware of, or unwilling to mention, the great flowering of science and mathematics, prior to the Christian one and now sadly over, during the Golden Age of Islam. The Kitab al-Manazir (book of optics) written by ibn al-Haytham (AKA Alhacen. 956-1039 AD) is recognised as the earliest work describing experimental science, can you guess from the name where he's from? Alhacen has been variously described the father of optics and the pioneer of the modern scientific method and he pre-dates Francis Bacon and Descartes by six hundred years or so. While Islamic scholars where naming the stars, inventing algebra and algorithms, practising something akin to modern chemistry and physics, and pioneering the study of many other fields of science along with the study of ethics and sociology, notable leaders of the Christian world of the same period were experimenting with the art of writing their names and hitting each other with sticks. Doubtless Nicky would claim that since Islam and Christianity have a common root, this is really just the Christian God in another guise, but I think we could safely dismiss that as sophistry since it is clearly his intent to imply that it is Christianity alone that is responsible for scientific advancement.

Furthermore, whether or not modern science "grew out of religious tradition" or not, and I don't believe it did for a minute as it seems to me to be another type of the false cause fallacy, is largely irrelevant to the debate. Astronomy grew from astrology, chemistry from alchemy, but no clear-thinking person would claim that the truth and efficacy of those sciences in any way lends credence to their crackpot predecessors; they might have been a necessary pre-cursor, but that does not make them right or in some way "true". Reasoning of this type is a variation on the appeal to consequences fallacy, of which we will doubtless hear more later.

NG:

So, Copernicus laid the foundations of modern astronomy and scientific revolution by suggesting on mathematical grounds that the Earth travelled round the sun. He held office also in the Polish church, as cannon of the cathedral, and he described God as the best and most orderly workman of all. Galileo, the mathematician, physicist and astronomer, was the founder of modern mechanics and experimental physics; he argued that the earth was not the centre of the universe. And although it’s true he was persecuted by the church, but he was a devout catholic Christian, and he once said that “There are two big books, the book of nature, and the book of supernature – The Bible” Keppler, brilliant early astronomer and mathematician, was also a deeply sincere Lutheran, and he said he was “thinking Gods thoughts after him.” Robert Boyle, one of the forerunners of modern chemistry, wrote a book “The Wisdom of God manifested in the Works of Creation.” Sir Isaac Newton, perhaps that greatest scientist of all time: he wrote theological as well as scientific books, and he thought his theological as more important. Faraday, one of the greatest scientists of the nineteenth century, again the Christian faith was the single most important influence upon him. Professor Simpson, the Scottish obstetrician who discovered chloroform that made possible modern anaesthetics: he was once asked this question “what’s the most important discovery you’ve ever made?” He said “the most important discovery I ever made, was the day I discovered Jesus Christ.” Louis Pasteur, who revolutionised microbiology, he said “Science brings us nearer to God.” Gregor Mendel, Austrian botanist and plant experimenter, whose researches into heredity form the basis of modern genetics, was a priest; he was a monk; he was the abbot of a monastery; he did much of his research in the monastery. And this is a problem for Richard Dawkins, because Gregor Mendel is the man whose work is what he, in his own scientific field, builds on. And he doesn’t really like the idea very much therefore that he was a sincere Christian. So he writes “Father Gregor Mendel, founding genius of genetics itself” “Mendel of course was an Augustinian monk, but that was the 19^th century, when becoming a monk was the easiest way to pursue his science. To him it was the equivalent of a research grant.” So he only went into the monastery to er, y’know, that, he’s saying it’s a kind of way to do free research. John Cornwall says in response “I was unaware that men took the drastic step of entering monasteries in order to enjoy free scientific research funding, not such a bad idea though: one square meal a day, albeit frugal; a cell on your own; an endless leisure to pursue those long-term research programmes unencumbered by fleshly distractions. But what far sightedness: father Mendel came to study plant biology late in his religious life, after spending seven years studying philosophy and theology and a career as a teacher in general subjects.”

Here we start a list of scientists with religious belief, and there are many; Dawkins even cites many of them in The God Delusion, so he's clearly not trying to cover up this fact. The problem here is that no number of scientists professing belief will make that belief true. Newton "perhaps the greatest scientist of all time" was indeed a believer, although more deist than theist; he was also an alchemist who wrote several books that, were they to be released today, would be put in occult section of the bookshop along with Nostradamus' predictions and other crackpot theories. Scientific genius apparently offers no guarantees that one will not fall for fallacious ideas and pseudo-science. The fallacy committed here, by implying that these luminaries believed in God so it must be true, is an example of the appeal to authority. Additionally, for much of history, to profess atheism or even express doubts about God's existence would be punished by a swift and messy death, so it's no wonder that nearly everyone was Christian, and made damned sure that they brought their children up Christian and told them to never question it. This cycle of indoctrination has proven hard to break. In a world where everyone is either religious or dead, even the scientists will be religious. Dawkins covers and refutes the "Argument from admired religious scientists" in his chapter "Arguments for God's Existence" which I thoroughly recommend any reader taken in by this talk reads for themselves, along with the rest of the book obviously.

Cornwall's mocking tone in relation to Dawkins’ observations on Gregor Mendel is also unjustified. Mendel worked as a gardener and bee-keeper, perhaps where his interest in biology was piqued, then enrolled in the Philosophical Institute at the University of Olomouc; after three years he was advised by his physics teacher to join an order of Augustinian Monks who were the sponsors of the college. The Abbey of St Thomas sent him to the University of Vienna to study zoology, botany, chemistry, and physics. On completion of his studies he returned to the abbey to teach Physics and, having been inspired by his university lecturers to study variation in plants, undertook his biological research in the gardens as St Thomas. Does this sound like someone who came to science through religion, or someone whose membership of a religious order enabled him to practice the science he was already interested in?

NG:

So was it just in the past that scientists believed? What about today? Well Dawkins concedes that forty percent of US working scientists are religious believers. They did a survey in 1916; researchers asked biologists, physicists and mathematicians whether they believed in a God who actively communicated with humankind and to whom we may pray in expectation of receiving an answer. Around forty percent answered in the affirmative. Nearly a hundred years later they did another survey, and found that the results were almost identical.

This is an outrageous lie of omission. Dawkins does indeed concede that forty percent of US working scientists are religious (or at least were in 1998 when the survey was done). What Mr. Gumbel fails to mention here is that more than ninety percent of the US population are religious when taken as a whole, and that among those scientists eminent and respected enough have been elected to the US National Academy of Sciences the figure is seven percent. Would you like to see a graph of those figures? Of course you would; everybody loves graphs and there have been a lot of words:

Similar surveys in the UK have shown similar trends, i.e. religiosity correlates negatively with scientific knowledge and education. Now it is important to remember, lest we commit a logical fallacy ourselves, that correlation does not imply causation; however it is likely that, one either causes the other, or a third as yet unknown factor, or combination of factors, causes both effects. So we are left with a choice: either religion makes you ignorant of science, science makes you unwilling to believe in religion or there is something else (let's call it X) that correlates negatively with faith but positively with scientific knowledge or vice versa. Interestingly, several surveys have also shown that IQ and education correlate negatively with religiosity, but positively with scientific knowledge. This shouldn't of course to lead us to the conclusion that all religious people are stupid or ignorant, or that any given backward or ill-educated person must be religious, just that they're more likely to be.

NG:

Of course, there are many leading scientists today who are believers. Now Richard Dawkins tries to dismiss them; he takes the British Scientists for example, some of the leading ones, and er, he is very witty and mocking, but he says “Three names crop up with the likeable familiarity of senior partners in a firm of Dickensian lawyers: Peacock, Stannard and Polkinghorne.” You can’t dismiss great scientists simply because their names sound Dickensian. I mean take for example Professor Sir John Polkinghorne KBE FRS, brilliant scientist, Cambridge professor of mathematical physics. He became the Dean and Chaplain of Trinity Hall, Queens College Cambridge and he’s written many outstanding books on the relationship between faith, in particular the Christian faith, and science. Take an example, I mean there are thousands of scientists in the United States who are Christians. Take one example, Francis Collins, he’s head of the Human Genome Project. He leads a team of two thousand scientists, and together they determined the three billion letters of the human genome; it’s our own DNA instruction book. If we were to read out those letters it would take thirty-one years to read it out aloud; all that information is in each of the hundred-trillion cells in your body. Each genome contains enough information to fill a library of about five thousand books. If all the chromosomes in a body were laid out end to end it would stretch a hundred billion miles. Our brains alone have a billion nerve cells. This scientist, Francis Collins, an evolutionary biologist who headed up this project, he speaks of a richly satisfying harmony between the scientific and the spiritual world views. The principles of faith are complementary with the principles of science. I heard him speak at the national prayer breakfast in the united states and this great scientist, having come to the end of his talk, said this “to conclude this homily I propose to do something risky: to ask you to join me in singing a song.” He said “Some may find it ironic that last year’s speaker, the rock star Bono, spoke about justice and economics, but passed up the chance to sing. Now this year’s speaker, a scientist who might be considered a bit of a nerd, proposes to sing with a guitar.” And he got up there and he sang this song, that went like this “God of wisdom, we acknowledge that our science and our art, and the breadth or our knowledge, only partial truth impart. Far beyond our calculation, lies a depth we cannot sound, where your purpose for creation and the pulse of life are found. As two currents in a river fight each other’s undertow, ‘til converging they deliver one coherent steady flow. Blend, oh God, our faith and learning, ‘til they carve a steady course; ‘til they ioin as one, returning praise and thanks to you, their source.” So, can faith and science live side by side? The evidence is, they can.

Again Nicky twists words, Dawkins does not attempt to dismiss these scientists because of their names; he brings these names up as an example of "genuine specimens of good scientists who are sincerely religious in the full, traditional sense", and then moves on, adding the little quip, to express his bafflement at their belief in such doctrines as the resurrection, the virgin birth etc.

To conclude this point, after a bit more of the argument from admired religious scientists, Mr. Gumbel chooses to assert that science and faith can live side by side. Well clearly they can, but it is increasingly obvious that they are uneasy bedfellows.

NG:

Second point: is there a profound contradiction between science and religious belief? Again Richard Dawkins think there is, he says “I’m a scientist, and I believe there is a profound contradiction between science and religious belief.” I think it ought to be noticed in passing that there are many disagreements and contradictions within science itself. In fact there are more within science itself than there are between science and religion. Conflict between rival views in science is quite common. But there are two main alleged conflicts between science and religion: the first is in the area of miracles, miracles defined there you’ll see in the notes. I mean miracles can be used loosely, you know, sort of “I prayed for a parking space and I found one; it was a miracle!” that is really talking about providence if anything. But here the term is used in the sense of a non-repeatable counter-instance of an otherwise demonstrable law of nature. And Dawkins follows the philosopher Hume in regarding a miracle as a violation of the laws of nature, and consequently he rejected miracles as being impossible. But this is a circular argument, if the laws of nature are defined as completely uniform, then the supernatural is ruled out from the start, and it’s therefore impossible to believe in miracles, however strong the evidence. So, in 1937 Max Planck a distinguished German physicist said this “Faith in miracles must yield ground step by step before the steady advance of the forces of science. Its total defeat is indubitably a mere matter of time.” What Planck was implying was this: that science now explains what was once thought to be miraculous, which suggest that those who believed in miracles in the past, did so because they didn’t sufficiently understand the laws of nature. This is not the case, I mean in Jesus’ day, everybody knew as well as we do for example that it wasn’t natural for a virgin to give birth to a child. They knew as well as we do that it wasn’t natural for someone who has been dead for three days to rise from the dead. If they’d had no knowledge of the laws of nature, then they would not have recognised the miracle in any shape or form. C.S. Lewis out it like this “Belief in miracles, far from depending on ignorance of the laws of nature, is only possible in so far as those laws are known.” So the real issue is this: is there a God? If there is then miracles become a real possibility, if God is God then he created matter, reason, time, space and all the scientific laws and therefore he’s at liberty to interfere. If there’s no God, then miracles are a problem, but philosophy and science alone won’t answer the crucial question. Scientific laws are not like the laws of pure mathematics that cannot be broken, rather scientific laws are descriptive.

Let's start with the woolly stuff here before we hit the clincher. The non-belief in miracles does not arise because of a prior belief in naturalism, it arises because there is not one single reliable account of a miracle having ever actually occurred. The Catholic church is exceptionally proficient as accepting the flimsiest of evidence as a miracle. Take the case of Padre Pio who was regularly buying carbolic acid, which could cause exactly the symptoms of stigmata he "miraculously" manifested, or the case of Monika Besra upon which the beatification Mother Theresa was based, where it turns out that the "miraculous" disappearance of her tumour was the result of two years of standard medical treatment rather than the laying on of some magic medallion. The credulous will see miracles where actually only the unlikely or temporarily unexplained exists, and they justify it by saying things like "I have faith that it was a miracle" which really means "I can't explain how that happens, so God must have done it" or sometimes "I prefer to imagine that God did it than accept the perfectly rational explanation available". Here we see our old friend the argument from personal incredulity come to visit again this time bringing his regular companion wishful thinking. Materialists and rationalists don't disbelieve in miracles because of some a priori assumption that they can't exist, but because there has never been one demonstrated for which there is not some alternative, more plausible, explanation available, forcing them to use Occam's razor to slice away the miraculous one. As Hume puts it "No testimony is sufficient to establish a miracle, unless the testimony be of such a kind, that its falsehood would be more miraculous than the fact which it endeavours to establish". The argument presented here is a variation on the "Atheism is a faith based position too." argument which, I'm afraid, is just a pathetic Tu Quoque. The position of naturalism arises from observation of the absence of miracles, and not vice versa.

