So – is it a human right now not to have to be exposed to, or even run the risk of being exposed to, ‘any statement or act showing a lack of respect towards other people’s religion’? Has that been decided? Officially? I ask because the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights is ‘concerned about a Danish newspaper’s caricatures of the Muslim prophet Mohammed and has ‘appointed UN experts in the areas of religious freedom and racism to investigate the matter.’ Uh oh. Experts in the areas of religious freedom are investigating cartoons about the prophet? So – what is religious freedom then? Does it mean the ‘freedom’ of religious people to call the cops (or the UN) whenever anyone … Read the rest

There’s a passage in Ray Bradley’s ID article –

Science, I came to realize, doesn’t rule out the possible existence of a supernatural world. It isn’t logically committed to metaphysical naturalism. But it is committed to methodological naturalism, the view that, in our attempts to understand how the world works, we should look for naturalistic explanations rather than taking easy recourse to supernatural ones. The successes of science in bridging the gaps that used to be plugged by the gods creates a strong presumption in favour of the idea that gods not only aren’t needed but don’t exist. It doesn’t prove, but it does probabilify to a high degree, the truth of metaphysical naturalism. And by the same token, it

One more dig at I mean comment on Steve Fuller. I think it’s the last for the moment, but who knows. The spirit bloweth where it listeth, etc.

It’s a point about arguing from authority. We’ve noted the arrogance of his tone in the thread at Michael’s – the way he seems to take for granted that he is The Expert in the subject and everyone else is some kind of supplicant or mendicant or rank outsider (an assumption not borne out by the comments, which would seem to reverse the equation – everyone commenting seems to be far more knowledgeable and clear-thinking than he does).

I’m sorry if this sounds patronising but I’d hate you to think you’ve been

Back to Fuller. Same thread at Michael’s place. Notice a certain tension in the main post. Third para:

In particular, I am a little disturbed by the ease with which humanists and social scientists justify deference to scientific expertise, almost in a ‘good fences make good neighbours’ vain [he means vein] (Stanley Fish comes to mind in criticism, but analytic philosophy and sociology of science have their own versions of this argument). In this respect, ‘our’ side pulled its punches in the Science Wars when it refused to come out and say that the scientific establishment may not be the final word on what science is, let alone what it ought to be. I guess we just never got

Quick thing. I just want to note it. I have noted a dislike for Joseph Epstein before. I’m going to do it again. I dislike a remark in this article in Commentary – which Arts and Letters Daily for some reason quoted in its teaser (which is why I saw it in the first place). Why flag up such a – well, here is the remark:

Wilson at his meanest shows up in Dabney’s account of his marriage to the novelist and critic Mary McCarthy—a marriage made in 1937 when he was forty-two and she was twenty-five. “I was too young,” McCarthy would later claim, and “I was too old,” Wilson would counter. It would be closer to the truth