You know how people like Massimo Pigliucci and others like to say that science has nothing to say about the supernatural? And therefore scientists who dispute religion are trespassing on other people’s territory and crossing their own borders without a passport and generally misbehaving? I’ve been thinking about that.

I googled the two words just now, and found a nice helpful item by Victor Stenger. He quotes the National Academy of Sciences:

Science is a way of knowing about the natural
world. It is limited to explaining the natural
world through natural causes. Science can say
nothing about the supernatural. Whether God
exists or not is a question about which science
is neutral.

That’s good, because it says exactly … Read the rest

Two Belfast girls, age 12 and 14, were going to be sent to Pakistan by their parents, for “education.” A judge issued a forced marriage protection order to prevent this little jaunt.

He said: “I find as a fact that there is a present real and substantial risk that G and D will be forced by their parents to marry against their wishes.”…He found the real reason G and D were to be sent to Pakistan in 2007 was “so that they could learn ‘respect’ as an overarching filial duty which I hold in the context of this family means obedience overriding their full and free choice.”

Ah yes, ‘respect’ as an overarching filial duty, meaning people never have lives … Read the rest

One of the places we’ve seen this claim that science has nothing to say about God or other religious beliefs lately is in the article about Francisco Ayala in the Times after he won the Templeton Prize.

Professor Ayala…won the prize for his contribution to the question “Does scientific knowledge contradict religious belief?”…[Ayala] says science and religion cannot be in contradiction because they address different questions. It is only when either subject oversteps its boundary, as he believes is the case with Professor Dawkins, that a contradiction arises, he said.

That’s a recipe for epistemic chaos. We can’t have hermetically sealed ways of “addressing” questions – not if we want to get things right. Ways of addressing questions have … Read the rest

A line from Sam Harris’s The End of Faith (p 128):

…we are confronted by people who hold beliefs for which there is no rational justification and which therefore cannot even be discussed, and yet these are the very beliefs that underlie many of the demands they are likely to make upon us.

This is why NOMA, in addition to being wrong as a description, is no use. It’s also why the much-repeated claim that science has nothing to say about God or other religious beliefs is flawed. If religious beliefs are immune to any kind of rational, this-world inquiry or dispute, then we are abandoned to a world in which unreasonable, protected beliefs get to tell us what to … Read the rest

NPR’s On the Media did a piece about the disproportionate number of men in the media, including NPR and On the Media. An NYU professor did a blog rant on the subject awhile ago, and On the Media brought him (yes, him, and they did the irony-check) to talk about the issue. He said women aren’t quick enough to say “Me me me me look at me I’m good me me me.”

CLAY SHIRKY: I said it then, I believe it now. I think the concern for how other people think about you is one of the sources of essentially work paralysis among women.
One of the big skills that you need, and my institution does not do a