NG:

I mean this is a real issue in Dawkins’ book The Dog er… God Delusion because he doesn’t believe miracles are possible, he never discusses the evidence for the resurrection, and of course the resurrection is the linchpin of Christianity; it’s the main rational ground on which Christians believe, and yet he never even looks at it, and considers the arguments for it.

Leaving that slip of the tongue in is a cheap shot I know, and one for which I apologise, but I have edited out all the other erms, stammers and slips; this one made me chuckle so I left it in. Did you hear the one about the dyslexic atheist? He didn't believe in dogs. Aaaanyway...

Evidence for the resurrection? Evidence for the resurrection? I'd like to see this. Mr Gumbel here offers us a throwaway line about there being evidence for the resurrection and then gives us nothing to back it up. There is, and let's be clear on this, not one single piece of evidence that Jesus even existed that rises above the level of third-hand hearsay, let alone for any of the supposed elements of his life and death described in the Bible, miraculous or otherwise. We have plenty of records from the Roman occupation of Judea, and yet there is not one single mention of a religious leader called Jesus who claimed to be king of the Jews or was crucified, despite many mentions of other such purported "messiahs" roaming the land causing trouble for the Roman occupiers. The New Testament is a cobbling together of allegorical writings by people who never met Jesus, heavily influenced by the myths of Osiris, Mithras, Dionysus etc. all written at least 40 years after Jesus' supposed crucifixion. Given that we cannot even be certain of the existence of a man called Jesus who had followers and claimed to be king of the Jews, what evidence can there be that he died and rose again? In fact, even if we had been living in Jerusalem at the time, and twelve religious fanatics claimed to have seen a man who had been crucified walking around alive and well we would have no reason to believe them or proclaim it a miracle unless we were truly gullible. Occam's razor yet again would force us to take the position that they were either lying or deluded, or that the man in question was never actually dead at all.

While we're on the topic of the crucifixion and resurrection: what is the big deal with the crucifixion anyway? We constantly hear phrases like "Jesus died for our sins." and "God sacrificed his only son that we might be saved." The only problem with this (well OK, not the only problem) is that a sacrifice of three days is no sacrifice at all, and a death of only three days is not death as we would understand it. The proposition that this is significant hardship to eternal beings of ultimate power is ludicrous. Both God and Jesus knew, or would have done if any of this nonsense were true, that Jesus would only be "dead" for three days. What is three days next to eternity in paradise? In fact it wasn't even three days since he apparently died in the afternoon on the Friday and was seen alive Sunday morning; that's forty-eight hours tops! (can't claim credit for this gag; check out Mr. Deity and the Really Big Favor) So in actual fact all Jesus had to endure was some flagellation, then torture on a stake for a few hours, be functionally comatose for half the weekend, then be alright again and ascend to heaven for ever more. Ask yourself sincerely, would you not take this option yourself whatever the torture might be? How much of a sacrifice was it really? There are plenty of people in the world today who suffer more than that, and often for better reasons, and no one is trying to use them as the crux (if you'll pardon the pun) of a religion. God didn't "sacrifice" his son at all, he was just parted from him for a infinitesimally brief period of time.
Oh, and that's right, if it happened at all, it was almost certainly a pole or stake, not a cross; the original Greek (yes, that's right, Greek, not Aramaic or Hebrew) of the New Testament says stake (gk. stauros) or stake/gallows/tree- /firewood/table (gk. xylon) all the way through and never mentions a cross. That said, none of the NT writers ever actually saw it so we can't take their word, but if you're going to trust the Bible as a historical account you should probably pay attention to what it actually says. I guess staurofixion of xylofixion didn't have the same ring as crucifixion or, as I like to call it, the crucifiction. So anyway, after that aside, back to the issue of Dawkins alleged lack of the study of evidence for the resurrection. I suspect that any such evidence one might produce when pressed would be "faith based evidence" rather than evidence based as the scientific community would understand it. Here we see an accusation that Dawkins has insufficiently studied his theology, a common canard about which we will hear more shortly.

NG:

Second area of alleged conflict is the whole area of evolution, and the biblical account of creation. There are different interpretations of genesis held by sincere Christians; some Christians believe in a literal, six-day creation. Other Christians interpret Genesis I differently, they point out that the Hebrew word for day has many different meanings, even within scripture; since the sun did not appear until day four, the writer probably didn’t mean 24 hour days. The word can mean a long period of time; therefore it’s not in conflict with the prevailing scientific view of the vast age of universe. Nor is it in conflict with a gradual evolution, which God not only started the processes, but worked within it to produce a system which culminated in human life. They point out that the order of Genesis I, written by people with no scientific knowledge, is in some way similar to that accepted by evolutionary theories; in other words: plants, then animals, and then humans as the climax.

This passage is a sophistic apology for the test of Genesis which, largely, isn't too offensive, but what is missing is a condemnation of the people who subscribe to that literal interpretation (AKA Creationism) and its idiot cousin the so-called Intelligent Design. Those people are dangerous loonies, and Nicky is afraid to say so because it might limit the sales market for his Alpha product which has already been criticised by this lunatic fringe for daring to suggest, as he does here, that the science of evolution is perhaps not incompatible with the teachings of Genesis and the world was maybe not created in 144 hours. And, of course, I use the term "fringe" with a certain trepidation since, according to a recent Gallup poll, fully forty-five percent of Americans believe that the human race was created whole, in its present form, some time in the last 10,000 years. Interestingly, more than half of these morons don't regard themselves as biblical literalists! Taking the US population as 300 million, this gives us 135 million people who think that mankind came into existence, fully formed from clay, in a time frame that is almost certainly later than the domestication of the dog. As Dawkins recently pointed out, the magnitude of this error "is equivalent to believing that the distance from New York to San Francisco is 7.8 yards." If one imagines that the US is alone in this madness that would leave us with 6% of Christians worldwide that believe this claptrap, but unfortunately we know that there are backward and highly-populated places like South America, sub-saharan Africa and Australia that are also bastions of biblical literalism, so the real figure is likely much higher. Even here in the UK our taxpayers money is being used to teach children this creationist nonsense in the form of "Faith Schools", although fortunately the number doing this is low. This pernicious poppycock must be fought tooth and nail, and the refusal of moderate religionists to condemn it is not helping.

We are then told that some Christians point out that the order of events depicted in the Bible kinda, sorta matches evolution. Genesis I doesn't even get the order the Earth, sun, moon and stars came into existence right let alone the animals. Here's the order things are created in the bible (King James and New English) :

Day 1:
Heaven and Earth.
Day and Night.

Day 2:
The Firmament or Vault (which he calls heaven, but probably means sky, since we already have a heaven), which apparently has water both above and below it!

Day 3:
The land and, as a by-product, the seas.
Grass, Plants with seeds, Fruit trees.

Day 4:
Sun, moon and stars. All of which are set in the firmament

Day 5:
Whales (or perhaps sea-monsters).
Every other living thing in the sea.
Birds (this includes bats as we find out later when God starts telling us what we can and can't eat).

Day 6:
Cattle, reptiles, other beasts of the earth.
Man (and woman).

Day 7:
The nice cup of tea and a sit down (Oh alright, I made that bit up).

So, we have photosynthetic plants before there is a sun, oh but that's probably OK because there was at least light from some other, unmentioned, source. We also have whales before other mammals. Except that we know that whales evolved from a land mammal, which God had apparently not yet created. Also, we have birds before any land animals, when we know that they evolved from land-dwelling reptiles. Oh and then in Genesis II he creates man, Adam, again after the seventh day. It should be obvious from this alone that this book is not divinely inspired; it's just the work of primitive man trying to explain how the world is and has no more validity than the stories of Odin fashioning Midgard (AKA The Earth) from the decaying remains of the hermaphrodite giant Ymir, or Atum fellating himself and the world being created when he spat out his jizz (God's don't swallow apparently). Anyone trying to tell us that the account in Genesis is approximately right is just talking out of their arse.

Nicky tells us that Genesis is not "in conflict with a gradual evolution, which God not only started the processes, but worked within it to produce a system which culminated in human life." This sounds suspiciously like he’s proposing that chemistry is not all that is needed to arrive at the first replicating molecules, that evolution by natural selection is not all that is necessary to arrive at the human race from those molecules and that humanity is the end of the process. This argument is a mainstay of the intelligent design (or ID) movement. ID is just creationism in science's clothing, and it's not even a very convincing disguise; its proponents (or IDiots, as we like to call them) argue that there are certain structures in bodies of various animals that cannot be explained by Darwin's theory, as only part of one would be useless and therefore not selected for; they call this irreducible complexity. Unfortunately for them, every example they have chosen, from the wing to the eye to the bacterial flagellum, has been shown to be wrong. ID is really just another example of the argument from personal incredulity: "I cannot comprehend how only part of this structure could be useful to a creature, therefore God must've done it." Just think a little harder guys, and your God of the gaps will vanish again. As was shown at the Dover trial, ID is just creationism cynically repackaged in an attempt to get God back into science classes. To be honest, I'm not sure whether Mr. Gumbel is one of these ID nutballs or not. Either way, statements like this play into their hands when what should be happening is outright condemnation of their ridiculous pseudo-science. This is one of the points that Sam Harris makes admirably in his book, that so-called "moderate" Christians (i.e. those who ignore all the nasty or inconvenient bits of the bible) are providing cover for these loonies that is enabling them to flourish by refusing to criticise them themselves, and making it harder for us to do so.

NG:

Others say “look, Genesis I, this is not intended to be a scientific account; it is a theological account” It’s a poetic form, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true; all interpretation starts with saying “What is this literary genre.” For example the parables of Jesus, they’re not historically true, but that doesn’t mean to say they’re not true. Poetic language can be true without being literally true. When the psalmist wrote “The world is firmly established, it cannot be moved” he is using a poetic image. But Galileo’s opponents took it literally and argued that the earth was stationary, and that the theories of the earth orbiting the sun must therefore be wrong. And these Christians feel that in the same way the early chapters of Genesis should not be taken literally, that there is strong evidence for evolutionary theory, and this is now accepted by the vast majority of scientists who argue that the evidence is inconsistent with a literal interpretation of Genesis. And those who take this view argue that what matters is that there’s a God who created and sustains the laws of physics and nature, which evolved over time, culminating in human life. It’s clear that whichever that one takes, that there’s no necessary conflict between science and scripture. In the light of the certainty and different opinions of genuine Christians, personally I think it’s wise not to be too dogmatic about this issue; certainly if you’re like me, and neither a scientist nor a theologian. The main point of Genesis I is not to answer the questions “How?” and “When?”, those are scientific questions; but to answer the questions “Why?” and “Who?”, those are the theological questions. The bible is not primarily a scientific book it’s a theological one. It offers a personal explanation more than a scientific one. The scientific explanation does not prove or disprove the personal one, rather it is complementary.

Here Nicky, who is apparently not a theologian despite holding an honours degree in theology from Wycliffe Hall - Oxford and making his living interpreting the Bible, tells us that "poetic language can be true without being literally true". What does that mean? Are we just dealing with a problem of equivocation? Is this some other kind of truth I wasn't previously aware of? I wasn't sure, my knowledge of poetry and philosophy being nowhere near up to my knowledge of logic and science. So I read up on "truth" and its various incarnations, and it's hard to see to which of the categories or theories of truth the good reverend is referring. There are two types of truth that it may conform to: Pragmatic Truth and Religious Truth, but there are problems with each. As a side note there is apparently also something called Mythological Truth, but I suggest that this is just religious truth that has fallen out of fashion, and the distinction is not one worth making.

Religious truth is defined as a body of doctrine that the faithful of a particular religion are required to believe as fact without evidence. This is where the Churches create the conflict with science: when science discovers something that is in conflict with its doctrine, the church must admit that it was wrong, or suppress the new knowledge and punish the heretic. It is the essence of religious truth that the followers believe it to be scientific truth. I don't think this is what Nicky is referring to here as it is clearly his intent so say that Genesis I is not a scientific truth, although actually he does a bit of an Alister McGrath on this point and doesn't tell us what he thinks himself at all, but tells us what "some Christians" think. This reticence just appears to be cowardice and disingenuousness to me. Anyway...

The pragmatic theory of truth is a stance that accepts something as true if it can be shown to be useful. We have already met the appeal to consequences, so this should not in any way lead us to think that pragmatic truth is the same as scientific truth, and Nicky says as much himself. What he is saying however is that there is a poetic meaning in these stories that, like Aesop's fables, can teach us something while not actually being historically or factually accurate. It is particularly hard to see Genesis I falling into this category, since there can be little use from an inaccurate rendering of the creation of the earth, except perhaps in an attempt to install in us an awe of the power of God. When we come to Genesis II however, as we will shortly, we may find the pragmatic theory to be relevant, but not in a positive way.

So, in Genesis II, God creates Adam to tend the garden of Eden, and tells him "Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die" then he makes Eve who is tempted by the serpent who says "Ye shall not surely die, for God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as Gods, knowing good and evil." So Eve eats from the tree and gives some to Adam who also eats and, crucially, they do not die, but realise they are naked and make themselves some aprons from fig leaves. We are constantly told that the serpent is the "deceiver" who beguiled Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, but he told not one word of a lie. God however said that eating from the tree would kill them and they did not die. And don't give me that rubbish about them having been immortal up to that point and their immortality being lost, because God also says "Behold, the man has become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: therefore the lord God sent him forth from the garden of eden..."

So what are we to learn from this "poetic" form that is "true without being literally true"?

God is a liar, but the serpent speaks only truth.
Being naked is evil.
Do what you are told, follow orders, remain ignorant, and everything will be OK.
Independent knowledge of the difference between good and evil merits punishment.

What a crock of shit.

