Julian has a good thing in the Guardian. Makes a change from Andrew Brown.

In order to be a distinct belief system, a religion has to have specific doctrines. That automatically creates two types of dissenters. Heretics are those who claim to be of the same conviction, but who disagree on some fundamentals…Apostates reject the religion altogether…In public life, we allow heretics and apostates their sinful ways. But within religious institutions, to grant the same liberty would be absurd. For example, you can’t have a Pope who thinks the Bible is a good book, but is no more the product of divine authorship than The Da Vinci Code.

Just so. That’s similar to the point Edmund Standing makes in … Read the rest

A little more on Swinburne, just for drill.

Why do all particles behave in exactly the same way as each other, so as together ultimately to produce human life? This enormous coincidence in particle behaviour requires explaining. I’ve got a good theory which explains it; you haven’t. And if you are really telling me that the production of humans is not, objectively, a good thing, I find myself wondering if you really mean something so implausible.

He’s got a good theory to explain it. His good theory to explain it is a big person (where? where is this big person? outside the universe? on one side of it? or all sides, going all the way around? a big round … Read the rest

I don’t like Andrew Brown’s tone. I’ve said so before and I say it again. It’s an unpleasant tone – sneering, nose downlooking, insinuating, and sloppy about the facts (or interpretations of the facts). It’s the kind of tone that failure to grovel to religion seems to bring out in a lot of people at this particular historical moment.

The faults are visible right from the beginning.

Hell hath no fury like a philosopher scorned – even one who doesn’t believe in hell. Two of the leading philosophers of evolution have been caught in an email slanging match that has been printed on the blog of their mutual enemy William Dembski, a supporter of the rebranded creationism known as

The Little Professor has been watching the dramatization of Bleak House.

I battered my head against the wall when Esther described Ada’s and Richard’s lodgings as a “damn poky little place.”

Oh, ya. I know that battering. It happens when it becomes suddenly abruptly clear that the people doing the dramatization simply don’t realize that people a century ago didn’t do everything exactly the way we do. That things were, you know, different then? Not the same? Otherwise? Dissimilar? Not identical?

I can think of a few examples that made me want to batter. The tv dramatization of Middlemarch, when disagreement first started to surface between Dorothea and Casaubon – and the way it surfaced was that Casaubon said … Read the rest