Moving on…

NG:

Even Stephen Hawking has admitted that science may solve problems of how the universe began, but it cannot answer the question “why does the universe even bother to exist?"

Let's look at the relevant passages from Hawking's A Brief History of Time in full:

SH:

The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer the questions of why there should be a universe for the model to describe. Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing? Is the unified theory so compelling that it brings about its own existence? Or does it need a creator, and, if so, does he have any other effect on the universe? And who created him?

A few paragraphs on:

SH:

However, the laws do not tell us what the universe should have looked like when it started – it would still be up to God to wind up the clockwork and choose how to start it off. So long as the universe had a beginning, we could suppose it had a creator. But if the universe is really completely self-contained, having no boundary or edge, it would have neither beginning nor end: it would simply be. What place, then, for a creator?

The snippet misquoted by the "good" reverend here is actually in a section illustrating a theory that the universe may not need a creator, because there was really no "beginning" since time did not exist before space did. Now this is a tricky concept, and one that I can't quite wrap my head around, but one thing Hawking definitely isn't trying to do is give credence to the God hypothesis by asking "What is the universe for?" Asking what the universe is for presupposes some kind of creator. It is a category error to assume that, because man made things have a purpose, that natural things must also have one. Look around the world and ask yourself what various items are for: "What is this computer for?", "What is this cup of tea for?", and “What is that car or that aeroplane for?" are all questions that make sense because those things had a creator; they were made by someone with an intent. Now try it for natural objects "What is that tree for?", "What is the sea for?", or mountains, elephants, ants, viruses and bacteria? While we may be able to make use of them, or see the need for them from our own limited perspective, they are not for anything, they simply are; they were not created with a purpose, they are the result of natural forces interacting; no intentional act, supernatural or otherwise, is required. If you twist this question of purpose around into a pantheistic implication that the universe itself has a will, and phrase the question "Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?" you are either, like Hawking, having a bit of a joke with your reader or you are, like Nicky, very very confused. While it is true that we don't really know what caused that initial beginning of our universe (or even if the word "beginning" actually has any meaning in this context) there is no reason to suppose some celestial intelligence that lives outside of space and time created it solely for the purpose of bringing us into being some 14 billion years later. This childlike solipsism is staggering. Even if we do take this unnecessarily deistic stance on first cause, there is still no reason to then extrapolate that to a bearded robed old man who can see and hear everything you do and think, takes a personal interest in your life, occasionally saves one little girl from hurricanes while slaughtering hundreds of others, rewards belief in him, and will punish you for all eternity for such heinous crimes as coveting thy neighbours ass or giving him one up it. Oh wait, there is one possible reason, and that is if you believe the words of some bronze-age desert nomads desperately trying to explain why their lives are so Goddamn hard, and that apparently it's because they are God's chosen people!

NG:

Let me use an illustration… Thank you my darling, very much indeed. This is a cake. Now supposing someone who had not seen what had just happened; supposing we had in this room, this cake and a whole load of scientists, mathematicians and nutritionists, and we showed them this cake, they could analyse it: the mathematicians could tell you how high it is, how much it weighs to hundreds of decimal points. The scientists could tell you what the ingredients are, exactly what it’s made out of, the proportions. The nutritionists will tell you whether it’s good for you. But, if you asked them this question first of all “Who made the cake?” Now I think you may’ve guessed that. But then this question “Why was the cake made?” the only person who can answer that question is Pippa, and if you want to find out, you’ll have to ask her. Dr John Lennox writes this “no amount of scientific analysis of the planet on which we stand will tell you why it was made, unless the creator chooses himself to speak” The fantastic thing is: he has spoken, and what he has spoken is called genesis. So there is therefore no necessary conflict between evolution, which attempts to describe the mechanism of creation, and genesis which describes the meaning of creation. So the Harvard University atheist, Stephen J Gould who, outside of Dawkins, is probably the most widely read public spokesperson for evolution of the past generation, he wrote this “Science simply cannot by its legitimate methods adjudicate the issue of God’s possible superintendence of nature; we neither affirm nor deny it; we simply cannot comment on it as scientists.” Darwin himself was agnostic; the great American botanist Asa Gray was a devout Christian; Charles D. Walcot was an equally firm Christian. Either half of my colleagues are enormously stupid, or else the science of Darwinism is fully compatible with conventional religious beliefs, and equally compatible with atheism. So, Francis Collins says this “those who choose to be atheists must find some other basis for taking their position, evolution won’t do.” And he himself says this “I can’t identify a single conflict between what I know as a rigorous scientist, and what I know as a believer” and in that he would be in agreement with perhaps the greatest scientist of all time: Albert Einstein, who said “A legitimate conflict between science and religion cannot exist.” So, can science live side by side? Yes. Is there a profound contradiction between science and religious belief? The evidence suggests, no.

More reiteration of the “What is the universe for?” question, and then we are told that Genesis answers this. Having actually read the first few books of Genesis several times now, I still can’t find anything that tells me the purpose of the universe. To assume from the “poetic” stories therein, which are apparently God’s word, that the universe was created for us would seem to me to be a massive and unjustified assumption. If this is the word of God, dictated to a prophet or otherwise, why would he not tell us exactly how he actually made the universe and the earth? You would think he could at least get things in the right order? If this is meant to tell us what the purpose of the universe, why would he not just come out and say it instead of couching it in cryptic allegory? If the fault lies with the scribe, why not pick someone to tell who could write it down accurately? If the problem here is that I’m insufficiently theologically trained so see the meaning, why didn’t God get it written more clearly so we didn’t need to spend years of study just to interpret the bloody thing? In fact this book appears almost exactly as if it was cobbled together from a load of old stories that primitive men and women told each other about how their world came in to being, and it has nothing at all useful to tell us about the actual creation of the universe, the earth or life upon it. Sometimes, if something looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, then I’m fetching the pancakes and hoisin sauce. As a moral guide or explanation of the whys and wherefores of the universe and our place in it, this book has no more value than Gilgamesh, the Mahābhārata, Grimm’s Fairy Tales or Kipling’s “Just So” stories; in fact it has no value at all other than as literature or archaeology that might help us with our understanding of less enlightened peoples, past and present.

There’s another classic out of context quote at the end of this section, this time from Einstein’s essay on Science and Religion. Shall we have a read of the original passage that contains it in full?

AE:

For example, a conflict arises when a religious community insists on the absolute truthfulness of all statements recorded in the Bible. This means an intervention on the part of religion into the sphere of science; this is where the struggle of the Church against the doctrines of Galileo and Darwin belongs. On the other hand, representatives of science have often made an attempt to arrive at fundamental judgments with respect to values and ends on the basis of scientific method, and in this way have set themselves in opposition to religion. These conflicts have all sprung from fatal errors.
Now, even though the realms of religion and science in themselves are clearly marked off from each other, nevertheless there exist between the two strong reciprocal relationships and dependencies. Though religion may be that which determines the goal, it has, nevertheless, learned from science, in the broadest sense, what means will contribute to the attainment of the goals it has set up. But science can only be created by those who are thoroughly imbued with the aspiration toward truth and understanding. This source of feeling, however, springs from the sphere of religion. To this there also belongs the faith in the possibility that the regulations valid for the world of existence are rational, that is, comprehensible to reason. I cannot conceive of a genuine scientist without that profound faith. The situation may be expressed by an image: science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind.
Though I have asserted above that in truth a legitimate conflict between religion and science cannot exist, I must nevertheless qualify this assertion once again on an essential point, with reference to the actual content of historical religions. This qualification has to do with the concept of God. During the youthful period of mankind's spiritual evolution human fantasy created Gods in man's own image, who, by the operations of their will were supposed to determine, or at any rate to influence, the phenomenal world. Man sought to alter the disposition of these Gods in his own favor by means of magic and prayer. The idea of God in the religions taught at present is a sublimation of that old concept of the Gods. Its anthropomorphic character is shown, for instance, by the fact that men appeal to the Divine Being in prayers and plead for the fulfillment of their wishes.
Nobody, certainly, will deny that the idea of the existence of an omnipotent, just, and omnibeneficent personal God is able to accord man solace, help, and guidance; also, by virtue of its simplicity it is accessible to the most undeveloped mind. But, on the other hand, there are decisive weaknesses attached to this idea in itself, which have been painfully felt since the beginning of history. That is, if this being is omnipotent, then every occurrence, including every human action, every human thought, and every human feeling and aspiration is also His work; how is it possible to think of holding men responsible for their deeds and thoughts before such an almighty Being? In giving out punishment and rewards He would to a certain extent be passing judgment on Himself. How can this be combined with the goodness and righteousness ascribed to Him?

What Einstein means when he says that there can be no legitimate conflict is that where religion tries to insist that it has truths about the nature of the universe that fly in the face of science, religion is always wrong. He is also saying that where science tries to decide upon moral values that it is stepping outside its remit, and he is right. I would expand on that to say that where religion tells us about morals, it is usually wrong too, and where it is right it is only by coincidence. Fortunately, we have humanism and philosophy to help us with these questions that neither religion nor science can answer adequately. Oh and I must point out that while science can’t tell what is right and what is wrong, it can and has told us how the mechanisms by which we make those decisions came into being; the process that created the basis of our moral sense is evolution by natural selection; yet again no supernatural entity, magic book, stone tablets, or apple of knowledge are required. In actual fact, while science can tell us the mechanism of our morals, it rarely pronounces moral edicts at all, so this flavour of “illegitimate” conflict is rarely experienced. Religion however is constantly trying to tell us “truths” that fly in the face of science, and when it does so it should be given short shrift. When idiots claim the earth is only 8,000 years old and men of science criticise them for their stupidity, what does Nicky do? He criticises the critics and not the idiots, probably because those idiots are potential customers.

NG:

Third Question: is science enough? Richard Dawkins thinks it is, but again, Albert Einstein said this “Religion without science is blind; science without religion is lame.” So what he’s saying is: we need science; science in itself is good; we need scientists. “Religion without science is blind” but “science without religion is lame” and that’s what the bible is saying really, when the psalmist says “the heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands” he’s saying: the creation is fantastic; we need scientists to explore God’s revelation in creation. But there’s something more, because he goes on to say “The law of the lord is perfect, reviving of the soul.” And we need both scientists to explore God’s revelation in creation, and theologians to explore God’s revelation in scripture. Because there are questions that science alone cannot answer. Science that is in the narrow definition of the word science, which is the one that Dawkins is using. Science actually, if you take the original meaning of the word “science” it comes from the Latin word that means “knowledge”. That’s why theology was regarded as the queen of sciences; it embraces all knowledge, including the natural sciences. Dawkins thinks that theology is not even a subject; it shouldn’t be taught in university; it’s nothing. But actually it’s the queen of sciences; it embraces all sciences, including the natural sciences on which he places so much emphasis.

Another Einstein quote from the passage I quoted earlier is misrepresented here: what he was saying when he said that “science without religion is lame” is that a scientist without a sense of wonder at or reverence for the universe, and a “faith” that the universe is rational and consistent, will be hampered by a lack of enthusiasm for his topic. Einstein often used the word “God” as a metaphor for the rules of the universe, and religion as a metaphor for the awe and majesty he perceived within it, which he called a “cosmic religious feeling”. If we want to know what Einstein really thought of Nicky’s version of religion we have to turn to a quote from a recently auctioned letter to the philosopher Eric Gutkind:

AE:

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

and another from a letter written some months later to an anonymous correspondent:

AE:

It was, of course, a lie what you read about my religious convictions, a lie which is being systematically repeated. I do not believe in a personal God and I have never denied this but have expressed it clearly. If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it.

It seems that the lie to which Einstein refers here is still being repeated.

I Googled for the source of the quote “queen of science” and found a number of claims to such a title including: mathematics, philosophy, physics (the King surely?), history, astronomy etc. with earliest quote I could find being Roger Bacon (1214-1294), a Franciscan friar often known as the “Grandfather of Science”, who asserts that “Experimental science is the queen of sciences and the goal of all speculation” Theology is rather a latecomer and clear usurper in this race for scientific royalty. If indeed theology ever was the queen of science, she now wears the jester’s motley, and we hope for the day when she’ll stop waving that ridiculous pig’s bladder in our faces. I suspect that theology may have been referred to as the queen of science by someone who believed that biblical truth and scientific truth were one and the same thing, or that science is a subset of biblical teaching, but these days we know better. Theology is no more worthy of merit than the study of faeries, leprechauns and unicorns. I would refer the reader to PZ Myers’ excellent “Courtier’s Reply” for an example of how this kind of defence of theology against Dawkins’ criticism sounds to the unbeliever; in short, while the faithful indulge in lengthy discussions of the colour, texture, quality and cut of purely imaginary royal clothing, it is obvious to us that his Imperial Majesty is, in fact, in the altogether.

NG:

But the natural sciences can’t answer these questions. Here’s the first one:
How come there’s something rather than nothing? That was the question asked by the German philosopher and mathematician Godfrey Leibniz. Why is there something rather than nothing? The great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said this “not how the world is, but that it is, is the mystery.” As Alister McGrath put it “The one highly inescapable fact about the world is that we, as reflective human beings, are in fact, here.” Sire Peter Medewar, an Oxford immunologist who won the Nobel Prize for medicine, and again like Dawkins a self-confessed rationalist says this, that “there is indeed a limit upon science is made very likely by the existence of questions that science cannot answer and that no conceivable advance in science would empower it to answer … I have in mind such questions as How did everything begin? What are we all here for? What is the point in living?” and of course this debate it starts with a five year old child: who says “Who made God?” and this, in a more sophisticated way is basically the debate that Dawkins is involved in, stating “If you postulate God then who created God?” But the God that we believe in is not a created God, he is a self-existent God “I am who I am.” He’s transcendent. Now this is a very hard concept to get your mind around: an eternal God who has always been there. But equally it’s very hard to get your mind round what they’ve got to get the mind round: everything we see has come out of absolutely nothing. Which is easier? To believe that God created something out of nothing, or… well this is what I would suggest: I think it’s easier to believe that God created… God created something out of nothing, than to believe that nothing created something out of nothing. So Francis Collins says this “I cannot see how nature could have created itself, only a supernatural force that is outside of space and time could have done that.” And he goes on to say this “The major inescapable flaw of Dawkins claim that science demands atheism is that it goes beyond the evidence. If God is outside of nature then science can neither prove nor disprove his existence. Atheism itself must therefore be considered a form of blind faith in that it adopts a belief system that cannot be defended on the basis of pure reason.”

Firstly, it’s worth noting that the ellipsis Nicky inserts into Medewar’s quote covers up, among other things “these are the questions children ask”. We also hear the argument that God is somehow “outside” nature: “transcendent”, “Self-existent”; this is clearly a case of special pleading and as such needs no further attention.

Anyway, to address the question of why there is something rather than nothing: who says that nothing is the natural state? Why do you think that nothing is more likely than something? Why should nothing be the “natural” state of affairs? With a bit more learning “nothing” might turn out to be inherently unstable and “something” almost inevitable. Again we see here the argument from personal incredulity from Francis Collins, which begins “I cannot see…” and from Nicky himself “I think it’s easier to believe…” It doesn’t matter what is “easier to believe”; sometimes things that are hard to believe are actually true; the laws of thermodynamics are hard to grasp but that doesn’t make them false. To put God into this, or any other, gap is a defeatist attitude; we will never find out the real answers, in fact never would have made any scientific advancement, if every time we “cannot see” how something could have happened we ascribe it to God and call off the search. Take off your biblical blindfold and join the rest of us in looking a little harder with the tools that science has given us.

NG:

Second question “How come the universe is so finely tuned?” this is the extraordinary thing about this universe: it is finely tuned. Stephen Hawking, the great scientist of this generation put it like this “if the density of the universe one second after the big bang had been greater by one part in a thousand billion, the universe would’ve recollapsed after ten years. On the other hand if the density of the universe had been less by the same amount, the universe would’ve been essentially empty, since it was about ten years old.” How was it that the initial density of the universe was chosen so carefully. Maybe there’s some reason why the universe should have precisely the critical density. And the chances of it being so finely tuned, Professor Polkinghorne says the chances of that is something like this “it’s the same as aiming at a target an inch wide the other side of the observable universe, twenty thousand million light years away, and hitting the mark” So how does Richard Dawkins, who recognizes this is a problem, deal with this. Well he says “it can’t be God, because I’ve ruled that out; what is the other possibility?” It can’t have just happened he concedes that. He said “Well maybe the reason it’s happened is that there’s been lots and lots of attempts at it. Now there could’ve been lots of attempts by the universe expanding and contracting, expanding and contracting until it got it exactly right, but he says that science has ruled out that possibility. The other possibility he says is that there are billions of universes out there, and it so happens that this one has got it exactly right. That’s the multiverse hypothesis, and that’s the one he goes for. But what is the evidence that there are billions of universes out there? This is something based on blind faith. Stephen Hawking says “The odds of a universe like ours emerging out of something like the big bang are enormous. I think there are clearly religious implications…”

Dawkins does indeed offer the multiverse hypothesis as a possible explanation for the goldilocks enigma (Why is the universe “just right” for life?), and Nicky is right, there is no proof of it. It’s worth pointing out that the multiverse is not some construction of Dawkins as might be inferred from this passage, but one put forward by many physicists, and there are many flavours: some say that the many universes happened one after the other, others that they all exist at the same time but in different spaces, others that they are contained within each other. As Nicky points out, there is no proof of any of this… yet, but Dawkins is using it to illustrate that there are plenty of alternatives to the God hypothesis to answer the question.

There’s an interesting little quote here from Hawking. I’ve googled for it, and it turns up on the web pages of many a creationist fruitcake; one even claims it’s from “A Brief History of Time” (it’s not). It does appear in a few books about Hawking, mostly by creationist fruitcakes and IDiots, but in all cases the original reference is unavailable online. I would really like to see this quote in context; if anyone knows its source, please let me know. The only expansion I can find is an unreferenced quote from John Boslough’s “Stephen Hawking’s Universe”, in which it concludes the phrase with “I think there are clearly religious implications whenever you start to discuss the origins of the universe. There must be religious overtones. But I think most scientists prefer to shy away from the religious side of it...The odds against a universe that has produced life like ours are immense.” Given how disingenuous the religious apologists tend to be when quoting scientists, it wouldn’t surprise me if the next sentence out of Hawking’s virtual mouth, or perhaps the phrase hiding in the ellipsis, was an explanation of how such an apparent unlikelihood may have come about, and that all Hawking was saying about religion was that it was easy for the human mind to infer what probably isn’t there. But I won’t know for sure until I find the source.

Whatever Hawking’s intent was, it may be as some physicists are currently suggesting that the number of possible combinations for the universal constants is actually much less than one would imagine if they are free to be changed independently of each other; it is possible that the “six knobs” that appear to govern the physical laws are not independent. When we finally find the unholy-grail of physics, the grand unified theory, it may become obvious that these values were never free to vary in the first place. Dawkins explains all this in TGD, but Nicky chooses to ignore it, calling into question whether he actually read the book, or is not being fully honest with his audience. Again, it is tempting to call off the search for the real reason these values are in the goldilocks zone and declare “God did it!”, but this is not only deeply unsatisfying but also, as I described earlier, a line of reasoning that inhibits finding out that genuine answer. When we find God seated at the control panel with 6 knobs on, I’ll grant Nicky the point; until then we’ll keep looking thanks. If you want to truly expand your brain, try this article from the new scientist on how string-theory (admittedly still unproven, and some say unprovable) and something called “compactification” may start to explain how the universe came to be the way it is. It may not be right, but you’ll still learn more than you will from reading Genesis.

Whatever the actual answer, I’m willing to stake eternal damnation on the bet that God isn’t hiding in the dark of this particular gap in our understanding, just as he wasn’t hiding in any of the places science has already successfully illuminated.

NG:

Third question: how come science cannot meet our deepest needs? Science of course is wonderful and it’s hugely important and valuable. But if that’s all you have, you’re reducing life, it’s a reductionist view of life, to the material. And at the end you end with the conclusion that Dawkins ends with, that life is empty, and he quotes Bertrand Russell “I believe that when I die, I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive”

The suggestion that Dawkins comes to the conclusion that life is empty is just plain wrong. Again this calls into question whether Nicky actually read the book, or is just lying to his audience again. Let’s look at the passage of the book that contains the phrase “life is empty”; in reference to some previously stated idiotic reasoning for the existence of purgatory (if purgatory didn’t exist, then our prayers for the dying would just be wasted breath), Dawkins writes:

RD:

That remarkable non sequitur is mirrored, on a larger scale, in another common deployment of the Argument from Consolation. There must be a God, the argument goes, because, if there were not, life would be empty, pointless, futile, a desert of meaninglessness and insignificance. How can it be necessary to point out that the logic falls at the first fence? Maybe life is empty. Maybe our prayers for the dead really are pointless. To presume the opposite is to presume the truth of the very conclusion we seek to prove. The alleged syllogism is transparently circular. Life without your wife may very well be intolerable, barren and empty, but this unfortunately doesn't stop her being dead. There is something infantile in the presumption that somebody else (parents in the case of children, God in the case of adults) has a responsibility to give your life meaning and point. It is all of a piece with the infantilism of those who, the moment they twist their ankle, look around for someone to sue. Somebody else must be responsible for my well-being, and somebody else must be to blame if I am hurt. Is it a similar infantilism that really lies behind the 'need' for a God? Are we back to Binker again?
The truly adult view, by contrast, is that our life is as meaningful, as full and as wonderful as we choose to make it. And we can make it very wonderful indeed. If science gives consolation of a non-material kind, it merges into my final topic, inspiration.

Dawkins hasn’t come to the conclusion that life is empty at all; he is telling us that this is part of a fallacious argument that believers often use in favour of their faith.

“Binker”, by the way, is Christopher Robin’s imaginary friend from A. A. Mile’s poem of the same name.

It is also instructive to read the whole of the quote from Bertrand Russell, as it appears in the God Delusion:

BR:

I believe that when I die I shall rot, and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting. Many a man has borne himself proudly on the scaffold; surely the same pride should teach us to think truly about man's place in the world. Even if the open windows of science at first make us shiver after the cosy indoor warmth of traditional humanizing myths, in the end the fresh air brings vigour, and the great spaces have a splendour of their own.

In the following section, on how he takes his inspiration from the beauty and elegance of the natural world, Dawkins quotes Emily Dickinson: “That it will never come again, is what makes life so sweet.”

The suggestion that Dawkins believes life to be empty is nothing more than a despicable slur, and an irrelevant ad hominem.

The bullshit starts to flow thick and fast here, so let’s press on:

NG:

But you can’t reduce life to the natural sciences, this reductionist approach to life. Just take music: John Polkinghorne says “The poverty of an objectivist account is made only too clear when we consider the mystery of music. From a scientific point of view it’s nothing but vibrations in air impinging on the eardrums and stimulating neural currents in the brain”. But science is not the only way of knowing about music.

Unfortunately, Polkinghorn is both right and wrong here. Music is “nothing but” the movement of molecules in the air, that bang on our ear drums, that are interpreted by our brains into sounds and voices. It’s the “nothing but” that I have a problem with; all of our experience in the world comes from a variety of sensory devices providing input to the brain, and the brain interpreting them. Here’s a diagram indicating the parts of the brain that respond to music from a recent New Scientist article:

It is, as Pascal Boyer points out in his work “Religion Explained: The Human Instincts that Fashion Gods, Spirits and ancestors”, that our brains have evolved a number of structures that provide us with survival benefits. Chief among these with respect to music, are the areas involved with communication and emotion; we enjoy communication because it aids our survival, and it seems that music hyper-stimulates these areas.

PB:

What you get from musical sounds are ‘super-vowels’ (the pure frequencies as opposed to the mixed ones that define ordinary vowels) and pure ‘consonants’ (produced by rhythmic instruments and the attack of most instruments). These properties make music an intensified form of sound-experience, from which the cortex receives purified and therefore intense doses of what usually activates it. So music is not really a direct product of our dispositions but a cultural product that is particularly successful because it activates some of our capacities in a particularly intense way.

As can be seen in the diagram above, there is hardly an area of the brain left untouched by our experience of music, particularly familiar music with lyrical content that resonates with us; it is hardly surprising that we are sometimes tempted to interpret this in a quasi-mystical way. However, yet again, no element of anything outside nature is required to explain anything.

NG:

John Humphries has written a very interesting book; It’s called “In God We Doubt” and he subtitles it “Confessions of a Failed Atheist” but he doesn’t like the sort of atheism of Dawkins; he says “…biologists like Richard Dawkins know a thousand times more than most of us will ever know about how our bodies work and how we’ve evolved… But there is that other mysterious attribute about which so many scientists are curiously incurious: there’s our soul…” A psalmist says “Reviving the soul” our spirit, our conscience, whatever else you want to call it; we’re more than the sum of our genes, selfish or otherwise.

In order to adequately discuss this, it’s instructive to look at a bit more of the passage from Humphries’ book, to see what’s hiding behind the ellipses that the listening audience can’t hear:

JH:

The fact is, atheists have the best arguments, what they don’t have – as far as I’m concerned – is much of a grasp on whatever it is that makes human beings what we are.
Self-evidently biologists like Richard Dawkins know a thousand times more than most of us will ever know about how our bodies work and how we’ve evolved. It has been a long journey from the primordial swamp to Bach and Beethoven. At various points along the way we have acquired legs and high-functioning brains (not always evident, I grant you, in the case of some reality-television contestants) and the ability to create and destroy possessed by no other living creature. But there is that other mysterious attribute about which so many scientists are curiously incurious: there’s our soul, our spirit, our conscience or whatever else you want to call it.
We are more than the sum of our genes - selfish or otherwise – but you might not think so if read only the works and listened only to the words of atheist evolutionists. They have little to say about our ‘fundamental awareness of the difference between good and evil’

It seems that despite Humphries’ knowledge of Dawkins, and the number of books by biologists he claims to have a little later in the chapter, he seems to have omitted reading the chapter “Nice Guys Finish First” in The Selfish Gene, and “The Roots of Morality: Why Are We Good?” in The God Delusion. Either that or he just didn’t understand them, which I can’t believe for a moment. What Humphries is choosing to call the soul, spirit or conscience, the ‘fundamental awareness of the difference between good and evil’, has evolved just like everything else about us. There is very little doubt about this. We have it because attributes like mutual support, sharing of food, not killing or maiming each other, our anger at, and the punishment of transgressors, caring for the young and old, all have survival value to our genes. If you think they don’t, I thoroughly recommend reading the above chapters, and perhaps even Michael Shermer’s “The Science of Good and Evil”. Once again, there is no need for some supernatural entity that we might call a soul to enable our morality, and we certainly don’t have it because it was given to us on stone tablets, and we certainly don’t only have knowledge of good and evil because two of our ancient ancestors ate it in a magic fruit!

Why can’t science answer our deepest needs? Why should it have to? We are built by our genes to need and want certain things that once gave us survival value. Evolving the kind of brain needed to do the reasoning and social bonding required for survival in a harsh world has also, as a by-product, enabled significant understanding of the way the universe worked that, while it had no direct survival value to our ancestors, may help us survive as a species into the future. It could of course enable our imminent destruction too, but in the current climate it is likely to be the religious with their finger on the button.

NG:

We sense a spiritual element in that nobility, in the miracle of unselfish love and sacrifice, something beyond our conscious understanding. We should not, we must not be browbeaten by arrogant atheists and meekly accept their deluded label. He quotes an Anglican vicar actually: Giles Fraser who says “To marry and make the love commitment is the nearest thing to faith I know, because it’s done with the same degree of risk.” Couldn’t a Dawkins-type figure make a case for love being a fiction, a function of human need, a function of selfish genes? There’s something deeply mistaken about thinking love is simply reducible to the chemistry of the brain. Scientifically, a kiss is no more than the coming together of two sets of lips, involving the mutual exchange of carbon dioxide and microbes. [laughter] but no-one would ever have kissed if that was all there was to it. There’s more to a kiss than that, and there’s more to love than that; that doesn’t do justice to a kiss let alone to love, let alone to this whole spiritual world that is out there.

This passage is particularly woolly thinking and it pains me to read it. Love is a function of our selfish genes, but that doesn’t make it a fiction, any more than hunger, lust, intelligence or pain sensations are imaginary. Love, between male and female at least, is an evolutionary function that enables procreation and the nurture of successful offspring, but that does not make it any less wonderful. The description of a kiss really is short-sighted and, as he points out himself, it’s certainly not the whole story; it omits the chemicals that flood the brain and body that cause all kinds of reactions, reactions that have evolved in us because they help us to form the bond that is required for the successful raising of offspring. Research shows, that we (women in particular) are capable of assaying potential mates, almost at the genetic level, from pheromones emitted by a potential partner. What better way to isolate the pheromones of one individual that to get up close to them, gee-up their nervous system a bit, and rub noses? Evolution will clearly favour those with a tendency to do this. Here’s some science about kissing, in case you’re interested. Whatever they’re “for”, just because the evolution of our neurochemistry explains the feelings we experience during a kiss, doesn’t stop us feeling them, or make them any less valid; this is one of many instances where knowing how the trick is done doesn’t spoil our enjoyment of it one jot. OK, maybe he just played this bit for laughs, but it’s indicative of a whole mindset that sees something as somehow less worthy if science can explain it. It is a truly impoverished world-view that maintains that something must be “outside” nature in order for us to marvel at it or take joy in it. Especially since nature is all there is; one would just be setting oneself up for disappointment.

NG:

I was not brought up as a Christian; I was an atheist. I believed, not in quite such a sophisticated way, I believed basically what Richard Dawkins believes; I believed that this whole world was determined by our environment, by our genes; I thought there was no such thing as unselfish love. I was not brought up as a Christian; I came to faith late in life; I looked at the evidence for Jesus and I came to put my faith in him, but I came to faith late in life. Dawkins says that the only reason why anyone’s a Christian is because they’re brought up that way; it’s like belief in Santa Claus; it’s something that you may be taught as a child but as you grow up, you grow out of it. But how many people came to believe in Santa Claus as an adult,[laughter] having not believed it before? It doesn’t work like that. And, when I came to believe in Jesus, on the evidence, to put my faith in him, I experienced that there is so much more to life than I thought before. It didn’t close my thinking.

This short passage covers a lot of ground. Firstly, it absolutely does not follow from atheism or evolutionary biology that there is no such thing as unselfish love. If Nicky used to believe this then that was his failing, not atheism’s. The term “selfish” in the phrase “selfish genes” is metaphor for the way the genes seem to behave, not a description of how they makes animals (or humans) behave. “Selfish” genes seem to seek to maximise the number of copies of themselves in the world; I say seem to because what is actually happening has nothing to do with the genes having an intent at all, but the concept of “selfishness” is a useful conceit that helps us visualise what is really going on. Simplistically put, genes that are good at causing their host organism to produce offspring that are good at reproducing flourish at the expense of others. It is the very “selfishness” of our genes that has caused us to evolve such traits as compassion, empathy and yes, unselfish love. Dawkins emphatically does not believe that there is no such thing as unselfish love, though many people have misinterpreted the title of the book that way, seemingly without actually bothering to read it. I’d like to reproduce the whole of the new introduction to the 30^th anniversary edition of The Selfish Gene, but that would probably infringe copyright and would take too much typing, so I’ll try to capture it’s essence with a few snippets:

RD:

Many critics, especially vociferous ones learned in philosophy as I have discovered, prefer to read a book by title only. No doubt this works well enough for The Tale of Benjamin Bunny or The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but I can readily see that 'The Selfish Gene' on its own, without the large footnote of the book itself, might give an inadequate impression of its contents.
…we should not be surprised to find individual organisms behaving altruistically 'for the good of the genes', for example by feeding and protecting kin who are likely to share copies of the same genes. Such kin altruism is only one way in which gene selfishness can translate itself into individual altruism. This book explains how it works, together with reciprocation, Darwinian theory's other main generator of altruism.
One of the dominant messages of The Selfish Gene (reinforced by the title essay of A Devil's Chaplain) is that we should not derive our values from Darwinism, unless it is with a negative sign. Our brains have evolved to the point where we are capable of rebelling against our selfish genes. The fact that we can do so is made obvious by our use of contraceptives. The same principle can and should work on a wider scale.

Then we move onto the “I used to be an atheist, hmm what about that?” argument that is also used by McGrath as if it gives them some kind of credibility to have deliberately distanced themselves from rationality, rather than had irrationality thrust upon them. He states that Dawkins claims that the only reason anyone is a Christian is due to childhood indoctrination, which is clearly not the case. Take a look at the passage from TGD paying special attention to the words I have highlighted in bold:

RD:

If you feel trapped in the religion of your upbringing, it would be worth asking yourself how this came about. The answer is usually some form of childhood indoctrination. If you are religious at all it is overwhelmingly probable that your religion is that of your parents. If you were born in Arkansas and you think Christianity is true and Islam false, knowing full well that you would think the opposite if you had been born in Afghanistan, you are the victim of childhood indoctrination.

Dawkins is simply stating the fact that the vast majority of religious people have the same religion as their parents. True there are conversions to many faiths in adulthood, but that doesn’t lend credence to the validity of those faiths. I’m sure there are a number of people who think that they came to Buddhism, Zoroastrianism or Wicca late in life based on what they think constitutes evidence, and Nicky’s statements about his conversion should not be taken as a pointer toward the truth of Christianity any more than these people are evidence for the truth of their faiths. As to this “evidence” that caused him to believe: I’d like to see some; he’s very good at talking about evidence without actually providing any. Nicky’s bio on Wikipedia says:

Nicky Gumbel was converted to Christianity during his first year studying law at Trinity College, Cambridge through reading the New Testament. He said, "I was enthralled. It was as if I had found what I had been looking for all my life".

I’m guessing that the evidence of which he speaks is what the religious call “faith based”, that he read the NT and it resonated within him, he somehow felt the truth of it, it seemed that this book had in some fashion encapsulated something he had known to be true all along, but had not yet been able to articulate. Our emotional state when reading a book cannot be considered evidence, and let’s not forget that this particular book itself is at best third-hand hearsay. If the existence of the NT and his experience of reading it are all the evidence he has, then this doesn’t amount to much I’m afraid. I’ve read plenty of books that stir me, where the words on the page seem to sing in my blood, and cry out with meaning; most of those books (though not all) were fiction too, and cunningly crafted to do just that. Nicky, although not brought up a Christian, was brought up in a broadly Christian society, so it’s hardly surprising that the stories seem to mean something to him, he’s been immersed in them his whole life, without really noticing it. I’m willing to bet that had he been brought up by secular parents in Riyadh instead of London, that he would’ve had a similar quasi-mystical experience upon reading the Koran. There’s a lesson here for us atheists, we absolutely must teach our children about religion, to think critically, and how to recognise it when our brain plays tricks on us.

As a man with a law degree from one of the UK’s most prestigious universities, Nicky really ought to have a better grasp of what constitutes good evidence. Would he present a case for the prosecution based solely on a strong feeling he got from reading an accuser’s testimony given him by a third party? “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I put it to you that this man is guilty upon the evidence that I personally had a significant emotional experience, an overwhelming sense of wellbeing and rightness with the world, which convinced me of the verisimilitude of the victim’s testimony whilst reading said victim’s statement. A statement which was given to me by a man I met only yesterday, but whom I nevertheless strongly believe to be trustworthy. Although like myself, the man presenting said document has never met said victim, he did have an air of authority and dependability, some nice clothes, an expensive car and wore a lot of gold. The prosecution rests!” If this is what he considers a sound argument, it’s no wonder he chose to take the cloth rather than pursue his legal career; unlike a courtroom, in a pulpit one is surrounded by people who earnestly want to believe you. Perhaps it is his legal training that leads him to these standpoints; emotional arguments may sway a jury to convict even if they fly in the face of the evidence, and many lawyers cynically exploit this fact as Nicky does here. I chose prosecution for my example rather than defence, because in a court the onus is on the prosecution to prove guilt “beyond reasonable doubt”; this is because the default position is innocence, much as the absence of anything supernatural should be the default position until someone manages to show that it does exist beyond reasonable doubt. Rationalism, naturalism and atheism are innocent until proven guilty, and the prosecution’s case is thin at best.

Last part coming up:

NG:

In fact it made me much more interested in the world, because this world, I suddenly saw that this world was created by God, and I was in a relationship with God, and that made me much more fascinated about the world; it made me value this world so much more; it made me value every human being much more because every human being is an individual created by God. It gave me a new love for other people, a new desire to do something about the needs of the world around us. And, there’s nothing greater than to know Jesus Christ who is the truth, and is the one through whom this whole creation came into being; and reading these books made me so thankful to know that relationship with Jesus Christ, to have found a meaning, a purpose to life. And also to see the urgency of getting this message out to our society because, yes our society needs Jesus, well it needs Jesus, it needs scientists. Much more than that, it needs Jesus; it needs the message that only the church can give it: the message of Jesus Christ, who is the way and the truth and the life.
May we pray:
Lord we want to thank you today for scientists and science, but even more we want to thank you for Jesus, the one through whom this whole creation came into being; the one who is the way, the truth and the life. And thank you that we can have this amazing privilege of being in a relationship, a love relationship with Jesus Christ, and taking that message to a world that so desperately needs it. In Jesus’ name, amen.

It’s hard to pick out the bits worth commenting on from this stream of drivel, but there are some bits worth mentioning. I’ll summarise with some bullet points:

Nicky is almost certainly not in a relationship with God, he just (probably) thinks he is. He’s like God’s stalker; he has made up an imaginary relationship that the object of his affection never instigated and is unaware of. Lucky for him that God, on account of his almost certain non-existence, won’t file for a restraining order.

If he needs to believe there’s a God in order to be interested in the world, that’s a pretty poor state of affairs. Plus it obviously hasn’t made him that interested or he would’ve learned more science.

If he believes that each human being is valuable, and that there’s a need to do something about the needs of the people in the world only because God made them individually, then that’s an even poorer state of affairs because a) it’s wrong and b) this means he did not feel this back when he was an atheist. Plus, his version of doing something about the needs of the people of the world seems to consist of teaching them this nonsense for cash rather than doing something actually beneficial.

What he needs to believe to get him through the day has no bearing on whether those things are actually true or not.

Jesus is not the embodiment of truth. Neither is he “the way” or “the life”; what does that even mean?

Jesus is “the one through whom this whole creation came into being”? Where does it say that in the bible? If he was born at all, it was a long time after the creation of the universe. Oh wait, I forgot God, Jesus and The Holy Spirit (whatever that is) are one and the same being. So Jesus is his own dad. Honestly? This sort of nonsense is almost enough to make you side with the loonies who try to claim that the Bible’s very implausibility is evidence for its truth, on the grounds that you just can’t make this shit up. Except, of course, that someone did (The council of Nicea 325 AD).

Society needs Jesus about as much as it needs any other iron-age myths obstructing its reasoned debates about what will actually benefit mankind.

So, having listened to Nicky and noted that significant proportions of his speech are either mistaken, deliberately misleading, or just outright lies and littered with logical fallacies, where does this leave us? Has science disproved God? Well no it hasn’t, and let’s not forget that Dawkins never claimed that it has, but what it has done is eliminated almost all of the reasons for believing in him. We simply do not need God to explain our universe anymore. The few great unanswered questions do not point to God, they point to something we do not yet know. The idea that a handful of desert-dwelling nomads a few thousand years ago were granted that explanation is frankly ludicrous, and made even more so when you examine the nature of the explanation they claim they were given.

It’s pretty clear that history has been one long saga of the erosion of religion by science. To illustrate this, try a little thought experiment recommended by Sam Harris in a discussion with an eminent Rabbi. Try to think of one single question where science once thought it had the answer and now the best answer we have is a religious one. Go on really try before you read on. Tricky isn’t it? Now think of a question where religion once thought it had the answer and now the best answer we have is a scientific one? Sunrise? Heliocentricity? The origin of species? Rainbows? Morality? And another? More? It’s easy; you could go on all day.

To reiterate, science has not disproved god, it has simply made him unnecessary to explain the world around us, and the universe in which it sits. So with apologies to my friend and erstwhile colleague, this was not “an excellent talk by an excellent preacher”, but a pile of drivel, by a man making a very lucrative career out of teaching people falsehoods.

So what’s next? O yeah: “Does religion do more harm than good?” The jury is out, but a guilty verdict is expected; we’ll just have to wait and see.

You're either deluded, ignorant, or an idiot\asshole\crackpot\fruitcake if:

2007-12-02T09:41:00.000Z

I’m getting fed up of hearing people excuse their religion by saying “Well I don’t believe that” when they are members of a church where “that” is the official line or the opinion of the majority of their churches followers. So I decided to make a specific list of beliefs to stop the get out clauses. It’s probably not comprehensive but here’s a first stab at it anyway.

You’re either deluded, ignorant, or an idiot\asshole\crackpot\fruitcake if:

You believe the world, or life on it, originated at any time in the last million years, or that humanity came into being at any time in the last twenty-thousand (scientists will find these numbers remarkably permissive, but I’m looking for stark-raving ignorance here, not just misconception)

You think it’s OK to punish someone for changing/losing/denying their religion.

You think it’s OK to punish someone for drawing or printing a picture of a religious figure, even if you find it offensive.

You think it’s OK to punish someone because God tells you to.

You think it’s OK to punish someone because they are homosexual.

You think it’s OK to punish someone because of what clothes they wear, how they wear their hair, how much skin/hair they show in public.

You think it’s OK to punish anyone for any acts that cause no harm to anyone else, which occur in private between any number of consenting, mentally competent, adults.

You think homosexuals (practising or otherwise) should be forbidden any goods/services/job/position in any organisation (including your church) or punished in any way because of their sexual preference.

You think women should be forbidden any goods/services/job/position in any organisation solely on the basis of their gender.

You think any particular race should be forbidden any goods/services/job/position in any organisation solely on that basis.

You believe your people are the “chosen” people.

You believe that people should be segregated in the street, on the bus, in school, theatres, cinema or anywhere else based on their gender, race, religion or gender preference.

You believe that the universe, or even just the earth, was created for humanity’s benefit.

You don’t believe that evolution by natural selection is responsible for all the many and varied life forms on the planet.

You understand the meaning of the phrases “Creation Science”, “Irreducible Complexity” or “Intelligent Design” and they don’t make you want to either laugh, cry or punch something.

You will allow yourself or someone else to die rather than have some type of medical treatment you think your god proscribes.

You believe abortion and/or contraception are worse crimes than rape.

You believe women are worth less than men.

You think that we are born guilty of anything.

You think that menstruating women are somehow “unclean”

You think a woman who exposes herself, up to and including going naked in the street, or meets with men who are not her family, would be more to blame for being sexually assaulted than her attacker, or deserves any punishment more severe than a stern reproving look.

You think it’s OK to kill someone for holding hands or kissing in the street, even if it does “bring dishonour” to your family.

You think it’s OK to punish someone for insulting a religion or a religious figure/prophet/god or speaking/printing their name.

You think it’s OK to punish someone for giving the name of your god/prophet/whatever to a pet or cuddly toy.

You think that the angel Moroni actually appeared to Joseph Smith or that Mr. Smith ever really translated those gold plates, with or without benefit of magic lenses/stones.

You believe anything L. Ron Hubbard wrote other than the bit about religion being the only way to make easy money.

You think it’s OK to hush up cases where priests are found to be paedophiles.

You think your religious leader really is infallible, even if you only think he’s only infallible when he’s sitting on his special magic chair.

You think AIDS is a divine punishment for homosexuality/promiscuity.

You think any natural disasters are a divine punishment for anything.

You believe a woman should be subservient to her husband.

You think it’s ever OK to cut bits off, or sew up, any part of a child’s sexual organs (or any other part of their body for that matter) for non-medical reasons. And no “it’s easier to keep clean” doesn’t count as a medical reason.

You believe global warming doesn’t matter because Jesus is going to come back in your lifetime and sort everything out.

You blame modern Jews for crucifying Jesus. Especially since that’s what god apparently had planned all along, but mostly because THEY WEREN’T FUCKING THERE! And, of course, partly because it may never have actually happened.

You think morality is impossible or meaningless without religion.

You believe that the ability to convince yourself or maintain that something is true, without a shred of evidence, or even in the face of evidence to the contrary, is ever a good thing.

You think Harry Potter is leading children into the occult and it should be banned on that basis.

You think that the ten commandments really are the ten most important moral imperatives; especially if you believe that and can’t name them.

You think that the teaching your religion to third world countries is a valid use of money donated to lift them out of poverty.

You think abstinence-only sex-education programs are a good thing in any realistic context.

You are against any medical procedure that will save lives (e.g. HPV inoculation) because you think it will “encourage promiscuity”

You teach children about hellfire and brimstone.

You think you’ll be granted eternal paradise/any number of virgins for dying in the process of killing people in service to your god.

You think any of the idiot beliefs above should be exempt from ridicule.

You support any organisation that fits any of the above criteria, and wonder why people criticise you for it.

Faith! What is it good for? (pt. 6)

2007-09-27T22:42:00.000+01:00

Faith teaches us morality/without faith there can be no morals

The idea that morality is not possible without religion is so obviously untrue that it would be laughable if the consequences of the lie weren’t so serious. If one actually looks at the evidence the implication is almost that reverse is true. Mark Twain once said "The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive...but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anaesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition." And that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of the barbarity committed by the religious, not just in the name of their faith, but because of it. If you look at violent-crime rate figures worldwide and correlate them with religiosity it becomes clear that the non-believers are a much more peaceful bunch than the supernaturally credulous. The same is true if this correlation is made by US state, rather than nations. It seems clear that the more religious a group becomes, the greater it’s propensity for bloodshed. The problem here is that the holy books of the three major abrahamic religions teach barbarity and inhuman acts on a grand scale. They are littered with the depiction and glorification of genocide, incest, slavery, rape and murder, not just witnessed by god or done in his name, but ordered and required by him. Against this background, people of reason have had to fight to gain laws that reflect morality that is obvious to them, but proscribed by biblical law, for the last few thousand years. As Bertrand Russell pointed out “the moral objection [to religion] is that religious precepts date from a time when men were more cruel than they are and therefore tend to perpetuate inhumanities which the moral conscience of the age would otherwise outgrow.” The very fact that people today are more moral than the holy books describe and prescribe should be evidence enough that it is people themselves who determine morality and not their faith. The Bible is unequivocal in its support for slavery, even the supposedly gentle Jesus was OK with it as long as you didn’t beat them so hard you knocked out their teeth and eyes or killed them on the spot (Luke 12:47). He also said that children should be put to death for swearing at their parents (Matthew 15:4-7) though, so why should we look to him for guidance? It should be clear that our modern sense of morals is neither derived from these writings nor should be. Even the most seemingly innocuous of Jesus’ teachings are can be shown to be immoral if one actually takes the time to think about it. Take loving thy enemies and turning the other cheek. Love thy Enemies? Why? Why Should I love people who want to kill me, my family and friends? Standing by and doing nothing while the evil commit evil acts it is within your power to prevent is an evil act itself. There are Christians who say that we can safely disregard the Old Testament as having been written for a different age when times were hard and barbarity was the norm. Though this is questionable in itself, if it is true we are still left with the assumption that the teachings of Jesus in the new testament are the pinnacle of morality and still relevant today. It is apparent from the examples above alone that this is not the case, and they’re not the only instances. Jesus, if indeed he existed, clearly had some very progressive thinking, for his time and place, but he has little to tell us today. Indeed he would have had little if anything to tell the Greek philosophers who predated him.

The facts are that Children demonstrate concern for the wellbeing of others long before they learn to read or are old enough to understand indoctrination from their parents. From this alone it should be clear that the roots of morality are innate. Many “lower” primates have complex systems of morality and justice: reward for good behaviour and punishment for bad, and I can’t recall ever having seen a monkey reading the Torah.

Christopher Hitchens, on his US tour in support of his latest book “God is not Great : How religion poisons everything.” challenges his audiences to come up with one single moral statement made by the faithful that could not easily have been spoken by the secular. Nobody has yet managed it, which surprises me as I can think of a few. How about “Abortion and contraception are the greatest threats to peace in the world today”? An idiotic statement made by Mother Theresa when accepting her ill-gotten Nobel peace prize. OK, maybe it could have been said by an atheist, but it would have to have been a really stupid one.

There are moral atheists, no question. Ask youself, who is the more moral, someone who does the right thing because they believe it to be right, or someone who does it because they believe their god wants it and will punish them if they don’t? Doing things out of fear of retribution or promise of payback isn’t morality, it is cowardice and avarice.

Faith! What is it good for? (pt. 5)

2007-09-26T18:33:00.000+01:00

You lose nothing by having faith, but stand to gain everything.

French philosopher Blaise Pascal attempted to apply the science of decision theory to the choice of whether to believe in god and came up with the argument now known as Pascal’s Wager (or Gambit), which I shall paraphrase here:

God either exists or he doesn’t. It is not possible for man to know for certain whether god exists or not, and we are already in the game of life so we are forced to bet on one possibility or the other. So we must play the odds against the benefits. If god exists, the benefits for believing are infinite, and the penalty for not believing is severe. If god does not exist and you believe you have lost nothing. Therefore it is prudent to believe.

I’ve heard variants of this argument used by several people, some of whom were unaware that Pascal had got there before them, or that it is easily refuted. There are several problems with Pascal’s wager. Firstly, the premise that it is not possible to know for certain whether god exists or not. This is by no means proven; just because no one has yet proven the existence or non-existence of a divine creator does not mean it is not possible to do so. However, this is the least of our disagreements with Pascal, since if this premise were replaced with “We do not currently know for certain the status of god’s existence.” we could continue reasoning from there. The major problems with the logic are the assumption of unspoken presuppositions, the first of which is unfounded unless we already believe the bible to be true, and the second is just plain wrong even if we do:

· God (if he exists) values and rewards belief, and punishes non-belief.

· Belief in god costs nothing.

Let’s examine each in turn.

God (if he exists) values and rewards belief and punishes non-belief.

If we are starting from the position where we are uncertain about the existence of god, there is no reason to suppose any of his characteristics. In order to believe this statement, we must already believe that the bible is the true and inerrant word of god, thus leading us back to our old friend the circular argument. Suppose we instead assume that god values moral actions and rewards or punishes accordingly regardless of belief in him. You might then think that those who act upon a morality arrived in a rational manner unfettered by barbaric bronze-age or medieval thinking are more likely to enter the kingdom of heaven than those who adhere to the doctrines present in so-called holy books written in antiquity. This kind of thinking has arrived at the Atheist’s Wager:

You should live your life and try to make the world a better place for your being in it, whether or not you believe in God. If there is no God, you have lost nothing and will be remembered fondly by those you left behind. If there is a benevolent God, he may judge you on your merits coupled with your commitments, and not just on whether or not you believed in him.

My favourite question to ask those who assert that faith in god is a requirement for entry into heaven goes something like this: “If your god is genuinely benevolent, would he deny heaven to a man who had followed all of his rules but did not believe in him, but permit it to someone who murdered and raped but had been absolved through Jesus on his deathbed.” Often with the addition of “If he would he’s a fucking petty-minded shit-head.”

Belief in God costs Nothing

This is patently nonsense. Many churches demand tithes, donations etc. even if they don’t, most belief systems demand at the very least that time and effort are spent in devotion. The problem is that if the non-believers are right, and there is no after life, and we’ve spent this one slaughtering goats in order to fix broken aeroplanes, or waiting for a child-molester in a frock to put a wafer he believes to be the flesh of his dead god in our mouths, we’ve wasted a portion of the only life we’ve got. We would have paid a significant price for our unwarranted credulity. Not least because that time we’ve wasted could have been spent doing something that is actually beneficial for mankind. Even staying at home and melting our brain by watching execrable drivel like the x-factor or big brother would probably be more productive; at least it wouldn’t be in support of organisations who teach pernicious falsehoods that cause genuine harm.

There are a couple of other problems with Pascal’s Wager, and they both hinge around the potential consequences of us agreeing with Pascal and deciding to believe in god. First, if we decide to believe in god, we have the question of which of the many permutations of faith should we subscribe to. Since we’re playing odds games, if we pick any one, due to sheer number of religions available to us our odds of being wrong are enormous. I can see the scene at the pearly gates (or local equivalent) “Ah fuck, the mormons had it right? That shit with the gold tablets being dug up in upstate New York just seemed too incredible.” Or maybe “Shinto? You’re shitting me right?!”

Second if we don’t believe and we take the bet and decide that we should, it’s simply not possible to suddenly make ourselves believe something we don’t, and believe me I’ve tried. If we are starting from unbelief, we need to reason something out or have it proved in order to start believing it. Of course we could say “well, I don’t really believe, but I’ll go through the motions for the possibility of eternity in paradise”, but if god is omniscient, and rewards belief, do we really think he’ll fall for that? Christopher Hitchens has prepared his response to god should he confront him about his lack of faith after his death: “I presume, divine sir, that you have some respect for intellectual honesty and to moral courage and that you would look with more favour on somebody who made an honest profession of unbelief than on someone who acceded to belief in you in the hope of a handout.” Terry Pratchett offers us a slightly more humorous illustration. In his novel the Hogfather, a man reasons out the potential risks and benefits in a manner very similar to Pascal’s wager and decides that he should therefore believe in the existence of the gods: “When he died he woke up in a circle of gods holding nasty-looking sticks and one of them said ‘We're going to show you what we think of Mr Clever Dick in these parts...’”

Faith! What is it good for? (pt. 4)

2007-09-25T07:52:00.000+01:00

My faith gives me great comfort.

My pants give me great comfort, but I'm not going to make supernatural claims based on that fact, and at least they definitely exist. In the words of Sam Harris, "before we examine the validity of this claim, it's worth noting that it's a total non-sequitur"; the amount of comfort or sense of wellbeing afforded someone by a given article of faith has no relevance on the truth-value of that claim. This type of logical fallacy is called argumentum as consequentum : Appeal to Consequences or wishful thinking. Sam gives the example of his imaginary belief that there is a giant diamond buried in his back-yard. He states that he would be laughed at and thought a lunatic if he started making statements like “It gives me an enormous sense of wellbeing to believe that there is an enormous diamond buried in my back yard.”, “I wouldn’t want to live in a world where there wasn’t an enormous diamond buried in my back yard, it gives my life meaning.” None of these statements give us any inclination to take the existence of such a gem seriously, yet somehow we are expected to refrain from laughing hysterically when the faithful use these kinds of phrases about their equally unfounded claims. If there is a reason we ought not to laugh it is not that we should respect faith, but that what they are really saying is “Please stop highlighting my misconceptions, it hurts.” We should be sympathetic to this since it will not help us free them from their delusion if we inflict unnecessary discomfort, but this should not signal an end to the discussion. Sometimes a little pain is necessary for progress.

Having established that the truth of the statement “My faith gives me great comfort” has no bearing on whether the object of faith is true, let’s have a look at the premise itself. Well clearly it is in many cases, people do derive comfort from the ideas that they will never die, and neither will their beloved friends and family, that all will live in bliss in paradise for eternity, that their prayers for their loved ones and the world at large are having some positive impact etc. Unfortunately, given the lack of evidence for these suppositions, their positive affect on mental state is nothing more than the placebo effect in action. Additionally, I hypothesize that to a large degree the need for this comfort is brought about only because of the pre-existence of the faith. Like the smoker for whom a cigarette buys temporary respite from the pangs of withdrawal that would not be present were he not a smoker, much of the distress people of faith find themselves in need of alleviation from is brought about by having been taught falsehoods such as that they are born in sin for which they must atone, or that they or their loved ones will go to hell for failing to believe (the argument ad baculum : appeal to force). People are taught to feel guilt for harmless actions, often perfectly natural, sometimes even biologically unavoidable ones. This guilt can only be assuaged by prayer, or confession, or other such wastes of effort that could otherwise be used doing something genuinely beneficial. The Catholic Church even used to allow people to pay cash to buy-off their sins with cash to make themselves feel better; these days many churches ask their congregations to pay tithes for the same reason.

Even if it is true that faith gives comfort, it's worth noting that taking morphine or laudanum would probably make you feel much more relaxed about your place in the world too, but I don't think anyone sensible is going to advocate that as a viable long term solution.

In addition to all this, the argument that you have a right to something or that it is beneficial to mankind because it brings you personal comfort is not good enough. Giving support to organisations that do evil deeds or preach that they should be done, because it makes you feel better is clearly an immoral act, and should be discouraged whenever possible. After all, we would not listen politely to people who say “I like punching people in the face, it makes me feel better about myself and my place in the world.” Or maybe we would, but only out of fear that they may punch us in the face.

Faith! What is it good for? (pt. 3)

2007-09-24T16:29:00.000+01:00

3) It’s impolite to discuss religion in polite company.

Oh fuck off!

Why is it? Because the faithful made up that rule so that people couldn’t criticise them. This isn’t an argument for faith, it’s a (lame) reason to stop talking about it. The late lamented Douglas Adams (God rest his soul ;)) had some useful stuff to say on this matter, and he’s funnier than me so I’ll hand this post over to him:

“Now, the invention of the scientific method and science is, I'm sure we'll all agree, the most powerful intellectual idea, the most powerful framework for thinking and investigating and understanding and challenging the world around us that there is, and that it rests on the premise that any idea is there to be attacked and if it withstands the attack then it lives to fight another day and if it doesn't withstand the attack then down it goes. Religion doesn't seem to work like that; it has certain ideas at the heart of it which we call sacred or holy or whatever. That's an idea we're so familiar with, whether we subscribe to it or not, that it's kind of odd to think what it actually means, because really what it means is 'Here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about; you're just not. Why not? — because you're not!' If somebody votes for a party that you don't agree with, you're free to argue about it as much as you like; everybody will have an argument but nobody feels aggrieved by it. If somebody thinks taxes should go up or down you are free to have an argument about it, but on the other hand if somebody says 'I mustn't move a light switch on a Saturday', you say, 'Fine, I respect that'.

The odd thing is, even as I am saying that I am thinking 'Is there an Orthodox Jew here who is going to be offended by the fact that I just said that?' but I wouldn't have thought 'Maybe there's somebody from the left wing or somebody from the right wing or somebody who subscribes to this view or the other in economics' when I was making the other points. I just think 'Fine, we have different opinions'. But, the moment I say something that has something to do with somebody's (I'm going to stick my neck out here and say irrational) beliefs, then we all become terribly protective and terribly defensive and say 'No, we don't attack that; that's an irrational belief but no, we respect it'.

It's rather like, if you think back in terms of animal evolution, an animal that's grown an incredible carapace around it, such as a tortoise—that's a great survival strategy because nothing can get through it; or maybe like a poisonous fish that nothing will come close to, which therefore thrives by keeping away any challenges to what it is it is. In the case of an idea, if we think 'Here is an idea that is protected by holiness or sanctity', what does it mean? Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Labour party or the Conservative party, Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows, but to have an opinion about how the Universe began, about who created the Universe, no, that's holy? What does that mean? Why do we ring-fence that for any other reason other than that we've just got used to doing so? There's no other reason at all, it's just one of those things that crept into being and once that loop gets going it's very, very powerful. So, we are used to not challenging religious ideas but it's very interesting how much of a furore Richard [Dawkins] creates when he does it! Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it because you're not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally there is no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we have agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be.”

Faith! What is it good for? (pt. 2)

2007-09-23T11:00:00.000+01:00

2) Faith is a virtue.

No it isn't. It might be one of the so called "Christian Virtues" (Faith, Hope and Charity/Love/Agape – 1 Corinthians 13:13) but we might only believe this is genuinely a virtue if we have faith that the bible is true. "I have faith that the bible is true, and the bible tells me faith is a virtue ipso facto, QED". All major religions have some article of scripture lauding faith, and all only stand up if you already have faith in the truth of those documents. This kind of circular reasoning gets us nowhere, and the name for this logical fallacy is petitio principii: begging the question. To paraphrase Sam Harris, how virtuous has Islam’s doctrine of martyrdom been shown to be recently? Or the Catholic insistence on the tenets that condoms and abortion are evil? Or the Christian teaching that sodomy is an abomination? These beliefs, and a multitude of other grievous lies, can only be interpreted as virtuous by those who already buy-in to the delusion that their holy book is the inerrant word of god, and that their interpretation is the only possible correct one.

Until faith can be demonstrated to have positive effects that outweigh its negative ones, despite the evidence to the contrary, we should fall back to the default position and assume that all such propositions are false.

Faith! What is it good for? (pt. 1)

2007-09-22T15:19:00.000+01:00

1) You can't disprove my article of faith, therefore it's as valid as any claim you might make.

No, no it's not... really. I think Bertrand Russell's celestial teapot argument dealt with this one adequately, as do the Flying Spaghetti Monster, Invisible Pink Unicorn etc. In case you haven't heard of any of these, they all essentially hinge around highlighting the fallacy of the following hypothesis: if I believe something, no matter how ludicrous, that cannot be disproved, it is therefore valid, worthy of my continued attention and not open to ridicule. Of course in actuality just because something might be true, this gives us no reason to believe that it is, particularly if there is not one single shred of actual concrete evidence that might allude to its truth. If it's extremely unlikely to be true, it's best for everyone if we just assume that it's false and behave accordingly; the burden of proof is on the holder of the faith, not on the rest of us. As Carl Sagan said: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”. In fact if the person of faith were to go as far as to assert that their article of faith were definitely true because there is no proof to the contrary, we find there is a name for that logical fallacy: argumentum ad ignorantiam : the argument from ignorance. Of course, another aspect of the argument from ignorance would be an argument that an article of faith is proven false by the absence of proof that it is true. Anyone who can think clearly would not use such an argument alone to suggest that someone's faith is unfounded, and nor need they for there are plenty of others available. The simple fact of the matter is, if you have no proof for something and it is extremely unlikely, I have no reason to take any suggestions arrived at as a result of your faith seriously or show them any respect.

"What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof." - Christopher Hitchens

Faith! HUH! Good god y'all. What is it good for? (intro)

2007-09-21T15:18:00.000+01:00

erm, well, ah, almost nothing. Say it again. OWWWW!

OK, so before I can start talking about what faith is good for, I guess I need to define what it is, or at least how I'm using it in this context. Let's have a look at dictionary.com:

faith –noun

1. confidence or trust in a person or thing: faith in another's ability.

2. belief that is not based on proof: He had faith that the hypothesis would be substantiated by fact.

3. belief in God or in the doctrines or teachings of religion: the firm faith of the Pilgrims.

4. belief in anything, as a code of ethics, standards of merit, etc.: to be of the same faith with someone concerning honesty.

5. a system of religious belief: the Christian faith; the Jewish faith.

6. the obligation of loyalty or fidelity to a person, promise, engagement, etc.: Failure to appear would be breaking faith.

7. the observance of this obligation; fidelity to one's promise, oath, allegiance, etc.: He was the only one who proved his faith during our recent troubles.

8. Christian Theology. the trust in God and in His promises as made through Christ and the Scriptures by which humans are justified or saved. —Idiom

9. in faith, in truth; indeed: In faith, he is a fine lad.

I'm talking about definitions 2, 3, 5 and 8, with maybe a smattering of 4.

I might even add a definition of my own that I think is probably omitted because it's supposed to be impolite to question someone's faith.

10. Belief that is in spite of the, often overwhelming, evidence to the contrary. AKA the "LALALALA, I'm not listening." defence.

There are plenty of arguments for it, not many of them valid. What follows is my attempt at deconstructing the major ones I've heard. Note that I’m not refuting arguments for why people have faith (check out Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained for that), I’m refuting arguments that people give for their faith; these two are not the same thing.

Addenda to Religions are all Shite pt. 1

2007-08-19T13:53:00.000+01:00

Now The Vatican has instructed all Catholics to cease their support for and donations to Amnesty International because they now officially support a woman's right to abortion after rape or if the pregnancy will severely harm the health of the mother.
They say fuck all about the Nazis but instruct all their followers to cease their support for Amnesty!
FFS! What a bunch of cunts?!

Religions are all shite, pt. 1

2007-08-03T12:47:00.001+01:00

So, see if you can can guess what group I'm talking about.
Attempted genocide, ethnic cleansing, suppression of knowledge, subjugation of non-believers, mass-murder of complete innocents, indoctrination under the guise of education, demonising common medical practice, covering up the sexual abuse of children and protecting the perpetrators, demonising contraception so that thousands of Africans die from AIDS, forcing through the canonisation worshippers of suffering with twisted morals, murdering or imprisoning scientists for speaking the truth, preventing medical research that could save hundreds of thousands of lives for no good reason, demonising Jews, demonising homosexuals, tacit support for the Nazis, utter fucking hypocrisy. That's right, it's the Catholics, wooo! And some of that lot is still going on today.

Why am I ranting about the Catholics in particular today? Well it's because I have to vent my frustration somehow after barely managing to nod and smile calmly when I was recently given a patronising lecture about not turning my back on something because "that's where Jesus lives." by a one of the unwitting followers of this immense force for evil and stupidity in the world.

Let's briefly cover the history of the Catholic church shall we? Just so we can see how we got to the current state of affairs.

Jesus creates a bit of a stir in Judea with some remarkably progressive thinking, a lot of charisma, and a few magic tricks, and is eventually crucified (probably).
St. Peter and St. Paul took their interpretations of Jesus' teachings to Rome where they and their converts were persecuted for them and both were likely executed.
Christianity continued to be an underground movement following the teaching of Jesus, with various people, many of whom had never met Jesus or even been to the "holy" land, writing gospels about his life and teachings and, largely, making it up. As an indication that most of these weren't written by the disciples, most of them were written in Greek - not the native language of the average red-sea pedestrian - and mostly 50 or so years after Jesus' supposed death. And so the gospels get coloured by typical Roman thinking; most notably Mithraism. Mithras is the son of god, born of a virgin on 25th December, etc., etc.
Eventually (313 CE), for reasons best known only to himself (probably hedging his bets), the Roman Emperor Constantine I converts to Christianity on his deathbed and starts the process eventually completed by Theodosius I, who declares Catholic Christianity to be the official state religion of the Roman Empire and declares all others "heretics" in 380 CE. Et Voila, the Roman Catholic Church is born.
What do they do first? They establish a "Canonical" set of books for the Bible (most of which weren't written by disciples remember), eliminating anything that looks like women might have any say in anything, and suppressing all the books they don't like or are too ridiculous for anyone to believe, like the gospel of Thomas where the young Jesus uses his magic powers to turn his brothers into dogs for a laugh. It's OK he turns them back :D. They have it all translated into Latin and make that the official "holy" language, despite the fact that Jesus almost certainly never spoke a word of it. The word then spread throughout Europe and the middle-east with all of the Roman Empire's might behind it. Where they can't stop the locals celebrating their local festivals, they steal and modify them and claim they was theirs all along. Easter FFS, what have bunnies and chicks got to do with Jesus' resurrection? Fuck all, that's what. The bloody festival is even named after a fertility goddess!
What followed is more than a thousand years of persecution and murder actively endorsed and encouraged by the Catholic church, of anyone who disagreed with them: The Inquisitions, The Crusades, both in the "Holy" land and in Europe. People tend to forget, or were never taught, stuff like the Albigensian Crusades where de Montfort and others attempted to murder everyone in the Languedoc, and succeeded in killing about 20,000 of them, at the direct request of the Pope. They even condemned as heretics people who dared to suggest that the bible might be translated into anything other than Latin. You might think that they didn't want the common man reading it, or he might realise that it's full of shit and the church are teaching them rubbish that isn't even in there.
Eventually, they were forced to modernise a bit, the zeitgeist changed so that they couldn't get away with mass-murder or locking up innocent scientists anymore. Why in 1992 (that's right nineteen-ninety-two) the Pontiff even managed to apologise for imprisoning and excommunicating Galileo for daring to suggest that the Earth wasn't the centre of the universe like it says in the bible.

Now you might say, "c'mon Tim, that was a long time ago; the church isn't like that now." but, at the risk of being (unjustifiably) accused of argumentum ad nazium, how long do you think it will be before we listen to people who say things like "Well, I know the Nazis did a lot of bad stuff, but we're just not like that anymore.", "Yeah but what about all the good the Nazis did for Germany", "Well, I am a Nazi, but I don't believe all that final-solution stuff, that's obviously rubbish"? Fifty years is obviously not long enough, how about two-hundred? five-hundred? What if, like the Catholic Church, they were still committing acts that are tantamount to genocide today, and attempting to justify it by citing specific passages of a book that they choose to ignore almost all of the rest of? Would it be OK to wear their badge then? or go to their meetings? or self-identify as a Nazi? To Bring your children up as Nazis? I think not. Incidentally, before I move on to detail the modern atrocities of the catholic church, it's worth pointing out that Hitler was a Roman Catholic. The very anti-semitism that he espoused, and that allowed him to rise to power, is a direct product of the Catholic doctrine that held the Jews responsible for the crucifixion (because obviously it can't have been the Romans' fault.) The propaganda war they started against the Jews that came up with such lies as the blood-libel and accusations of deicide is still going on today, although these days it's more likely to be by Muslims and US fundamentalist born-again Christians than Catholics, but they started it. And what did God's emissary on earth do when (arguably) the worst evil the western world has seen for millennia marched across Europe committing genocide on the way? Not one thing. Tacit support even, one might say. You might think that the earthly representative of a benevolent God might say something against such obviously immoral horrors, no matter what the cost to himself; but no, not one titter. Fantastic. You've really convinced me that you are a moral authority now mate. Oh, and It's also worth noting that a certain Mr. Ratzinger, the current pope, was a member of the Hitler Youth during all this. BTW, in 1961 the Vatican officially forgave the Jews for killing Jesus, and told Catholics to stop persecuting them; better late than never I always say, and at least they beat Galileo by thirty-one years.

So "enough with the ancient history already" I hear you cry, what about now? Well, in Africa, AIDS has reached epidemic proportions, massive numbers of people are dying, children are being born with AIDS and dying before they grow up. In many areas, the only education these people are getting is being given by the Catholic church. That's a good thing you might say, nice Catholics educating the needy, but you'd be wrong. Aid agencies are supplying condoms by the truckload to African nations, and these catholic schools, often the only option available to the locals, are teaching them that to use a condom is a sin, tantamount to murder, for which they will be punished for all eternity. And this is an area where in many cases there is insufficient resources for people to have as many children as they already have. Death and suffering are the inevitable results of these pernicious lies. This is tantamount to genocide and it's happening now, and the catholic church are not only standing by and doing nothing; they actively encourage, endorse and fund it. Instead of teaching people genuine methods of preventing the spread of AIDS these people attempt to teach abstinence. Abstinence programs have been shown to not even work in the west, so how is it going to work among the tribespeople of Africa? Incidentally, studies in America have shown that teenagers who enrol in abstinence programs - where they promise themselves and their god that they will abstain from sex until marriage - are no less likely to indulge in sex before marriage than their less devout contemporaries. In fact, due to their religious education, they are less likely to use contraception when they do, and the inevitable result is unwanted teenage pregnancy and the spread of venereal disease. Nice work.
Africa too far away for you? How about Poland? This year one Polish woman went blind because of the country's stupid catholic-induced abortion laws. She has a condition that meant the increased hormone levels during pregnancy would cause her retinas to fail. In Poland you need the agreement of two doctors and a priest who decide that you medical condition is serious enough to allow an abortion. This poor lady was unable to get such an agreement and has lost her sight because of it. One fact all the news reports failed to mention of course is that if it hadn't been for the socially-retarded Catholic attitudes to contraception prevalent in Poland, a woman who knows these risks almost certainly would never have got pregnant in the first place.
Poland too eastern-European and backward for you? What about America? At least eight abortion clinic workers including doctors, nurses and security guards have been murdered by people who believe abortion is murder because of catholic doctrines, and there have been at least as many convictions for attempted murder. Now you might say that these murderers and would-be murderers were dangerous, insane extremists, but I don't think you'd be right. Friends of theirs usually say they were good and moral people, and often endorse their actions. The point is, that if you genuinely believe that abortion is murder, every sane person has a moral obligation to prevent it. The people that believe this and don't act on it must surely either be cowards or not truly have the courage of their convictions. Teaching people these lies has consequences, and it's about time the catholic church faced up to it, and its adherents stopped supporting them if they wont.
America too far away for you? What about the UK, where Catholic adoption agencies would rather stop helping to place discarded or orphaned children with loving parents than run the risk of having to accept that homosexuals are not evil sinners and treat them as normal human beings. How can you claim to be a moral authority when you will stop giving aid for such pathetic reasons?
Or worldwide, where the teachings of Catholicism cause a large number of people with any sexual leanings that the church say is bad to take the cloth. They can't indulge their leanings and so takes the obvious route of priesthood and celibacy, which you might think is the right thing to do. Unfortunately this then often turns out to involve being in a position of trust within the society. If these persons have a sexual attraction to the young, and no other way to work out their frustrations (masturbation also being a sin obviously), they are often given the perfect opportunity to gain the trust of children, and act out their perversions. In one single event recently the arch-dioces of Los Angeles paid $660 million dollars to settle hundreds of child-abuse allegations. This is by no means an isolated example; it's so common that many catholic institutions actually take out insurance against allegations of child-abuse. Until very recently, the official church policy on child-abuse was to attempt to cover it up and simply move the perpetrator to a different region; where they nearly always reoffended. A spate of recent high-profile cases and the attendant disrepute has forced the church to change it's official line, but how can an organisation claiming to be a moral authority get away with such heinous policies for so long? This respect for the priesthood is so ingrained that in some cases even when the evidence is incontrovertible, the congregations often side with the priest in question and talk about how horrible this ordeal must be for father so-and-so, ignoring the plight of his victims!

There are plenty of other doctrines, teachings and opinions of the Catholic church that are just plain stupid: transubstantiation, the trinity, the virgin birth, original sin, purgatory, limbo, the pope's magic infallibility chair, claiming Harry Potter is corrupting the world's youth and leading them to the devil, etc. but they don't really need our attention as they are not, to my knowledge, particularly harmful beyond the fact that they are evidence of the human race's unbounded capacity for unwarranted credulity in the face unsupported absurdity. There are even a few immoralities and unpleasant, counter-productive falsehoods, both historical and modern, that I haven't covered: selling "indulgences", confession, claiming Mother Theresa was a good person, having enormous amounts of cash and churches full of gold while people they claim to be helping are starving and dying, preventing stem-cell research etc., but this was only meant to be a quick post, and it's turned into a bit of an epic already, and the issues I have covered above really ought to be enough on their own to convince any sensible person of my viewpoint.
There's only really one question left to be asked, and that's why do non-Catholics put up with people that support and endorse this massive edifice of harmful, murderous lies, deceit and corruption? Well there's two reasons, one is that for some bizarre reason it's supposed to be impolite to question idiocy if it's got the "religion" label on it, and the other because by and large, we realise that they're good people and it's not their fault; we know that they have been so inculcated that they are either incapable of, or unwilling to try, thinking clearly about it. The indoctrination takes so well that it's very hard to break free from it, or even see the need to.

Lapsed Pagan WTF?

2007-04-24T21:05:00.000+01:00

First, some definitions:

Lapsed: No longer committed to or following the tenets of a particular belief, obligation, position, etc.: e.g. a lapsed Catholic.
(neo)Pagan: Adherent to a 20th-century revival of interest in the worship of nature, fertility, etc.

So that's it then, used to define myself strongly as Pagan (or Neopagan to be more accurate) but not anymore. Why not? Well that's a short question with a long answer and no mistake guv'nor.
The short version of the answer is "It became counter-productive, so I stopped it." To really answer why I stopped being a Pagan, I guess it's important to find out why I was a Pagan in the first place, and what kind of Pagan I was.

Why was I a Pagan?
I think when I was about 9 or 10, I rejected Christianity as a bag of shite, and had thereafter strongly identified myself as atheist, though perhaps with agnostic tendencies. My parents had half-heartedly tried to bring me up to be CoE, which was tricky since neither of them actually believed it, but paid it lip-service in the lazy way that most British people of no fixed belief do. For a lot of people, it's easier when asked "what religion are you?" to say "Church of England" or just "Christian" (usually with the caveat "but I don't really go to church much") than it is to say "I'm not any." So anyway, fortunately for me, their lacklustre attempts to indoctrinate me into the social norm didn't take.
I developed a strong interest in the so-called paranormal: esp, rosicrucianism, Golden Dawn, Qabbalah (yes before it was trendy) etc. and read a lot about all of it. I also became interested in my Celtic heritage and began to read up on that that. Additionally, I read of loads fantasy literature, much of it with significant Celtic influence. When I was about 14 or 15 I got into rock music, a lot of which has (moreso then than now even) "satanic" or magical themes and imagery associated with it and I was attracted to the glamour of all of this. It was at this point that a few of those I called friends at that point decided to be Satanists 'cause it was "cool". I dabbled with this for a few weeks but quickly came to the realisation that "Satanism", to most dabblers at least, is just an excuse to act like a cunt to everyone around you in the name of religion, and surround yourself in pseudo-mysticism (so, exactly like Christianity then ;D), so I ditched it, and them. I was around this time that my reading into the paranormal and occult led me to discover the concept of Neopaganism, though no-one used the prefix "neo" at the time. It strongly appealed to my sensibilities: a religion that teaches tolerance, and respect for each other and the natural world, and with a branch that has it's imagery and observances rooted in the Celtic world (albeit in much modified/reconstructionist form), so at some point I guess I thought "I want to be one of those" and hey presto, I was, because you don't need any initiation to be most kinds of Pagan.

What kind of Pagan was I?
So, I read loads Pagan literature; I dismissed Gardnerian Wicca as a sex cult, Asatru as racist, etc. In fact most other Pagans I met just got on my tits with their insistence on a firm standpoint on some very woolly ideas and seemingly unshakeable belief that their practices were the a direct, unbroken descendant of whatever pre-Christian belief system they modelled them on, despite evidence to the contrary (most of it is reconstructed, cobbled together from what little evidence there actually is, or simply made up). I never even joined the Pagan Federation as, at the time, they insisted that you sign up to a firm belief in the Wiccan Rede and the Law of Threefold Return, and I think the law of threefold return is bollocks and that they both represent dogma, which is almost always harmful. They recently relaxed this rule but it was too late. I was what gets called an "eclectic" or "solitary" Pagan; pick and choose bits from the various traditions you like, discard the rest, and make some stuff up for yourself. What was the essence of my belief? You could probably sum it up in a single phrase from The Fast Show if you wanted a sound-bite "Isn't nature brilliant¿"; or, for something a bit more explanatory, "A pantheistic Neopagan following a loosely Celtic oriented path of ritual and meditation, with a mostly naturalistic viewpoint." I'll probably elaborate further in later entries about what I mean by "mostly naturalistic"
Why am I not a Pagan Now?
Well it all started when I read Richard Dawkins excellent polemic on religion "The God Delusion", but it's not quite as simple as "Dawkins says religion is bullshit, so I won't be religious". If you haven't read it (go and fucking read it! ;)) it's a piece by piece deconstruction of all the bullshit reasons people give for being religious, clearly showing how they are all fallacious and don't really stand up to any kind of rational scrutiny. If fact it goes further than that and hypothesises that religion is counter-productive and does more harm than good; wars, gay-bashing, fuck stupid bans on stem-cell research, teaching the third world that contraception is a sin, violence in the middle-east etc. But reading this alone didn't stop me from calling myself Pagan. Because Dawkins necessarily focuses on the "big 3" abrahamic religions, many of the arguments simply don't apply to pantheistic neopaganism; in fact Dawkins describes pantheism as merely "sexed-up atheism". What the book did do, and what I think it's done for a lot of people who detest the hypocrisies of organised religion, is galvanise my opinions and make me want to speak out more against the harmful bullshit that we see all around us that people seem to tolerate because it's religious: "Oh people can believe what they want" no, they fucking can't, not when what they believe causes acts that bring harm to others, or gives support to those who do, and the beliefs those harmful acts are based on is totally unsupported and contrived to be unprovable; that's just bullshit. Anyway, so I started having conversations with people where I say "organised religion is bad" when what I really mean is "dogma is bad" (but part of the problem with having these kinds of conversations is that many people don't really understand what is meant by words like dogma, pantheism, agnostic, theism, deism etc.) and what would often happen is that the best counter-argument that anyone can come up with is the ad hominem "but you're a Pagan." It doesn't really work as an argument, it's a classic logical fallacy, and a transparent diversionary tactic, but it's a pain in the arse having to explain this.
In addition to this, the term "Pagan" carries with it a lot of baggage; many Pagans seem to have an in-built tendency to believe any old new-age bullshit that drifts through their transom from feng-shui to palmistry to astrology. I used to think that the term "Pagan" said more about me and my outlook on life, than the term "Atheist", and I was right, but I've recently come to realise that it also says a lot more than is actually true. While I'd like people to understand that I have a respect for, if not awe of, nature and an interest in history, heritage and the traditions, and art of the celtic peoples (among others), I don't really want them to think that I'm falling for bunk like crystal healing, dreamcatchers or reiki. So that's it, I say I'm not a Pagan and hey presto, as if by magick (sic), I'm not.